"The fastest mind with which I have ever come in contact," said President Woodrow Wilson. "Probably the most charming extravert in the Western world," marveled a rival editor. Ebullient, egocentric, suave and unflaggingly dynamic, Herbert Bayard Swope stood splendidly apart in an era of splendid individualists. As reporter, foreign correspondent and executive editor on the famed New York World—Joseph Pulitzer's proudest monument—Swope gave a glamorous flair to the incisive, personalized brand of U.S. journalism that flourished before World War I and stretched into the '20s.
Son of a prosperous watchcase manufacturer, Swope grew up in St. Louis, passed up college to get a look at Europe, came back to the U.S. to bounce from Pulitzer's St. Louis Post-Dispatch to the Chicago Tribune to the New York Herald before settling down in 1909 as a reporter for the World. There he soon became one of the best reporters in a Manhattan galaxy of byliners that included Irvin Cobb. Frank Ward O'Malley and Richard Harding Davis. Herbert Swope's unique asset: overwhelming personal charm. Said an envious New York Telegraph reporter: "He finds out who is the principal source of information, and proceeds to fascinate that person. He will not let the victim go until he has coughed up all he knows."
Confirmed by History. Swope's beats for the World were often as highhanded as they were spectacular. Covering Europe in 1914, he charmed the German high command into letting him break the news that the submarine U-9 had sunk three British battleships ("the greatest setback the British navy has ever suffered"). So dazzled by Swope was James W. Gerard, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, that he disclosed confidential reports that Germany planned to launch submarine attacks against U.S. ships. Swope's story was promptly denied by the State Department, promptly confirmed by history.
Back in Germany in 1916, Swope gathered material for a series of articles analyzing the nation's war effort that won him the first Pulitzer Prize for reporting. When he was barred from the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, Swope grandly donned top hat and cutaway coat, brushed past deferential guards with the explanation that he was a delegate from Liberia, and came out with the hitherto unpublished League of Nations Covenant. Said he: "All I can say for publication is that I found it lying on a table in the meeting room."
Dictum & Dry Rot. In 1920, with the backing of Ralph Pulitzer, who became the World's publisher on his father's death in 1911, Swope knocked out a few partitions to make himself a suitably imposing office, brought in the first rugs ever seen on the twelfth floor of the World building on Park Row, and hung on the door a brand-new title of his own devising: Executive Editor.