RIP Joe McGinniss, Dec. 9, 1942 - March 10, 2014 Author, "The Selling of the President 1968"

Reporter and author Joe McGinniss passed away yesterday of prostate cancer. He was 71. 

McGinniss was the author of the groundbreaking book, “The Selling of the President 1968” which chronicled the reinvention of Richard M. Nixon and the first time a presidential candidate was packaged and sold to American voters like toothpaste.

I witnessed this process as a journalism student working as a secretary in Communications at the Republican National Committee during the 1968 presidential campaign.

One of the key players McGinniss credits with making Nixon more charismatic to the American people was Roger Ailes who served as a television consultant to the former president before going on to become president of the Fox News Channel, and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group. (Ailes once wrote in a memo to Nixon titled "A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News": "Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any form of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit -- watch -- listen. The thinking is done for you.") 

McGinniss later wrote Fatal Vision: The Last Word on Jeffery MacDonald, Blind Faith, Cruel Doubt and several other best-selling books.

This morning The Washington Post has an excellent story on McGinniss's life and career.

"Private schools in Washington are like that. We don't integrate. We prefer not to."

Typing Class, Washington School for Secretaries

In the spring of 1961 two chapters of Iota Phi Lambda Sorority, a national organization of African-American business and professional women, conducted a survey to determine if African-Americans had equal access to business training in the Nation's Capital. 

Of the 12 business schools that participated in the study, six acknowledged placing racial restrictions on admissions, reported Jean M. White in The Washington Post ("Trade School Aid Sought for Negroes," May 27, 1961). The schools included Strayer Junior College of Finance, the Washington School for Secretaries, American Institute, Benjamin Franklin University and Stenotype Institute of Washington.

Benjamin Franklin University was the only school that did not respond to White's request for a comment.

A spokesman for the Washington School for Secretaries acknowledged that the school "has no Negro students."

Although Marvin Martilla of the Temple Secretarial School said "Negroes are admitted to all classes," White disputed his statement, reporting that Temple "only accepts Negroes on a segregated basis."

E.G. Purvis, president, of Strayer College explained his stance: "We just couldn't afford to take 40 colored students and have 60 or 90 white students leave."

"Lee Manahan, director of the American Institute, said Negroes are accepted in the keypunch and IBM departments but not as students in the secretarial or self-improvement courses," White reported.

Ruth Everett, director, the Stenotype Institute was unapologetic about the school's segregationist policies. "Private schools in Washington are like that. We don't integrate. We prefer not to," she told White.

In time, more schools began to desegregate as they felt pressure to generate higher numbers of students. 

Washington School for Secretaries, 1920s Handbook