The Last of His Kind

Among the memorabilia from my tenure as editor of the Chicago Tribune are an unusual United States map with no state of Rhode Island and a sign that once designated an elevator in the Tribune Tower lobby as being for “frate” only.

Both souvenirs attest to the strangeness of the newspaper’s late editor and publisher, the remarkable Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick, a man sane enough to build a great newspaper company yet weird enough to challenge the existence of one of the 13 original colonies and to seriously try forcing the English language into phonetic spelling.

Since long before his death in 1955, some journalists, Tribune employees, relatives and a great many Chicagoans familiar with McCormick believed him to be a kook. And now, after all these years, their view finally has been validated by the judicious, unimpeachable work of an eminent historian, Richard Norton Smith, biographer of Thomas Dewey, Herbert Hoover and George Washington, among others.

For this official endorsement, the reviewer must assume some credit or blame, depending on your point of view. It was during my 8 1/2 years as editor of the Colonel’s newspaper that Tribune executives finally agreed to open up his archives and authorize a book on his life to coincide with the Tribune’s 150th anniversary this year. For three decades, the personal papers of one of the most powerful, feared, vilified and important men of the 20th century had been guarded like a national security secret, shielded by both provisions of his will and the paranoia of those he’d left in charge. A biography was out of the question until the mid-1980s, after the expiration of an ironclad McCormick family trust and the death of his cantankerous widow, Maryland, who was bitter at not being left his fortune and control of the Tribune Co.

Even then, opening the door on the Colonel’s life was done with trepidation. An authorized profile, it was feared, would not only spotlight the Colonel’s zany exploits, it would detail a 50-year-old family feud with the New York branch, the heirs of Daily News Publisher Joseph Patterson, at precisely the time when Tribune management was trying to get rid of the unprofitable Daily News and win recognition from Wall Street as a cautious, well-managed, publicly traded company. Image, after all, had always been foremost in the Colonel’s mind (or at least he had professed it to be). His behavior, of course, was always another story.

Prominent in politics, diplomacy and publishing, the Colonel had left a treasure cache of letters, memos, telegrams, diaries, unfinished autobiographies and taped interviews detailing more than a century in the life of one of the nation’s most colorful families. Those of us who knew the trove’s richness at once envied and pitied the poor soul ultimately chosen to mine it. For McCormick had packed the lives of several active men into the years of one, living each to the fullest. Despite his political isolationism, he was an inveterate globe-trotter who bought his clothes in Europe, crawled through the trenches of World War I, furloughed at the Ritz in Paris, amassed Canadian woodlands, founded new cities in foreign countries and hobnobbed with every major world figure from Czar Nicholas II to Harry Truman. He went to Groton Academy with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to Yale with the most blue-blooded of his generation. He met his idol, President Theodore Roosevelt, and unsuccessfully courted Roosevelt’s bewitching daughter, Alice, once riding a polo pony into her parlor in an unimpressive flirtation.

He wore down warhorses, rode early vintage airplanes into the ground and sea, and personally affected scores of lives, not always positively. He sought to impeach presidents, to undermine foreign tyrants and to mire his publishing competitors with dirt dug up by his legions of reporters.

Mocked in rival newspapers as “Colonel McCosmic” and ridiculed as a nut by former friends and employees, he had become in death a caricature of the early American press baron, a publisher so controversial, combative and divisive that journalists were disqualified by the Tribune as potential biographers. While reporters might have the best chance of understanding McCormick, his successor trustees concluded that their objectivity would always be suspect. What the Tribune wanted was a cold, accurate, dispassionate, academic treatment of their contradictory, contrary, fire-breathing leader. And that is what Richard Norton Smith has delivered.

In a Herculean task even for one of the country’s most accurate and respected researchers, McCormick’s extraordinary life of passion, adventure and combat has been distilled into a 500-plus-page narrative rich in both detail and insight, and weighted down with the terrible burden of even good biographers like Smith--psychoanalysis. After all, what everyone wants to know about the infamous and the mysterious dead is what made them do all those crazy things. Biographers of men like McCormick inevitably end up mired in Psychology 101, relying on Sigmund Freud to decipher what they cannot understand so many years after the fact. Thus, concludes Smith predictably, “the Colonel’s life was a one-man age of anxiety.”

McCormick was a striking figure--6-foot-4 with a 52-inch chest and unusually long arms--and his angst was as oversized as he was. Using the young McCormick’s lonely correspondence to friends and relatives, Smith easily links the Colonel’s eventual megalomania to his relationship with his mother, Kate, daughter of pioneer journalist Joseph Medill, onetime Chicago mayor, Republican Party founder and political mentor to Abraham Lincoln.

Kate is portrayed as petty and despicable. A defining moment in her sons’ lives came in 1913 when she telephoned them from abroad, where she spent most of her adult life, to gleefully report that they no longer had to fear the congenital curse of insanity she had always believed had been introduced into the family by their grandfather William McCormick. Doctors, she said, had concluded that their father Robert, a minor diplomat who sailed on his father-in-law’s wind, was dying not from inherited brain disorder as Kate thought but rather from a “softening of the brain caused by syphilis.”

For the first half of his life, Kate shortchanged her second son, “Bertie,” in favor of her firstborn, Medill, whom she thought smarter, better looking and more likely to inherit his grandfather’s powerful newspaper. (Medill ultimately succumbed to alcohol and mental disease and ended up, of all places, in the United States Senate.) This left his little brother, Bertie, “starved for maternal affection . . . plagued by self-doubt and a deeply felt need for an outsider to justify his existence.” It also gave him control of the Tribune, which he shared with his cousin Joe. Scarred emotionally but in charge, he pursued older women, stole another man’s wife and became a hellbent crusader for causes just, lost and absurd.

“His friends on the polo circuit noticed a recklessness to his play,” Smith found. “A similar quality marked his infatuation with early air travel; as a novice pilot, he walked away from two plane crashes and swam away from a third. As with horses and airplanes, so politics afforded him an outlet for his aggressive energies and a field on which to prove his manhood. McCormick needed enemies, it seemed, the way most men need friends.”

This particular need and most others in life, McCormick filled to the brim. Among those he hated and thrashed with his powerful newspaper were his old schoolmate Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, as Smith discovered, did turn the power of the federal government on the Tribune as McCormick always claimed; auto industry magnate Henry Ford, whom McCormick called “ignorant” and “an anarchist” in his newspaper; and President Herbert Hoover, whom he labeled “the greatest state socialist in history.” There were also the insufferably “snobbish” British; State Department functionaries “dead from the neck up”; Wisconsin, “the nuttiest state in the union, next to California,” particularly its liberal “hotbed” capital, Madison, which he referred to as “New Leningrad”; New Yorkers who could not see beyond Ohio; and the Rhode Island Legislature, whose persistent ignoring of editorial advice earned the state a total lack of Tribune recognition and the singular distinction of having its star snipped from a huge flag in the Tribune lobby and its image stricken from maps.

The Colonel fought with his cousins; his friends; the great Sam Insull, the father of public utilities; the gangster Al Capone; his kept mayor, Big Bill Thompson; and thousands of enemies real and imagined who threatened Chicago, the “republic” of America and his beloved Tribune.

Many of these battles, like McCormick’s opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal and his fierce defense of the right of newspapers to publish free of government restraint, have been chronicled in earlier books. It is the meticulous and authoritative reconstruction of these struggles by Smith--not his psychoanalysis--that should be the measure of his work.

Detractors, for example, had sullied McCormick’s reputation for patriotism and bravery, raising doubts even about his presence at the storied World War I battle of Cantigny, from which McCormick claimed his military credentials and took the name of his Wheaton estate. But Smith’s research debunks charges of McCormick cowardice and concludes that, although the Colonel “could be an unreliable narrator of his exploits . . . there is no shortage of independent, contemporary evidence attesting to McCormick’s presence and conduct at Cantigny.”

Even more important is the essence of McCormick that Smith finds beneath the strident oddball isolationist caricature. He documents the curious, persistent engineer who had seven patents to his name and who pioneered the use of color in print, wireless transmission of news and primitive fax technology; the visionary who named all three Chicago airports, fostered the development of elevated highways, synthetic rubber, automobile seat belts and alcohol from cornstalks; the dedicated young public servant whose stint as elected head of the Chicago Sanitation District set a standard for honesty and integrity unmatched to this day in the political history of Chicago; and the thoughtful philosopher whose clearheaded view of the role of government in a free economy 75 years ago has become the consensus in America at the close of the century. Except for his isolationism, the Colonel’s politics of free market capitalism and individual liberty, free of government interference, is the predominant view in America.

For all his emotional shortcomings and bizarre behavior (once when his secretary tripped over a German shepherd and was sent sprawling on the floor, McCormick instructed the dog to “trite her”), the Tribune publisher was a dedicated humanitarian and a generous philanthropist who wielded his wealth and power in ways he undoubtedly believed to be in the best interest of community and country.

Despite a dorky youth and the fact that he came to his power largely by default, McCormick grew into a brilliant entrepreneur whose prowess as a civic and political leader matched, if not exceeded, that of his more admired grandfather.

Despite the stature and fierceness of his enemies and competitors, none ever bested him: In perhaps the greatest of American cities and the toughest newspaper market in the world, he took on all the great press barons--sometimes two at a time--and dispatched them. According to Smith’s research, despite more competition and vastly inferior equipment, the Tribune had larger circulation and greater net annual earnings in 1925 than it did 55 years later when I became editor.

None of the more admired and celebrated publishers then or now had a clearer understanding than McCormick of the role of the press in a democratic society or what sustained it. Considered by Smith to be “the last publisher to pursue duty at the expense of profit,” McCormick told students at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, which he had endowed, that they were entering a “priesthood,” where they would be “servants of an institution which scorns all service less than the public welfare and which leads or drives individual factions, even political parties, in that direction.”

Like many of his contemporaries, the Colonel used his newspaper to reward friends and punish enemies, to promote what he liked and fight what he didn’t. But even the indefatigable Smith found no instances when he let those relationships or his financial interests compromise his principles or the Tribune’s editorial philosophy. And such dedication is history for sure.

For Smith, getting at the real McCormick was clearly a titanic struggle. The biographer ended up being fair, which his subject often wasn’t. And he scrupulously withheld all opinion and judgment, for which the Colonel could never have forgiven him. Still, in death the old editor remains indomitable, as defiant and contradictory as he was in life, disguising one neurosis with another and fending off all definition.

As “the last leaf on the tree,” McCormick outlived most of his contemporary relatives and spent his final months as a sick, alcoholic recluse who “preferred the company of dogs to people and books to dogs.” In a vain last attempt to explain his subject with psychology, Smith attributes McCormick’s solitude to having been a lightly regarded second son and a painfully shy social misfit. He calls into question the Colonel’s own explanation that he spent most of his life friendless because “the moment I become friendly with a man he wants me to keep his divorce out of the paper.”

But trust me, anyone who has ever edited the Tribune--or for that matter any big city newspaper--alcoholic recluse or not, eventually arrives at the same order of priorities for people, dogs and books and knows full well that the Colonel knew of what he spoke.