The Colonel

...The Colonel got many things right...

...Generations of Chicago schoolboys (including me) thus grew up thinking the correct spelling of "through" was "thru...

...Every edition of the Tribune bore the unmistakable impress of his odd personality...

...Grant and a study of Gettysburg...

...To transport his newsprint to Chicago, he made himself a shipping magnate...

...Having caught a Trib executive and his secretary in estrus on an office couch, he banned couches from Tribune Tower...

...McCormick held fast to the tradition...

...In addition to being an accomplished historian, Smith is a former director of the Reagan library and a speechwriter for Bob Dole—a Republican, in other words...

...disliked long "think pieces"—unless, as an employee said, "he did the writing and thinking himself...

...McCormick needed enemies," Smith writes, "the way most men need friends...

...As a boss McCormick could be impulsive...

...The only man in our own day to compare him to is Al Neuharth, the semi-literate lounge lizard who conceived USA Today...

...It was founded in 1847 to be, as its original motto said, "neutral in nothing...independent in everything...

...As an alderman and later as president of the Chicago Sanitary Commission, he exposed corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, cleaned up the stockyards, and fought the rapacious utility mogul Samuel Insull to a standstill...

...His Anglophobia was world-class, though it never extendedto his wardrobe, which was pure Savile Row, or his preference in athletics, which was polo, or the baronial pretensions of life on his country estate outside Chicago, which he wandered in jodhpurs and ascot (Scratch a -phobe and you'll find a -phile...

...It was, after all, his newspaper, and he saw no reason why his views should be confined to his editorial page...

...It is owned by a corporation and managed by corporate functionaries, and what personality it has it takes from its editors and reporters, who are the standard-issue journalismschool products: vaguely liberal, obsessively multicultural, liberationist in "lifestyle" matters, and dedicated by turns to flattering and hectoring their lumpen readership...

...This shouldn't matter, but it does...

...In sprawling, wide-open Chicago, there was never a shortage of possibilities, and he carried them with him after he abandoned his career in politics and assumed control of the Tribune...

...He was a reformer then, taking the first Roosevelt as his hero...

...He detested both schools...

...Medill became a confidant of Lincoln, and, for the rest of his life, an endless giver of advice (as opposed to adviser) to presidents, all the way up to McKinley...

...As the election approached, Tribune operators were instructed to answer the telephones with the greeting, "Did you know there are only x more days to save the country...

...He took the editorship reluctantly, to keep the newspaper in the family and incidentally, Smith thinks, to win the favor of his shrewish mother...

...He was schooled back in America at Groton and at Yale...

...He was fiercely loyal to his employees, cared nothing about offending advertisers, and spent lavishly in a multitude of lawsuits and public campaigns to reinforce the First Amendment...

...In business he was a pioneer of "vertical integration...

...He44 He was a hater, which is bad, but he hated many of the right things, which is some compensation...

...McCormick thought Roosevelt a proto-fascist...

...that most of all...

...M cCormick understood, as his grandfather Medill had, that newspapers would be judged in the marketplace primarily as a means of entertainment...

...He demanded that the editor of Time be identified in news stories as "Henry Luce, who was born in China but is not a Chinaman...

...But like Medill he knew, too, that newspapers can also be a means of personal expression for the men who own them...

...Og z 0 The American Spectator September 1997 67...

...O'Rourke — the one who killed bears but not the one in the wheelchair...

...FDR thought the Colonel was "touched in the head...

...He loved his family, his city, and his country...

...He was a reactionary, but a farsighted one...

...He edited by whim...

...The paper's power grew as Chicago grew, and it grew rich along with its city...

...McCormick died childless in 1955, and today the Tribune is indistinguishable from a dozen other fat, rich metropolitan sheets that land on their subscribers' doorsteps each morning with a very dull thud...

...The newspaper no longer reciprocates the affection...

...Once, after Eleanor was involved in a traffic accident, Chicagoans awoke to find a five-column headline stripped across the front page of the Trib: REVOKE MRS...

...His understanding of the Roosevelts was uncomplicated...

...McCormick's own politics were ferociously right-wing, which means they were roughly those of, say, Thomas Jefferson, transplanted intact to the twentieth century, and Smith doesn't take them as self-evidently absurd...

...He disdained syndicated columnists from Washington, like Walter Lippmann, considering them mere courtiers to power...

...His sympathy for McCormick survives...

...need ever trouble himself to write another...

...Richard Norton Smith has now written the giant's biography, and he has done the job with such thoroughness and fair-mindedness that no future biographer ANDREW FERGUSON, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Fools' Names, Fools' Faces (Atlantic Monthly Press...

...McCormick's life is inextricably bound up with the life of the Tribune, and so Smith begins his story with the story of the newspaper...

...But he did know a giant when he saw one...

...He had his own kind of integrity...

...He kept his employees happy—drivers, printers, even editors and reporters —with generous health benefits, high wages, and profit-sharing...

...He originated or bought up the best comic strips in the business and loaded the paper with "service" features to leaven its ample supply of hard news...

...And of course his newspaper...

...McCormick was born there in 1880...

...McCormick's ambitions were as vast as his eccentricities: He wanted his newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, to mobilize armies, steer the economy, forge grand alliances, and more generally remake the country into something closer to his taste...

...Other McCormick revisions: tho, iland, frate, and jaz...

...The Colonel, as McCormick liked to be called, was a newspaperman, a contemporary of Hearst and Pulitzer and Scripps...

...His service in World War I, which brought him the rank of Colonel, was deft and even heroic, and he remained a lifelong student of military matters, publishing a biography of U.S...

...Do the rest of us any longer...

...For much of his childhood his parents lugged him around Europe, where the elder McCormick held a variety of diplomatic posts, secured through family connections...

...An edition doesn't go by, I'll wager, that fails to send the Colonel spinning in his grave...

...When the Democratic convention opened in 1936, the Tribune headlined: THE SOVIETS GATHER AT PHILADELPHIA...

...When radio was launched, he turned WGN (for "World's Greatest Newspaper") into one of the most powerful stations in the world...

...These were the days "when newspapers were read not for their objectivity but for their personality," Smith writes, and the Colonel upheld that tradition too...

...His craving for self-aggrandizement may have been more fully rewarded in politics, but his genius was for journalism—and he managed to squeeze plenty of self-aggrandizement out of that too...

...The experience simultaneously bred in the Colonel a lifelong love for the plainness of the American Midwest and an undying distaste for the Old World, particularly for England...

...Neuharth wants USA Today to tell his countrymen "How More of Us Are Eating Zucchini...

...He believed, for example, that the conventional spelling of English words was irrational...

...he did the 66 September r 9 9 7 The American Spectator same thirty years later with TV...

...He once sent a correspondent to the university at Madison, Wisconsin, then as now a palace of pinkos, to confirm his belief that the men there wore lace panties...

...He returned to Chicago bent on a career not in journalism but in politics...

...Put the two men next to each other and you have a nice illustration — a suitable graphic for USA Today, in fact— of American journalism's steep decline...

...FDR'S DRIVER'S LICENSE...

...There were cooking and gardening tips for homemakers, financial advice for the man of the house, superb sports coverage, columns to counsel the lovelom, and original fiction from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ring Lardner...

...When paper supplies seemed unreliable, he ventured deep into Canada and made himself a lumber baron: buying up timberland and building paper mills and power dams...

...The Tribune became famous for its contemptuous (and contemptible) coverage of FDR, who had been a classmate of the Colonel at Groton...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW A Colonel of Truth The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick Richard Norton Smith Houghton Mifflin / 597 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Andrew Ferguson al he last of the giants" is what the press critic A. J. Liebling called Robert R. McCormick six years after his death, and it should quickly be added, in fairness, that Liebling hated him, and lampooned him without pity...

...He was not merely a crank—not even primarily a crank, as Smith proves...

...He was a hater, which is bad, but he hated many of the right things, which is some compensation: New York, the State Department, William Jennings Bryan, Prohibition, California, taxes, government in general, and in particular any government intrusion on the right of newspapers to say what they wish...

...He liked—to borrow from P.J...

...But he can take some consolation from this final monument by Richard Norton Smith, a biography fairer and more judicious than the Colonel would have liked, but brimming on every page with the dazzling energy that made him a giant...

...Both men were megalomaniacs and eccentrics, but there the comparison ends...

...I don't think many other professional biographers nowadays, as consumed by politics as any academic, could leap this hurdle...

...His maternal grandfather, Joseph Medill, bought the paper in 1855, turning it quickly into an organ allied with the newly born Republican Party...

...When New Dealers overtook the Rhode Island state supreme court, he ordered a star stripped from the American flag that hung in the Tower's lobby—his way of excommunicating an entire state...

...In doing so he invented the modern newspaper...

...So in several instances, he demanded the paper use alternatives...