During a 20-year Tribune career, William F. Anderson was city editor, a Washington correspondent and a D.C.-based syndicated columnist before staying in Washington to work in a variety of roles in the federal government, including for U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Ed Derwinski.
“Bill was an agent of change at the Tribune, a leader who tried to usher a newspaper encrusted with rigid perspectives, outdated practices, aging editors and declining readership toward a brighter and more relevant future during the cultural and political cataclysms of the 1960s and early ’70s,” said former Tribune reporter Joseph McLaughlin. “Bill took chances on hiring young job seekers others might have passed over, gave them challenging assignments earlier in their careers than would otherwise have been the case, pushed for stories the Tribune might otherwise have ignored and made sure that the reporters in his city room shared his sense that journalism was not only the first draft of history but one hell of a lot of fun.”
Anderson, 98, died of heart failure Aug. 25 in Lexington, Virginia, where he lived, said a friend, Sarah Myers.
Born and raised in Greeneville, Tennessee, Anderson left high school at age 16 to enlist in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II, serving in New Guinea, the Philippines and Okinawa, Japan. During high school, he covered Greeneville High School football games for the Greeneville Sun, where he also worked during the summer while in college.
After three years in the Navy, Anderson attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he helped manage the university band’s halftime shows during football games and also was business and publicity manager for the band. In 1949, the now-defunct Knoxville Journal hired him as a police reporter. He later covered politics.
In 1950, Anderson joined the Nashville Banner as a reporter, and he then was hired by the Dayton Journal-Herald in Ohio as a military aviation writer. His military background proved a draw to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, which in 1955 hired Anderson as a reporter in Tokyo and then made him the Okinawa bureau chief.
In 1956, Anderson returned to the Knoxville Journal briefly to help cover a pro-segregation school riot in Clinton, Tennessee, after a court order mandated desegregating Clinton High School.
“It was a herd of journalists there from all over the United States, but I had a leg up on ’em because they were all from out of town,” Anderson told the Rockbridge (Virginia) Advocate newspaper in 2019. “I still knew the sheriff out there and I’ve never lost a news source in my life.”
Late in 1956, the Tribune hired Anderson as a general assignment reporter, covering neighborhood news on the South Side. Soon, Anderson shifted to the neighborhood news copy desk under neighborhood news editor Raymond Schotter. Tribune political editor George Tagge then tapped Anderson to be his assistant.
“In that job, you did profiles of people running for state legislature,” Anderson said in a 1994 interview. “I guess I was the third man in Springfield. And I worked on stories of the first McCormick Place. I worked on stories on the second McCormick Place after it burned and over time I got to know Mayor (Richard J.) Daley.”
In 1960, Anderson was promoted to correspondent in the Tribune’s Washington bureau, covering manned space events and the Pentagon. He also occasionally covered the White House and traveled with President John F. Kennedy to meet with the United Kingdom’s prime minister. He also covered the Gemini astronauts’ flights.
In 1966, Anderson returned to Chicago to become day city editor. In 1967 he was made city editor, a role he held until 1970. Anderson in 1968 created the Tribune’s daily “Action Express” column — a consumer-oriented piece edited by reporter James Coates — and he also oversaw “Save Our Lake,” a 1967 series of articles on Lake Michigan. He also managed Tribune reporter William Jones’ multipart 1970 investigation of an ambulance scandal that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971.
Anderson was city editor during tumultuous events of the late 1960s, including riots sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the controversial 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“We did the best coverage, in my opinion, of anybody in the United States for that convention,” Anderson said in the 1994 interview. “I don’t mean that personally, I mean that the reporters dug in. … We had our entire staff on it.”
Retired Tribune reporter Donna Gill recalled Anderson’s plan to place several reporters in Andy Frain usher uniforms at the 1968 Democratic National Convention to spy on state delegations in search of scoops. The plan almost worked, until word leaked to a competing newspaper’s reporter.
“He was a terrific newsman with a reporter’s gut for a story, an editor’s instincts for accuracy, a mentor’s bag of journalistic tools and a solid sense of decency and equality,” Gill said.
Gill also recalled Anderson’s willingness as city editor to dole out key assignments to female reporters at a time when women were severely underrepresented in the newsroom.
“He was just strictly in favor of giving the job to whoever could do it, and to giving everyone a chance,” she said.
Coates, later a legman for Anderson in the paper’s Washington bureau, recalled Anderson as a person who “knew absolutely everybody” both in Chicago and in D.C. Coates praised Anderson’s focus as an editor.
“He had a quality of leadership where you didn’t know you were being led (by him),” Coates said. “And if you were covering a tornado or a flood or a fire or a shooting, Bill backed you. He backed you like crazy.”
In the 1994 interview, Anderson said as city editor, he was most proud of creating the “Action Express” column, given its popularity, and of naming the first environmental editor at any U.S. newspaper, Casey Bukro.
Anderson enjoyed helping his staff find niche beats where they could thrive.
“I used to think of the newsroom a little bit like a big band with a lot of different personalities and temperamental people and talented people,” he said in the 1994 interview. “And you mix all that up and you get a marvelous brew and you just have to keep the brew going, I think, to keep a lively place.”
In 1970, Anderson returned to the Tribune’s Washington bureau, where he became a national correspondent, writing three columns a week under the byline Bill Anderson. Soon afterward, editor Clayton Kirkpatrick asked Anderson to write three additional columns a week.
Anderson’s column was nationally syndicated and also appeared in the Tribune’s Perspective section. He traveled widely as a columnist, including to Rome in 1975 to cover the canonization of the first American saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton. He also wrote about the rise of former California Gov. Ronald Reagan’s run for the presidency in 1976.
Anderson left the Tribune in 1976. In his farewell column, he noted his pride that the newspaper had been “fair and human, positive and even provocative in being informative.”
“Not everyone liked our Save Lake Michigan campaign, but it helped trigger a great national environmental movement — one still being debated,” he wrote.
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After leaving the Tribune, Anderson worked for U.S. Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, D-Washington, and then joined the newly formed U.S. Department of Energy, where he oversaw editorial services for the department’s first secretary, James Schlesinger. He then was public liaison officer for the U.S. Information Agency and as acting director of English broadcasts for Voice of America.
Anderson later became a special assistant to Derwinski, who at that time was counselor to the U.S. State Department. After Derwinski became the first Veterans Affairs secretary in 1989, he recruited Anderson to join him as a special assistant and as director of public affairs. Anderson later taught media classes at the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia.
After Anderson retired from the federal government in 1990, he enjoyed rehabbing houses and mentoring young people, Myers said.
In 2018, Anderson donated the land from his childhood home in Greeneville to a Methodist home for children, where his mother had taught for many years.
Anderson never married. There were no immediate survivors.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.