Fleeson, Doris (1901–1970)

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Fleeson, Doris (1901–1970)

American journalist who was a Washington political columnist for 20 years. Born in Sterling, Kansas, on May 20, 1901; died on August 1, 1970; youngest of six children and second daughter of William (manager of a clothing store) and Helen (Tebbe) Fleeson; University of Kansas, B.A., 1923; married John O'Donnell (a political reporter), on September 28, 1930 (divorced 1942); married Dan A. Kimball (a corporate president and former secretary of the navy), in August 1958; children: (first marriage) one daughter, Doris Kimball (b. 1932).

Acknowledged as one of the toughest journalists in Washington from 1940 to 1960, Doris Fleeson was one of the first women to gain respect as a political columnist. She was born in 1901 and raised in Sterling, Kansas, where her father ran a clothing store. Fleeson left her rural hometown to study journalism at the University of Kansas and graduated in 1923. After working for two midwestern newspapers, she moved to New York where she worked as city editor for the Great Neck (Long Island) News. She then landed a job as reporter for the New York Daily xNews, where she covered crimes, trials, and scandals. Fleeson claimed her early tabloid experience taught her to hook the reader with the lead sentence. "We belonged to the who-the-hell-reads-the-second-paragraph school," she once quipped. As a result of her city reporting, Fleeson won a coveted assignment at the Albany bureau, where she began the political reporting that would become her stock in trade.

In 1930, Fleeson married fellow political reporter John O'Donnell, a tall, handsome Irish fellow described by colleagues as "brilliant and unpredictable." Three years later, after the birth of their daughter, the couple was assigned to the Daily News' newly opened Washington office, where they co-wrote a provocative political column called Capital Stuff. Fleeson, however, did not share her husband's political views, and her growing commitment to Franklin Roosevelt's foreign and domestic policies made the couple's professional and personal relationship increasingly difficult. They divorced in 1942, after which O'Donnell was kept on as a Washington correspondent while Fleeson was recalled to the New York office to write radio news. She left the paper in 1943 to become a roving war correspondent for Woman's Home Companion. In the 1940s, the magazine was broad in scope; its work included editorials for women doctors in the military and an investigation of rationing fraud. In a series of ten articles appearing in 1943 and 1944, Fleeson covered the Italian and French fronts during World War II.

After the war, she returned to Washington and launched a new phase in her career, that of syndicated columnist. Beginning with commitments from only the Washington Evening Star and The Boston Globe, she was soon carried in over 100 newspapers. According to a longtime friend, columnist Mary McGrory , "She roamed the Capitol, a tiger in white gloves and a Sally Victor hat, stalking explanations for the stupidity, cruelty, fraud, or cant that was her chosen prey." One of her early columns became front-page news when it exposed the open feud between Supreme Court justices Robert H. Jackson and Hugo Black. Additional journalistic coups brought more and more subscribers to her column until she was eventually writing five days a week for the United Features Syndicate. Fleeson covered the administrations of five presidents and never hesitated to criticize or offer advice. Her barbs were fairly and evenly distributed. As Newsweek reported in 1957: "There is, in fact, almost no Washington figure, Republican or Democrat, who has not felt the sharp edge of her typewriter."

In 1958, Fleeson married Dan Kimball, secretary of the navy under President Harry Truman, and they settled in a century-old house in Georgetown. The columnist also worked tirelessly for liberal causes and helped young journalists like McGrory get started. "To be a woman reporter in the man's world of Washington in the 1940s and 1950s was to be patronized or excluded," wrote McGrory. "She knew that few of the men were her peers and none her superior, and she was, well in advance of the women's liberation movement, a militant feminist." Earlier, in 1933, Fleeson was a leader in the founding of the American Newspapers Guild and fought for a minimum wage of $35 a week for reporters. Later, she fought for the installation of women's restrooms in congressional galleries and, in 1953, sponsored the first African-American applicant for membership in the Women's National Press Club.

Doris Fleeson was semi-retired in 1967, suffering from circulatory problems. She died on August 1, 1970, just 36 hours after her husband's death on July 30. The couple had a joint funeral service and were buried together at Arlington Cemetery.