An Editor Finds Her Personal Life on Page One   

When Ted Koppel introduced Geneva Overholser as a "Nightline" guest last year, he mistakenly identified her as the editor of the Wall Street Journal. In fact, she was the editor of the Des Moines Register. "Forgive me, Geneva," Koppel said. "Would you like to be the editor of the Wall Street Journal?"

Fast forward to September 1995, when Overholser, no longer in Des Moines, might very well wish she'd been the Journal editor. Details of her divorce and her love life were on the Journal's front page. "It was an out-of-body experience," she says. "I thought someone was making it up."

Journalists often wrestle with the dilemma of how to handle news about the personal lives of public officials. But what about when the subject is one of their own?

Overholser, the Register's editor for six-and-a-half years, is a prominent journalist. For years she's taken the news industry to task for being overly preoccupied with profits.

So when she and her managing editor, David Westphal, a 17-year Register veteran, abruptly resigned in February, they not only stunned the Register newsroom; they made national headlines. The pair, both 47, said they were tired of the relentless financial pressures and needed a break from the daily grind.

Although she gave few interviews, Overholser was portrayed as Saint Geneva, the embodiment of all that's good and noble in the news business. The resignations were seen as another triumph for business concerns over quality journalism.

But there was more to the story. Though both were married to other people, they had become involved with each other. The pair chose not to mention it at the time because they felt it was not the prime reason for their departure. Their former boss, Charles C. Edwards Jr., the Register's president and publisher, also believes their reasons for leaving were more professional than personal.

Edwards says he had no idea they were involved when they quit. He says there's no truth to the widely circulated rumor that he demanded that they end their relationship or leave the paper.

"Clearly there were professional reasons," says Edwards. "..There was a level of frustration that got pretty high... But there certainly appears to be a personal issue in all of this that I think apparently had some bearing on her decision."

Edwards says Overholser had told him last fall she'd probably leave after her 17-year-old daughter graduated from high school in the spring of 1996. But he says he was surprised when she gave him her letter of resignation. He says he sounded out Westphal about succeeding Overholser, although he did not offer him the job. Westphal, citing job stress, said he wasn't interested.

Edwards, like many at the Register, now feels angry and hurt. "How naive they were to think in our industry that this wouldn't come out at some point," he says. "I think there was a whole lot of selfish thinking going on and not a whole lot of thought about the institution and their colleagues and our customers and Gannett," which owns the Register.

Overholser says she no longer wants to discuss the situation. In a column in the Washington Post, where she is now ombudsman, she wrote, "I can repeat and repeat that I genuinely left the job for professional reasons. I can say that I couldn't have added then the truth about the course my personal life would take, because I didn't know. None of that holds the kind of power for people that this one fact holds: Eight months later, the two of us are together here in Washington." Westphal is now McClatchy's deputy Washington bureau chief.

Believing Overholser would have some provocative things to say about the state of the newspaper business, AJR interviewed her in June. We asked Overholser if there was more to her resignation than professional frustration, and she responded that "powerful personal reasons" played a role in her decision, and she mentioned she was getting a divorce.

The interview, in which Overholser described editors' high salaries as "hush money" and was highly critical of the mounting power of the business side, ran in the September issue. It infuriated some news executives, particularly since the piece didn't deal with her relationship with Westphal.

The AJR interview was the first time Overholser had publicly alluded to "personal reasons" for resigning. Later, the Register learned that the two former editors were buying a house together in Washington. On September 26, the paper ran a story on the back of its Metro section, under the headline, " 'Personal reasons' played a role in editor's departure."

"When the story came out in AJR and the deed was filed, we felt we had enough facts to go on and print it," Edwards says. "I felt strongly and so did Dennis [new Register Editor Dennis Ryerson], as difficult and agonizing as the decision was, we had an obligation to readers to tell the whole story."

When Register reporter Thomas A. Fogarty asked Overholser to elaborate on those "personal reasons," she responded, "Why my personal life as a private citizen of Washington, D.C., interests you or your readers is absolutely beyond me."

Overholser now regrets making the remark. But the damage had been done.

Three days after the Register story, the Wall Street Journal ran its story, depicting Overholser as a hypocrite--an editor who advocates reporting on people's personal lives but won't discuss her own.

"This was not a tough call at all," says Journal Managing Editor Paul E. Steiger. "Her former paper runs a major story saying that there were additional reasons to the ones she raised at her departure. Since her departure was a cause célèbre, it was an obvious story for us." But, he adds, "would we have done the story without the Register's story? Probably not."

The prominent treatment surprised the Register's Edwards. "I mean, hell, in how many other industries would the Journal give second- and third-level management, which is what these people were, front page coverage?... I thought it got way too much play."