Press Secretary

If WOODY KLEIN '51 were playing himself in a Western movie, he'd wear both a white and a black hat. For ten years this New York newsman has been a municipal critic. Now he's Mayor John Lindsay's press secretary.

"I'm just as impatient with government as I was," he says, "but now I concentrate on the realm of the possible."

An associate describes Woody as having "a singularly acute social conscience." It is reflected in the reporting that won him several awards from his peers. Among those he's proudest of: a certificate of recognition from the National Conference of Christians and Jews for his 1965 stories and columns on race relations; the 1960 Deadline Club Award from Sigma Delta Chi, national journalism society, for "outstanding journalistic achievement" in the New York metropolitan area; and the Page One Award from the Newspaper Guild of New York for his 1960 series "I Lived in a Slum."

Woody met Lindsay in 1958 when he was covering the campaign circuit. Congressman Lindsay wrote the foreword to Woody's book published in 1964, Let in theSun, the story of the life and death of a New York tenement located in the city's worst block.

By the end of 1965, Woody - with an M.A. from Columbia - had climbed from reporter and part-time journalism instructor, to TV and radio panelist and moderator, to the professional's "plum" of investigative reporter for CBS. He was there just a few weeks when Lindsay made his offer.

"I had to take it," Klein says.

Woody's closer look at municipal bureaucracy hasn't toughened his reactions to civic and social injustice. "My commitments are the same. But now I see more practical ways of doing things."

He dislikes personal labels but the one he pins on himself is "practical idealist."

The transition from City Hall newsman to City Hall press secretary was harder than he expected.

Woody was new to the job - his superiors weren't too sure what the job was - when the inauguration day transit strike walloped New York and Lindsay and company. The press secretary recognized his mistakes almost as soon as he made them.

Shortly after the strike he took the City Hall press corps out to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. He told them: "You are eating Chinese food. I am eating humble pie."

Now the mayor holds at least two major press conferences weekly. He is usually his own spokesman. Woody is legman to the press corps, fielder and funneler for the city's fifteen aides who also handle press relations. He is an administrator on his own staff of six. And he's a liaison between City Hall and those scores of city agencies who also have their own press people.

Marvin Sleeper, New York World Journal Tribune reporter and "Inside City Hall" columnist, said recently, "It's a hard job to be number one press secretary to the number one mayor of the United States, serving 8,000,000 people, a job second only to the White House press secretary."