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John Fox was everything a newspaperman should not be. Under the name Washington Waters he wrote a financial column with some of history's most thunderously wrong predictions, e.g., that the Korean war would be a good time to sell short because of a falling market. A frenetic promoter, he once called in his ad manager and announced: "I've got an idea that will knock the Jews in this town on their butts. We're going to send cows to Israel." He got Bernard Goldfine to donate the first cow toward a project that fell flat only when Fox discovered that New England livestock could not survive in the Middle East climate.
Worst of all were Fox's notions of the principles which should guide journalism. To Post executives, fretting at the paper's wild machinations, Fox had a stock answer: "No one has ever measured the capacity of the American people to absorb manure." John Fox, yardstick in hand and a slug of bourbon within reach, gave it a try—and drove the Post into bankruptcy court. One of those pulling the plug on Fox was Friend-Turned-Enemy Bernard Goldfine.
Friendship's End. The blowup came over Goldfine's project to build a garage under Boston Common. After it became a losing venture despite some uncommon help from Boston's Mayor James Michael Curley and Governor Dever, Goldfine still managed to talk Fox into investing in it. At a 1955 showdown meeting at which Fox was supposed to settle up, Goldfine claims that Fox walked out—and Fox last week claimed that Goldfine disappeared after saying "he had to go to the men's room."
In any event, Goldfine called in his Post loans to Fox, later appeared as the angel behind a syndicate trying to buy Fox out of the staggering Post. Fox, certainly at least as much through his own behavior and his growing reputation as a fabulous deadbeat as through anything Goldfine might have done, found credit doors slammed in his face. The Post folded on Oct. 4, 1956. In his struggles in the net of finances, John Fox has had federal tax liens slapped on his properties, been hauled through Boston's Poor Debtors' Court, been arrested for failure to meet court judgments against him and for failure to pay back wages to former Post employees, last week was collared on criminal libel charges. Even his old Boston friends have come to realize that he is a bitter, discredited, broken man.
All his troubles he blames on Bernard Goldfine—and on Goldfine's political friends, most particularly including Sherman Adams—a fact which he made abundantly plain last week in his testimony before the House subcommittee.