From the Streets of Chicago to the Court of St. James

No, this isn’t another story about Joseph P. Kennedy, but about Moses Annenberg and his son, Walter, who became a publishing giant, art collector, major philanthropist, and friend to a series of presidents, among them Joe Kennedy’s son. But power, sex, money, ambition, redemption, presidents, the mob, good works, and social climbing — all the elements that have made the Kennedy saga one of America’s favorite soap operas — are equally present in the newly published Legacy, Christopher Ogden’s account of the rise, dip, and rise again of the Annenberg family, which rose in the space of two generations from brickbats on the South Side of Chicago to immense wealth and the company of royalty.

Ogden’s last book, Life of the Party, told how Pamela Harriman ran through rich men in four different countries until her last husband bought her the entree into politics she desired: Several facelifts and many millions of dollars later, she had become an ambassador. The Annenbergs’ rise to an ambassadorship is a more complex story, darker and grittier, with a far broader range of both social background and human emotion.

A story of legacy begins with a founder, who is often hard to love. “I had to hunt or starve,” Moses said, comparing himself to a wolf among house dogs. “I learned how to hunt, and I kept it up.” Born in East Prussia in 1877, he was sent at age six to fish all day in a lake near his home to feed his numerous family members. At eight, he stood barefoot on the deck of a passenger ship to glimpse the Statue of Liberty. He found his first paying job at thirteen in Chicago, where his family settled, and for the next ten years held a series of jobs, none of which did much to satisfy what Ogden calls his “increasing passion to make money and a name.”

“I was so hungry for success,” he wrote later, “that my one wish, for which I prayed night and day, was for an opportunity to demonstrate how earnestly and hard I could work if only I had a chance.” The chance came when William Randolph Hearst moved into the city with his Chicago American and took Moses on as a subscription salesman, charged with canvassing, and delivering papers.

This was not as tame as it sounds. Papers were stolen or burned by rival establishments, and salesmen were beaten and threatened. Moses rose every day at 3:30 A.M. and hit the streets with two guns in his pocket at the head of an army of toughs, some of whom became killers. He held his ground, charmed sales out of housewives, and was sent by Hearst to Milwaukee to re-organize his holdings there in 1906.

It was in Milwaukee that he consolidated several weak papers into the Wisconsin News, bought distribution agencies, and made his first real break-through on a tip from his wife — offering, on her advice, silver spoons as premiums for new subscribers. He sold 100 million spoons, made his first million dollars, and branched out into real estate.

In 1920, now worth more than $ 2 million, he was called to New York to direct circulation for the entire Hearst empire, which included thirty-seven papers from Boston to San Francisco and nine magazines. For $ 400,000, in 1922, he bought the Daily Racing Form, the indispensable organ of the horse-racing industry, which was soon fattening the Annenberg coffers by $ 2.5 million a year. In May 1923, Moses was able to set up the Cecelia Investment Company (the middle name of wife Sadie) as an umbrella organization to shield his multiple holdings, which rose in 1927 to forty diversified businesses. The barefoot boy from Prussia was a multi-millionaire, a press baron, a huge success story, rapidly shedding the stigma of his violent days in Chicago. And then he made three terrible mistakes.

The first involved horses and gambling. In 1927, Annenberg purchased “the wire,” the telegraph service that supplied information to the Associated Press, the United Press, and all the illegal bookmakers nationwide. Vastly more profitable than the up-and-up Racing Form, the wire multiplied the Annenberg fortune many times over. But it also put him, as Ogden says, “in a very bad neighborhood,” set back his campaign for social acceptance, revived talk of mob ties from his days in Chicago, and tarnished the legacy he passed on to his son.

Annenberg’s excuse was that he was merely a purveyor of information to customers, and that what they did with it could not be put on his ticket. But the wire was nonetheless the lifeblood of an illegal enterprise and gave ammunition to his long list of enemies. It was also a sign of hubris, and an acute failure of judgment — which would be increased by his second mistake.

In 1935, his old friend Arthur Brisbane (the prize columnist of the Hearst newspaper chain) warned Annenberg about taxes, urging him to make sure his accounts were in order. Annenberg had been involved for some time in evasion on a massive scale: hiding assets, moving them from holding to holding, writing off private spending — a lavish wedding for a daughter at a hotel in Manhattan, a trip with his mistress to South America — as business expenses. Eventually, he would be charged with evading taxes and slapped with a fine of $ 9.5 million ($ 110 million in 1999 dollars), the largest ever levied on a single man. The financial management of Moses’s companies was so chaotic — his one accountant was a man with a third grade education, who had taken a non-credit commercial course in bookkeeping at age fifteen — that it is hard to tell intent from carelessness, but the evasions were too massive for any excuse of simple error to fly.

If it was a mistake for an ambitious man to tar his name with the racing wire, it was a far worse mistake to make himself vulnerable to criminal tax charges — and the worst mistake of all to do it when he was about to pick a battle with the president of the United States.

In 1936, Annenberg moved to Philadelphia and bought the ailing Inquirer, bringing him into a fierce, commercial war with the Philadelphia Record, published by David Stern, an ardent supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Annenberg too had backed Roosevelt in the 1932 election and again in 1936. But then he began to turn on the president, criticizing him for his court-packing scheme in 1937 and for what he took to be his increasingly radical and anti-business tone.

In 1938, as the midterm elections approached, he began to challenge the administration in Pennsylvania state politics, picking and then ardently backing what was in effect his own slate of candidates against the local Roosevelt proteges. Soon, the commercial battle of Stern against Annenberg became the political battle of Annenberg against Roosevelt, as the nondescript candidates were all but forgotten in the venomous wars of their backers.

Democrats attacked Annenberg, digging up and adding to all the old charges. But on Election Day, Annenberg routed the Roosevelt slate in a landslide, ending the “Little New Deal” in Pennsylvania and terrifying the national Democratic party, which was heading into the next elections with a failing economic program.

Unforgiving — and apprehensive about his 1940 prospects — Roosevelt launched unconditional war against Annenberg, insisting not only that he be fined heavily for his tax problems but also that he be jailed. And jailed he was when — as part of a plea bargain to lift an indictment against his son Walter (who was wholly innocent) — he pled guilty to one count of evasion and entered the medium-security prison at Lewisburg on July 23, 1940.

Parole efforts failed, and Moses Annenberg was grudgingly released two years later only when it was abundantly clear he was dying. He died one month and seventeen days later, on July 20, 1942, leaving his largely untested heir with a sense of guilt, a huge fortune, and a tarnished name.

Walter had suffered his own problems, which made his future appear less than bright. The sixth child and first son in a family of sisters, he was the object of his father’s blowtorch attentions from his birth. Intensely pressured, he was also not “perfect” — deaf on one side (a family failing), with a deformed and shrunken right ear.

Not surprisingly, he developed a ferocious stutter as well. (Also not surprisingly, it abated after his father died.) His attentive father was a difficult parent who entertained his children by listing his companies and unnerved them with his unsettled temperament. Ogden notes, “Moses had a colossal temper, a blast that could appear from nowhere and leave his children quivering and associates with their mouths agape.”

Marking him as the heir from the beginning, Moses took Walter into business and kept him beside him while giving him no job and no power. And though loving the boy, he also browbeat him, undermining what little confidence he might have had. “Walter adored his father, he really did, and yet the old man treated him just like dirt,” Ogden quotes an associate of the Annenberg family. Said another, “Walter was the apple of ML’s eye, but he didn’t look very promising. If he asked Walter a question and he didn’t know the answer, ML would just lay him out.” This was a pity, as Walter could have better judgment, as when he begged his father not to purchase the wire. Thus Walter, a young thirty-two when his father went to prison, an older thirty-four when he died — took over the family business as an unformed and untested man, forced to train and invent himself.

Walter believed, Ogden says, that his father’s fall made a man of him. It not only secured him access to power, but it gave him what many dynastic heirs lack: a challenge and a sense of purpose. He had to prove himself a worthy business successor and redeem through his life the name of his father — which he turned into a crusade, embracing the idea that his father was an innocent man unfairly pursued by a vindictive president.

It was only half true. Moses was a guilty man unfairly pursued by a vindictive president, as his daughters realized. But it gave Walter a kind of emotional balance: To repay his father’s sacrifice in going to jail (as he thought) to save him, he would redeem the name of his father: “It was a whip on my back, a lash spurring me on.” The burden of a flawed parent to whom one owes everything can be a heavy one for a child. Because Joseph P. Kennedy had been called a political appeaser and a personal coward, his first son volunteered for a suicide mission and his second son, who should have been deferred for medical reasons, saw dangerous service in the South Pacific. Courage — in politics — was the theme of John Kennedy’s books. Respect would be the theme of Walter Annenberg’s life as he struggled to lift his family’s name.

One of the nicer tales in dynastic sagas is the undervalued heir apparent — bookish Jack Kennedy, mousy Kay Graham — who, compelled by death or disaster, more than lives up to the job. It was two years after his father’s death that Walter proved himself a marketing genius. In 1944 he founded Seventeen, the first magazine for the teen-aged consumer and a fountain of revenue. He bought TV stations, then in their infancy. In 1953, he launched TV Guide — the Racing Form for the recumbent home viewer — the bestselling weekly publication of all time. Profits doubled, quadrupled, and doubled again, aided by the booming postwar economy. From mere millions, the Annenbergs’ holdings zoomed into the billions.

He began the “University of the Air” — educational television — that won major honors. From his seat at the Inquirer, he backed reform politicians like Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth. He became a friend to a series of presidents, with most of whom he felt something in common. Like John Kennedy, he was the tough but far more subtle son of an aggressive and primitive father, whose imperatives had dictated his destiny. Like Lyndon Johnson, he was thought an inadequate heir to an idolized leader. His closest relationship was with Ronald Reagan, with whom he had the most sustained and genuine friendship. But it was Richard Nixon, his friend since the 1950s, who crowned his quest for redemption by naming him — the son of an immigrant whom people had called a thug and a felon — ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Nixon had nominated him because he seemed so unsuitable: super-rich, inarticulate, from a declasse background, a man whose publications catered to the middle class. “I wanted him for the reasons the [New York] Times opposed him,” Nixon told a biographer. In the place of the patrician David K. E. Bruce, who collected old books and had an ante-bellum estate in Virginia, London was getting, as the Daily Mail put it, “an American ambassador who owns the country’s top racing sheet, has a private army, a private golf course, and seven sisters who are multi-millionairesses.” The paper added, “This refutes those people who say Richard Nixon has a flair for being dull.”

Annenberg’s plans to renovate Win-field House, the ambassador’s residence, were not taken kindly. To his critics, he was “a know-nothing conservative crony of that awful man Nixon,” who was coming in with a “nouveau riche blonde” (his elegant second wife, Leonore) to “build a screening room, pipe in Muzak,” and paint everything pink. The elegant Bruces showed terrible form by staying on in London in a rival “court,” tearing down their successors in terms the New Statesman summed up nicely: “If President Nixon had a sense of humor, he might have conceived of the designation of Walter Annenberg to ambassador in London as a monstrous practical joke.”

But as he had with the jailing and death of his father, Walter soldiered on. The turning point came with the unveiling of the restored ambassador’s residence, filled with exquisite antiques and Impressionist paintings, with not a touch of Hollywood in sight. Artists raved. Aristocrats fluttered. The Annenbergs won over the press. They won over the queen (who was less fussy than Georgetown aristocrats) and the salty queen mother (a woman resembling his own mother, who had died in 1965).

A love affair began between Walter and Britain that healed all the old wounds of his life. This in turn tapped a gusher of charity that flowed out liberally, first in England and then to good causes in general, until he had become, in the late 1990s, the distributor of over $ 2 billion and one of the greatest philanthropists of all time.

Largesse brought tributes, which in turn loosed more charity. In 1976, he became the first American ambassador ever knighted by the queen. In 1972, he had commissioned a sumptuous book about Westminster Abbey, one of his favorite churches. In return, the abbey bestowed a stained glass panel in his honor, giving him a place among kings, poets, and generals; a stunning tribute to the son of Moses Annenberg and the culmination of his ambitions. England became the jewel of his life.

“London changed our lives,” said his wife Lee. Walter was a different man after England, better and happier — which makes his original appointment as ambassador all the more strange. What bound him to Richard Nixon were their shared resentments and injured pride. “Each man had been hit by criticism and was constantly on the alert for the next incoming slight,” Ogden notes. The son of the jailed millionaire and the son of the failed small farmer from California had in common a sense of grievance and a feeling of being despised by the social establishment. Walter resented his deafness and stutter, his family tragedies (a teenaged son committed suicide), his rejection by the old guard of Philadelphia society as a Jew and his father’s son. Nixon resented his childhood poverty and the admiration people gave his golden-boy rivals — Nelson Rockefeller and John Kennedy — while mocking his buttoned up manners.

Underneath, the two had quite similar feelings and instincts. The difference was what they then did. Nixon gave in to his grudges until they defined him. Walter decided “he would be bigger than those who had wronged his family.” Did people think that his name had been tainted? All his works would be ultra-respectable. Did people think he just cared about money? He would give billions away. Nixon decided to stiff the establishment. Walter seduced it. Nixon would disparage the Kennedys. Walter would make them like him.

The London appointment defined their approaches. However much Nixon might have wished to reward his friend, his real motive was to thumb his nose at the Times and its allies by giving them, in his choice assignment, the kind of man he thought would insult them. If this hurt his friend (as it did, for a while), the point would still be made. By 1972, when Walter was being honored by Westminster Abbey, Nixon was becoming entangled in Watergate by trying too hard to throttle his enemies. And, in the bicentennial year in 1976, when the queen knighted Walter, President Nixon was not there. He had been booted from office two years before.

Nixon, for Walter, was the dark road not taken, the last of his several tests. The Annenberg clan had to fight many battles, in the climb to the heights Walter attained. Moses had the drive to blast his family free of the ghetto, but he was greedy and arrogant and paid too much for it. Walter then had to fight to redeem his name and rebuild his fortune; and then he had to fight to keep his resentments from taking him over. This was his last and most difficult battle. It was also his best.

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery lives in Alexandria, Virginia.