MCCORMICK REVISITED

The Chicago Tribune is embarrassed by the man who made it a great newspaper. On the 150th anniversary of the paper last June, associate managing editor E Richard Ciccone told his readers that Colonel Robert McCormick inappropriately imposed his likes and dislikes — especially his dislikes — on the paper’s coverage. McCormick’s opposition to internationalists, interventionists, liberals, the League of Nations, FDR, Herbert Hoover, Tom Dewey, John Foster Dulles, England, Russia, Henry Ford, New York City, the South, Communists, socialists, activists, Prohibitionists, and racists (this is only a partial list) spilled over into the paper’s news columns. Worse yet, the Tribune kept at it, violating what Ciccone called “the commonly accepted requirement of objectivity on its front pages,” when other papers began to clean up their acts in the 1950s and 1960s. Now, Ciccone concluded triumphantly, the paper is legit, providing the “usual coverage of politics that is found everywhere else in America.”

True enough. The Tribune today is like most major newspapers, indeed like most of American journalism. It’s trendy, professional, self-important, politically correct, faintly liberal, elitist, and extremely bland. It has a few great reporters (Bill Neikirk, Jim Warren, Ciccone himself), but no distinctive edge. It’s not fun to read, or interesting, or infuriating. What the Tribune needs is exactly what it’s happy to be rid of an idiosyncratic guiding force like McCormick.

McCormick, who died in 1955 after running the paper for nearly a half- century, was neither fair nor objective. A rich kid who grew up unloved, he used the Tribune to promote the Republican party and his own predilections. He thought the nation’s capital should be moved out of Washington, perhaps to Grand Rapids, Michigan. He assigned reporters to find out whether University of Wisconsin men wore lace underwear and why New Yorkers spat on the sidewalk. But McCormick was also a newspaperman who insisted on hiring the best reporters, providing serious coverage not only of Chicago but of the entire world, running the best features and comics, and taking on the powerful (even powerful Republicans). “For all his strangeness, he really did have an integrity and professionalism all his own,” Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham told biographer Richard Norton Smith.

In The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, Smith captures the mad-genius quality that drove McCormick and made the Tribune a rousing commercial success, though it never became the “the world’s greatest newspaper” he claimed it was. McCormick was a peculiar fellow. He insisted the room temperature at his home or office be 60 degrees. “He frowned on off-color stories, women who wore rouge, and anyone who lit up in defiance of the NO SMOKING signs he had posted throughout Tribune Tower,” Smith writes. “A prudish streak prompted orders to the art department to paint more clothes on an offending model and to conceal her feet.” McCormick believed feet were ugly. He also didn’t like the sound of whistling or the cooing of mourning doves, which he shot from his bedroom window.

In some ways, McCormick was a fraud. He had a moralistic streak, yet ” required the ego gratification that came from stealing another man’s wife.” But he was a genuine colonel, having served with notable bravery in France during World War I with the First Division. He was a far-seeing businessman, trekking repeatedly to Canada to create his own logging community and ensure a steady supply of newsprint. And he spearheaded (and financed) the successful challenge of a prior-restraint order barring publication of supposedly offensive material that led to the landmark Near v. Minnesota decision of the Supreme Court in 1931.

Smith, the director of the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids and author of an acclaimed biography of Tom Dewey, breaks new ground with revelations about President Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to drive McCormick out of business. FDR personally got Marshall Field III to launch the Chicago Sun to compete with the Tribune. When the Tribune printed classified details about the Japanese fleet in 1942, FDR initially wanted to send Marines to occupy the Tribune Tower and indict McCormick for treason. Later, FDR overrode the objections of his attorney general and had a grand jury convened to investigate McCormick, who was not indicted. Meanwhile, Interior secretary Harold Ickes proposed intervening with Canadian officials to block McCormick’s access to newsprint. Once again, we discover that White House trampling of the Constitution didn’t start with Watergate.

In lamenting the Tribune’s past, Ciccone complained the paper “was still wearing its conservative trappings” well past McCormick’s death. It continued to run a daily cartoon on page one, most of them bashing Democrats. Since the 1970s, though, all that has vanished. Media critics applauded. I doubt that many readers did.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.