By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 28, 2006; B07

Otis Chandler, 78, the swashbuckling former publisher of the Los Angeles Times credited with rescuing his family's newspaper from mediocrity and establishing it as a nationally respected media voice, died Feb. 27 at his home in Ojai, Calif. He had Lewy body disease, a degenerative brain disorder.

For much of its early existence, the Los Angeles Times was a profitable laughingstock. Like the Chandler clan, its politics were squarely with the reactionary arm of the Republican Party: pugnaciously anti-union, starkly anti-Communist and gleefully burying important news of Democratic political candidates.

This provoked opinion makers to poke fun. The humorist S.J. Perelman circulated a story of asking a porter for a newspaper during a brief train stop in Albuquerque. "Unfortunately," Perelman said, "the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles Times." As far away as London, the Economist magazine regarded the Times as "a shoddy sheet of extreme right-wing viewpoint."

In 1960, when he began his 20-year reign as publisher, Mr. Chandler was best known for his athletic diversions, including his once-national ranking as a shot-putter. Tall, blond and rippling with muscles, the 32-year-old resembled a beach nut who had wandered into a corporate boardroom. He did not do much to dispel this image when he reportedly fled an editorial meeting after being handed an urgent message: "Surf's up at 12:30."

Expectations were not high. However, he displayed a remarkable independence that confronted the paper's long-held prejudices. In a key move -- one that fractured family relations -- he agreed to publish a long series about the John Birch Society. He ordered a strong, front-page editorial condemning the group's ultraconservative, sometimes virulent political views.

More than 15,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions, but the paper made clear its new direction and in time gained hundreds of thousands of readers. Mr. Chandler spoke of the New York Times as his model for excellence.

After the John Birch stories, other series followed about Mexican immigrants and blacks -- articles that would have been unthinkable in previous years. Such progress was only to a point: No black reporter was on the staff through much of the 1960s, leading to lingering frustration over civil rights stories.

Although the paper won a 1966 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watts neighborhood race riots in Los Angeles, Mr. Chandler was not always as socially conscious.

According to one story, the black journalist and civil rights activist Louis Lomax met with Mr. Chandler at the time of the riots, and the publisher said he didn't know where Watts is. "Over there, where the smoke is," Lomax said. "That's where Watts is."

On other fronts, Mr. Chandler was far more impressive. Offering big salaries, he lured prize-winning writers from other papers, including Robert Donovan of the New York Herald Tribune, and hired star editorial cartoonists, including Paul Conrad of the Denver Post.

He opened bureaus around the world and created a wire-service partnership with The Washington Post. Knowing it would also aid his own national profile, he made the Times' bureau in Washington one of the largest in staffing.

The editorial budget increased dramatically and, by 1976, circulation had doubled to more than 1 million, according to David Halberstam's media book "The Powers That Be."

"No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did," Halberstam wrote.

The Chandler newspaper dynasty dated to the early 1880s, when Harry Chandler and Harrison Gray Otis began to turn a minor publication into a major voice of conservative policy- and king-making. Their concerns were in crushing unions and buying water rights and land.

The Chandlers became one of the foremost families of the West, known for a personal asceticism and sense of civic obligation. Harry Chandler's son was Norman Chandler, also a talented businessman but lacking the ferocity of his father. Norman married Dorothy Buffum, called "Buff," an ambitious daughter of a Long Beach, Calif., dry goods dealer.

Buff Chandler was credited with shaping her son's destiny by strategically sidelining her brother-in-law when it came time to choose a successor to her husband.

Otis Chandler, born in Los Angeles on Nov. 23, 1927, was a strapping figure who captained the track team at Stanford University before graduating in 1950.

Around that time, at Lake Arrowhead, Calif., he met his first wife, Marilyn "Missy" Brant. He later told the Christian Science Monitor: "She saw some large character dive off a water tower into the lake. Nobody had ever jumped or dove from that height before. She asked somebody who . . . was that character. That was me. And we met later that night."

The marriage ended in divorce.

After service in the Air Force during the Korean War, Mr. Chandler began his apprenticeship in the family business and became an assistant to his father.

During his reign as publisher, Mr. Chandler saw the Los Angeles Times receive six Pulitzer Prizes. But his own reputation suffered when the Wall Street Journal revealed his role in the GeoTek investment scam. In contrast, the Times largely hid the story, which involved an oil-and-gas drilling enterprise run by a college friend named Jack Burke.

Burke used Mr. Chandler to find high-profile investors -- including actor Kirk Douglas and Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke -- but the company was a sham, and most concerned lost millions of dollars. Burke pleaded guilty to making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission and served more than a year in prison.

After a three-year SEC investigation, charges were dropped against Mr. Chandler in 1975. However, the physical and emotional toll of the GeoTek affair weighed on him, and old intestinal ailments flared up.

In 1980, shortly before his second marriage, Mr. Chandler announced that he would step down as publisher of the Times. He was succeeded by Tom Johnson, a former publisher of the Dallas Times Herald and the first non-member of the Otis or Chandler families to run the paper in 100 years.

Mr. Chandler held a series of executive positions with the parent company, Times Mirror, which had grown into a $1.4 billion communications giant, but mostly raced muscle cars, collected vintage motorcycles and hunted jaguar and musk ox, the last once trampling him during an outing in northwestern Canada.

Meanwhile, a younger generation of the arch-conservative branch of the Chandler family began taking a more active role in the paper's operations. They helped install bottom-line managers, among them the cereal company executive Mark Willes.

Willes, who had no publishing experience, prompted a staff revolt by seeming to endorse collaboration between advertising and editorial sides of the newspaper. The most vivid example of this was the special Sunday magazine issue celebrating a downtown sports complex in 1999.

Such tangles threw the Otis Chandler era in high relief as a halcyon period. Mr. Chandler appeared a hero to many when he wrote an open letter to the staff criticizing current management, and he said he felt Willes was upending a reputation for the paper that he helped build. He told the New York Times: "I don't want my obituary to read, 'Otis had all these opportunities to be helpful and he just stayed away and said it's not my problem.' "

Soon after, Willes was ousted and the Chicago-based Tribune Co. bought the Times Mirror Co.

Mr. Chandler's survivors include his wife, Bettina Whitaker Chandler, whom he married in 1981; four children from his first marriage; a sister; and 15 grandchildren. A son from his first marriage died of a brain tumor in 2002.