Who Made Danny Run?

The Weatherman had predicted rain, but dawn broke pale and clear on Saturday, March 23. A stiff wind snapped the tails of yellow ribbons belted to trees. Flags unfurled from porches like crisp salutes. At noon, four generations of the Pulliam family converged at a nursing home in Franklin, Indiana, a tiny burg 20 miles south of Indianapolis. The clan was gathered to celebrate the 100th birthday of Martha Ott Pulliam, widow of newspaper baron Eugene Collins Pulliam. In her lace-collar dress, the matriarch sat in a wheelchair surrounded by her progeny, including one grandson who stole the spotlight: James Danforth Quayle.

It was Dan, not Martha, who cut the ceremonial first slice of white-frosted birthday cake. It was Dan, not one of his elders, who raised Old Glory up the two-story flagpole outside. And it was for a glimpse of the Vice-President more than a quote from the local centenarian that kept reporters and photographers waiting outside, held at bay by Secret Service men with automatic weapons tucked under their jackets.

Quayle made no speeches, but he titillated the journalists nonetheless. According to Rebecca Sun, a stringer for the Franklin Daily Journal and student at the Pulliam School of Journalism at Franklin College, Dan told his grandmother, "Gee, Nana, we didn't think you'd last this long." Sun heard the quote from a local TV cameraman who was allowed into the banquet hall for a sound bite.

The man who endowed this Hoosier dynasty did not, as the Vice-President might put it, last long enough to attend the party. Eugene C. Pulliam, Quayle's grandfather, was 16 years in his grave when his second wife ate a piece of her 100th-birthday cake. Still, his presence could be felt, as if her were one of those meddling gods from ancient mythology looking down from the parted clouds.

In the years roughly bracketed by the two World Wars, Eugene C. Pulliam built a print empire now worth about a billion dollars. Central Newspapers, Inc., the seven-paper chain he consolidated in the Forties and bequeathed to his heirs in 1975, includes the morning and evening papers in Phoenix, Arizona, Indianapolis and Muncie. Indiana, and the Vincennes, Indiana, Sun Commercial, whose publisher is the Vice-President's brother. Although the combines circulations of the seven papers is less than 1,000,000, the company's influence in the markets in rules is immense. The morning editions in Phoenix and Indianapolis, state capitals, are the de facto newspapers of record in their states. In words and pictures, they define local issues and influence votes. For four decades, they have reflected the right-wing sensibility of their patriarch. Like William Randolph Hearst a generation before him, Pulliam was obsessed with politics. He used his newspapers to launch crusades and settle vendettas. He bellowed at his readers in front-page editorials and wrangled for power in backroom deals. Shamelessly slanting news stories long after the style was obsolete, Pulliam passed to his heirs a legacy of journalistic infamy as well as a cushion of dynastic wealth.

When President Bush's heart fluttered, it fanned "Dump Quayle" brush fires. The future of the golfing Veep--code-named "Scorecard" by the Secret Service--was scrutinized, editorialized, polled. Time and Newsweek weighed in with cover stories. Among their revelations was a nonpartisan research group's finding that "Quayle finally lost his standing as the most mocked figure on late-night television. He was replaced by Saddam Hussein." The polls showed that a majority wanted Bush to drop his embarrassing sidekick in 1992. The Indianapolis Star, however, saw press "sharks" on a "feeding frenzy."

"All Vice-Presidents have come under similar scrutiny in such circumstances," the touchy Star opined. "Yet some reporters seemed more interested in hammering Quayle than in the President's state of health."

In Indianapolis, Quayle rumors have been flying fast and loose for years. One had Danny coming home to be publisher of Central Newspapers--tiptoeing in on cleated feet and hanging his golf cap in the corner office.

Like all good gossip, the rumor had its own logic. Old Man Pulliam's high-profile grandson had played his college golf at DePauw University in nearby Greencastle and sneaked through law school in Indianapolis. His wife, Marilyn, a native Hoosier, was a law school classmate. She went home often for fund raisers and family gatherings; the day of Martha Pulliam's 100th-birthday party, the Quayle motorcade stopped at the home of Dr. Warren Tucker, Marilyn's dad, in the little town of Peoga. Even as a discarded Vice-President, Dan would be a celebrity publisher in the heartland. And what would the job demand? Lunch with local merchants. Black-tie appearances at charity benefits. A TV interview or two. Golf. Dan could handle that. And the men who run the newspapers could keep the presses rolling.

Just how they would view their new boss is open to question. Last year, Star staffers held a retirement party at the Press Club for managing editor Bo Conner. Members of Dan's extended family, some of whom are top editors and writers at the Indianapolis papers, mingled with the crowd. "The Vice-President of the United States couldn't make it," the emcee announced. Then, handing a small package to Conner, he added, "So he sent his balls." Conner blushed as he took the proffered box of golf balls, and laughter filled the room.

Danny isn't going home. Or maybe he is. One rumor has Quayle going back to run for governor in 1992, challenging Democratic incumbent Evan Bayh, son of Birch Bayh--the man Dan unseated to get into the Senate in 1980. Lately, the boyish Bayh has looked vulnerable, due to a huge shortfall in the state's projected income. "Every time I hear the rumor, it's cast in a positive way," says a local political writer. "You know, 'Dan has to go home and save the troubled Republican Party in Indiana.' This would be promoted as an honorable way to get him off the ticket."

The Dan-Quayle-as-publisher rumor made the best water-cooler gossip. Imagine the quotes. A man with foot-in-mouth disease leading a brigade of writers! But it was probably just a sign of the confusion in the house of Pulliam.

When Eugene C. Pulliam was alive, everyone knew who was boss. Figuring out what Old Man Pulliam wanted was "the ultimate second guess," says Paul Dean, a Los Angeles Times columnist who worked for The Arizona Republic in the Sixties and Seventies. "You wrote as if he were looking over your shoulder." Now the bean counters rule. Their leader is the founder's only son, Eugene S. Pulliam, who settled into his father's sheltering shadow in Indianapolis just one year after graduating from DePauw, his father's alma mater. He became assistant publisher of the Indy papers in the Sixties and inherited the title of publisher when Daddy died. Those who knew his father still refer to him as Young Gene and even Sonny. This year, he celebrates his 77th birthday.

Reporters in Indianapolis, some of whom have worked in the same building with Young Gene for decades, say they do not know how the publisher fills his days. He is a pleasant man, they say, kindly and soft-spoken. But what does he do? "My primary interest and my abilities, if there are any, are in the business side," he says. "I approve all pay increases and all out-of-state travel...." He sits in a paneled corner office surrounded by family photos. One shows his father shaking hands with a very young and tan and blond Dan Quayle. It was taken on the day Danny joined the frat the Old Man had belonged to at DePauw. Nearby are Young Gene's golf trophies and mementos from his years as publisher. He calls them "do-dah awards."

"Young Gene is neither loved nor hated, respected nor disrespected," says a local writer who worked at the papers under both Gene Pulliams. "He's a neuter. He's just there."

Also working at the family shop in Indianapolis is Young Gene's son Russell, a Bible-thumping editorial writer for the News, and his feisty sister Myrta, assistant managing editor for news at the Star. Myrta and Russell have an estranged younger sister named Debbie, who lives in Maine and once edited an alternative newspaper there; one writer who has worked for the chain for more than 20 years has never even heard of Debbie Pulliam.

Of the third generation of the Pulliam clan working in the empire, including Vincennes Sun-Commercial publisher Michael Quayle, Dan's younger brother, Myrta is thought to have the best shot at the corner office. Yet for all their years of service to Central Newspapers, none of the inheritors represents the founder's will to power as well as the one who left the business for Washington, D.C.

•

If Eugene C. Pulliam hadn't made a fortune wielding newspapers like blunt instruments, Dan Quayle would not be Vice-President. Quayle probably wouldn't be in politics at all. The only reason he came to the attention of G.O.P. functionaries in Allen County, Indiana, in 1976 was that his daddy owned a paper there and was, by marriage and temperament, part of Pulliam's conservative print army. James Quayle had married Old Man Pulliam's daughter Corinne and bought the Huntington Herald-Press from his father-in-law in 1964. Twelve years later, it occurred to Orvas Beers, the Republican Party chairman in Allen County, to run James Quayle's son for a Congressional seat. Dan was 29 years old, living near a golf course in Huntington. Between rounds, he worked in the dingy publisher's office at the Herald-Press, a room now occupied by his sister, a trained nurse who came to publishing in the same way Quayle went to Washington--with a slim résumé and a potent surname.

Beers thought Dan Quayle had a shot at Congress in part because of his "attractive features and his friendliness." What else was there to go on? While those qualities might not have impressed Dan's grandfather, promoting a political novice was a gambit he understood. Three decades earlier, Pulliam and some pals had retooled Phoenix city government into an engine of their will. Self-appointed civic dons, they drew up slates of councilmen and mayoral candidates and publicized them in Pulliam's papers. On the cabal's first roster was a departmentstore heir who just three years later--boosted by Pulliam puffery and editorial endorsements--defeated Senate Majority Leader Ernest MacFarland. Soon after, Senator Barry Goldwater boldly ran for President.

A joke that made the rounds in Phoenix in the Fifties had Pulliam demanding of his top editor, "What did Goldwater say today?"

"Nothing," said the editor.

"Fine!" responded the publisher. (continued on page 154)Who Made Danny Run?(continued from page 86) "Put it on page one, but keep it down to two columns."

High on a hill in Paradise Valley, a wealthy suburb north of Phoenix, Barry Morris Goldwater, 82, sits in his home office studying the urban sprawl framed by his picture window. In the distance, jagged hills poke through the smog like sharks' teeth. The former Senator wears Bermuda shorts and a golf shirt. His hands are as gnarled as the limbs of a Joshua tree; the fight is gone from them.

These days, Goldwater recalls his friend Gene Pulliam grandly. He was the last of a breed, the elder statesman says. "Gene knew what he liked, and if he didn't like you, you knew that, too. Whatever he thought, he sat down with his little white hands and punched it out on his typewriter. You could read about it on the front page."

Although Pulliam's Arizona papers endorsed Goldwater's bid for the White House in 1964, Gene abandoned his buddy during the campaign. He plotted strategy with Lyndon Johnson and made public statements in support of the incumbent. Even the newspapers' editorial endorsement was backhanded, informing readers that "Lyndon Johnson has been a good President," and "Barry Goldwater is not a political freak."

Goldwater waves those untidy memories away. "I think I'm the only one who knows this story," he says. "For some reason, Gene wanted to own a share of the New York Central Railroad. I never asked him why, I just knew he did. Johnson promised he would help Gene get the New York Central deal if he was elected, so that was business, not politics. It was nothing personal. I don't think we ever had an argument about politics."

Savvy as he is about the business of politics, Goldwater takes his time pondering Dan Quayle's astonishing career. What would Gene Pulliam have thought of his famous grandson's success?

"That's a hard question," Goldwater says. His gaze wanders from the streets of Phoenix to the Native American art that covers his office walls, then back to the window. "I know Quayle about as well as anybody. He went to school with my children. I knew his mother and daddy. He served on the Armed Services Committee when I was chairman."

The old conservative gunslinger thinks for a moment. "I have a very strong hunch," he finally answers. "Gene would have called Bush and told him, 'No. That's not the man to pick for Vice-President.' "

The careers of Barry Goldwater and Dan Quayle were midwifed by Pulliam and his newspapers. But long before he was trumpeting political pets and projects, Eugene C. Pulliam had to create himself.

Picture a boy on the wind-swept plains of western Kansas as the 19th Century draws to a close. He wears coarse clothes sewn by his mother from his father's castoffs. He trades pennies for kernels of corn, sells the popped corn to railway passengers, then reinvests his copper profits. Hand to mouth, he learns his first lesson in commerce.

His father is a fundamentalist missionary who tucks a Bible into his saddlebags and rides to nearby towns. At each dusty stop, he spills from his heart tales of hell-fire, damnation and Jesus' eternal love. He is paid with butter, potatoes, bacon, beef, wrinkled dollar bills. Every few years, the Pulliams pack their meager belongings and move to a new home, and at each home, they welcome to their table those with even fewer comforts, a grimy congregation of tramps and beggars with their eyes askance and their palms out. The fadier bends his head in prayer. The boy looks for a way out.

Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House when Gene left Kansas to attend DePauw, his mother's alma mater. Unlike his famous grandson, whose academic indolence would become a subject of public fascination, Pulliam left his mark. He helped start a college newspaper, helped organize a press club and co-founded the country's first journalism fraternity. He became a stringer for The Indianapolis Star, a paper he would one day own. Still, schoolboy life chafed like church clothes. After his junior year, he dropped out and husded back to the West, taking a job as a reporter first at the Atchison, Kansas, Champion and then at The Kansas City Star.

On the police beat in Kansas City, he observed a raid on an opium den. His nostrils flared at the "pungent, stifling odor." He saw "buckets on the stove ... bubbling hard with the concoction." Inside the buckets was a witch's brew--"the drug that makes beasts of men and women." Hell-fire! Damnation! With his notebook and pen, the fledgling scribe prowled the land his father had canvassed with a Bible. He learned to like the sound of his printed voice and he learned a new lesson: The man who owns the paper calls the shots. From the reportorial trenches, he looked for a way up.

Gene got his first crack at publishing in 1912, when he married a girl he'd met at DePauw and, with the help of his Midwestern in-laws, bought the Atchison Champion. He made a mess in Atchison, sinking the little paper in two years, but his youthful mistakes presaged his later style. The Champion's new publisher, 23, came out swinging. He fought a tawdry print battle with his competitor, the Atchison Globe, beginning with a story that hinted the wife of the Globe's publisher was drunk at a party--the ethical equivalent of a sucker punch. He leaped into local politics with windy exhortations to restructure government. He focused his parochial hatred of the East Coast on John D. Rockefeller, Sr., cofounder of Standard Oil, crudely dubbing him "the Pharisee." Throughout, the mudslinger heralded his own honor. "The policy of the Champion," Pulliam wrote, was "in accord with enlightened journalism."

After the Champion debacle, Pulliam returned to Indiana to start over. His weak eyes kept him out of World War One, so he put his powerful lungs to work, stumping the Hoosier State selling war bonds. Widowed and remarried, Gene used the few thousand dollars he'd salvaged from Atchison to buy a share of the Franklin Evening Star. It was the first bite of a purchasing binge diat lasted three decades. He traveled the country by train and car, studying Commerce Department reports to locate towns growing faster than their newspapers, then swooped in for the main chance. He borrowed money from friends, leveraged his investments with debt, traded up. B.S.C. Pulliam, they called him. Buy, Sell, Consolidate.

Between 1917 and 1922, he became sole owner of the Evening Star. He bought a daily in Lebanon, Indiana, two papers in Daytona Beach, Florida, and one in North Carolina. Cashing in a portion of his holdings in 1929, he went to Oklahoma and snatched up 11 papers in six months. When the stock market crashed, he found his fiscal savior in Oklahoma City oilman Frank Buttram, who bought $150,000 worth of Pulliam's stock and promptly decided to run for governor. Buttram got a share of flattering coverage for his money, and his opponent took some editorial flak. The oilman lost at the polls, but not before the Clinton Daily News staked a hollow claim for its part owner. "We are for Buttram solely because we think he is the better of the two men--the man widi the most qualifications." So much for enlightened journalism.

Pulliam moved on with a new partner, Texas tycoon Charles Marsh. In 1930, they claimed ten papers; in the next three years, they collected 16 more. By 1934, Gene was ready to fly solo. Taking a handful of dailies, he left Marsh and formed Central Newspapers, Inc., and within five years, the boy who'd learned to turn a profit selling popcorn was atop a print empire of his own.

He divorced his second wife, the enduring Martlia Ott Pulliam--who would celebrate her 100th birthday with grandson Dan Quayle at her side--and wed his secretary, Nina, a regal-looking blonde 18 years his junior. Between 1944 and 1948, he bagged the influential morning dailies in Indianapolis and Phoenix and matched them with a pair of afternoon papers that solidified his power base in those cities. He traveled the world with his new wife in the chilly dawn of the Cold War. He changed his papers' motto from "Fair and first" to "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." That New Testament phrase--still printed daily on Pulliam's front pages--expressed "the whole spirit of Christian living," he told readers, "the whole reason for the existence of man on earth."

•

Picture a man at the height of his power: deep-chested, thickened with age, as prickly and stubborn as a saguaro. He measures six feet from his soles to his silver crewcut but seems taller. His head is massive, roughly chiseled, the weak eyes magnified by black-framed glasses. Ambition has stiffened his posture, success suffused his fury with divine right. A fat cigar juts from his hand. Commands tumble from his lips. He is the majority of one.

Pulliam lived his last years in a white-washed adobe home in Paradise Valley, near Goldwater's hilltop compound. He and Nina looked out on eight private acres landscaped with desert grasses, palms and cacti, citrus and eucalyptus trees. Some days, Nina wrote the prayer that appeared on the front pages of The Arizona Republic and The Indianapolis Star, the two largest-circulation newspapers in their states. At banquets, she bowed her head before ambassadors and businessmen and recited an invocation. The Old Man, as his employees called him, poured drinks with a heavy hand. He rode to work in the back seat of a black Cadillac. He ate lunch at his desk. Soup and crackers, fruit and cheese: The missionary's son was no sensualist, no connoisseur. Sunday mornings, he was ferried three miles along the base of the chocolate-colored Camelback Mountain to the Paradise Valley Country Club for a round of golf. He played well and scored even better, routinely giving himself long putts and teeing up balls on the fairway--working the angles at his hobby just as he did in business. Sometimes he was joined on the course by his grandson, a promising young golfer named Dan.

Employees felt fortunate to work for him. He paid a decent wage. He built recreation areas for staffers in Indianapolis and Phoenix and hosted annual picnics there. Among those who served him in his heyday, Pulliam's acts of generosity are legend: bonuses written on his personal checks, hospital bills summarily cleared, children's educations underwritten. The Old Man also dipped deep into his pockets to upgrade his newspapers, expanding editorial staffs and modernizing pressrooms. He sent correspondents to Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Europe, Canada, Mexico. For an ambitious reporter, Central Newspapers was a place to make a name.

But Poppa also liked to preach. As much as he liked reporters and respected enterprising journalism, Pulliam would sacrifice both to flaunt his most prized possession: political power, tn Indianapolis, he picked a fight with Democratic governor Henry Shricker. "The Old Man had a hell of a vendetta going with Shricker," recalls columnist Don Campbell, who worked in Pulliam newsrooms for 30 years. "If Pulliam didn't like you, you were blacklisted from the paper, and that's what happened with Shricker. Can you imagine trying to cover state politics without ever mentioning the governor's name? It got to the point where if they had a picture they wanted to use and he was in it, they'd white him out. I remember one where someone had his arm around empty space, just hanging there where the governor was standing before they zapped him."

In Phoenix, Gene wanted two state-supreme-court judges to be re-elected. "He called me into his office and told me who he wanted to win," remembers Robert Early, managing editor of the Republic at the time. "He said, 'I want a story in the paper every day, either on the front page or on the front of the metro pages.' This was three months before the election!" Early produced stories for 90 days. Gene's favored judges won.

Although he toed no party line, Pulliam was a conservative by instinct. He despised the East Coast establishment, resented old money and felt no sympathy for the urban underclass. In his cowboy credo, America was a ladder every man could climb. No one deserved a boost. Active and generous with the college he'd dropped out of, Pulliam quit De-Pauw's board of trustees in the Sixties when the president decided to accept Federal financial aid. "Taking that first million dollars from the Government will be like taking the first shot of heroin," he told fellow alumnus Bernard Kilgore, chairman of The Wall Sheet Journal.

Pulliam's favorite whipping post was the Federal bureaucracy. He capped years of columnizing with an editorial in 1971 that filled the front pages of his seven newspapers. "Most democracies have been destroyed by centralized bureaucracies'--or at least by the rule of organized minorities," the publisher fumed. Working himself into a frenzy, he attacked Government agencies ranging from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the FCC, the FDA and "State Department parasites." Busing school children was a "national scandal." Consumer advocate Ralph Nader was the new Lenin. " 'His goal,' " wrote Pulliam, quoting another Nader hater, "'is a top-to-bottom take-over of industry by the Government, with Mr. Nader himself, I would guess, in charge....' " Not satisfied to preach only to his own readers, Pulliam paid to have his screed reprinted in The Washington Post.

While veering in print from the center to the hard right, the Old Man privately curried favor with any big-time pol who'd have him. "I am for you 100 percent," he wrote to candidate Nixon in 1960. Four years later, Pulliam was advising Lyndon Johnson. "I wouldn't discuss a word about civil rights," he warned L.B.J., as the Democrat headed for Indiana. "The law has been passed.... Any effort on your part to justify it would only hurt." He lambasted Jack Kennedy in countless speeches and editorials--Kennedy had "a dictator complex," had bought the Democratic nomination, had made "a martyr of himself on the Catholic issue in order to get sympathy and to glamourize himself." But when Kennedy won, Pulliam trotted off to the White House for lunch at the new President's side.

Before long, another Kennedy hit the campaign trail, and Pulliam was back to his old tricks.

In the spring of 1968, Attorney General Robert Kennedy went to Indianapolis for Indiana's Democratic primary. As it happened, R.F.K. arrived just as news was breaking of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, assassination. When his plane touched down, Kennedy was told that King had been shot. Stunned and grieving, Kennedy began an impassioned, extemporaneous speech on the virtues of King's nonviolent crusade. What America needed, he said, was "not division, not violence or hatred but love, wisdom and compassion." Parts of the speech are engraved on Kennedy's monument in Arlington National Cemetery.

Pulliam was not impressed. The Star buried Kennedy's speech deep in a story about a youth group supporting Indiana governor Roger Branigin, who was also in the Democratic primary. Journalism students--including many of the reporters who now work for Central Newspapers--study that day's Star as a textbook case of news manipulation, a vestige of highhanded tactics that have mostly gone the way of the Model T.

A former editor of The Arizona Republic remembers April 4, 1968, for another reason. Shortly after he learned King was dead, J. Edward Murray picked up the phone in his Phoenix office and heard Pulliam's familiar growl.

"No picture of Martin Luther King on the front page," the boss ordered.

Beloved by his ambitious young staff for his dedication to fair reporting, Murray was as much a fighter as the Old Man. As staffers gathered outside the glass wall that enclosed his corner of the newsroom, he battled Pulliam on the phone. "I won," Murray remembers, "and he never said anything about it again." But the editor's luck didn't hold for long. When he decided to bring the rebellious Sixties to the pages of Arizona's dominant newspaper, Murray added the syndicated cartoon Dooneshnry. Pulliam let a few of Garry Trudeau's leftist salvos slip by, then canceled the strip without consulting his editor. Murray also hired a young columnist named Daniel Ben-Horin to present his generation's point of view. In one early column, Ben-Horin reported on Arizona State frat boys' serenading sorority women, who responded by showering their suitors with panties and bras. The publisher's pious wife was outraged. Ben-Horin and Murray were canned.

Back home in Indiana, the Sixties passed quietly. Pulliam's dutiful son Gene, assistant publisher of the Star and the News, didn't blow his nose without first checking with Dad. To this day, he can't remember a time when he made an editorial decision against his father's wishes. "Never," mumbles the inheritor of the throne. "You didn't do that." You did help your own, though--as when Wendell Phillippi, a retired Army major general and senior editor of the News, made the recommendation that got Dan Quayle into the Indiana National Guard. Like his grandfather, the hawkish scion never went to war.

Sunshine and golf had called the Old Man to Phoenix in the Forties, but it was politics and power that preoccupied him there. From his white casa, he exerted control over almost every aspect of civic life. The city limits were expanded because Gene Pulliam wanted it done. Huge tracts were zoned to promote business because Gene Pulliam wanted it done. He killed the cross-town Papago freeway project in 1973 by filling his papers with antifreeway stories, photos of smog in other cities and front-page cartoons mocking Papago supporters. By then, the population of Phoenix had grown more than four times as large since Gene hit town. He had courted and won Presidents, Congressmen and governors and launched the career of Barry Goldwater, the voice of American conservatism.

On the morning of June 23, 1975, Gene Pulliam, 86, dictated a memo on unemployment to one of his editors. Then he scribbled a note on the pad by his bed--"Goldwater." Soon after, he suffered a massive stroke and died. Then the preacher's kid made one last trip East. Eulogized in Phoenix, Pulliam was buried in Lebanon, Indiana, a little town in the cornfields north of Indianapolis. His plot is marked with a small granite stone engraved with only one word other than his name: Son.

•

When Pulliam died, control of Central Newspapers passed to a trust managed by his son Gene, his third wife, Nina, and a corporate executive named William Dyer. The company's board of directors includes the Vice-President's father, James Quayle, who at 69 is nearly two decades younger than the oldest of the directors, 88-year-old Dyer. Some newsroom grunts refer to them as "the petrified forest."

Two years ago, Central's executives took the chain public so that the third generation of Pulliams and other stockholders could get their money out of the company. Franklin College, in the Indiana town where Martha Ott Pulliam turned 100, sold 1,300,000 shares at the first public offering. Dan Quayle hung on to his cut of Central stock and made, $13,444 in dividends and interest on it last year. Management now feels the heat to turn a profit, and Young Gene is reduced to perusing expense reports, running the empire with Wall Street analysts looking over his shoulder.

Upstairs from the paneled room where his dad sits with his do-dah awards, Russell Pulliam, 41, taps out his editorials for The Indianapolis News. Pleasant in the noncommittal way of his father, Russell does not travel far, in conversation or in print, before marking his path with a crumb from Scripture. None who know him think he has a shot at the corner office. "Little Rusty's a dial tone," says a former Star writer.

"The only way he could run things is if they turned it into a Christian newspaper chain," says another Indy wag.

"I just want to do what needs to be done," Russell humbly asserts. "There's a phrase in the Scripture--it says not to lord it over people. I'm not going to take my family name and lord it over people."

His sister Myrta, on the other hand, just might. In Indianapolis and Phoenix, staffers talk about Myrta's short skirts, her profane temper, her liberal politics, her ambition. "She's got the Old Man's piss and vinegar," says an editor at The Arizona Republic. The 44-year-old heir has worked her way around the newsroom like someone with an eye on the top job. Like her granddaddy, Myrta started on the police beat and was boosted through the ranks at The Indianapolis Star to assistant managing editor for news, her current post. The position was created for her earlier this year. When the promotion was announced, she was vacationing in Antarctica.

Earlier in the year, Myrta had gone on safari in Kenya--and written it up in a splashy two-part feature published with her own photos in the Star on consecutive Sundays. The stories left some staffers rolling their eyes. "Another gig she got through hard work and industry," said one, with a sarcastic laugh. Before Kenya, Myrta had organized a jaunt for journalists and friends to the Soviet Union.

"How many weeks of vacation you up to, Myrta?" a sportswriter needled her recently. "Fifty?"

Globe-trotting, dabbling at Daddy's papers, Myrta waits for the trees to fall in the petrified forest. "I think she's been offered the job of publisher," says a friend, "but I think she's delaying it as long as possible, because she'd have to settle down."

While the Indianapolis papers are guided by the timid hand of the patriarch's son, Phoenix erupts with one crisis after another. The first publisher on the Western front after the Old Man died was his widow, Nina. Her brief, tumultuous tenure included an editor's suicide and a labor dispute in which the papers sued their own employees. Publisher Duke fully, who a year later took the reins from Nina, boasted of having flown combat missions in Korea and Vietnam, wore a chestful of medals and made speeches in full military regalia; he locked horns with the Maricopa County attorney, who did some digging and unmasked Duke as a fraud. Tiilly, it turned out, had never even joined the Air Force. He quit in disgrace and checked into a psychiatric ward.

In 1976, one of the Republic's reporters was murdered. Don Bolles, an award-winning investigative reporter, had written about corruption in state government and the Mafia's entrance into Arizona. One summer day, he got a call from a man claiming to have information Bolles might be interested in regarding a sleazy land deal involving local bigwigs and state-government representatives. After the meeting, Bolles climbed into his white Datsun and was blown to bits by six sticks of dynamite attached to the belly of his car.

Months of investigations by reporters and the cops produced a mountain of newsprint and a round of trials. A local plumber and a land developer were convicted of the assassination (and later freed when another court overturned the ruling). "To this day, no one knows who was behind it," says writer Paul Dean, who headed the Republic's team investigating the murder. Some who knew the martyred reporter, though, look back at that sad chapter in the Phoenix papers' history and see it as a sign of changing times.

"I'm here to tell you, if the Old Man had been alive, Bolles would not have been blown up," says Don Dedera, a Republic reporter in the Fifties and Sixties. "Nobody would have dared. Gene wouldn't have slept a night until they were found, and when he got 'em, they'd have been nailed up on the side of a barn like a bearskin."

•

In Old Man Pulliam's day, his papers clawed and crowed and puffed out their chest feathers like fighting cocks; they had a taste for blood. Now their black-and-white world view has blurred to gray. The newspapers have become bland and, with few exceptions, predictably professional--more like Dan Quayle, the Yuppie Vice-President, than like Eugene C. Pulliam, the firebrand founder. Still, the presses roll.

In April of this year, The Indianapolis Star won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of investigative stories on the state's medical-malpractice-insurance laws. A few months earlier, the paper had published a syndicated column that blew verbal kisses at the Vice-President. "Dan Quayle has done more than survive," the columnist opined. "He has prevailed." The paper's front page still carries a daily "Prayer" and "Chuckle"--quaint remnants of Old Gene's homespun style. On January 16, the day the Gulf war began, a solemn note below the prayer read, "The Chuckle will return tomorrow."

In Phoenix, an Arizona Republic special-projects team known as the SWAT team broke the story of a wide-ranging police sting that netted indictments of 18 people--including seven state legislators--on charges ranging from campaign-law violation to bribery.

Shortly after the series began last February, an editor strolled through the lobby of the Republic and Gazette building. He paused to read a bronze plaque. On it was a quote: If you forget everything else I've said. Remember this--america is great only because America is free. Beneath was the craggy signature gene pulliam. The editor smiled. He knew the Old Man. "If you forget everything else I've said," he roared, mimicking his former boss, "you're fired!"

If the Veep is dumped, this is where he might end up ... back at his family's chain of powerful newspapers.

Confusion reigns in the house of Pulliam. There's no one like the old man to take control.

"He was the last of a breed: 'Gene knew what he liked, and if he didn't like you, you knew that, too.' "