By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 15, 2006; B07
Philip Merrill, 72, the publisher of Washingtonian magazine and the Capital newspaper of Annapolis who also had been a NATO diplomat and a philanthropist, disappeared June 10 during a lone sailing trip in the Chesapeake Bay.
He was presumed dead June 12, police said after searching without success for his body. His 41-foot sailboat, the Merrilly, was discovered abandoned in the bay about 20 miles from his home in Arnold, on the Severn River.
Mr. Merrill was the first person in his family to attend college and became a self-made millionaire with his media holdings, which at one time included the glossy Baltimore magazine. He once described himself as an "old-fashioned 19th-century entrepreneur" without a particular goal as a young man but with a singular wish to work for himself and no one else.
He was an aggressive and ambitious State Department intelligence analyst early in his career, but he detested bureaucracy and left government at age 34 to enter business. He borrowed money from friends and banks in 1968 to buy the Capital, a newspaper he described as barely profitable. "It cost several million, and I didn't have $10,000 in cash," he once said.
He continually struggled to finance the paper as he set about creating new editorial and business practices; some were progressive, such as including news coverage of weddings and the deaths of black residents. Meanwhile, he faced lawsuits by his initial partners for control of the paper and once traveled to Afghanistan to get power of attorney from an investor, which helped him win his legal battles.
He made local news the focus of the paper, putting national and world coverage deep inside. He hired young staff members, worked them hard for little pay and had a leading role in making the editorial page a forum for his intimidating personal style.
He once accused Anne Arundel County Executive Joseph W. Alton Jr., who ultimately went to prison on corruption charges, of orchestrating real estate deals for personal gain that amounted to "mass rape" of the Annapolis landscape.
Mr. Merrill's fist-pounding office manner and steaming temper went full boil when challenged on his opposition to slot-machine gambling in Maryland. Slots would lead to moral degradation and organized crime, he said.
On many other topics, his booming style was designed to test the reaction and substance of the person on the receiving end, friends and associates said.
The Capital became a great circulation success in Annapolis and by the late 1980s was reportedly worth at least $50 million.
Among his holdings, Washingtonian, which he purchased in 1979, brought him the most prestige. He often trumpeted the high income and education of its subscribers, saying the magazine was targeted at the "upper 10 percent" of the city's wealthiest society.
"This is unashamedly -- or, if you will, unabashedly -- an elitist magazine," he once said. He was not shy about including himself among the magazine's lists of the city's "who's who."
Philip Merrill Levine was born April 28, 1934, in Baltimore and grew up in New York City and Norwalk, Conn. His father, who worked in public relations, later encouraged his son to drop "Levine," saying that a Jewish surname could limit his career prospects.
He was visibly uncomfortable discussing in any public way his upbringing and family's past. He once told the C-SPAN network that his father came from a part of Russia "run over by every army since Napoleon." He said he was not fond of politicians who make their ethnic heritage central to their public identity, adding, "I do not like to wear that particular badge on my shoulder."
At Cornell University, Mr. Merrill majored in government and was managing editor of the student newspaper. He was known to be generous with his red pencil when editing other students but also showed a fun side when he planned an elaborate prank to replace Syracuse University's paper with a satirical forgery.
After graduating in 1955, Mr. Merrill served in the Army, worked at New Jersey newspapers, developed interview questions for Mike Wallace's "Night Beat" television program and had a brief stint with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.
Mr. Merrill was hired by the State Department in 1961 and worked under diplomat Chester Bowles, a former Connecticut governor and Democratic presidential adviser.
While at State, Mr. Merrill attended a Harvard University management development program and was a senior intelligence analyst on South Asia. He seemed headed for a Foreign Service career but could not stand being ordered from one assignment to the next.
Not long after, he bought the Capital. His other investors in the $2.5 million purchase included Washington lawyers Myer Feldman and David Ginsburg as well as columnist Jack Anderson. The partnership deteriorated, and Mr. Merrill fought to retain total control.
Later, Mr. Merrill brought in Norfolk-based Landmark Communications Inc. as a minority partner of his Capital-Gazette Communications Inc., which grew to include Washingtonian and other publications.
John A. Limpert, the editor of Washingtonian, wrote of Mr. Merrill: "One unusual thing about how he operated: He kept no paper on his desk, no files. When you sent him a note, he either wrote an answer on it and sent it back to you, or he tossed it. His desk was clean from one day to the next. That freed him to think about and work on what he thought was important. There was no bureaucracy in him at all."
Mr. Merrill, who by the late 1980s was reportedly one of Washington's richest people, took leaves of absence from his publishing business to serve Republican administrations.
He was counselor to the undersecretary of defense for policy from 1981 to 1983; assistant secretary-general of NATO for defense support, the highest-ranking U.S. position in the Brussels-based treaty organization, from 1990 to 1992; and chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States from 2002 to 2005.
He also served on the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Defense Department, as well as on government panels negotiating matters concerning telecommunications and the law of the sea.
"To use a sailor's analogy, one hand for yourself, one hand for the ship," he told C-SPAN in 1990. "One half of one's life should be devoted to what it takes to, if you will, stay alive and stay ahead and stay in business. And one half should be devoted to public service."
Mr. Merrill invested in commercial real estate and America's Cup campaigns and became a philanthropist. In 2001, he gave $10 million to the University of Maryland journalism school, which was renamed in his honor. Other money went to Johns Hopkins University, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Cornell, the last for a sailing center.
He first learned to sail at 7, when he swabbed boat decks in exchange for trips on the water, and he served in the Merchant Marine at 16 to earn money for college. In recent years, besides the sailboat Merrilly, he owned a power cruiser named Working Capital.
His main home was in Arnold, and he had an apartment at the Watergate complex and a condominium in Snowmass, Colo.
He once listed the five pillars of life: "sailing, skiing, sex, the absence of litigation, and ice cream."
Survivors include his wife of 45 years, Eleanor Pocius Merrill of Arnold; three children, Douglas Merrill of Shelburne, Vt., Cathy Merrill Williams of Washington and Nancy Merrill of Arlington; a sister; and four grandchildren.
