Conservative columnist who covered 11 presidents started U.S. News & World Report.
David Lawrence Jr. (1919-1995)
David Lawrence Sr. (1888-1973)
Ellanor Campbell Lawrence (1887-1969)
David Lawrence Sr.’s life-long career as a journalist began in high school, picked up steam in college, and peaked as columnist, founder, and editor of U.S. News & World Report magazine.
For more than 60 years, he reported from Washington, D.C., observing the administrations of 11 presidents, from William Howard Taft to Richard Nixon. At one time, his conservative columns appeared in about 300 newspapers as well as his magazine.
David Lawrence was born on Christmas Day 1888 in Philadelphia, and his family moved to Buffalo, New York, when he was an infant. As a high school student, he began writing for the local paper during school vacations. By the time he left for Princeton University, he had a line on a job as campus correspondent for The Associated Press.
His first big scoop came in spring 1908, when he was sent to Lakewood, New Jersey, to report on President Grover Cleveland, who was gravely ill. After a few days, David had to return to Princeton, but he’d made friends with First Lady Frances Cleveland, who agreed to keep him apprised of her husband’s health. In late June, she sent a telegram: “Grover Cleveland died at 8:40 A.M.” David’s exclusive story helped him get a job in The Associated Press’ Philadelphia bureau in 1910, and when a position opened in Washington, D.C., he transferred.
Six years later, he quit the wire service and became Washington correspondent for the New York Evening Post, which let him syndicate his own column. It was, he noted in his entry in “Who’s Who,” the “first Washington dispatch to be syndicated nationally by wire.”
He and Ellanor Campbell Hayes were married on July 17, 1918, in Hartford, Maryland. They had three children, David Jr., Mark, and Nancy. David Jr. was born April 30, 1919, and attended the Woods School for people with disabilities in Langhome, Pennsylvania. His parents created a trust to ensure he would be well cared for his entire life.
In 1926, David Sr. left his job at the Post to start U.S. Daily, a magazine that reported on federal government activities. After the Daily folded in 1933, he began publishing United States News, a weekly review of national events. And in 1946, he launched World Report, focusing on international affairs. A year later, he merged the two magazines into U.S. News & World Report, which built a paid circulation of 2.1 million by 1983. His column focused on political and economic developments at home and abroad.
“What’s wrong with America?” a 1968 column asked rhetorically. His response: “There’s a lot that’s wrong with America today—but nothing that can’t, in due time, be cured if the majority of the citizens make up their minds to act together to establish respect for law and order.”
His column in February 1973, shortly after the United States signed the Vietnam peace agreement, concluded, “The United States did not surrender as the ‘antiwar’ protesters have been demanding. We have attained peace with honor.”
Although the views he expressed publicly were consistently conservative—he said he voted for every Republican presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover—he described himself as a “liberal conservative.” When he received the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, from President Nixon in 1970, his friend Benjamin McKelway, former editor of The Washington Evening Star, summed up David’s approach: “No matter in which direction the tide may choose to flow, Dave is more inclined to buck it than float with it.”
Ellanor Lawrence died in 1969. Four years later, David Lawrence Sr. suffered a heart attack and died at his home in Sarasota, Florida. He was 84.
In his obituary, The New York Times noted that photographs depicted the columnist as grim-faced, his prose “a militant sort of conservatism.” However, that picture was totally at odds with the real David Lawrence, who was shy, almost timid, his friends said. He believed that men worked best when they owned what they worked for, and he arranged a stock bonus plan that permitted his magazine to become employee-owned.
After the Lawrences’s son David Jr. died on March 24, 1995, the remainder of his trust was transferred to The New York Community Trust for charitable purposes.