The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880-1955 - Softcover

Smith, Richard Norton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810120399 ISBN 13: 9780810120396

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2003

Synopsis

This is the acclaimed biography of a giant of American journalism. As editor-publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Robert R. McCormick came to personify his city. Drawing on McCormick's personal papers and years of research, Richard Norton Smith has written the definitive life of the towering figure known as The Colonel.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Norton Smith is director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. His other books include Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (Simon and Schuster, 1982), a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize; and Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (Mariner, 1997). Smith is also a regular participant in the roundtable discussions on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, so he has visibility on public television.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The epic story of the the contentious publisher and fervent conservative who, along with William Randolph Hearst, was a model for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. In its heyday, writes Smith (Patriarch, 1993, etc.), there was no paper quite like the Chicago Tribune, the self-proclaimed World's Greatest Newspaper, and McCormick, its editor and publisher, made himself synonymous with the Windy City. At once acerbic and empathetic, the multifaceted Colonel lived many lives- -city official, soldier, inventor, historian, and publisher--but, Smith observes, it is as the begetter of controversies that he is best remembered. McCormick, who joined the Tribune as treasurer after working as president of the Chicago Sanitary District, picked up where his contentious predecessor, maternal grandfather, and early Tribune editor Joseph Medill, left off. Serving in France in 1917, Bert McCormick was promoted to lieutenant colonel and saw heavy action. Returned stateside and established in his sanctum on the 24th floor of the new Tribune Tower, he found in Hoover and Prohibition (and, later, the New Deal Democrats) confirmation of his worst fear: ``an overreaching government enacting laws that resulted in unprecedented lawlessness.'' McCormick's Tribune, a bible to hundreds of small-town editorial writers, waged ceaseless battle with the Colonel's Groton classmate FDR, courting White House ire with revelations of US military plans on the eve of Pearl Harbor and later coming within a hairsbreadth of an espionage indictment over reporting on the Battle of Midway. Consumed with concerns over labor and succession at the Tribune, McCormick spent his final years ``marooned,'' like Kane, a man out of his time. Smith, the first biographer with access to the Colonel's private papers, orchestrates, with an objective eye for ironic detail and a firm grasp of events and their significance, a vivid ensemble of characters on a domestic and international stage. An indispensable guide to an outsize character and his era. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0810120399
• ISBN 13: 9780810120396
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 640