William Turner Catledge

Choctaw County native William Turner Catledge was best known as the person for whom the New York Times created the position of executive editor. He was born on the three hundred-acre farm of his paternal grandfather, George Berry Catledge, near New Prospect, Mississippi, on March 17, 1901. When he was three years old, Turner moved with his parents, Lee Johnston and Willie Anna Turner Catledge, and his older sister, Bessie Lee, to Philadelphia, where his father worked in the hardware store owned by his mother’s brothers.

Turner Catledge developed an interest in politics and the law from his father, who served a term as mayor of Philadelphia. As a child, Turner loved watching trials at the courthouse with his father and with James Eastland, whose father was Woods Eastland, the district attorney.

Catledge attended Mississippi A&M College, sixty miles north of Philadelphia near Starkville, working in the mess hall, as a typist and then as an assistant to the head of the school’s agricultural department. In this capacity he wrote, edited, and distributed bulletins on agricultural topics to the state’s farmers. While still in college, he took his first newspaper job working for editor Clayton Rand at the Neshoba Democrat, learning about setting type and other essential tasks of publishing a newspaper.

In 1922 Rand purchased the weekly Tunica Times and asked Catledge to move to Tunica and run it for him. After working briefly there and in Tupelo, he moved to Memphis, where he took a job at city’s leading newspaper, the Commercial Appeal. On an assignment covering the 1927 Mississippi River flood he met reporter W. A. S. Douglas, who arranged a job for him with the Baltimore Sun. On the same assignment, he also met Herbert Hoover, then President Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, who recommended Catledge for a position at the New York Times. Catledge began his long and productive career at the Times in August 1929. Later that year, the Times assigned him to the Washington bureau, where he soon became knowledgeable in national politics and honed his skills at political reporting.

Catledge left the Washington bureau of the New York Times in early 1942 for the assistant managing editor position at the Chicago Sun, a position he held for nineteen months before returning to the Times Washington bureau as national correspondent. Two days before Thanksgiving 1943, he embarked on a four-month tour of the western war zone, covering the activities of the Red Cross and observing troop morale for General Marshall. His next assignment was covering the upcoming presidential campaign.

In January 1945 Catledge became assistant managing editor of the Times, a job he held until he became executive managing editor in January 1951. The highlight of his visits in 1957 to fifteen countries in Europe was an interview with Nikita Khruschev at the Communist Party headquarters in Moscow in which Catledge achieved exclusive coverage of Khrushchev’s call for a summit meeting of world leaders. They spoke through an interpreter, giving Catledge information for an article for the next day’s New York Times. As the meeting adjourned, Khruschev remarked to Catledge in perfect English, “Off to see the Mongolians.”

In 1964 Catledge was named executive editor of the New York Times, a position created for the purpose of centralizing all editorial decisions for the paper under one person. Aspiring to the motto of Arthur Ochs, former publisher of the Times, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” Catledge improved the reporting in the paper to reflect objectivity and capture the interests and concerns of its readers. In 1968 Catledge was promoted to vice president of the Times Company and chosen serve on the company’s board of directors. He retired two years later, in 1970, while continuing to serve on the board of directors but moving to New Orleans where he began working on his autobiography, My Life and The Times, which was published in 1971.

A member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors since 1951, he was elected to its board of directors in 1954 and served as president in 1960–61. He was also a member of the advisory boards of the Pulitzer Prize and the American Press Institute.

Catledge married twice, first in 1931 to Mildred Turpin, whom he met in Baltimore. The couple had two daughters, Mildred and Ellen. After their divorce, Catledge married New Orleans native Abby Ray Izard in 1957. Turner Catledge died on April 27, 1983, at the age of eighty-two at home in New Orleans. A memorial service was held two months later at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.