How useless has it proved to be, trying to give Omar a black eye? He is an educated man of the world, somewhat like Quintus Horatius Flaccus, good company, urbane, witty, tolerant... If the noble vintage of his petry ever made adipsomaniac or his indulgent smile ever broke up a marriage, that news has yet to come in over the teletype.

Editorial style now is terse and unpretentious. More to the point, charming irrelevance has given way to sober reformist mood.

Winship has chosen a political man like himself -- a mellow dex-radical named Charlie Whipple--to head the editorial staff. As an undergraduate at Harvard in the '30's, Whipple was a card-carrying Communist and was arrested picketing Sears, Roebuck. After working his way from office boy to reporter on the Globe,he spent two years as a guild organizer before returning to the paper. (He no longer agrees with the guild and is not a member, but he remembers that he "gave it may all in those days.")

Under Whipple's editorship, lead editorials have become as earnestly political as he himself is. Tea-table prose has been relegated to the "relief" editorial, an intentionally frivovlous piece at the bottom of the page.

Whipple's tampering with the editorial page has occasionally met with opposition. Since 1880, the lead editorials in the Globehave always been signed "Uncle Dudley." When Whipple decided to remove the embarrassing signature three years ago, he came up against stubborn staff resistance. Members of the staff argued that "people always talked about 'what Uncle Dudley said.'" Whipple went ahead and removed it. He adds parenthetically that he received only one letter after it was removed: "I'm glad you killed off Uncle Dudley--he was a nigger lover."

Readers had become less provincial themselves by the early '50's. According to Menzies, the influx of technically oriented people to Massachusetts when electronics plants began to go up around the new Route 128 provided new readership. The Globestaff responded to a group of more cosmopolitan readers--and began hiring non-native reporters.

Breathing Room

Ironically, it was also at this time that the Globe began to become less concerned about reader response. For the first time in its history, the Globedid not have the feeling of being "sat on" by competitors.

When the Globewas established in 1872 it was a home-town paper in what Menzies calls "the most competitive news town since the word go." Boston, until recently, has had more papers per capita than any city in the United States. In the 1880's and '90's, six papers competed with the Globe;advertisers, by threatening to switch to other papers, wieled crippling power. If rain was predicted for Easter, advertisers forbade the Globeto print the weather on Good Fritay for fear that sales would slip. The Globetad no choice but to comply.

In 1941 the Transcript folded. However, the Globewas still one in six, and as the only fence-sitter was in serious trouble. Between them, the other papers captured most of the Democratic and Republican readers and threatened to squeeze out the Globe.

Even as late as the McCarthy period, the Globefelt forced to cling to its policy of vigorously dodging controversy. James Morgan, then editor of the editorial page, feared the Globe would lose a huge block of readers if it came out against McCarthy. He adopted a policy of silence. Says Whipple, who as an ex-Communist was no McCarthy sympathizer, "We tried to express ourselves between the lines rather than in."

Dubious as it sounds, the Globe did just that. If you search closely through. editorials of 1953, you find several cautiously couched barbs at the manner in which the McCarthy hearings were conducted. The strongest editorial asks, "Is it just, or indeed possible, to make our diplomatists the laughing stock of the world by forays among them which resemble a chapter in Dick Tracy?" On the whole, though, editorial writer Don Willard accurately sums up the Globe's McCarthy record as "cowardly."

Hopelessly Middle-Brow

Since the fifties, a series of foldings and mergers has reduced competition dramatically. The Post folded in 1956, the Record Americanmerged with theAdvertsier in 1961, and theHerald Travelermerged last July. The staff no longer worries about the Globe's circulation figures. When asked last week what circulation was, executive editor Haviland had to call the promotion department to find out.

The concentrated coverage that theGlobegave to the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries is a dramatic indication of their new political disposition. Says Menzies of the Globe'scampaign coverage, "We try for balance"; but what they try for often seems closer to exhaustiveness than balance. On a day when Kennedy and McCarthy both make news. Menzies tries to get an LBJ story and a Nixon story even if Johnson and Nixon have done nothing outside the routine. "What do we do on LBJ?" he asked the other day during a page-planning session, and staff members searched through news releases to find out how Johnson had spent the day.