Jim Bellows

The scrappy newspaper editor who loved a good fight

Jim Bellows

1922–2009

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Jim Bellows, who died of Alzheimer’s disease last week at 86, once said that the ideal news­paper should be “irreverent, rash, feisty, and really care.” In a career spanning half a century, Bellows embodied that philosophy, generally expressing himself through mumbles and hand gestures, hunching his shoulders, and chain-smoking all the while. Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter David Halberstam called him “a serious man who did not seem serious.”

Bellows’ personal appearance fit his underdog image, said the Los Angeles Times. Born in Detroit, at age 18 he stood only 5 feet tall. Though he eventually “sprouted to 5 feet 7 inches, he never stopped thinking of himself as ‘the runt.’” After Navy service in World War II, he entered journalism in 1947 at the Columbus, Ga., Ledger. “There, the cub reporter pursued a story about the Ku Klux Klan that ended with angry Klansmen forcing liquor down his throat until he passed out.” Bellows’ front-page account put his career on the fast track and, in 1961, he joined the New York Herald Tribune.

Bellows brought a “drive to dig below the surface of events,” said The New York Times, a trait that produced stellar coverage of the civil-rights movement and urban decay. Later, as an editor at the Tribune’s Sunday magazine, he embraced New Journalism’s “use of novelistic techniques to give reporting new layers of emotional depth”—giving free rein to such fresh voices as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. His signature moment may have been publishing Wolfe’s hilarious 1965 takedown of The New Yorker. Calling it “libelous” and “murderous,” editor William Shawn begged Bellows not to publish it. Instead, Bellows alerted Time and Newsweek to the fracas and made national news.

The next year, Bellows joined the Los Angeles Times, said The Washington Post. But it was not a good fit; calling it a “velvet coffin,” he decamped for The Washington Star in 1975. He enlivened that paper, too, giving writer Diana McLellan license to mock Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his then-girlfriend Sally Quinn as “the Fun Couple.” In 1978 Bellows joined “what was considered the worst urban daily in America, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.” Once again, Bellows shook things up. “He focused the public’s outrage after two cops emptied their guns into a woman over an unpaid $22 gas bill. He also put a runaway hippo named Bubbles on the front page.”

After retiring from newspapers, Bellows went into television, becoming the first managing editor of Entertainment Tonight and serving as executive editor of ABC’s World News Tonight.