Letters to editor, February 1984

This subseries is the largest in the collection at 13 boxes and contains four boxes of incoming correspondence, two of letters to the editor, one-and-a-half of outgoing correspondence and half a box of phone messages. Also included are newspaper clippings and various publications. Events of interest are the Tribune’s endorsement of Harold Washington for Chicago mayor in 1983, material from Squires’ 1984 trip to the former Soviet Union as part of an American Society of Newspaper Editors delegation, the “American Millstone” series about Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood published in 1985, the printers’ union strike in 1985-1986, and material documenting Squires’ struggle against the corporate ethos of Tribune management in the late 1980s. Also of interest are the lengthy battle between the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, culminating in Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Sun-Times and columnist Mike Royko’s defection to the Tribune. Correspondents of note include former presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, advice columnists Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers) and her sister Abigail Van Buren, former U.S. Senator and Vice-President Al Gore, Jr. and his mother Pauline Gore, columnist Mike Royko, cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, authors Arthur Miller and Tom Wolfe, and newspapermen David Halberstam, Bill Kovach and John Seigenthaler. One book has been removed and shelved with the Southern Civilization collection.