Scope and Content Note
The papers of Robert Gerald Spivack (1915-1970) span the years 1931-1970, with the bulk of the material dating between 1936 and 1970. Spivack was a reporter who covered news, politics, and organized crime in New York for the New York Post in the 1940s and 1950s, and who later covered national politics in Washington, D. C. In the 1950s and 1960s he was a syndicated columnist and newsletter publisher on national politics. The papers consist of five series: General Correspondence , Speeches and Writings , Subject File , Miscellany , and Oversize .
The General Correspondence consists of letters and memoranda exchanged between Spivack and friends, colleagues, literary agents, public figures, and readers of his articles, columns, and newsletters. Included are memoranda to and from editors and colleagues at the New York Post, Paul Sann and James A. Wechsler among others, and with the owner of the Post, Dorothy Schiff. Other correspondents include Herbert Agar, Wilbur E. Bade, Ulric Bell, George T. Bye, Elliott E. Cohen, Louis G. Cowan, Fern Marja Eckman, Lloyd D. Hagan, Joseph P. Lash, Reuben A. Lazarus, Newbold Morris, Herbert Nagourney, Shaemus O'Sheel, Oliver Pilat, Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur J. Rosenthal, John Herman Henry Sengstacke, Eric Sevareid, Abraham M. Sirkin, Martin Sommers, Mark Starr, and Rex Stout.
The Speeches and Writings include articles, book projects, columns, interviews, memoranda for the record, newsletters, and newspapers, written or edited by Spivack or by others. The series includes a comprehensive file of Spivack's articles for the New York Post between 1941 and 1961, the entire span of his career with the paper. Subjects included New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey and unsuccessful mayoral candidates Jonah J. Goldstein and Newbold Morris. One of Spivack's themes was the nexus of New York politics and organized crime, notably during the administration of Mayor William O'Dwyer. When Spivack was the Post's Washington correspondent from 1952 to 1961, he covered the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration and figures from that era such as Senators Owen Brewster, Irvin McNeil Ives, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Joseph McCarthy.
Speeches and Writings include Spivack's book projects relating to Thomas E. Dewey, underworld figure Frank Costello, Lyndon B. Johnson's administration, and Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt (1914-1988).
Spivack's columns documented in the papers include In the Town's Backrooms, which covered politics on the New York and national levels, and his syndicated product Watch on the Potomac treating national politics from 1956 to 1970. The series includes examples of the University of Cincinnati newspaper that Spivack edited as a student, Cincinnati Bearcat, and of his newsletters on national politics, Private Wire and Spivack Report.
The Subject File includes files relating to Spivack's late 1960s initiative, Reporters' News Syndicate, a program designed to give minority candidates practical training in journalism, and to Spivack's activism beginning in the 1930s with student and other groups advocating for war refugees and occupied peoples, against American isolationism, and in favor of United States participation in World War II. Spivack was editor of SOS, the newspaper of the Student Defenders of Democracy, and there are several examples of the newspaper in that organization's file. During 1937-1938 he served as secretary of the International Student Service and from 1940 to 1941 as publications director of Fight for Freedom. There is material on these and other interventionist organizations in two oversize scrapbooks relating to the World War II era.