Sins of The Fathers

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

THE PATRIARCH: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BINGHAM DYNASTY

by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones; Summit; 574 pages; $24.95

They hobnobbed with Roosevelts and Kennedys, counseled Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson, entertained the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. At their hereditary mansion they favored English butlers and European decor; even the family charades grew so elaborate that they were pictured in LIFE magazine. But for all this golden splendor, the Binghams of Louisville were not precisely household names, unless your household was in Kentucky, where they owned the dominant newspapers, the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times. The papers built, then eroded, a name for excellence; they promoted liberal orthodoxy and civic virtue, but had scant national profile. Thus it is a touch baffling that the past four years have yielded four books linked to the family feud that led to the sale of the dailies and reduced to mere wealth the clan's erstwhile power.

The last and best -- certainly by far the most inclusive -- comes, fittingly, from Alex Jones, whose reporting about the Binghams in the New York Times won a 1987 Pulitzer Prize and alerted publishers to the saga's dramatic potential. He and his co-author and wife, Susan Tifft, a TIME associate editor, have induced virtually all the members of this tortured family to expose seemingly every intimate detail, as if in some ritual of confession and humiliation to make up for all the years of privilege. The reader is exposed to reckless drug use and irredeemable boozing, to a daughter's experiments in group sex and a now dead son's alleged attempt at an incestuous rape -- even to summaries of children's grade school report cards and prep school fraternizing. No fact, it appears, is too intrusive or too repetitive for Tifft and Jones; the point that these communications moguls were personally inept at communicating is made over and over, as is the matching irony that a pair of chilly, detached parents felt lifelong sexual heat for each other. Amid all this, however, is a thoughtful group portrait wrapped into a cautionary tale about wealth: half the family were crushed by the burden of duty, the other half laid waste by wantonness.

Tifft and Jones root the Binghams in Southern traditions, from the mythmaking of genteel poverty to the brute force of the Klan, and sidle up to intriguing questions about the morality of inheriting vast fortunes and the special duties of media owners. But the core story is the mid-1980s sale of all Bingham companies for $448 million by Barry Bingham Sr., then 79. His son and namesake unsurprisingly felt that an adult lifetime of corporate devotion entitled him to the lion's share of control. Two wayward sisters, whom Barry Jr. had disenfranchised, equally unsurprisingly felt entitled to more than a dividend of one-half of 1% a year on the value of their holdings. The tragedy was that both sides rejected rational compromise because their concern was being judged right -- with their father as arbiter, a role he characteristically ducked by selling.

While confirming many rumors, Tifft and Jones debunk the darkest: that Judge Robert Worth Bingham murdered the new wife whose bequest enabled him to buy the papers in 1918. They suggest that she died of alcoholism or tertiary syphilis contracted from a prior spouse. Promised revelations about what finally led Barry Sr. to sell prove anticlimactic: senior aides were ready to move on, making continued family operation unmanageable. What really deserted the Binghams was the faith that a family-owned newspaper is more than a mere capital asset. The book never proves that Bingham ownership was all that good % for the employees, or even necessarily for Louisville. But no one can miss the wreckage that ensued when the family ceased to believe that its ownership was, at the very least, good for the Binghams.