July 1985
The Legacy of Citizen Robert
At 21 Robert Decherd set out to capture the prize that had eluded his father: the throne of Texas’ most powerful media dynasty. At 34 he has won control of the Dallas Morning News and much, much more—but to what end?
When his father died, Robert Decherd was 21. It was November 1972. He was a senior at Harvard, and his life was full of possibilities. He was young and smart, and he was rich, a fourth-generation member of the family that owned what had been Texas’ most important newspaper, the Dallas Morning News.
Decherd’s father, H. Ben Decherd, Jr., had worked at the paper all his life, beginning when he was 21; he had risen to chairman of the board of the News‘ parent company, the A. H. Belo Corporation. Robert Decherd had displayed his own flair for the newspaper business. In prep school he had been editor of the student paper, and now he was just finishing a year as the first Texan ever to preside over the Harvard Crimson. The family would welcome him at Belo. But Robert Decherd had made up his mind months before that he was not going back to Dallas.
It was a time of rebellion, but Decherd was no rebel. There was more to his decision than wanting to make it on his own. Decherd wanted to work for a great newspaper. Except for a few lingering pretensions, little remained of the News‘ old reputation as one of America’s foremost regional papers. And there was the lesson of his father’s career. Ben Decherd had been the most able family member of his generation, but he had been passed over for the presidency, Belo’s most powerful position, because he had the wrong last name. Dealeys had run the News since its founding in 1885, and Dealeys continued to run it. Robert decided to stay in the East, get a reporting job with a big daily, and work his way up into the editing ranks. Someday he might go back to Dallas. Not now.
On a Friday night near the end of his term as president of the Crimson, Decherd and his fellow editors gathered at a pricey continental restaurant overlooking the placid Charles River. They were there to eat a bit, to drink a lot, and finally to select their successors. In the middle of it all, Decherd was summoned to the phone. It was his mother, Isabelle Thomason Decherd.
Your father is dying, she told him. Ben Decherd had lost a two-year battle with lung cancer. After a brief remission, the disease had reappeared and spread uncontrollably, and now, in a hospital bed at the M. D. Anderson cancer center in Houston. 1,800 miles from Cambridge, Ben was slipping away. Robert returned to the meeting but said nothing about his news. He presided over the selection of the new editors, then went to his dorm, packed a few things, and had his roommate speed him to the airport for a late flight to Houston. When Robert got there the next morning, his father was in a coma. At 5:45 p.m., Ben Decherd died.
Suddenly Robert faced a radically different set of considerations. His mother was a widow, and he was the only son. Moreover, he was coming into his inheritance at a critical time in the history of A. H. Belo; the trust that had allowed the Dealeys to control the News for two generations following the death of G. B. Dealey would expire in 1976, just four years away. Then Robert and his older sister stood to get a hefty block of Belo stock, a total of 16 per cent—not enough to control the company but enough, perhaps, to give him more of a chance than his father had had. Young Decherd was at a crossroads, and the paths before him diverged widely. Down one lay the future he had wanted. Down another—the one he chose—lay Dallas.
Today Robert Decherd, at 34, rules one of the major media empires in America. The A. H. Belo Corporation owns television stations in Dallas and Houston; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Sacramento, California; and Norfolk, Virginia. It owns AM and FM radio stations in Dallas and Denver. It owns seven suburban Dallas newspapers, and, most of all, it owns the Dallas Morning News—still the most important newspaper in Texas, now once again the best.
With his downy hair, pink skin, and unlined face, the most important man in Texas journalism looks more like an overgrown cherub than a media baron. Robert Decherd rarely drinks, never smokes, and eschews all the pastimes of the old-generation Dallas executive: he doesn’t hunt, fish, or play golf. On first meeting, the most striking impression he makes is one of clean-cut, all-business wholesomeness, the sort that prompted his prep school chums to remember him with the quotation “Come on over and have a glass of milk, guys!” and his college friends to recall him as the only classmate they knew who never smoked dope. His dress is as low-key as his personality; he wears dark, conservative suits with cuffed pants, white shirts, and loafers. His office strikes the same theme of the commonplace. It contains no great art, no rare objects, no evidence of worldwide travel or consuming hobbies. The sole clue to his ambition is a glass statue of a winged lion that belonged to his father.
In a company that was dominated not just by old men but also by old relatives, Decherd’s willingness to conform served him well. He still seems slightly uncomfortable with high station. When he rides in the company limousine, he sits in the front seat, next to the chauffeur. He is unflaggingly polite, serious, and deferential. It is not a studied pose; it comes naturally. When the News staff decided to publish an in-house parody issue to mark Decherd’s thirtieth birthday, a reporter was assigned to write a funny story about the young executive who had spent three years training in the newsroom. The reporter nearly gave up in despair; Robert Decherd is not a funny man.
Because of his unthreatening personality, Decherd was able to offer his ideas without offending his elders. But he could never have risen so far so fast on personality alone. Decherd’s real genius is an instinctive understanding of Dallas, the modern media corporation, and how the two fit together. That was why his ideas proved to be the right ideas, and his decisions, when he was allowed to make them, proved to be the right decisions.
Robert Decherd now serves as president of the A. H. Belo Corporation. In gaining the title that eluded his father, Decherd has denied not only his cousin and rival Joe Dealey, Jr., but also a tradition. The Dealey era—a period that had much to do with making Dallas what it is today—has ended at the Dallas Morning News. That Robert Decherd won what his father lost shows how much Dallas has changed in a generation. The struggle for control of the Belo Corporation was a clash of visions, a battle between the old Dallas and the new. The Dealeys stood for tradition, private ownership, secrecy, rigid conservatism, and control by birth. The Decherds stood for the future, change, risk, public ownership, rule by merit, and ambition. In the end, the future won out.
The most visible sign of that transformation is the $32 million, seventeen-story Belo Building, a new corporate palace for Decherd’s new empire. When it is finished in November, Decherd and his top executives will move from the Dallas Morning News building on the southwest edge of downtown to the fancy new office tower across the street. For the first time since the News began publication, Belo’s chief operating officer will not preside from the newspaper building. That is appropriate, for Robert Decherd, unlike his predecessors as president of the Belo Corporation, is not a journalist; he is a corporate executive. Belo is no longer a newspaper company but a media corporation. And that is perhaps the most radical change of all.
The Great Tradition
Around the top of the long rectangular building that has housed the Dallas Morning News since 1949 is a row of polished metal outlines of the state of Texas, with large stars marking the location of Dallas. The maps are more than a decoration; they are a statement of the News‘ traditional position in Texas journalism, as not Just a Dallas newspaper but also a statewide newspaper of record. More than any other institution in the state, the News promoted and championed the idea that the regions of Texas formed a single entity with common concerns. Its cartoonists developed the figure of Old Man Texas, an elderly gentleman with a Western hat. Its editorials established the existence of a Texas position on issues ranging from industrialization (for) to two-party politics (against). It published The Texas Almanac (“as a public service to Texas, rather than for profit”) and formed a news organization that served as the vote counter in all statewide elections until 1984. The News was a second paper for readers throughout the state, with interests ranging from Broadway shows, which were regularly reviewed, to Texas politics. The best testimony to the status of the News in its earlier days can be found in the old Texas-government clippings filed at the state library; most of the time, the only report judged worthy of preserving is from the Dallas Morning News.
The man who was responsible for lifting the News to its exalted status was George Bannerman Dealey, whose stern-eyed portrait today gazes out from the News‘ fourth-floor lobby. Dealey was the prototype of the newspaper publisher as leading citizen. Men like Amon Carter of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Jesse Jones of the Houston Chronicle, and W. L. Moody, Jr., of the Galveston Daily News were to follow, but of all of them, only G. B. Dealey was able to resist using his newspaper for the advancement of his outside wealth and political power. When Dealey died, on February 26, 1946, at age 86, the flags were lowered at the state capitol.
Dealey had worked 72 years at the A. H. Belo Corporation. Hired when Ulysses S. Grant was president, he died after Truman had dropped the atom bomb. And though he is remembered as the founder of the Dallas Morning News, Dealey spent all but the last two decades of his life as a hired hand. He began at the Galveston News, then the state’s leading paper, in 1874, four years after his family had immigrated to Texas from England. He was fifteen and started as an office boy.
