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Pulitzer's Pain

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"Ethiopian soldiers, backed by Soviet advisers, were advancing steadily on the town, reclaiming with a vengeance the desert territory they had yielded a year earlier to the surprise blitz of the Somali National Army. Nur's clansmen and friends from the outlying villages, fleeing before the advance, had told him of the ghastly destruction and pillage."

Ex-wife Jennifer says reporting was Joe's true passion. "I think it was genetic," she says. "It was in his blood. He loved reporting."

But if Joe were to take charge of the paper, he needed to learn the business side of the company. In 1984 he was promoted to an administrative role as the Post's marketing manager, and two years later he became vice president for administration, responsible for marketing, promotion, purchasing and specialty publications. From the outset, though, Joe's reputation as an executive was marred by ineptitude, according to sources at the newspaper.

Reporting conformed to Joe's nocturnal instincts. Until 1984 the Post was an afternoon paper and copy was filed late at night or early in the morning. Accustomed to staying up until 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. and rising around 11 or noon, Joe struggled to adjust to a managerial nine-to-five schedule.

"He was simply unable to do the job necessary to run the paper," says a former Post employee. "He was given the same training as his father working his way up the ranks, and he demonstrated at every level that he didn't have what it took."

Eliot Porter recalls one of Joe's first administrative blunders, when he ordered that the paper's telephone credit cards be canceled.

"After Joe saw the enormous telephone bills these cards were generating, he canceled them, without so much as a moment's notice," Porter remembers. "There was one guy, a sportswriter out covering a game somewhere, who found out he couldn't reach the office because his credit card was canceled.

"He finally called in from the hotel and asked what the hell was going on. No one seemed to know, and it led to an investigation. A few days later an executive came round the newsroom and passed out new cards to everyone. It was absolutely deadpan. No questions. No smiles. No nothing. Word later trickled down that it was Joe IV who canceled the cards."

It wasn't long before his father placed limits on his son's power.

"He was in charge of doling out office space, managing the security guards and the parking lot. Essentially a big title and little authority," explains a Post employee who worked with Joe. "He was clearly being prevented in getting what he thought was his rightful [inheritance]: control of the paper."

Joe's defenders argue that he was never given the same guidance and tutelage as his dad received. Soon after Joseph III joined the paper in 1936, he was copied on all internal memoranda issued by his father, Joseph Pulitzer II. These notes served as an owner's manual for Pulitzer III, who had access to the memos for nearly twenty years before his father's death. Looking back on his own tenure as editor and publisher, Joseph III told biographer Daniel Pfaff that the memos were the most integral part of his training.

Why wasn't Joe given similar instruction? Because, say Post insiders, his father already had his sights on the man who would eventually succeed him in the editor's chair -- and his name didn't end in Pulitzer.

"His father clearly had more confidence in the un-adopted son, William Woo," says a Post employee.

Woo joined the paper in 1962 as a features writer and quickly moved up the ranks from editorial writer to editorial page editor. In 1976 he accompanied Pulitzer III on a fifteen-day trip to China, which was then largely closed to the West. The journey established Woo as Pulitzer III's prodigy.

"Woo worked himself the old-fashioned way: He sucked up to the boss," cracks a longtime veteran at the paper.

Another former scribe is a touch more diplomatic: "[Pulitzer III] liked elegant people, and Woo was both elegant and smart. Unfortunately, he was also a terrible editor."

After the China trip, the men were often in each other's company, meeting at least once a week to discuss the paper's editorial page. Few others in the newsroom had as much access to the reclusive Pulitzer III.

For many onlookers in the newsroom, the death knell for Joe first sounded in 1986, when his father stepped down from his role as editor and publisher and installed Woo as editor and Nicholas Penniman as publisher. It was the first time in the newspaper's history that the top two jobs had not been held by a Pulitzer.

"That was a big blow for Joe," remembers a close friend. "It was the beginning of the end."

Woo, now a journalism professor at Stanford University, denies he served as any official or unofficial member of the Pulitzer family and declines to speculate as to why Joe never inherited the family empire.

"I was Joe [Pulitzer III]'s editorial-page editor and editor, but I was never a member of the family," he says. "I haven't talked to the family in years."

The Writing on the Wall

The relationship between Joe and his father might not have been so distant, say friends, if Joe's mother, Louise Vauclain Pulitzer, had not died so young. She was just 54 when she succumbed to throat cancer, dying on her son's nineteenth birthday in 1968. Years later, Joe continued to talk of her absence.

"I think her death really had an impact on him," says Wiktor Szostalo, an artist who befriended Joe in the 1980s. "He mentioned several times to me that he missed his mother and that things were never the same since her death."

Five years after Louise died, Joseph Pulitzer III married Emily Rauh, then the curator of the Saint Louis Art Museum. Joe maintains a cordial, if less than familial, relationship with his stepmother. When visiting St. Louis, he stays in a friend's guest house in north St. Louis county rather than the Pershing Place or Ladue estates that Emily inherited following his father's death.

Emily is said to provide annual monetary gifts to all four of Joe's children, but she never fully embraced her stepson.

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