Our Own Hall of Fame

 

ANNE O’HARE McCORMICK

 

NEVER TOOK NOTES

Anne Hated Fuss, Wins a Pulitzer

 

THE DAYTON DAILY NEWS,  MARCH 1, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

 

     When Anne O’Hare McCormick was 67 she was clambering up and down the mountains of Greece reporting a guerrilla war.

     Franklin D. Roosevelt broke his rule about granting private interviews because he liked to talk to her.

     She was the first woman ever to win a major Pulitzer Prize for journalism.  She was the only woman ever to sit on the New York Times editorial board which shapes policy for one of the world’s most powerful newspapers.

     Dorothy Thompson said she should have been secretary of state or ambassador to Moscow.

     BUT ONE –TIME Daytonian Anne O’Hare McCormick refused to have her name in “Who’s Who.”

     The little redhead who looked like she’d be more at home at a tea party than in a trench (and probably was) couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.  She was astonished when three national groups named her “Woman of 1939.”

     The girl who was to become a celebrated international affairs columnist and editorial writer for the Times had no formal journalism training.  Born of American parents in England, she grew up around Columbus, went to a small college there and then broke in as associated editor of a weekly Catholic publication in Cleveland.

     IN 1911 Anne O’Hare married Francis J. McCormick, a Dayton manufacturer and importer, and came here to live.

     It was while traveling with her husband abroad on buying trips after World War I that she began to teach herself to be a foreign correspondent.

     Anne O’Hare asked the Times editors if she could become a free-lance contributor and impressed them with her astute stories from Italy as Mussolini began his power play.  While other reporters shrugged the future II Duce off, Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote: “Italy is hearing the master’s voice.”

     Six years later the McCormicks left their house on Cherry Dr. and moved to New York.  Anne continued her association with the Times and in 1936 joined the editorial page staff.  The next year she won the Pulitzer prize for foreign reporting.

     IN 1939 the gaily-hatted globe trotter ranged through Europe and the Near East as war loomed.

     Her by-lines and perceptive prose streamed out of Cairo, Jerusalem, Rome, Budapest, Belgrade, Vienna, London, Paris.  (In the early days a few copy readers called her ”Verbose Annie,” but she quickly learned to tighten her stories.)

     She talked with the men in the chancelleries and the men in the streets and came up with sharp reporting and clear-headed analyses.  She interviewed Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, two Popes.

     For 35 years Anne O’Hare McCormick was a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday magazine and from 1940 on wrote a thrice weekly editorial page column called “Abroad.”

     A NON-SMOKER and only a sipper of cocktails (old fashions), she spoke in a deep contralto, never took notes, continuously urged the United States to treat allies with consideration but develop foreign policy from strength.

     She covered wars, but maintained she’d “rather interview people than guns.”

     In his retirement, her husband continued to travel the world with her, from Claridge’s in London to the cratered desert of Israel.

     Mrs. McCormick died from cancer in New York in 1954.  She was 72.  A few months later her husband followed her in death.

 
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