The Deal from Hell (7 page)

With his avid interest in politics, Medill forged the
Tribune
's durable ties to the GOP, which became a substantial part of the paper's suburban Chicago readership base—one that would make advertisers covet its pages. In his will, he stipulated that the paper could only endorse a Republican for president. When Medill was Chicago's mayor, the paper's editorial board endorsed Horace Greeley, whose White House campaign was backed by Democrats, even though he ran for president from an offshoot of the GOP. When Medill returned to the
Tribune
at the end of his term, he fired the entire board. It wasn't until 2008, under new management, that the paper dared to endorse another Democratic presidential candidate: Barack Obama. Medill infused the paper with character and commitment to public service, but his pugnacious and controversial grandson, Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, made the paper world famous and built the financial foundation from which the Tribune Company grew.

Inventor, entrepreneur, commentator, politician, and self-promoting eccentric, the Colonel understood something that escaped most of his peers: readers embraced the personalities of the people who ran and wrote newspapers, if not the papers themselves. The Colonel stamped his enigmatic personality onto the pages of the
Tribune
, spawning some of the worst, most biased, unfair journalism in the nation's history and catapulting the number-three paper in Chicago to the most widely read and financially successful full-size daily newspaper in America.

Richard Norton Smith, the Colonel's biographer, listed his phobias and enemies, in no particular order, as the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Wall Street, the United Nations, Henry Luce, New York City, Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, grand opera, Thomas E. Dewey,
the East Coast, Walter Winchell, NATO, and Wisconsin, except for its firebrand Senator McCarthy, whom the Colonel tolerated because of his virulent anti-Communism. McCormick used the
Tribune
and later the radio station, WGN, which stood for “world's greatest newspaper,” the monicker that the Colonel gave to his newspaper, to let the world know how he felt about things. He used both to castigate FDR, for whom he had particular political and personal hatred (something FDR attributed to his stealing a girlfriend from the Colonel when both were classmates at Groton). Once, when Eleanor Roosevelt had a minor traffic violation, the
Tribune
reported the story on its front page with a five-column headline that called for revoking the First Lady's license. A skilled horseman, handsome, muscular, six foot four inches tall, with a neatly trimmed mustache, the Colonel could be remote, cold, aloof, and aristocratic. He stole his two wives away from their husbands, men who happened to be his friends. He would stroll through the newsroom with a soldier's bearing, on occasion wearing an English officer's jacket, boots, and spurs, with his three German shepherds in tow.

The Colonel routinely used his newspaper to further his personal and political interests, tarnishing the paper's reputation for decades.
Tribune
editorial writers browbeat the Illinois legislature into dedicating public assets to help build Meigs Field, a small airport in downtown Chicago that the Colonel favored so he could fly his plane to work from Cantigny, his spacious, militaristic compound in Chicago's western suburbs, a base of the isolation he championed.

As interested as he was in pursuing his own agenda with the
Tribune
, the Colonel could display journalistic integrity. When a
Tribune
ad manager asked editors to downplay the divorce of a wealthy department store owner, the Colonel ordered the story
in
the paper and the ads
out
. Regarding some issues, the Colonel acted like a liberal. An avid defender of the First Amendment, he spent lavishly in a legal challenge to the so-called “Gag Law,” convincing the U.S. Supreme Court in 1931 to overturn a ruling that suppressed a small, scurrilous Minnesota weekly local politicians attacked as a public nuisance. But on most issues, the
Colonel was conservative, reactionary, and insular. The Midwest was America, in his view; the East Coast was a collection of British sympathizers and Communists. Readers of today's comparatively bland newspapers would find the front-page headlines on the Colonel's papers jarring. He once launched a series of stories about the state of newspapers and magazines on the East Coast under the headline:

The Colonel embraced Medill's attempts at reforming the English language, spelling words like
though
as
tho
and
through
as
thru
, giving critics fodder for columns that portrayed him as more than slightly off plumb.

By today's standards, the Colonel's brand of journalism might sound downright offensive, but readers loved his paper for its readability, the entertainment value of comics like “Little Orphan Annie” and “Dick Tracy,” and the tirades of the Colonel and his surrogates. The
Tribune
has employed some of journalism's most famous reporters: Ring Lardner, sports writer; gossip columnist Hedda Hopper; advice maven Ann Landers. Arch Ward, the paper's sports editor, created the idea of baseball's All-Star game in the pages of the
Tribune
by suggesting the best of the American and National League square off in a game; and the
Tribune
named the first female as a war correspondent. Years later the paper also promoted the first woman to be a police reporter. The
Tribune
's daily circulation rose to 1 million by 1942, and ad revenues flew off the chart.

For all of his odd ways, the Colonel also created a structure that
Tribune
executives would later exploit to build the multimedia company that would gobble up Times Mirror. Unlike many of his peers, the Colonel invested heavily in his company to maintain its independence, and he embraced change in the form of new technology. With revenues gushing from his paper in Chicago, the Colonel acquired an interest in the Mutual Broadcasting System and bought paper mills
in Canada to ensure that his
Tribune
would always have an adequate, economical supply of newsprint. He pioneered the use of color and teletype transmission, and experimented with a crude version of what would become the fax machine. When commercial radio appeared on the scene early in the century, the Colonel acquired WGN in Chicago in 1924, in part because he saw its promise, in part so he could spread his message near and far. With WGN Radio in his portfolio, the Colonel started
Chicago Theater of the Air
. Every Saturday evening at 9 p.m., listeners could tune in to the Colonel's booming baritone lecturing on everything from military tactics and obscure Revolutionary War heroes to reports on his extensive world travels and idiosyncratic personal interests.

In 1948, he bought a television station, which he named WGN-TV. “I decided WGN must be a Chicago station,” the Colonel said, making sure that his readers and audience understood that he was looking out for their interests. “A Chicago television station could not simply be the Midwest outlet of a New York network,” he said. When federal regulators later prohibited cross-ownership of the major broadcast and print properties in major American cities, his acquisition proved prescient. Since the company already owned WGN, federal officials allowed Tribune Company to keep its station, grandfathering the ownership arrangement and giving Tribune executives a foundation to exploit and build a national media company years later.

As the
Tribune
grew, the Colonel enlisted his dysfunctional family to help oversee his expanding empire. He had earned his rank as an artillery officer years earlier on the battlefields of World War I, where he and his cousin, Captain Joseph Patterson, stationed near a French battlefield, planned to publish a “picture paper.” At the war's end, Patterson, with capital from the
Tribune
, moved to New York to found the
New York Daily News
, a tabloid that would become the nation's largest circulation daily newspaper.

Another cousin, Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, edited the
Washington Times Herald
and made it the top tabloid in the nation's capital before buying it from William Randolph Hearst in 1939. Her Auntie Mame
antics, failed marriage to a penniless Polish count, and scandalous love affairs made her and the McCormick clan the talk of Washington. The Colonel eventually bought the paper and sold it in 1954 to Eugene Meyer and his son-in-law, Philip Graham, who folded it into what is now the
Washington Post
. Captain Patterson's daughter, Alicia, started
Newsday
, the tabloid that would become as successful on Long Island as the
Daily News
was in Manhattan.

Childless, and paternalistic toward employees, the Colonel grew increasingly remote when his health started to fail in the 1950s. By then, the
Tribune
's circulation had started to tail off; it had dropped 20 percent from 1946. The paper slowly started to change, initiating a new editorial department called “The Other Side” that exposed readers to different viewpoints and took the political edge off the
Tribune
's front-page cartoons.

When he died in 1955, the Colonel left behind an estate valued at $55 million, most of it in Tribune stock housed in the McCormick Tribune Trust. He had turned over management of the paper to three trusted executives, and the long process of change picked up speed, despite the best efforts of some of his trusted aides.

In 1974, just five years before I would meet Jones, the Cook-Kirkpatrick era began. Kirk, as he was known, vowed to change the news and opinion columns of the
Tribune
in ways that would have sent the Colonel on one of his famous tirades. “
Thru
is
through
and so is
tho
,” Kirk declared.

The Colonel was buried in full uniform in an oversize coffin at his Cantigny estate, but his reputation and shadow lived long afterward at Tribune Tower. Even after working at the
Tribune
for two decades, I would get a feeling while walking down the halls of his famous Tower at night that somehow and somewhere, the Colonel was watching. One night I walked out of the rear door of the newsroom and took the freight elevator to the first floor to leave the building. As the elevator's doors closed, I looked back and noticed the label on the elevator door.

It read
Frate
.

B
leakwood Avenue runs through a barrio about eight miles due east of the
Los Angeles Times'
Globe Lobby, a marble art deco entry that features a massive globe, Hugo Ballin's murals of 1930s life in America, and bronze busts of General Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, and other members of the family whose name, in Southern California, is synonymous with wealth and power. For Leo Wolinsky, the distance between the newspaper where he would become a keeper of the journalistic flame and the downtrodden east Los Angeles neighborhood where he grew up might as well have been halfway to the moon.

A resourceful journalist with a twinkle in his brown eyes and a mischievous laugh that pervaded his speech, Wolinsky was a career newsman who knew the ins and outs of the newsroom better than most. In far-flung newsrooms, we shared a roughly parallel path—he at the
Los Angeles Times
, me at the
Tribune
. Products of working-class America, we both rose through the ranks to the pinnacle of journalistic power and decades later would play a role in each others' career that neither one of us could have imagined.

In the 1950s, S.J. Perelman called the
Los Angeles Times
“the most wretched fish wrap in America,” second only to the
Chicago Tribune
. Much as the Colonel polluted the
Tribune
's journalistic reputation to make a fortune and further his eccentric political interests, General Otis and his entrepreneurial son-in-law, Harry Chandler, used the
Los Angeles Times
to build a financial and political empire that put Los Angeles on the map and made the Chandlers a California legend.

A jingoistic, anti-labor firebrand who called his newspaper headquarters “The Fortress,” General Otis bought a quarter interest in the
Los Angeles Daily Times
in 1882 for $5,000. The paper had a circulation of 400, and Los Angeles' population totaled 12,500 restless souls surrounded by orange trees, wheat fields, and a handful of wineries. An Ohio native who, at age sixty-one, convinced his friend President William McKinley to pin a star on his epaulet for service in the short-lived Spanish American war, Otis used the pages of the
Times
to reward friends, punish enemies, and relentlessly promote Southern California. Otis, who weighed 250 pounds, was the walrus in the family. Harry Chandler was the fox, the sly man who married the general's daughter and started a family that eventually made the
Times
a powerful and financially successful civic institution that dominated the California Republican party as thoroughly as the Colonel's operation did in the Midwest. The way the Chandlers used the
Times
to enhance their financial interests made the Colonel look like a Boy Scout.

The classic film
Chinatown
was based on the story of Harry Chandler's secret purchase of huge tracts of land in a parched valley north of Los Angeles. He then ordered coverage and editorials in the
Times
to support construction of a canal to bring water from the Owens Valley (220 miles northwest of Los Angeles) to the San Fernando Valley. The massive project, financed by a public bond issue, vastly increased the value of Chandler's nearby real estate holdings and made Harry and a close circle of friends a fortune at the expense of the impoverished farmers who naïvely went along with the deal.

Like the right-wing
Tribune
of the Colonel's day, the
Times
promoted a staunch, conservative political playbook. In
The Powers That Be
,
David Halberstam related how Turner Catledge, then a young reporter for the
New York Times
, once asked Kyle Palmer, the
Los Angeles Times
political reporter, for information about the Democratic gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair, whom conservatives despised because of his Socialist ties. “Turner, forget it,” quipped Palmer, who doubled as a charming schemer and political operative. “We don't go in for that kind of crap you have back in New York of being obliged to print both sides. We are going to beat this son-of-a-bitch Sinclair any way we can. We're going to kill him.” And they did. Sinclair got 37 percent of the vote running on the EPIC (End Poverty in California) platform that advocated universal employment in the state. But Frank Merriam, the Republican candidate favored by the Chandlers, got 49 percent in a campaign that featured fake newsreels showing Russian Communists arriving in California to vote for Sinclair.