The Press: Chandler’s Change of Heart

When Los Angeles Times Publisher Otis Chandler summoned his Washington bureau chief to the home office last summer and installed him as an associate editor, nobody doubted that highly regarded Robert J. Donovan was being groomed to become the paper’s editor. But last week Donovan was preparing to return to Washington as a Times columnist. Metropolitan Editor William F. Thomas, 47, had been unexpectedly tapped for the top job.

Chandler insisted that Thomas had been in the running for the job all along. But some Times staffers said Donovan, 58, had simply not proved tough enough to take on the administrative headaches that come with the top job. Donovan was not talking; friends described him “extremely disappointed.”

The Right Attitude. While Donovan is indelibly stamped as an Easterner, Thomas knows the home territory. He was editor and part owner of a Los Angeles suburban paper, the Sierra Madre News, before joining the Los Angeles Mirror in 1957. He was city editor when the Mirror was killed by the parent Times in 1962, and became metropolitan editor of the Times in 1965. Since then his young and talented local staff has won two Pulitzer Prizes.

Personality may also have played a persuasive part in the surprise selection. “He has the right attitude about things,” says Chandler of Thomas. “He and I have a very good personal relationship.”

For the next two months, Thomas will hold the temporary title of executive editor while he learns the ropes; he moves to the top on Aug. 23, the day Nick Williams, 64, retires after 13 years in the editor’s chair.