Gregg Ramshaw
The featured speaker for the Press Club’s March luncheon was Gregg Ramshaw, an ideal individual to guide us down Memory Lane from 1972 to 1974. At the ripe old age of 27, he had been named the Washington correspondent of Chicago Today newspaper, the afternoon little brother of the Chicago Tribune.
Nearly all the Press Club members lived through and recalled the tumultuous times of the Watergate scandal and its historic aftermath when President Nixon chose to resign to avoid impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate. But the intervening 50 years have blurred many of the names and details. Moreover, the technology of reporting has changed dramatically since then, and Ramshaw’s recollections of a rookie thrown up to his neck into a story that can be said to have defined an age captured us all.
This was not a mere recitation of names, dates, and facts. We all knew those by heart. Instead, our speaker told us what it was like to be a reporter in those days — an unknown correspondent for an equally unknown Chicago afternoon paper. In those days, if you or your employer didn’t enjoy a national reputation, you had to rely on sources like AP and UPI —and television, which covered the minutia of the Congressional hearings in agonizing detail. Primary sources, like members of Congress, tended to cultivate the national media.
Ramshaw felt he had no one to turn to — there was not a single Representative from the Chicago area sitting on the House impeachment committee whom he could buttonhole in a hallway for comments on the history unfolding before them. Similarly, the Senate Watergate committee did not include either of the Illinois senators.
As a local newspaper, Today’s coverage had been largely scooped by print and broadcast media which got leaks and disclosures from insiders.
Gregg Ramshaw had to find his own way in the mayhem and invent his own approach to reporting the events as they played out. The solution lay in writing “round-ups” or “news analyses” gleaned from the resources described above, and trying to present the facts (or continuing questions) as fairly as possible in ways that made readers think about the daily revelations.
In an era when headlines screamed things like “NIXON OUT” in billboard-sized type, his first lead to the Nixon resignation story aimed at something more historic: “The mantle of the nation’s highest office in the land passed from the troubled shoulders of Richard Nixon to the waiting shoulders of Gerald Ford.”
This was Ramshaw’s effort to focus his reporting on the end of our long national nightmare. In an appropriately quieting line, he quoted President Ford as saying, “May our former president, who brought peace to millions, find it for himself.” Ramshaw added that a month later Chicago Today folded — a reflection of the consolidation of news organizations that was beginning.
He described it all to the luncheon’s rapt audience with appealing humor and humility, laughing at his own shortcomings and lessons. Yes, he was only 27 at the time and trying to learn at lightspeed. And learn he did. His career did not fold like his newspaper. Instead, his career took him to Television News Incorporated, (TVN), ABC News, and ultimately to PBS as a producer for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in 1983 until 2004. Balance and fair reporting were the hallmarks of his life in the media and made him an exceptional witness to moments in history.
Renny Severance is retired executive editor of The Island Reporter, The Islander, The Captiva Current and related publications on Sanibel and Captiva. He is also a co-founder of Southwest Florida Business Today.