Political Animals
Northway, Martin E.
Book Review/Martin E. Northway Of Men and Morning Newspapers • • Ours, we are constantly told, is the age of television. But for the better part of a century, most Americans would have agreed...
...Apparently, at times it did fight that way...
...He phrased the report as ridiculously andas strongly as he could, "confident that the colonel would see the limb he was pushing the Tribune out on...
...34 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975...
...Trohan's memoirs are a reminder that newspaper journalism has been in the doldrums since the advent of television...
...From 1934 to 1971, Walter Trohan wrote about men in Washington for the Chicago Tribune, which, at least when he started working, was one of the most powerful of the nation's dailies—and also the most conservative...
...He should know: he was there when things were different...
...but because of his partisan reporting he trod an ever more delicate line, often becoming persona non grata at the White House...
...On one occasion—and with Roosevelt's blessing Political Animals: Memoirs of a Sentimental Cynic by Walter Trohan Doubleday $10.00 —Trohan and his cohorts terrorized financier-diplomat Norman H. Davis, setting off firecrackers in and around his compartment for an entire night while he was a guest on the President's train...
...Trohan did write the story, even though he knew it was not true...
...The "open secret" is finally discussed in Political Animals—he claims that Eisenhower was romantically involved with his British WAAC chauffeur during World War II—but Trohan does not record in his memoir the slur he had earlier committed...
...The article appeared on page one...
...Once McCormick wired Trohan, "I have it right out of the horse's mouth, the secret government is Morgenthau, Frankfurter, and Lehman," implying that Trohan do an article documenting the assertion...
...He never detailed the exact nature of the "material" in the pages of the Tribune...
...The episode controverts Colonel McCormick's claim about political sex scandals, namely that "the Tribune didn't fight that way...
...Trohan was frequently under orders to write stories that attacked the very integrity of the Administration...
...The next morning Davis hastily departed, announcing dramatically, "Never, never again, will I ride a Presidential special...
...As the campaign was swinging into full gear in 1952, Trohan wrote in a column, "It has long been an open secret in Washington that material existed on which a muckraking personal attack could be built against the general...
...Colonel McCormick was a driving taskmaster, and Trohan's respect for—and perhaps fear of—his employer led him to make some ill-considered journalistic decisions...
...In the years since McCormick, our lunatic devotion to "objectivity" has robbed modern newspapers of the excitement and individuality they once had...
...But these men were cautious to innovate, and they lacked McCormick's shrewdness...
...To top it off, a Secret Service man pulled up Davis' pajama top and dropped a twenty-five-pound block of ice on the great man's chest...
...McCormick was a believer in adversary journalism...
...But in Political Animals Trohan tells only part of the story of his involvement in the Taft-Eisenhower contest...
...That such a bombastically critical journal could coexist for twenty years with Presidential administrations inimical to its expressed ideals is a tribute to the flexibility of republican government...
...But for the better part of a century, most Americans would have agreed with Wendell Phillips' judgment that we "live under a government of men and morning newspapers...
...During the Truman Administration Trohan was no longer playing the role of a beneficent leprechaun who happened to wield an acid pen...
...Evidently, the Colonel felt that his editorial truths needed a push from his news columns once in a while, and it is as McCormick's "adversary journalist" in Washington that Trohan will be chiefly remembered...
...But though reporters need not admire the objects of their investigations, they must at least be able to get along with them...
...When McCormick died in 1955, he was replaced by a board of trustees who ran the Tribune the way they thought he would have run it...
...Political Animals is the memoir of a Washington observer who was often in an exceedingly awkward position, ameliorated only slightly by the fact that his paper's iconoclastic editor-publisher, Robert R. McCormick, had been a prep-school classmate of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...With newspapers proliferating in the big cities and radio rapidly coming into its own, newspapers could afford—in fact, in McCormick's view, had an obligation—to trumpet their opinions as loudly and as outrageously as possible...
...further, they failed to inspire enthusiasm in their Washington correspondent...
...The record of the Chicago Tribune, and of Walter Trohan's 38 years in Washington, leaves us with an open question: Cannot newspaper journalism be both partisan and fair...
...According to Trohan, he did, in fact, like FDR...
...Colonel" McCormick was a "schoolmate of FDR but no chum," confides Trohan, and the two men's slight mutual regard—a function perhaps of their universal recognition as members of America's exclusive gentry—did nothing to diminish their deep political differences...
...With the approval and encouragement of McCormick, he actively assisted Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft in his campaign for the Republican nomination for President, helping him revise and write speeches and providing advice on publicity matters...
...Once, during a period when he was in good grace withthe FDR staff, he ignored the movie advice of that fine old Irish gentleman Barry Fitzgerald that we "observe the proprieties at all times," and organized among the press corps and the Presidential staff a group of pranksters called the "Poughkeepsie Protective Association...
...Is there no middle ground...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
