Bernard Kilgore guided the emergence of the Wall Street Journal into a national daily newspaper of more than a million readers by the time of his death in 1967. Known to his colleagues as "Barney," Kilgore spent his postcollege career working for the Journal and its parent company, Dow Jones. He was a columnist who explained complex economic questions in simple language, and a company president who campaigned in the newsroom for clear, uncomplicated prose.

Kilgore was a quiet man but a generator of ideas. Under his guidance the Journal launched its practice of two "leader" (major) articles, on the left and right sides of the front page. He also established the National Observer, a general-interest newsweekly published from 1962 to 1977. The Kilgore years also saw the expansion of other Dow Jones properties, including Barron's Weekly and the Dow Jones News Service, a national and international distributor of business and...