John Seigenthaler
Native Nashvillian John Seigenthaler was a titan of the publishing world. A U.S. Air Force veteran, Seigenthaler started his career as a cub reporter at The Tennessean before serving as an assistant to Robert F. Kennedy. He returned to The Tennessean in the 1960s, ultimately serving as the daily’s editor for many years, covering the civil rights movement and uncovering corruption in the city government. In 1991, he founded the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. Nashville’s John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge is named for him — it’s where, in the mid-1950s, Seigenthaler saved a man from the brink of suicide.
And all that’s just a drop in the bucket. Seigenthaler was an outsized figure, well respected not just in Nashville circles and in Tennessee politics, but in journalism at large. For the 10th anniversary of Seigenthaler’s death, founding Nashville Scene editor Bruce Dobie has a pair of remembrances he shared with us. Read them both below.
Was Seigenthaler in Watauga? Was He Not in Watauga? The Ruling Class Had Different Opinions.
Some stories that you think are going to be difficult to report turn out to be super easy. Other stories you think will be easy to report become super difficult.
For years I had wanted to write about Watauga, the super-secret club of powerful white men in Nashville who exerted tremendous influence on the city from the late 1960s through the mid-’80s. When I was a reporter at the Nashville Banner in the early ’80s, I would occasionally hear Watauga come up in conversation. One day in the newsroom I asked a business writer whom I respected, “Hey, what’s up with this Watauga thing?” He said, “It’s a big deal, but we’re prohibited from writing about it. So are reporters at The Tennessean and everywhere else. Just bury it.”
You read that right. Watauga had never been mentioned once in local media.
So while I was at the Scene, I was thinking, “Let’s dig up this Watauga gem of a story and report on it and do some serious Messing With the Establishment.”
I thought it was going to be hard. But it turned out to be a cinch. There was of course a wrinkle that involved Seigenthaler. That was unsurprising, because all hidden hallways of Nashville’s power structure, even the mostly Republican Watauga, ran right through his office. The reason the story was a cinch was because so many of the Watauga members were such decent people. They weren’t the Establishment Enemy. They were in fact super helpful.
I first called Eddie Jones, the longtime head of Nashville’s Chamber. I said, “Eddie, what do you know about Watauga?” And he said, “Well, I wasn’t a member, but I was its secretary. I kept the files. You want ’em?” And so I was generously handed over the minutes of the meetings, the lists of members over the years, all sorts of great stuff.
Two of the still-living members were Leadership Nashville founder Nelson Andrews and banker Ken Roberts. I knew Nelson fairly well, so I called him up. “Hey Nelson, I want to write a story about Watauga, like a history piece. Would you be willing to talk about Watauga and what you guys did?”
And he said, “Sure, how about breakfast tomorrow at the Vanderbilt Plaza? I’ll ask Ken Roberts to join. He was a member too.” I’ll never forget that breakfast. Ever the iconoclast, Nelson ate a cheeseburger and french fries, claiming it was part of a revolutionary new diet.
The story essentially wrote itself. Everyone I called spoke openly, with the exception of real estate pioneer Bobby Mathews. I said, “Bobby, Eddie Jones gave me all the member lists and you’re all over them.” He said, “One never talks about Watauga.” You gotta respect the guy.
There was one curious entry, though, in the Watauga meeting minutes. It needed to be fleshed out, because it sure looked like fun. In one of the member lists, John Seigenthaler was listed as a member. That would have been a clear violation of his paper’s independence if he were a member of a club, a largely pro-business one, that was trying to control the city’s levers of power. Back then in the media world, you did not serve on boards or anything of the kind. You were independent so as to avoid conflicts of interest.
So I called Nelson. “Was Seig a member, Nelson?”
Nelson said, “Sure, he was a member. Absolutely John was a member. No question.”
I called John.
“No, I was never a member of Watauga. Pure and simple. I knew some of the members, but no, I absolutely and categorically deny I was a member.”
I called Ken Roberts to see what he thought. “I think they are both right,” Roberts said. “John was important enough that of course someone would likely include him as a member of Watauga because anything we came up with would almost certainly have to be run past him for his approval. So in that sense, Nelson is right to think he was a member. But John may be completely correct that he was not technically a member.”
Ultimately I turned this “he said, she said” into a nice little sidebar with the muckety-mucks disagreeing in stark terms with one another.
John Seigenthaler: May He Rest in Peace
When John had cancer, a whole lot of people were keeping a close death watch. Phones were abuzz. You heard anything about Seigenthaler? Is he at home or at the hospital? I hear he’s better. I hear he’s worse. Locally, he was so revered. I was no longer at the Nashville Scene, but I was trying to keep tabs on the situation for this reason: I wanted the Scene to break the story of his passing before any other media, particularly The Tennessean, and I wanted it to be the best-written obit on the man, as a tribute to him. I went to the Scene’s editor at the time, Jim Ridley, and I said, “We really need to beat the shit out of The Tennessean here, break the story first, make them feel awful, and then on top of that do a better job of writing about him and explaining his importance to the city.” Ridley was all in.
John Seigenthaler bought his ink by the barrel, and he goes to his grave having exercised more unrivaled power — and having carried a broader …
Seigenthaler’s death might have been weeks away, but Ridley and I wanted it all done early. So I started writing it. And when I finished it, Ridley — one of the most talented wordsmiths I’ve ever known — took it to supersonic levels. One day, as expected, a tipster let me know Seigenthaler had died. Of course, our story was all ready to go. Ridley threw it up on the Scene’s website, and we beat everybody.
This was the lede of the obit I wrote:
John Seigenthaler bought his ink by the barrel, and he goes to his grave having exercised more unrivaled power — and having carried a broader portfolio — than any other single figure in the past half-century of this city. After a long fight with cancer, the former Tennessean editor and publisher died today. He was 86.
It was a decent enough lead. Hardly anything special. Pretty rote, as I look back on it. But by the end of the obit, I thought we had managed to take it up a notch. I think John would have liked what we wrote. I think he would also have liked that we beat the competition and took pride in that. I think he would have liked that we cared.
These are the last two graphs of the obit I wrote and Ridley edited:
In his heyday, Seigenthaler played the print game at a time when comma by comma, and word by word, the papers told stories of the world we saw, and the world we dreamed of becoming. It was hard work — dirty work, actually. But as if by magic, the world appeared anew every morning, carried by the sentences and paragraphs and quotations and photographs and headlines that John Seigenthaler oversaw. He not only brought the city to us, but he brought us its benevolent interpretation, ever goading us to a better place.
In the process, John Seigenthaler very much became a story himself — one with a strong lede, a marvelous plot, heaps of delicious conflict and an ending that would honor any man. He is why newspapers mattered. He is why newspapers might remind themselves that they matter still.
Bruce Dobie was the founding editor of the Nashville Scene.
