Outpost

Despite its gloom over the Senate's fatal ratification" of the North Atlantic pact, the arch-isolationist Chicago Tribune (circ. 957,000) still found one ray of sunshine last week. Cried the Trib: there is now, in Washington, "an outpost of American principles . . . better provisioned, better sited and no less valiantly defended, we hope, than young George Washington's Fort Necessity."* What Trib Publisher Bertie McCormick meant was that he had just bought the Washington Times-Herald (circ. 278,000) from the seven "faithful employees" to whom his cousin, the late Eleanor Medill (Cissy) Patterson, had bequeathed it a year ago (TIME, Aug. 9, 1948).

For weeks, Washington gossips had been telling one another that the capital's biggest and gaudiest newspaper would soon change hands; they had identified the buyers as everybody from young Bill Hearst and young Tommy Stern (who bought the New Orleans Item last fortnight) to the Washington Post's Eugene Meyer. Hardly anybody had suspected that it would be Bertie.

There was a certain irony in Colonel McCormick's entry into Washington; he has always regarded anything east of Gary, Ind. as a foreign country. But there was also a practical and compelling reason for his purchase of the Times-Herald.

Cousin Cissy's estate included not only the Times-Herald but also about a one-eighth interest in the Patterson-McCor-mick family trust, whose 2,000 shares control both the Chicago Tribune and the New York Dotty News. Under Cissy's will, the stock was part of her residual estate, earmarked for such charities as Chicago's Children's Home and Aid Society and the Cradle Society. But it looked as if the stock might have to be sold to help pay inheritance and estate taxes. That posed for Colonel McCormick the horrible prospect of acquiring some minority, but possibly strange and unfriendly, partners. He began dickering to buy the stock.

At the same time, Cissy's seven heirs were looking for a chance to convert their legacies into cash. Times-Herald Editor Frank C. Waldrop, together with two co-executors of Cissy's estate, agreed to sell the trust stock to McCormick for a reported $9,500,000--if McCormick would pay another $4,500,000 for the Times-Herald as well. On top of the $640,000 each of the seven faithful would get from the Times-Herald sale, Waldrop drove a still shrewder bargain. He got the colonel to agree to give each of them ten shares (worth at least $35,000 a share) of the McCormick-Patterson trust stock. Times-Herald staffers wondered whether there would be any personnel changes. Said Editor Waldrop: 'You'll have to ask the colonel. He's the boss now."

* After holding out for ten hours, Washington surrendered Fort Necessity, with its British garrison, to an overwhelming force of French and Indians in 1754.

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