Newsweek's Young Turk Turns Heads

May 24, 1999

Newsweek's Young Turk Turns Heads
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI

Jon Meacham, a stolid fellow known in the Newsweek offices for his neatly combed hair and carefully chosen words, has a bust of George Bush on the shelf next to his desk. An authority on civil-rights history and World War II arcana, Mr. Meacham drinks Jack Daniels, loves to talk about his wife, Keith -- "she's a real Mississippi Delta girl," he said -- and goes to church on Sundays.

Mr. Meacham has also been part of the team supervising coverage of dozens of national news stories, from the 1996 Presidential campaign to Monica Lewinsky, for the magazine owned by the Washington Post Company. In November, he was named managing editor, a title he shares with Ann McDaniel, Newsweek's longtime Washington bureau chief.

If Mr. Meacham sounds like -- let's be blunt -- a vastly experienced old fogey ticking off the days to retirement, please read on: Mr. Meacham, arguably one of the most influential editors in the news magazine business, was still in his 20's last week. On Thursday, he finally passed over the epic chronological cusp of 30, an age when most journalists at newsweeklies are still grinding out articles, not overseeing a magazine staff.

"I don't think my age is an issue," Mr. Meacham said in an interview on his birthday in his Manhattan office -- the size of a studio apartment, which is what most of his college classmates are probably still living in -- overlooking Central Park.

Mr. Meacham pointed out that Richard M. Smith, Newsweek's editor in chief and chairman, does not care either. "He believes in 'Throw them in the deep end of the pool and see if they can swim.' "

Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek correspondent whose reporting helped to uncover the Lewinsky affair, refers tartly to Mr. Meacham in his book "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story" as "the 'Boy Wonder' nation editor." Around the Newsweek offices, Mr. Meacham's reputation is that of a man so methodical -- although his youth and relative inexperience have rankled some staff members -- that colleagues often referred to his age by reversing the numerals, said one editor; when Mr. Meacham was 27, for example, they considered him 72.

"I remember that we all thought, when we learned he was going to be the nation editor, well, gosh, he's awfully young," Mr. Isikoff said. "But he certainly filled the role pretty quickly."

Mr. Meacham is a bit of an anomaly, although there is historical precedent. After all, Briton Hadden and Henry R. Luce founded Time magazine when they were in their early 20's. But the standard trajectory in the newsweekly business has been to rise through the reporting ranks -- as Ms. McDaniel and Mark Whitaker, Newsweek's new editor, did -- before assuming the authority of senior editorial roles. At 29, for example, Ms. McDaniel was covering the Supreme Court and the Justice Department for Newsweek.

"Well, I guess I was no slouch," Ms. McDaniel said. "But it did take me until I was 42 to be named managing editor."

Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., Mr. Meacham spent most of his childhood at the knee of his grandfather, a prominent Chattanooga judge. "Every morning at 10, he had this group of old guys at the Downtown Hotel who would meet for coffee, five days a week, every day except for Christmas," Mr. Meacham said.

""The governor would stop by, and Al Gore would stop by," he recalled, referring to the father of the Vice President. "So my earliest memories are talk of politics and personalities, from what was going on in Watergate to who was going to become the new county lawyer."

Because Chattanooga was a relatively isolated city, in terms of news, in the 1970's and 1980's, Mr. Meacham said, newsweekly magazines were cherished objects. "It was before the national edition of newspapers and before CNN, and so Time and Newsweek played a huge cultural role," he said. Tuesdays, the day Time and Newsweek arrived, "were a big day in my house."

He majored in English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., purposefully skipped journalism school, going to work as a reporter at The Chattanooga Times instead. After a year, he went to work for The Washington Monthly, where -- for an annual salary of $10,000 -- he was put through what he referred to as journalism boot camp and caught the eye of Newsweek's editor, Maynard Parker, who died last year.

The swift pace of Mr. Meacham's career can be attributed, in part, to an element beyond his septuagenarian, er, sanguine demeanor. Time Warner's Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report have had to confront the aging of their readership during the last decade; to thrive they must attract younger readers with ever-younger editors. Stephen A. Douglas, the general partner at the Douglas Jones Group, a research firm for the advertising industry, said that aging readership is a special concern for the newsweeklies, and pointed out that in 1985 the median age of Newsweek's readership was 37, and in 1998, it was 43.2.

"A news magazine has a bunch of old editors, and sometimes having a young editor brings a different perspective the readers can sense," he said.

Mr. Smith said that "no one has ever asked or considered how old someone was around here." He added: "Jon's a wonderful writer. He sees stories whole and he sees packages of stories whole. He has a great sense about how to make the words and the pictures and the organization of cover packages accessible, entertaining and informative for the readers. That's not an age-specific thing."

But does Mr. Meacham risk cultivating too stodgy an image with his old-fashioned demeanor, his bourbon habits and his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations?

"No," Mr. Meacham said, explaining that he was a "term member" of the council. "That means I'm junior league. Just a pledge. That means I run around getting them drinks."