Obituary: Longtime journalist and editor Frank McCulloch dies at 98
Newsman Frank McCulloch, who was bald, blunt and beloved, wrote stories, ran newsrooms, challenged presidents and got late-night phone calls from Howard Hughes.
He asked hard questions. He was rarely satisfied with the answers. And he made sure that the reporters who worked for him were every bit as skeptical as he was.
His skeptical voice as a Vietnam War correspondent helped shape the public’s understanding of the conflict that tore the nation apart half a century ago.
McCulloch died Monday in a Santa Rosa nursing facility following a brief illness. He was 98.
Among his many jobs in America’s greatest newsrooms, McCulloch was the former managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner, the former afternoon daily owned by the Hearst Corp., which owns The Chronicle. He dove into the job when he was 65, an age when most people are diving into retirement. He was liked by some colleagues and worshiped by the rest.
His boss at the time, William Randolph Hearst III, said the Examiner was lucky on the day in 1985 when McCulloch agreed he might not be too old to help run the place.
“It was a little like someone telling you that Pelé is willing to play a little more soccer, and are you interested?” Hearst said.
McCulloch, his old boss recalled, was a “terrific human being, good with a story and very fair-minded.”
“The younger people who worked for him were in awe of him,” Hearst said. “They adored him. He was a great mentor. always willing to share.”
Former Examiner columnist Stephanie Salter smiled and said her boss and friend had “impeccable journalism bona fides up the wazoo.”
“He took an interest in everyone and he edited with a light hand,” she said. “He was good at getting you to figure out what the problem was.”
Then-Examiner Executive Editor Larry Kramer called McCulloch a “Superman in the industry” who was “good at making you understand why what you did was important.”
“He had a position of trust and respect in the country that you just don’t see anymore,” Kramer said.
The son of a northern Nevada cattle rancher, McCulloch was a semipro baseball pitcher whose fastball wasn’t fast enough. He enrolled in the University of Nevada at Reno and before long landed a job on the school newspaper. After graduation, he was hired as a reporter for United Press International in San Francisco, at $15 a week.
In 1942, he joined the Marines. A heart ailment kept him from combat during World War II, and he spent the war writing stories about Marines for the public relations office.
He covered crime stories for the Reno Evening Gazette, poking into the less-than-exemplary backgrounds of applicants for gaming licenses, and receiving warnings that he shouldn’t. In 1951, he began writing for Time magazine, traveling through the South and writing a profile of future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
About that time, McCulloch got the notion to try to profile Hughes, the famously reclusive billionaire. He sent a list of 100 questions to Hughes’ office and, not long after, his phone rang.
“This is Howard Hughes,” the voice said. McCulloch, characteristically skeptical, needed convincing. But the two men quickly established a rapport that led to McCulloch writing a handful of stories about Hughes. It was to McCulloch whom Hughes confided years later that the sensational biography of him by one Clifford Irving was a fake.
In 1960, Los Angeles Times Publisher Otis Chandler named McCulloch managing editor of the paper. McCulloch helped the Times become one of the great U.S. newspapers, overseeing exposes of the John Birch Society and of abuses by the Teamsters union pension fund.
McCulloch then went to work for Time-Life, which sent him to Southeast Asia in 1963 to cover the Vietnam War. His stories questioned official accounts that maintained the war was proceeding according to plan, with victory just around the corner.
His skepticism set him apart. Fellow Vietnam reporter David Halberstam called McCulloch “a legend.” CBS correspondent Morley Safer called him a “soft-hearted guy who demanded that (reporters) get it absolutely right.”
President Lyndon Johnson, enraged by McCulloch’s reporting, was said to have complained that the bald man from Time magazine had been wandering around in the jungle sun without a hat.
About that time, McCulloch addressed critics of the press and of Vietnam War coverage.
“We admit the free press is not what it should be, and probably never will be,” he said. “But it’s all we’ve got. So long as this remains an open society, you and we — a free people and a free press — are stuck with each other.”
In 1975, after leaving Time and complaining to his wife that he was “dying of boredom,” McCulloch was hired as managing editor of the Sacramento Bee. Five years later, he was appointed executive editor of all three Bee newspapers in California. Under his leadership, the Bee published highly regarded stories about organized crime.
Following six years at the Examiner, McCulloch retired in 1991, but continued to champion the First Amendment. Five years ago, he helped a group of journalists persuade the Pulitzer Prize board at Columbia University to award a posthumous award to Associated Press reporter Ed Kennedy, wrongly accused of breaking an embargo in reporting the German surrender in May 1945.
McCulloch is survived by daughters Michaele Lee (Dee Dee) Parman and Candace Sue (Candy) Akers of Santa Rosa, and by two grandchildren, two step-grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Jakie, his wife of 64 years, died in 2006.
Plans for a memorial service in Santa Rosa are pending.