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A full college generation older than his classmates, ambitious Mark Sullivan stuck close to his books, lost no time on athletics, glee clubs, social life. Earning an A. B. in 1900, he stayed on for three years of law, meantime writing special articles for the Boston Transcript to pad out his dwindling $5,500. After a brief and briefless stab at the law in Manhattan, his Transcript record got him a job with Edward Bok for a spirited, 18-month campaign against quack patent medicines in the Ladies' Home Journal. In 1905 came two milestones in Mark Sullivan's life. He went to work for Collier's and he met President Theodore Roosevelt. He stayed with Collier's for twelve years. He is still, in mind and heart, with the great T. R.
President's Friend. For Collier's, where he succeeded Norman Hapgood as editor in 1912, Journalist Sullivan journeyed often to Washington, wrote a department called "Comment on Congress." For Teddy Roosevelt, of whom he became friend & adviser as well as worshiper, the young journalist hurled his pen into the Progressive fight. He crusaded for Pure Food and for Conservation. He lambasted "Standpattism" and "Cannonism." He fought for low tariffs and direct primaries. In those zestful days young Mark Sullivan was indeed, as old Mark Sullivan has described him in Our Times, "a fierce young eagle of the press."
In 1919 Mark Sullivan settled permanently in Washington as a political correspondent, first for the Democratic, liberal New York Evening Post, after 1924 for the Herald Tribune. Also in 1919 he lost his leader. With the death of Roosevelt I, the crusading fervor went out of the Sullivan dispatches. His reports on the Harding and Coolidge Administrations were conscientious, uncritical, uninspired. Meantime Mr. & Mrs. Sullivan had become fast friends of another poor boy who had made good. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, and his wife. Many a Sunday evening the Sullivans walked around the corner from their Wyoming Avenue home to the Hoovers' house on S Street, helped entertain the Hoover friends. When, in 1929, the Hoovers moved to the big White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, the intimacy continued. Never have President and journalist been closer. Timid and distrustful of newshawks in general. President Hoover put Pundit Sullivan in his "Medicine Ball Cabinet," had him to breakfasts, took him on fishing trips,* called him often to the White House for long, confidential talks. Result was that Mark Sullivan became, to other Washington correspondents' envy and chagrin, an authoritative Administration spokesman in his own right. Pundit Sullivan sometimes differed with the President in private, never in his dispatches. The Hoover Administration gave him, temporarily, an excessive fame and influence, fixed him firmly in the public mind as a biased political observer.