The Chicago Tribune helped bury autocratic owner Col. Robert R. McCormick in 1955, but it has spent many of the years since trying to make peace with his ghost.
With much struggle, it has kicked off the vestiges of McCormick’s outsized personality that left the paper one of the nation’s last outposts of print journalism as an expression of the publisher’s beliefs: the partisan news coverage, the shrill, front-page political cartoons, and the tendency to treat the city as a place that can be explained only by the officials who patrol and govern it.
Clinging to the Colonel’s ways, post-mortem, made sense in some respects. McCormick had made the Tribune into the city’s most influential and financially successful newspaper, and the men who ran it after his death felt little inclined to rock the boat or even peer over the gunwales.
Clayton Kirkpatrick, who would become the Tribune’s editor in 1969, recalled meetings where those gathered would finally ask: What would the Colonel want? Usually, that would settle the matter.
“It was kind of like divining what the unseen hand would have done,” Kirkpatrick said. “When the Colonel died, he left a static organization. The trusted lieutenants thought it was almost an act of sacrilege to change anything that he had done.”
But however hidebound, the paper, post-Colonel, remained powerful. It was able to ramrod a monument to McCormick into a site where many still contend it never should have gone. Erected in 1960, McCormick Place turned a vast chunk of the lakefront that was supposed to remain “forever open, clear and free” into parking lots and enclosed buildings from which the inhabitants rarely even glance through a window.
It is a measure, perhaps, of the paper’s respect for the Colonel that Don Maxwell, who was the editor from 1955 to 1969, cited the erection of McCormick Place as his “greatest journalistic achievement.”
Lois Wille, whose reporting won a Pulitzer Prize for the rival Chicago Daily News in 1963 and who would win another in 1989 for her writing as a member of the Tribune’s editorial board, did not see it that way.
“It destroyed a whole section of the lakefront forever. It was kind of a textbook example of how a newspaper can abuse its influence,” she said in a recent interview.
The paper prided itself on thoroughness and accuracy, and some newsmakers of the time give individual reporters credit for playing square with the news. Leon Despres, a staunch McCormick Place opponent, was a liberal alderman from Hyde Park from 1955 to 1975.
“In City Hall, the Tribune had a reporter named Edward Schreiber,” Despres said. “He was very conservative to the point of being reactionary, but he was very accurate and never unfair.”
Yet in general in the 1960s, Wille said, the paper was viewed with disdain and fear by progressives. “They always had a front-page cartoon that was just a real nasty, right-wing, vicious-spirited thing,” she said. “It wasn’t just the editorials. It was the slant of the news columns. You just couldn’t trust anything you read in the Tribune.”
Still, the paper did have more staff and more weight with public officials than did its three daily rivals, the Sun-Times, the Daily News and the American. “As a reporter,” Wille said, “you were competing against two other reporters and then the delegation from the Tribune. But while it had a lot of reporters at the scene, it was not particularly well written.”
The Tribune, almost alone among the journalistic community, editorialized against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When it came to the major protest movements of the 1960s, the paper tended to cover them with police reporters, recalled Hank De Zutter, who wrote for the rival Daily News and would co-found the now-defunct Chicago Journalism Review in response to Chicago newspapers’ coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and its police riot.
Needless to say, no Tribune staffers joined their journalistic peers by participating openly in the Review. “That would be like a police officer joining the Black Panthers,” De Zutter said. “There was no rule against it, but it wouldn’t be done.”
The police-student clashes during the convention saw all four papers playing the stories from a political perspective. The tone of its rivals alternated between outrage and civic-minded damage control, but the Tribune was on the side of law and order. While reporting that police had beaten journalists merely attempting to cover the mayhem, the editorial column excused the actions by noting that “some of these newsmen looked like hippies.”
“Swarms of anti-war, anti-administration `peaceniks,’ some carrying Viet Cong flags, swept from Lincoln Park south toward the Loop last night,” said the lead on one front-page news story. And a headline “Police Battle Mob in Grant Park” carried the subhead “Old Glory Is Torn Down”; you had to delve into the text to learn that 19 people had joined the flag in sustaining injuries.
The paper had aggressively covered major police scandals such as the 1960 Summerdale District debacle that saw members of a police burglary unit practicing the crime they were supposed to be fighting. But the general impression was that the Tribune, perpetuating the status quo within its own offices, sided with the status quo in the city at large as well.
There were things happening backstage, however, that suggested the newspaper wanted to move into the future or at least the present. In 1961, Maxwell had rebuffed one McCormick edict and rejoined the larger journalism community by entering the paper’s work into the annual Pulitzer Prize competition, winning for the first time since 1936. In 1967, the year that McCormick Place burned to the ground and would be rebuilt even bigger on nearly the same lakefront spot, the paper launched an influential “Save Our Lake” campaign.
Just as the world was offering readers more sources for news that almost mandated putting more views in the newspaper, journalism, too, was changing. More reporters were college educated. The “New Journalism” just coming into vogue placed a premium on getting not just the facts of a story but on suggesting the often murky motivations.
And some of the Tribune’s subscribers were–not to put too fine a point on it–dying off. Others were finding their own reasons not to read the Tribune every day. From 1960 to 1971, daily circulation dropped from 868,000 to 770,000, while the circulation at the rival morning daily, the Sun-Times, had stabilized at 543,000.
A new management team, with Tribune veteran Kirkpatrick as editor, took over in 1969, recognizing that change was necessary. “The slanting of news for partisan purposes at last came to an end,” wrote Lloyd Wendt in his 1979 history of the newspaper. The front-page cartoons disappeared. Kirkpatrick recalled shocking many readers by introducing columns from the liberal point of view.
“I arranged to have a couple of leftist aldermen endorsed by the Tribune,” Kirkpatrick said, recalling his early days as editor. “They were the only decent ones that were available in the particular offices, but they were flaming liberals.
“There was a time my wife used to say, `If you keep on, you’re gonna get canned.’ And she believed it.”
The change did not come without lurches. On Dec. 11, 1969, as the first year of the Kirkpatrick era was ending, the paper’s front page trumpeted an exclusive: the police version of the deadly raid seven days earlier on an Illinois Black Panther Party stronghold. In the large, accompanying photos of the crime scene, released exclusively to the Tribune, the paper identified circled bullet holes in a doorjamb in the apartment, backing the official story that Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed in a gun battle. The Sun-Times, however, debunked that: “Those `bullet holes’ aren’t,” said the headline on the paper’s Page 1 story the next day. They were, rather, nail heads. And a federal investigation would conclude that police fired about 100 shots, the Panthers just one.
Perhaps the watershed moment in the Tribune’s move into modern journalism, the one that made average Chicagoans and the rest of the country take notice, came in 1974 when the Tribune caused twin journalistic sensations. First it printed the entire text of the White House tapes of President Richard Nixon the day after they were released.
It was a feat that highlighted the paper’s technical prowess, and papers nationwide borrowed the Tribune’s plates to make reprints.
More important, a week later an editorial called for Nixon to resign. “In about 300,000 words we have seen the private man, and we are appalled,” said the editorial. “He is devious. He is vacillating. He is profane . . . The high dedication to grand principles that Americans have a right to expect from a President is missing from the transcript record.” One of the founders and the longtime journalistic voice of Republicanism, the Tribune had broken with a man it had supported from Checkers to China.
That same year Time magazine named the paper one of the nation’s 10 best, an honor that would have been unthinkable just six years earlier. Newsweek would call it, almost tauntingly, “the liberal Trib.”
“The front page is . . . easier to look at,” D.J.R. Bruckner wrote in a 1972 Columbia Journalism Review article on the paper. “When the rigid gothic grayness of the page went, the old righteous isolationism seems to have gone with it.”
By the mid-1970s, there was an effort even on the front page to spotlight young writers by putting their pictures in the paper alongside their work. But De Zutter recalls the Tempo section, which began in 1973, as a women’s section but became the home to general-interest features in 1976, being the first to really draw young people into the newspaper.
“Tempo got me really reading the Tribune in a way I hadn’t read it before,” he said. “I used to read (the Tribune) and laugh at how quaint, how out of it, it was. And then I started reading Tempo for insights, for thoughts I hadn’t thought of before.”
Maxwell McCrohon, managing editor of the paper beginning in 1972, took over from Kirkpatrick as editor in 1979. He aggressively pushed the paper’s expansion of features sections, which not only would boost the physical and intellectual heft of the paper but also its tight grasp of local advertising dollars.
Meanwhile, the Tribune and the Sun-Times stopped the financial hemorrhaging at their afternoon papers, the former closing Today (formerly the American) in 1974 and the latter the Daily News in 1978. The Tribune announced plans in 1979 to build the Freedom Center production plant on the Chicago River, which would give it more press capacity than any paper in the U.S. and put tremendous financial pressure on the Sun-Times.
Also facing family pressures–his brother, Ted, wanted his share of the money to go into the movie business–Marshall Field V sold the Sun-Times to Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch in 1984.
The Tribune’s long-standing financial superiority was quickly echoed in a clear journalistic edge. In protest of Murdoch’s tawdry, tabloid style, that paper’s star columnist, Mike Royko, the personification of working-class Chicago since his days with the Daily News, walked across the street to the patrician Tribune, signaling a sea change in public perception of the papers.
“When Royko moved to the Tribune, that was the magic moment,” said Ron Dorfman, another of the rival newspapermen of the 1960s who founded the Chicago Journalism Review. “That’s when the transformation was complete. Everybody was flabbergasted, not least of all Royko.”
The Sun-Times had been the edgy, culturally attuned one, the “writers’ paper” to many area residents. Suddenly it was offering shrieking headlines and ticky-tack games. “The Sun-Times had a big group of the lakefront liberals and the Hyde Park liberals and the growing number of suburban Democrats. That was a pretty affluent group, and that’s the group it lost,” said Wille, who joined the Tribune post-Murdoch and stayed until her retirement in 1991.
The Tribune the year before Murdoch’s arrival had taken its ownership public, which forced a necessary hard look at the bottom line and killed off the benevolent paternalism that had been the model for employee relations. The paper managed to survive a 1985 strike by 1,000 production workers, which cost it surprisingly little in public-relations damage and saved it much in production costs.
“The Tribune was a big, flabby, fat booger,” said Jim Squires, who was editor of the paper through much of the 1980s. “Everybody could make more money and still have a tight belt . . . When they struck us, it was like a gift from the newspaper gods.”
On the editorial side, Squires pushed coverage of the city that took note of the people who lived there, not just the official institutions.
If the paper had failed to be attuned to the groundswell of support for Harold Washington’s bid to become the city’s first black mayor in 1983, it caught up after the Democratic primary by endorsing him in the general election against Republican Bernard Epton. It also backed him as mayor, through his wars with intractable white aldermen on the City Council throughout the mid-1980s.
“We quit excluding people,” Squires said. “We used to exclude people with the tone and attitude. We began to cover the city. We started having black faces on the front page.”
Squires, succeeded by Jack Fuller and then Howard Tyner, the current editor, further developed Kirkpatrick and McCrohon’s emphasis on good writing in the newspaper, a valid response to the rise of television and other media fighting for the attention of readers. It didn’t keep the paper from participating in the industry-wide circulation slide–in 1985, the paper’s daily circulation was 775,000; today it is 665,000–but the Tribune became a financial juggernaut.
Continuing a push from the 1970s, the paper followed its readers out to the suburbs, opening a bevy of new, strip mall-based editorial/advertising offices and aggressively zoning its sections, offering different news and ads tailored to different areas.
Pulitzer Prizes flowed, especially to writers for an editorial page that, while remaining fiscally conservative and generally supporting Republican candidates in statewide and national contests, was reclaiming a social progressivism in keeping with the abolitionist principles upon which the newspaper was built.
“In the course of moving from one man and his minions into corporate newspaper culture, the Trib has lost some distinctiveness,” said frequent critic Dorfman, “and I think that’s a bad thing only in the romantic sense.”
“It’s a great transformation,” Wille said. “The Tribune went from being a biased, cold-hearted institution to something that truly reflected the concerns of all the kinds of people living in the Chicago area.”
The paper won two Robert F. Kennedy Awards for public-service journalism for massive reports on city residents trapped in seemingly perpetual poverty in 1985 and 1993, honors that Fuller, now executive vice president of Tribune Publishing Co., jokes both Kennedy and the Tribune might have had some cognitive trouble with just a couple of decades earlier.
“Like a lot of organizations that were built and run by powerful personalities, when the Colonel died, this one went through a period when it wasn’t very inventive. That happens when all the invention is done by one person,” Fuller said.
But McCormick’s spirit of invention has been rekindled, Fuller said, in modern-day efforts to be on the leading edge of digital journalism. “Look, this is the man who when most publishers in the United States were trying to kill radio, he bought himself an experimental radio station,” said Fuller, referring to what would become market leader WGN-AM. McCormick matched that foresight when, in 1948, he added WGN television to the empire.
Fuller pointed at the Internet edition of the Tribune visible on his computer monitor. “What would you expect Col. McCormick’s reaction to this to be? `Climb on. Jump on it,’ ” he said. “It’s part of our character and tradition, and it’s one of the best parts of our character and tradition.”
When you ask Fuller what the product will be in 10 years, he is frank.
“The first thing to say is, `I don’t know exactly,’ ” he said. “What I think today will be outmoded before the end of the year. It would be surprising to me if it were one thing. What we’ll be is a collection of means by which people learn the things they need to know in order to be free participants in an open society. We’ll be doing reports on the new medium distributed through this new medium that we’ll be helping to invent . . . But I cannot envision the time when lots and lots of people won’t want to read things written on paper.”
