The Rewrite Man

"Our main mission is to teach people about the First Amendment. To do that you fish where the fish are," says Overby.

"The way I try to define my role is to be the chief encouraging officer, and I tried to be behind what everybody does and give them the resources," says Overby. He had the staff hold daily story meetings, just like newsroom planning sessions. Eight out of 12 senior managers were former journalists. Polshek Partnership Architects and Ralph Appelbaum Associates headed the architecture and exhibition design teams.

"Those of us with a daily journalism background, we are used to completely building a newspaper in a day and sending it out, enjoying the fruits of that work, getting the feedback and building something else all over again the next day. If something doesn't work out well, you try something different the next day," Overby says. "This construction project, you start building on Pennsylvania Avenue -- you know, we don't have a corrections department. We are building for 100 years or more."

High on his list of what had to be done, and done right, were the windows. "We made an important strategic decision five years ago to put the views out front for the visitor," he says. The Wolfgang Puck signature restaurant and the condominium apartments -- part of the unusual mix -- would not have the prime vista. "The visitors have the best elevated view of Washington that is available. We said, if we are going to teach people about the First Amendment, we need to inspire them. There is nothing more inspirational than to be able to look at the Capitol and the monuments around here."

The number of details in a complex building didn't throw Overby and the team off-track. "Charles has always been very calm. And if you are going to have frayed nerves, this is the project to make it happen," says Edward M. Rogers, a partner with Nixon Peabody, the project's lead outside counsel.

Overby insisted on a clean work site, Rogers says, and would point out imperfections. "If the corners of the railings weren't right, he would say, 'That is uneven and you need to do it over.' " Zambo, the real-estate broker, remembers only one angry phone call from Overby, when she got off-message and told a reporter the appeal of the site was because it was on the inauguration route. "It came across as negative," she says. "And he was stern and said he didn't like it."

When it was apparent the project wouldn't be ready by the original opening date in October, Overby accepted the blame for not anticipating the extra time needed.

One overhaul he wanted was the news history gallery. In the first museum, "we made a decision to not start using television to show the history until television was invented. That blocked out several centuries," says Overby, and that was a mistake.

Overby represents the television generation, and decided to scale back some of the television history to make room for the story of the digital transformation in the news.

Overby was born in Jackson, Miss. After his father died, his mother, a secretary, raised Overby and his younger brother. "She worked for some years for a construction company," says Overby, thinking a minute about that irony and his recent hard-hat years.

After finishing at the University of Mississippi in 1968, he worked in Washington and then launched what became a long career for the Gannett newspaper chain. He worked as a reporter and editor at the former Nashville Banner, then as executive editor of Today in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He became president of the Gannett Foundation, the nonprofit fund of the media company, in 1989, and then chairman and chief executive officer of the Newseum and the foundation's successor, the Freedom Forum, in 1997. The forum has given $5 million, added to $2.5 million from the state of Mississippi, for a new journalism and politics building that will be named for Overby at Ole Miss.

There are two episodes regarding civil rights and Mississippi history, now told in the museum, that he particularly remembers.

Overby recalls the day in 1963 when Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary, was killed outside his own home in Jackson. He also remembers how the local paper covered it the next day. " 'Californian charged in murder.' And the guy had lived in California maybe as a child. I said, we have got to get that front page." And it is part of the 35,000 front pages in the museum.

He shakes his head at the bravery of his friend Jack R. Thornell, who captured the 1967 prize-winning photo of the shooting of civil rights activist James Meredith. "Everyone else was ducking behind parked cars while the shots were being fired. He stood up and took the picture, and you can see Meredith lying on the ground in pain. You can see the rifle. That was such an act of courage," Overby says. That's in the museum's Pulitzer gallery.

Overseeing the museum's development follows another important achievement in his professional life. In 1983 Gannett's Jackson Clarion-Ledger, where Overby was the editor, won the Pulitzer Prize Public Service Medal for news and editorials on education reform in Mississippi. "I thought there would never be, and I hate to say this out loud, never be a more exhilarating feeling than the afternoon in Jackson, Mississippi, when we won the Pulitzer Prize," Overby says. He wells up for a minute and continues talking about the collective effort the newspaper joined to change education in the state.

One of the hardest decisions, he says, was closing the Freedom Forum's six offices. The offices in London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, New York and San Francisco sponsored conferences on politics and the press and special issues such as photojournalism in the digital age. The work has been folded into guest international journalists programs and work in the museum's World News Gallery. "I loved those offices," Overby says. "But if you are going to run a big-time museum on Pennsylvania Avenue, you can't have programs and operations on every continent."