Pages Stalked By Legends the Paper: the Life and Death of the

By Paul Gray

Even people who dislike the press seem susceptible to the romance of journalism. The image of the reporter as a nicotine-stained Quixote, slugging back Scotch while skewering city hall with an expose ripped out of a typewriter on the crack of deadline, persists despite munificent evidence to the contrary. Newsrooms have provided electric settings for popular entertainments: in the theater, The Front Page; Citizen Kane at the movies; Lou Grant on the tube. The public has even proved curious about the facts of the matter. The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese's anecdotal book about the New York Times, was a national best seller in 1969.

There was once another glittering paper in Manhattan. During its 131 tumultuous years, the New York Herald Tribune often seemed larger than the life it tried to record. Legends stalked its pages: Lucius Beebe, Walter Lippmann, Grantland Rice. Abraham Lincoln courted the paper's support; so did Lyndon Johnson. The Tribune was glamorous in part because of its precarious, hand-to-mouth existence. The paper's death in 1966 lent its history the final stuff of which enduring myths are made: a sad ending.

Author Richard Kluger, 52, is uniquely qualified to tell this tale. He was a Tribune editor during those final years. He has a nuts-and-bolts knowledge of journalism, acquired in jobs ranging from rewrite man on the Wall Street Journal to publisher of a suburban New York weekly. He is the author of Simple Justice (1976), an acclaimed history of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision outlawing segregation in U.S. public schools. Kluger, who has also published fiction, brings a novelist's imagination to some vivid material.

The author begins where the Tribune did, with Horace Greeley, a self- educated printer and "one of the nation's truly fabulous characters." Contrary to popular belief, Greeley never said "Go West, young man." He uttered a sentiment along those lines that was later paraphrased into immortality. But Greeley did found the Tribune in 1841; his thundering editorials against the spread of slavery helped set the climate for the Civil War; he was a prime mover in the creation of the Republican Party. Greeley's death in 1872 might easily have been followed by that of his now leaderless Tribune.

Instead, Whitelaw Reid, one of the paper's editors, seized control. The notorious financier Jay Gould almost certainly backed Reid's takeover, but the issue of such unsavory support soon became academic. In 1881 Reid married Elisabeth Mills, whose father had an immense fortune: "The Mills millions turned the paper into a hereditary possession . . . In that loss of dynamism were planted the seeds of its doom."

Kluger is largely critical of the three generations of Reids who owned the Tribune, and he marshals the evidence to support his charges. True, Whitelaw's son Ogden acquired the Herald (founded 1835), the Tribune's archrival during Greeley's days, in 1924, thus consolidating against competing morning papers. But the Reid family never saw fit to do adequate battle with the growing threat of the Times, which had been founded in 1851 by one of Greeley's disaffected lieutenants and bought in 1896 by Adolph Ochs, who had no private fortune but possessed a vision of what the future might bring. While the Reids lived like royalty (one of their getaways, a summer home in the Adirondacks, sported 23 bedrooms), Ochs and his successors plowed profits back into the Times. In the long run, it was no contest.

But the Tribune did not go down without a fight, and Kluger's account of this final struggle is the high point of The Paper. In 1958 collapse was postponed by the intervention of John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, a multimillionaire then serving as U.S. Ambassador to Britain under the Eisenhower Administration. Ike himself urged Whitney to save the nation's oldest and most eminent Republican organ. Jock tried. In its death throes, the Tribune emanated an eerie, phosphorescent brilliance. Fledgling reporters like Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin were given all the latitude they could handle, with results that shook up journalists across the country. The benign, calming presence on the paper was Whitney, who emerges from Kluger's history as a gallant and, given his fortune, oddly self-effacing proprietor. As Breslin said, "He was the only millionaire I ever rooted for."

When the Tribune went under, fingers were pointed everywhere. Unions and their strikes killed the paper; advertisers, more interested in reaching customers than in maintaining tradition, let the Tribune die; the New York newspaper-buying public did not know a good thing when it saw it. Kluger gives all of these complaints fair play. But the burden of his report bears a melancholy message. In the end, the Tribune lost touch with the world it was supposed to reach; it mattered passionately, but almost exclusively, to those who worked for it.