McCrary, John Reagan (“Tex”)

(b. 13 October 1910 in Calvert, Texas; d. 29 July 2003 in New York City), colorful journalist, public-relations practitioner, and Republican activist who pioneered the talk show format on radio and television and helped convince Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president in 1952.

One of two sons of John Reagan McCrary, a cotton farmer, and Margaret Duggins Adoue McCrary, a pianist, McCrary attended public schools in Calvert, Texas, before spending two years at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. There he received his nickname. “Anybody from Texas who went to Exeter got called Tex,” he later recalled.

Graduating from Exeter in 1928, McCrary went to Yale University, where he served as the editor of the Yale Record, the school’s humor magazine, and was elected to the prestigious Skull and Bones society (a secret society thought to provide its members with an entrée to a powerful political and social network). He graduated with a BA in architecture in 1932 but soon refocused his career plans on journalism. He moved to New York City to work as a copy boy and then as a reporter at the New York World-Telegram.

The tall, dark-haired McCrary showed a knack for making contacts that would serve him throughout his career. Moving to the New York Daily Mirror, a morning tabloid, he caught the eye of the editor, Arthur Brisbane, who became his mentor. In 1935 he married Brisbane’s daughter Sarah. After Brisbane’s death in 1936, McCrary became the paper’s chief editorial writer. He and Sarah had one son. They were divorced in 1939.

In 1940 McCrary interviewed the model and actress Jinx Falkenburg about her part in a Broadway musical, and the two began dating. Eugenia Lincoln Falkenburg, nicknamed “Jinx” by her mother, was born in Spain in 1919. Graceful and athletic, she began acting in Spanish-language films at age sixteen. Although she appeared in twenty-two films over the course of her career, she was best known as a model and was acknowledged as one of the most beautiful women in the country.

Falkenburg said in her autobiography that she knew from the start that she wanted to marry McCrary, although it took him longer to commit himself. Their courtship was drawn out further by World War II. In 1941 McCrary began delivering lend-lease airplanes to Britain. In 1942 he joined the U.S. Air Force as a public-relations officer and photographer and rose to the rank of captain. In 1944 he coauthored a book, First of the Many, a series of portraits of Eighth Air Force pilots, many of whom he had accompanied on combat missions in the course of his duties.

McCrary finally wed Falkenburg in June 1945. At the war’s end in August, he flew to Japan to organize American press coverage of the aftermath of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He encouraged journalists to soften their stories about the casualties, explaining, “I don’t think they can stand to know back home what we’ve done here.” Despite this sobering experience, he enjoyed participating in a historic event. He later liked to say that he landed in Japan before General Douglas MacArthur, prompting the Japanese to surrender to him by mistake.

McCrary and Falkenburg began their married life in New York City after the war. His first postwar position was as editor of the American Mercury, a magazine that had changed its direction along with its owners several times since its beginning in 1924. McCrary and Falkenburg were soon approached by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC)’s New York radio station, WEAF, to introduce a morning talk program. “Hi Jinx” debuted in April 1946 and achieved rapid success. The program stood out from other early talk shows in the seriousness of the issues that were covered. “My newspaper experience,” McCrary later said, “convinced me that the radio ‘execs’ were all wrong when they said that people, particularly women, didn’t want serious stuff in the morning.”

The radio program was followed in 1947 by the first of several television shows. As they had done in their radio format, McCrary and Falkenburg took turns interviewing newsmakers and McCrary relayed the headlines. In general, Falkenburg provided color while her husband played the straight man, although occasionally McCrary let his flamboyant side show; on one telecast he boxed with the world middleweight champion, Jake La Motta. By the mid-1950s McCrary and Falkenburg had two radio programs, a daily television program, and a newspaper column. They had two sons as well.

In addition to his journalism, McCrary became active in Republican politics. In 1951 he, Falkenburg, and the financier Bernard Baruch flew to Paris to persuade General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president. McCrary staged a huge rally for Eisenhower at Madison Square Garden in February 1952, featuring such politicians as Henry Cabot Lodge as well as such celebrities as Clark Gable and Ethel Merman. The crowd chanted “I like Ike,” a phrase McCrary is said to have invented. A year later Eisenhower was inaugurated as president.

True to his love of the military, McCrary often spent Christmas at American air bases overseas. In December 1948 he convinced the comedian Bob Hope to accompany him to entertain U.S. pilots in Berlin, most of whom had participated in the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949. Thus began Hope’s Christmas tradition of visiting American troops abroad.

As McCrary’s political activities increased in the 1950s, however, he lost credibility as an objective journalist and turned to public relations. Among his clients over the years were the home builder William Levitt, the New Haven Railroad, Lear Jet Industries, and the New York Herald Tribune. In 1959 he sent the typical American home of his client Herbert Sadkin to a trade fair in Moscow. There it became the site of the famous “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. McCrary’s public-relations philosophy was, “The PR practitioner doesn’t go along with the action; he makes it happen.”

McCrary served as a mentor to many journalists, including William Safire, Barbara Walters, and Andy Rooney. He reportedly had a temper to match his larger-than-life ego, but colleagues respected him in spite of it. After McCrary’s death, Safire wrote a tribute recalling “Tex and Jinx” as the ultimate smart, glamorous couple.

McCrary remained active in politics as well as journalism. He advised Richard Nixon and urged Ronald Reagan to wear a hearing aid. “You have got to decide once and for all whether you want to come over deaf or dumb,” he bluntly told the former actor. In his later years he encouraged both Colin Powell and John McCain to run for president.

McCrary and Falkenburg separated in the early 1980s. She lived on Long Island, while he maintained an apartment in lower Manhattan. The pair remained close, however, until his death of natural causes in July 2003. Falkenburg died less than a month later. McCrary requested that his ashes be divided between the two rivers he loved most, the Hudson in New York and the Brazos in Texas.

McCrary relished his reputation as an interviewer, public-relations maestro, and kingmaker. He believed that the role of the journalist and PR person is to convey information actively. “[Marshall] McLuhan said the medium is the message,” he told a reporter in 1993. “I say the messenger is the medium. In all of these things you can call me a catalyst on a hot tin roof.” As that catalyst, he propelled Eisenhower into the White House and injected serious content into radio and television talk shows. Asked in 1993 what he would choose for his epitaph, he suggested, “To be continued.”

McCrary’s book First of the Many: A Journal of Action with the Men of the Eighth Air Force (1944), coauthored with David E. Scherman, sheds light on his attitude toward the war and the men who served in it. Jinx Falkenburg’s autobiography, Jinx (1951), explores McCrary’s courtship of his second wife and the couple’s early radio and television career. Also helpful are the dual profile of Falkenburg and McCrary in Current Biography (1953), and M. L Aronson, “Tex Rex,” an interview with McCrary in Town and Country 147 (Aug. 1993). Memorial tributes include William Safire, “Of Tex and Jinx,” New York Times (15 Sept. 2003) and Art Stevens, “Remembering a Mentor,” Public Relations Tactics 11 (January 2004): 10. Obituaries are in the New York Times (30 July 2003) and Los Angeles Times (2 Aug. 2003).

Tinky “Dakota” Weisblat