Robert S. McCord (1929–2013)

Robert S. McCord was a journalist with a crusading instinct whose work as a photographer, reporter, editor, and newspaper owner left a significant mark on public policy and government integrity in the state. He was principally responsible for the passage in 1967 of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which guaranteed people’s access to the deliberations and acts of their governing bodies—from cities, towns, counties, and schools to state executive agencies. It was one of the strongest such laws in the nation. The legislation passed both houses of the Arkansas General Assembly without a dissent and was signed into law by Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, who claimed it as his first achievement as governor. With Phillip M. Carroll, his college friend and the principal author of the law, as his attorney, McCord was the plaintiff in the first lawsuit testing the act (Laman v. McCord, 1968).

Robert Sanford (Bob) McCord was born on April 4, 1929, at Camden (Ouachita County), the son of Mose Sanford McCord, who was a theater operator, and Myrtle H. McCord. When he was two years old, the family, which included an older sister, moved to North Little Rock (Pulaski County), where his father ran a theater. His father bought him a good camera, and picture-taking became a preoccupation. His father developed a darkroom at home where McCord could print his work. At North Little Rock High School, he worked on the biweekly newspaper, The Hi-Comet, as its photographer. He also played in the band and later was a big-band drummer at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County).

At the age of fifteen, McCord began to take his photographs to the two daily newspapers, the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette, where most of the young male staffers had left for the armed services in World War II. The Democrat sports editor paid a dollar for McCord’s game pictures, and one day the paper’s aging editor asked if he would come to the paper and take pictures in his spare time. He went to the Democrat offices after school and on weekends and began to write articles, too. His photography work ceased in 1945 when the newspaper’s chief photographer returned from the war, although McCord took the famous picture of a grinning Governor Sid McMath wearing a Panama hat and President Harry S. Truman, in a white suit and waving a Panama hat, marching down Main Street of Little Rock (Pulaski County) in the Thirty-fifth Division Reunion Parade in June 1949. McCord’s photograph won the Palmer trophy for the Picture of the Year in Arkansas and first prize for the best spot news picture of the year in the annual Associated Press news photo contest.

McCord graduated from high school and entered UA, where he worked on the student newspaper, The Traveler, and became its editor his senior year. There, he met World War II veteran Phil Carroll, who became a fraternity brother and lifelong friend, and Ben Allen, another veteran who also would become a lifelong friend and the sponsor of McCord’s FOIA bill in 1967.

After college, in December 1951, he married Muriel Stuck of White Plains, New York. She had met McCord on a trip to Fayetteville with friends, transferred to Arkansas, and graduated with him. She worked with him on the college paper.

McCord was drafted and spent two years in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, mostly editing army newspapers. After his tour of duty, he attended Columbia University on the GI Bill, received a master’s degree in journalism, and returned to the Democrat as the editor of its Sunday magazine while doing some newswriting. He bought the weekly North Little Rock Times in 1958—his father was its vice president—and edited the paper until 1968, when, upon the death of K. August Engel, the owner and publisher of the Democrat, he returned to the newspaper as the editor of its editorial pages. McCord, who called himself a conservative Democrat but whose views on most issues would classify him in the twenty-first century as a moderate, also bought some stock in the paper at the encouragement of one of the successor owners, Marcus George. He remained the editorial editor for six years until the newspaper was bought by Wehco Media and Walter E. Hussman Jr. assumed control. McCord became the executive editor but soon left the paper, explaining later in an oral history for the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History that he disagreed with much of how Hussman intended to battle the Arkansas Gazette for supremacy in the market and eventual control.

The Gazette hired him in 1981 as an associate editor in charge of producing a daily “op-ed” page, which would offer a variety of voices, local and national, on the issues of the day. He would remain until October 1991, when the Gazette was sold to Wehco Media and combined with the Democrat to become the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

It was McCord’s ten years running the crusading weekly paper in North Little Rock that made his reputation as an iconoclast among community newspapers that rarely rocked the boat or took on local governments. North Little Rock was run for more than sixteen years by Mayor William F. “Casey” Laman, a charismatic and domineering politician, who ran the city like celebrated big-city political bosses Edward “Boss” Crump of Memphis and Richard Daley of Chicago. City officials, including the city’s aldermen, tended to fall in line. The long Laman-McCord imbroglio was edgy but often respectful. In one editorial McCord wrote resignedly: “People call Laman all sorts of names, but when they get in the voting booth, they call him mayor.”

McCord and his managing editor, Ralph Patrick, protested closed meetings and closed records. In 1961, soon after buying the paper, McCord led the movement to start a chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). He would become national president of the organization in 1975–1976. In 1966, the SPJ voted to produce a freedom-of-information law like many other states’. Phil Carroll, McCord’s friend at the venerable law firm now known as the Rose Law Firm, wrote a draft, perfected by the legislature’s professional staff, and McCord’s friend Ben Allen, a state senator, introduced it, with Senator Max Howell, the reputed boss of the Senate, as a co-sponsor. In the House of Representatives, McCord’s neighbor Representative Leon Holsted handled the bill. It sailed through both houses without a dissenting vote, and Governor Rockefeller signed it into law.

About two months later, the North Little Rock City Council adjourned a meeting and entered Laman’s office with the city attorney to discuss contesting an order by the state Public Service Commission. Reporters for the North Little Rock Times and the Gazette tried to enter the meeting and pointed out that the new law assured them of the right to cover the meeting, but they were shut out by Laman and the city attorney. McCord and his managing editor, Ralph Patrick, represented by Carroll, filed suit in Pulaski County Circuit Court against Laman and the attorney. The city, supported by Leon B. Catlett, a lawyer who was chairman of the state Democratic Party, argued that the common-law doctrine of attorney-client privilege overrode the FOIA, and the circuit judge, Warren E. Wood, agreed. On appeal, the Arkansas Supreme Court issued an unusually strong opinion supporting McCord’s defense of the statute. Justice George Rose Smith rejected all the arguments of the city, concluding with this statement about how the FOIA should always be interpreted: “We have no hesitation in asserting our conviction that the Freedom of Information Act was passed wholly in the public interest and is to be liberally interpreted to the end that its praiseworthy purposes may be achieved. The language of the act is so clear, so positive, that there is hardly any need for interpretation.”

After the end of the Gazette in 1991, McCord wrote a column for the weekly Arkansas Times, a news outlet edited and largely written by former members of the Gazette staff, and hosted a weekly forum on public television on issues of the day. He wrote for the Times until 2007.

McCord died on April 13, 2013, and is buried in Rest Hills Memorial Park in North Little Rock.

For additional information:
Digangi, Christine. “Remembering Robert S. McCord.” The Quill, June 6, 2013.

McConnell, Jerry. Interview with Bob McCord. Arkansas Gazette Project. David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. https://pryorcenter.uark.edu/project.php?thisProject=2 (accessed March 15, 2024).

Musa, Aziza. “Longtime Journalist Dead at 84.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, April 14, 2013, p. 2B.

Obituary of Robert S. McCord. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, April 15, 2013, p. 2B.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas