The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1997 by Michael J. Ybarra

During may last year of college, I took a semester off to intern at the Chicago Tribune. Walking out of the Tribune Tower to lunch with some senior colleagues one arctic January afternoon, I asked why the publication's gothic edifice on Michigan Avenue didn't have a cafeteria like most good-sized newspapers. The Colonel didn't want one, was the reply. At the Trib, that settled things -- even almost a half century after Col. Robert McCormick's death in 1955.

No publisher was ever more synonymous with -- or his whims satisfied so thoroughly by -- a single paper. "The world's greatest newspaper" -- the Colonel's favorite boast -- was laughably parroted on the Tribune's masthead until 1977. In 1934 McCormick decided that English was too complicated and ordered his minions to turn the Tribune into an orthographic experiment, changing "island" to "iland" and "freight" to "frate" This silliness persisted until 1975. And the last time I looked, the Tribune still flew the American flag that the Colonel had first hoisted atop its front page.

But today the Trib is as colorless as it was once colorful and so insipidly mediocre that it is hard to imagine the influence it once wielded in the country. Only a few cosmetic relics remain of the paper's quirky past. For instance, the Tribune's otherwise staid metro section still goes by the name of Chicagoland. In the Colonel's day, this denoted more than a city and its suburbs; it was a vast inland empire that included parts of Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana and held 10 percent of the country's population prior to World War II.

Chicagoland was the heartland, a vast citadel of conservatism and nativism, a safe haven for American virtue and democracy under attack from the decadent denizens of both coasts, but particularly the effete elite and teeming masses of the East. "The very sight of the New York crowd antagonizes the visitor who has come into New York from his farm or small town on the Western plains," a Tribune correspondent reported in 1944 from Gotham -- which the Colonel referred to as a foreign bureau. "These frizzy heads, these broad, brutish cheekbones, these furtive, piggy eyes, these slacken mouths -- the whole `muffinfaced race' which he sees in the New York subway -- how different from the well-marked features of his neighbors back in Iowa or Kansas."

McCormick once proposed a sort of Maginot line running from Albany to Atlanta and along the Rockies that would have ceded, without much sacrifice, both coasts to attacking enemies. And enemies were something about which the Colonel knew plenty. Auto tycoons and politicians sued him for libel. But for pure vitriol no feud held a candle to the enmity between McCormick and his old Groton classmate Franklin Roosevelt. After the Trib slipped a scoop about the smashing U.S. victory at Midway past the military censors, FDR wanted to send in the Marines to occupy the Tower; the president was livid that McCormick's enterprising correspondent obliquely revealed one of the war's biggest secrets -- that the U.S. had broken the Japanese code. FDR even considered charging the Colonel with treason, a capital offense. Some publishers might be cowed by such threats, but McCormick used the occasion to run a series of articles attacking a decade of White House vindictiveness toward the Trib. "McCormick needed enemies," Richard Norton Smith writes, "the way most men need friends."

The Colonel has also long needed a biographer as skillful as Smith, who has done fine books on Republicans as different as Herbert Hoover and Tom Dewey, crafted speeches for Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole, and headed important collections of GOP documents at the Hoover Library and the Eisenhower Center. Currently Smith is the director of the Gerald Ford Library. (One can only hope that a 600-page biography of the man from Michigan is not in the offing.)

Given this background, Smith could have easily placed McCormick within the currents of American conservatism, showing how the Colonel's isolationism and enmity toward the emerging New Deal welfare state reflected a deeply divisive battle over the kind of nation that the United States was to become. But Smith, as is his right, chose to treat McCormick as sui generis, concentrating on his outsized character and outrageous antics. He has dug up some new material and does an entertaining job describing the McCormick-Roosevelt feud, but the book doesn't quite live up to its press kit's billing as "a sweeping revisionist account of the New Deal." Instead we get a sympathetic, anecdote-crammed biography of a newspaper titan from an age when newspapers actually reflected their communities and not some bean counter's monomania with rising quarterly profits. When a big department store owner wanted to water down a story, McCormick barked: "Keep the story and throw out the advertising." We also get a rather sad portrait of a man at war with much of the 20th century.

Robert R. McCormick was born in 1880, the second son of Robert S. McCormick, whose uncle invented the reaper and whose own career as a dilettante diplomat took a backseat to his more serious pursuit of alcohol; and Kate Medill, the insufferable daughter of a newspaper dynasty, a woman so sparing with her love that she had to bribe her son to visit her. Lovestarved McCormick later came to wed (twice) older divorcees without children who might compete with him for affection.