A Telling Tale of the 'Trib'

...Brown no doubt saw his anti-Communism as a ploy to unseat his brother and save the paper from immediate financial collapse...

...The Tribune was conservative in outlook but intelligently written and edited, and it attracted more than its share of talented young writers...

...He may have been half joking, but Whitelaw was indeed destined to rule...

...To the very end he holds one's interest, writing about the roles of Tom Wolf and Jimmy Breslin, the last outstanding recruits, with as much fervor and as richdetailashehaslavishedonthestars of the paper's greatest days, people like Stanley Walker, Homer Bigart, Red Smith, Marguerite Higgins and a host of others...

...If he did not invent the phrase "Go West, young man," he popularized it, making vivid the promise in the unbroken expanses of the American hinterland...

...Whitelaw Reid's private secretary...

...The Herald, meanwhile, had passed to the founder's son, James Gordon Bennett Jr., inKluger's phrase "aswaggering precociously dissolute lout...

...The only sense in which it is a masterpiece is that it managed to get by the three Reids...

...Whitie asked me to see his mother before making my refusal final...

...That was not an atmosphere in which one could work effectively...

...His condition was the departure of the last Reid...

...It is an accomplishment that makes the vast enterprise seem to have been worthwhile...

...When eight years later I again went up to her office to tell her I was leaving the paper, she looked at me with the same pale eyes: "Don't you know," she said, "that nobody ever leaves the Herald Tribune except to go downhill...

...I recall Geoffrey Parsons, my long-time predecessor who kept his office while exerting a stabilizing influence on the dissolving scene, saying to me one morning, "Augie, today's lead editorial is a masterpiece...

...Reviewed by August Heckscher Former chief editorial writer, New York "Herald Tribune...

...With fierce energy he moved about the editorial rooms, the advocate of a more dynamic paper...

...Both men were eccentric geniuses, or near genuises, whose papers reflected their interests and passions...

...I was the editor of an upstate New York evening paper, the Auburn Citizen-Advertiser, and hated to leave the small-city way of life I had embraced with enthusiasm after the War...

...In his effort to be fair the author sometimes puts his subjects to the indignity of alternating favorable and unfavorable dicta, or inserts a dagger to prove he is not too kind...

...Fear and paralysis ruled the staff as family warfare simmered just below the surface...

...His book is a dazzling performance, researched with scholarly zeal and written with the gusto of journalism at its best...

...Greeley was a reformer who sought through a stormy, often lopsided career to increase the well-being of the average American and to advance the cause of justice and right...

...The younger sibling appeared on the scene as a malevolent presence, the opposite of his brother not only in nickname but in other respects...

...I had reason to know her force and persuasiveness...

...It has a head and a heart, a birth, a variety of fortunes and—like all mortal things—a death...

...who will be looking forajobsomeday," Ogdengaveasa reason...

...There was Whitie, but there was also Helen, his mother...

...His daughter, Elizabeth, would show herself to possess his virtues and more...

...He immediately built for it an elaborate new headquarters near City Hall, a sort of Florentine campanile signifying the paper's new wealth and prestige...

...He would surely have instigated a period of high distinction for the paper had an impossible economic situation not seemed to require talents other than those he possessed...

...Not surprisingly in a massive compendium, errors occur here and there (for example, I am given a middle initial of "V," whereas I have never had any at all...

...Before long', of course, financial collapse was once more imminent...

...You know perfectly well the piece is dreadful...

...When after a brutal transfer of power he ruled supreme, his political virulence abated...

...Anyone who writes so tirelessly must occasionally write tiresomely...

...When Whitie, a Yale classmate, first asked me to come to work at the Tribune I demurred...

...He had died by 1948, a lackadaisical editor crippled in his last years by alcoholism...

...It was during his tenancy of the editor's chair that I arrived at the paper in 1948, becoming a witness to many of the events Kluger chronicles so dramatically...

...White-law Reid proved a good administrator and a capable writer...

...Mills was an unexpectedly attractive figure for a successful financier of the period, honest and gentle of disposition...

...As a slip of agirl just out of Barnard College, Helen Rogers had applied successfully for the job of Mrs...

...Kluger's determination to follow every subject to the end can lead him into a bottomless pit, as when, discussing a scandal of the Tilden era, he not only tells us that Tribune reporters broke an important code but elaborates at length upon the nature of the code and the method of deciphering it...

...Next came John Denson, who for a while piqued the town's interest by daily packaging the front page in weird arrangements of headlines and typographic forms...

...Two generations later Reid's grandson would ask John Hay's grandson to take over the paper, then at the point of expiring...

...Whitney was ambassador to England at the time (as the first Whitelaw Reid had been), and unfortunately he did not come back to take command . His managers sought with almost comical naivete and ineptitude to find a new editor, until their choice fell upon an upright yet sleepy small-town figure who lasted a brief term...

...His generosity of spirit, incidentally, is indicated by the way he placed all the records in the hands of Richard Kluger for the writing of the present book, and in the disarmingly candid appraisals he makes of his own work and that of other members of his family...

...The Paper has its faults...

...Supported by the business manager Bill Robinson, he intimated that the Tribune's financial troubles were due to the too-liberal policies of the city desk and the editorial page...

...After Greeley's death the Tribune was bought by Whitelaw Reid...

...Jock Whitney, the aforesaid grandson of John Hay, was persuaded to provide backing out of his immense fortune...

...Her pale blue eyes, hersoftvoice, her absolute conviction that the Herald Tribune was the greatest institution in the world, won me over—as her qualities had won over statesmen whom she sought as speakers at the Forum, or merchants whose advertising she coveted...

...She had first impressed her employer, then endeared herself...

...director, Twentieth Century Fund...

...he was open in his views, loyal and just toward those who worked with him...

...He created a style and an institution conveying the agitation, the color, the human pathos of the crude metropolis coming into its own...

...One of these was John Hay, at 32 already having served as Lincoln's private secretary and married the daughter of a wealthy Clevelander...

...Besides Helen and Whitie there was also Brown...

...Helen Reid had become a national figure, presiding over the Herald Tribune Forum and to a large extent over the business end of the paper...

...Richard Kluger's book is on the whole masterful and absorbing, and it tells a story eminently worth the effort he has expended upon it...

...the Herald to George Gordon Bennett...

...he sponsored McCarthyite features...

...In 1924 Whitelaw Reid's son Ogden, who had inherited management of the Tribune when his aging father went off to Paris and London as ambassador, bought the two Bennett papers: "I have a son, White-law, 10 years old...

...The Tribune goes back for its origins to Horace Greeley...

...The changes he introduced consisted of a notorious spy series and hiring—for a paper once graced by such luminaries as Percy Hammond and Virgil Thomson—the likes of Hy Gardner and Billie Rose...

...In 1880a31-year-oldMidwesterner, raised on a farm, joined Greeley's Tribune as its chief editorial writer...

...It could not have been easy to do so, and the resulting text will not invariably be pleasing for him to read...

...But he was too inexperienced to know what might vitalize it...

...but Kluger is immeasurably the better writer, his judgment is more sane, and his civility and tolerance are far more developed...

...Not the least of Kluger's achievements is that he makes the final years of the Tribune constantly alive and often amusing...

...Following a scandal he fled to Paris, where he lived off the prodigious profits of the paper at home and, more as a pastime than a serious enterprise, founded the Paris Herald...

...Only Robert Caro among recent biographers matches Kluger in an inexhaustible lust for detail...

...Bennett was more fundamentally the journalist and city man...

...But these are small complaints...

...When Reid left on a seven-month wedding trip he asked Hay to take care of the paper in his absence...

...As editor Whitie favored sparkle and simplicity of style...

...A great newspaper thus deserves a great biographer, and the old New York Herald Tribune has found its own in Richard Kluger...

...Geoffrey, you old fox," I replied...

...Who among the myriad reporters, editors, managers, and publishers of the papers that went into the making of the Herald Tribune could have imagined that when all was said and done they would have this sort of testament, this imaginative record of their failures and successes...

...The story Kluger has to tell is in itself a fascinating one...

...Yet on the whole Kluger is fair to him, seeing him as part of an unfolding tragedy that perhaps nothing could have averted...

...A newspaper has many of the characteristics of a human being...

...He combed the staff looking for Communists...

...Itwas in the fates, and in Elizabeth Reid's plans, that Helen should marry her son Ogden...

...For 10 years after joining the paper he remained a bachelor, then married the daughter of one of the country's richest men, Davis Ogden Mills, who had made his first fortune during the California gold rush...

...He lost me on that one...

...As social arbiter and doyenne of huge estates she would become refreshingly independent and, as mother-in-law of the future Helen Rogers Reid, generous and supportive beyond measure...