CHICAGO — On the March morning she officially became the chair of the board of directors of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, Martha Minow sat on a couch in the handsomely appointed apartment of her father and remembered the past.
“In the summer after my freshman year at college, I worked as a copy clerk for the Sun-Times and Daily News,” she says, talking about the building that housed both newspapers, now the site of Trump Tower. “It was fascinating, carrying papers, learning layout. I was able to write a couple of obituaries. And I met so many great people, Lois Wille among them. And I used to get coffee for Mike Royko. He was fine but I think I did hear him growl once.”
That summer job, though it did help fire an early if short-lived passion for becoming a journalist, is not on her resume. Among the many details on its 31 pages packed with accomplishments is undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan; a master’s degree in education from Harvard University and a law degree from Yale; clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; teaching at Harvard Law since 1981 and replacing Elena Kagan as dean in 2009; becoming in 2018 the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard; writing a number of books and dozens of articles ... and on and on.
She is a revered but accessible academic, a fine writer and palpably personable and warm. She would have made a fine newspaper reporter.
She is 67 years old and has been married for 35 years to attorney/professor Joseph Singer. They live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have a daughter, the artist and writer Mira Singer living in New York.
She has been on the MacArthur board since 2012. “I have been on other foundation boards,” she said. “At MacArthur, I have great admiration for the other board members and the staff, so talented. What appealed to me was that here was a place that was proactive, here was a spot I could make a difference.”
John Palfrey, the president of the foundation, said, “I am thrilled that Martha has accepted the role to chair MacArthur’s Board. She has helped shape where the foundation is today.”
The foundation, of course, is most well-known for its MacArthur Fellows Program, which annually gives a couple dozen people $625,000, no-strings-attached awards. These are commonly known as “genius grants,” described as “unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”
Another of its noted actions, certainly in these parts, was its recent financial support of the merger of WBEZ and the Sun-Times. Palfrey said, “We are confident this deal will result in two stronger news organizations that will do a better job covering all of Chicago’s communities, and that this collaboration can serve as a national model for addressing the financial crisis in the news industry at a time when our democracy needs it most.”
Minow is enthusiastic about this, saying, “It is my hope that this might make a great path forward for the future of journalism. But these are perilous times for journalism and there is no silver bullet.”
She will formally begin her tenure in June, staying with her dad whenever in town, and talks enthusiastically about such topics as human rights, civil society, climate-related issues and other concerns of these precarious times.
The news of her appointment came to me not from official channels but from a parental source. Her father is Newton Minow, who was an esteemed and high-powered attorney for many decades, with a short break in the early 1960s when President John F. Kennedy appointed him to serve as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, a role during which he famously referred to television as “a vast wasteland,” a phrase that has proved sadly durable.
He has ever been a proud papa, touting the accomplishments of Martha and her sisters Mary and Nell. No hard sell, since these three have had estimable careers; Mary as a lawyer specializing in library law and Nell, also a lawyer, who is a film and television critic who once wrote the “Media Mom” column for the Tribune.
This family has been dealing with the recent death of its matriarch. Wife and mother Josephine “Jo” Minow died in mid-February. She was 95. A lovely woman who was an active organizer and advocate who served on the boards of many local civic institutions, she imbued her daughters with a love for this city. She would often say, said Martha, “I just want to throw my arms around the city. I love it so much.”
She and her husband were married for 72 years.
“It’s difficult, but we are doing as well as can be expected,” said Martha.
When Newt, as he is commonly known, greeted me at the door of his apartment, he handed me Martha’s latest book, “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for the Government to Act to Preserve the Freedom of Speech,” for which he had written a preface.
The apartment is filled with other books and many photos. On one table is a photo of former President Barack Obama, and it tells a story.
In 1988, Martha was a professor at Harvard Law School. She called her dad to tell him she had in one of her classes the best student she had ever taught. She asked her father to see about hiring this freshman as a summer associate at his law firm, Sidley Austin. The young man had already been offered that job. That was Obama and he would meet his future wife at the firm that summer. Years later, when he was trying to decide if he should run for president, he met with Newt and Abner Mikva, a prominent and admirable Chicago political figure. The pair urged him to go ahead and … well, you know the rest.
Another story concerns 2010, when Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, born and raised in Chicago, announced his retirement. Martha’s name was on the shortlist to replace him.
“Well, that was nice of the White House,” she said, going on to offer high praise for new Supreme Court appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson, who she knows and admires.
In time, the conversation again returned to the past, to Martha’s high school years at New Trier, reporting news and weather for its radio station, editing the yearbook, working as a copy kid downtown, and being on the staff of the University of Michigan’s newspaper, The Michigan Daily.
“I think I still have ink on my fingers from those days and nights,” she said. “And then Watergate happened. I was working in Washington, and I snuck in to see and listen to the hearings. It was then I started to realize that as great as it is to tell stories, it’s even better to be part of the stories.”
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