As early as January 1920 McCormick could boast to the Chicago Association of Commerce that 70 percent of all foreign dispatches quoted in the European press were credited to the Chicago Tribune.
Such dominance was not achieved risk-free. Tribune correspondent Richard Henry Little was seriously wounded near Petrograd while covering the conflict between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and White Russian forces loyal to the Czarist past. In the autumn of 1920 correspondent John Clayton caused a sensation by unearthing a plot by Indian nationalists to assassinate the Prince of Wales. The royal visit was postponed.
Two years later the American high commissioner at Constantinople credited an exclusive Tribune interview of Turkish leader Mustapha Kemal Pasha (later Kemal Ataturk) with averting war between Turkey and Britain.
Thousands of miles to the east, McCormick’s man in China, Charles Dailey, supplied graphic accounts of the devastating Yellow River floods and resulting famine.
In 1923 a Tribune photographer obtained the first pictures taken inside the newly discovered burial chamber of Egyptian King Tut.
Like a proud but stern Victorian father, McCormick made regular trips to Europe to check up on his offspring.
At a dinner for the Paris Tribune staff, sports editor Herol Egan, a self-professed military expert, rashly grabbed a place at the table immediately to the Colonel’s left. Egan launched into a rambling discourse upon the inadequacies of the American high command–culminating in the supreme idiocy of those in the artillery who had shelled their own infantry ranks at Cantigny (where the Colonel had served during World War I).
McCormick rose from the table like a rocket.
“That man has spoiled my evening.”
The next day he gave explicit instructions to Egan’s superior: “Never fire that man, and never give him a raise.”
McCormick sent his foreign correspondents to cover wars, revolutions and palace coups the way local reporters covered fires and gangland shootings. In the mid-1930s Will Barber of the London bureau was ordered to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital thought to be in peril from Italian invasion. Barber sensibly inquired as to the inoculations he would need to ward off African diseases. These would delay his departure by two weeks, information he duly cabled to Chicago.
A testy reply
Back came McCormick’s testy response: “ARE YOU A HISTORIAN OR A NEWSPAPER- MAN?” A chastened Barber left England without obtaining all the recommended shots. He died of breakwater fever on the day Mussolini’s forces belatedly crossed the Ethiopian frontier.
Other correspondents drew even stranger, if less life-threatening, assignments. William L. Shirer, a balding, bespectacled Iowan from Cedar Rapids, freshly graduated from the copy desk of the Paris Tribune (an offshoot of the Chicago Tribune the Colonel had started during World War I), was sent to Cantigny. His mission: to locate a pair of binoculars McCormick had left in a barn nine years earlier.
In his memoirs, Shirer enjoyed sweet literary revenge, recalling Chicago’s overreaction to his coverage of a routine speech delivered at Oxford by U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Charles Dawes.
“STOP TOADYING TO BRITISH. BE AMERICAN,” McCormick angrily cabled his man in London. “DO YOU THINK BRITISH ARE GOING TO GIVE YOU A TABLET IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY?”
In fact, no such communication has been preserved in McCormick’s papers. There is a McCormick telegram to Shirer dated Aug. 24, 1929. Without mentioning any speech by Dawes, it cautions Shirer against taking the British side in an ongoing debate over major-power naval strength. “No Tribune correspondents will be given tablets in Westminster Abbey,” McCormick told Shirer, adding that such tributes were reserved for foreign ambassadors. The tone was lightly mocking, even self-mocking.
McCormick cut an imposing figure stalking around the 24th-floor executive suite of Tribune Tower in Chicago, his 52-inch chest and 36-inch arms draped in Saville Row suits, replaced on the hottest days by elegantly tailored khaki shorts. At 45 the Colonel still managed to give his polo ponies an honest week’s work. His physical stamina exhausted men half his age. “Let’s get out where we can talk” was a depressingly familiar phrase to Tribune executives whose feet throbbed after a 90-minute “conference” conducted over 6 miles of Chicago pavement.
Noise sensitive
Hypersensitive to noise, he found whistling in the workplace as grating as the mourning doves he shot from his bedroom window at Cantigny, his home in DuPage County. McCormick personally ordered the firing of legendary police reporter Shadow Brown, whose frayed sweaters and caps he regarded as a crime against fashion. Brown’s superiors responded by telling him to lie low for a while, taking special care to avoid the fourth-floor newsroom where McCormick appeared as fancy dictated.
Brown was in any event unlikely to have penetrated McCormick’s inner sanctum on the 24th floor. Here, amid the smell of freshly printed paper, the Colonel toiled behind a protective cordon of feuding secretaries and armed guards–the latter hired after some goons answering to Mayor Big Bill Thompson chased McCormick down a dark alley one night.
Endless speculation swirled about the office. It was rumored that secret passageways afforded escape from any gangsters who managed to slip past McCormick’s driver/bodyguard, a tough ex-cop named Bill Bockelman. McCormick also was said to keep an ax handy with which to dispatch assailants and, secreted in the ceiling of his walnut-paneled suite, a machine gun.
The truth was more prosaic. The gun was purely ornamental, part of an elaborate plaster depiction of highlights from an eventful life. At the southern end of the 35-foot room, reverently placed upon a dais, a 7-foot slab of red and white Italian marble purchased by his wife, Amy, on their honeymoon served McCormick as a desk. Here the Colonel sat, framed by sunlight streaming through a lacy Gothic window, and if visitors gazing up at him felt a bit as if they were staring into the face of God, the effect was purely intentional.
A concealed door
Adding to the atmosphere of studied intimidation was a concealed door, the movements of which were controlled by a buzzer on McCormick’s desk. First-time callers on bowing themselves out were invariably discomforted to find no apparent exit. It was McCormick’s little joke, one he never tired of playing.
Accompanied by one of the menacing-looking Alsatians or slobbering English bulldogs who were his constant companions, the Colonel was able to traverse the cloistered setting without ever breaking stride, thanks to a small brass doorplate installed for his convenience at floor level. Trained to obey their master exclusively, McCormick’s dogs were no respecters of other persons. Chief offender was Lottapups, whose fecundity made her the bane of Tribune staffers and police officials in three counties whose assignment it was to find and return to the Colonel his runaway German shepherd when she was in heat.
The whereabouts of Lotta’s owner were never in doubt. “I’m here six days a week, and I think you should be too,” he bluntly informed a managing editor who had the temerity to ask for two days off. McCormick avoided fashionable clubs and the wastrels who frequented them.
“You can’t edit a newspaper from the Pump Room,” he grumbled.
When asked to define a newspaper’s most important function, McCormick was quick to respond: exposing corruption. But what if the press itself were corruptible? What if individual reporters, subject to the same weaknesses and appetites as other mortals, could be infected by the virus of greed and illicit power released into the American bloodstream by Prohibition?
On June 8, 1930, McCormick met in his Tribune office with Frank J. Wilson, chief of the U.S. Secret Service, then hot on Al Capone’s trail. During the course of his investigation Wilson had learned of a Tribune reporter named Jake Lingle, often seen accompanying Capone in Miami, the luxurious safe haven from which the gang leader supervised half a dozen breweries, 15 gambling houses, a string of lucrative brothels, a thousand speak-easies and as many bookie joints.
Lingle’s demise
The government would appreciate any assistance Lingle might be able to provide, Wilson told McCormick.
The Colonel was eager to help. “I’ll get word to Lingle to go all the way with you,” he assured Wilson. An appointment was arranged for noon, two days later. The reporter never kept it. Shortly after 1 p.m. on June 9 an off-duty Lingle descended into a pedestrian tunnel leading from Grant Park to a station of the Illinois Central Railroad. His destination was a familiar one, the Washington Park racetrack in suburban Homewood. Lingle was not too engrossed in his copy of the Daily Racing Form to remark to a friendly policeman he spotted near the underpass, “I’m being tailed.”
Apparently neither man noticed a tall blond stalker, dressed in a light suit, who approached Lingle from behind, stuck a .38-caliber snub-nosed Colt revolver just above the reporter’s collar and fired a single bullet upward, execution style. Lingle fell forward, still clutching his Racing Form, a lit cigar clenched between his teeth.
His murderer tossed away his gun before fleeing up the stairs leading to Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street. He quickly lost himself in a maze of nearby alleys.
A few minutes later a distraught Col. McCormick appeared in the Tribune local room. “Jake Lingle has been shot. We have got to find the man who did it and find out why.”
$25,000 reward offered
McCormick remained just long enough to post a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Lingle’s killer. Then he returned to the 24th floor. Managing editor (Edward Scott) Teddy Beck and Tribune lawyer Weymouth Kirkland were there to help him map plans for an all-out investigation. Based upon the previous day’s meeting with Frank Wilson, McCormick jumped to the conclusion that Lingle was the victim of gangsters whose criminal activities he was about to expose.
In 18 years as a leg man gathering information about the underworld, Lingle never graced McCormick’s pages with a byline. “He murdered the King’s English,” recalled India Edwards, a society reporter whom Lingle often took to lunch, paying the check with a $100 bill peeled off a huge bankroll. Jake’s editors didn’t care. They valued his connections first developed as the playmate of future cops–among them Chief of Police William H. Russell–and future gangsters.
Since coming to the Tribune on the recommendation of West Side political boss John J. McLaughlin in 1912, the stocky, affable Lingle had befriended the likes of Big Jim Colosimo and Johnny Torrio. He had also won the trust of a rising Al Capone, who formalized their relationship by presenting his new friend with a diamond-studded belt buckle.
Lingle visited Capone in jail, where his exclusive interviews with Scarface Al made Tribune bosses all the more inclined to overlook the reporter’s sumptuous lifestyle. If asked, Lingle variously attributed his three homes, his Cuban vacations and his tailor-made suits to killings in the bull market, a $50,000 inheritance from his father and an extended lucky streak with the ponies. Newsroom colleagues from whom Lingle occasionally bummed $50 or $100 loans nicknamed him Lucky.
Luck runs out
Lingle’s luck ran out in the Michigan Avenue underpass. The journalistic fraternity, sharing McCormick’s indignation, closed ranks around the slain reporter. Hearst’s Herald and Examiner matched the $25,000 reward offer of the Tribune. The Evening Post sweetened the pot with another $5,000.
At a June 11 meeting of Chicago publishers, McCormick obtained unanimous approval of actions he already had set in motion. At his request State’s Atty. John A. Swanson named Charles Rathbun, a well-regarded member of the Tribune law firm, to take charge of the Lingle investigation. Noted private investigator Patrick Roche would assist Rathbun. All costs of the probe were to be assumed by the Tribune.
Just three days after Lingle’s murder–and 24 hours after the Tribune had noisily accepted the underworld challenge–the dead man’s halo was beginning to slip.
The chairman of the Lake Shore Bank supplied McCormick with records detailing Lingle’s banking and brokerage transactions for the past three years. During the past 18 months, the $65-a-week crime reporter had deposited more than $63,000, and lost an additional $85,000, in the market collapse that began with Black Tuesday.
Among Lingle’s investment partners was none other than Police Chief Russell, a lifelong friend who had often lent his official car to the likable reporter Russell likened to a son.
As Tribune rivals scoffed at the “Board of Strategy” made up of Rathbun and his team, stories about Lingle’s reputed mob ties proliferated. It was said that he had once boasted of setting the price of beer in Chicago. He had quarreled with Boss John McLaughlin, his original sponsor, over a gambling resort to which Lingle had faithlessly promised legal protection. Eyewitnesses to a heated confrontation in the lobby of the Sherman Hotel swore that they heard McLaughlin tell his former protege, “I’ll catch up with you, Mister.”
Scarface Al blamed
Others pointed the finger of blame squarely at Scarface Al, who was reportedly furious over million-dollar losses at his unprotected dog tracks–while Lingle pocketed a $100,000 payoff. Still other newspaper accounts claimed that Lingle, in his capacity as “unofficial police chief of Chicago,” had leaned hard on Capone’s enemies in the Bugs Moran-Joey Aiello Gang, going so far as to threaten to cancel the opening of the Sheridan Wave Tournament Club, a plushly appointed gambling joint on the North Side, unless he received $15,000.
Lingle’s palm went ungreased. Instead, on the very day the new club was to have welcomed its first high rollers he was gunned down by the mysterious blond man in the underpass. Early in July Herman Black of Hearst’s American escalated the newspaper war by demanding, in 120-point type, “Who Killed Jake Lingle and Why?” After the same headline appeared a second time, alongside a demand that Tribune executives go before a grand jury, McCormick convened a general staff meeting.
He asked the sole female reporter present to leave the room. Then, sitting atop a city room desk, idly fingering a riding crop, he professed ignorance of Lingle’s extralegal activities and vowed to let the legal chips fall where they might.
To those inquiring into his paper’s moral standing, the Colonel said he would emulate the reply of a British duchess to a common gossip: “Nothing a streetwalker may say about a woman can slander her, if she is
a lady.”
Who killed Jake Lingle?
In August 1932 Louis Piquett, chief counsel for Leo Brothers, the man convicted of Lingle’s murder, confirmed to McCormick that Brothers had indeed been the hit man, and that he was one of a gang of five–the others aiding in Brothers’ escape–whose members split $3,000 as payment for the crime. Moreover, said Piquett, Jake Lingle was the sixth man Brothers had killed in his criminal career.
To the writer John Bartlow Martin, McCormick was unique in successfully combining two divergent strains of American journalism–the flamboyant personal style employed by Tribune legend Joseph Medill, and that of the shrewd businessman with a weather eye for profitability. Increasingly of late, wrote Martin in Harper’s, big city newspapers had fallen into the hands of industrial operatives, men who might as easily have mass-produced girdles as editorials, and whose overriding concern could be summed up in the eternal, grubby inquiry: “Will it pay?”
Always inquisitive
McCormick was different. With a firm grasp of what would sell and of how to manage his business, “he also knows what he believes and is willing to go to hell for it.” Because he never stopped asking questions, McCormick often stumbled onto realities hidden from the more credulous.
In the first days of January 1944 he raised some hard choices for those advocating a postwar alliance among the United States, Russia, Great Britain and China. To begin with, McCormick wondered about the final disposition of boundary disputes involving Russia and China–an issue unresolved more than four decades later.
Stalin attacked
Did anyone realistically believe, demanded McCormick, that such vexing conflicts could be resolved through lofty, meaningless phrases contrasting peace-loving and aggressive nations? A month later, on Feb. 5, McCormick told a national radio audience that Stalin would not be content to expel the Nazis from Mother Russia. In the past, Russian armies had occupied Vienna; Zurich; Genoa, Italy; Copenhagen; Paris and Berlin. “Judging by the whole history of Russia and its imperial Roman doctrine inherited from the eastern empire, we may expect that Stalin will overrun the whole of Europe if he can.”
The tragedy of Franklin Roosevelt was that he died too soon; the tragedy of Robert McCormick that he lived too long.
Outlasting the era of personal journalism, McCormick lingered on to see television begin to homogenize America, destroying the regional loyalties on which the Tribune had built its power. Marooned in the second half of the 20th Century, McCormick spent his final years in a harrowing re-enactment of “Citizen Kane,” with the erstwhile urban reformer thwarted in politics and frustrated in love, irreconcilably alienated from the political party synonymous with three generations of his family. His newspaper in decline and his personal life in a shambles (his second marriage was already rocky), the aging mogul stumbled from one disaster to the next.
Upon reading of the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan in August 1945, McCormick ripped out the page one banner and sent it to an assistant with a scrawled note: “Find a remedy for this.”
A test of wills
McCormick hadn’t the stomach for personal confrontation, at least not at this stage of his life, but that didn’t mean he was unprepared for a strike in 1947, or reluctant to engage in a test of wills with militant union leaders. Hidden from the
International Typographical Union was the Tribune’s secret weapon: the varitype, an ungainly machine that produced columns of identical width, in a typeface corresponding to the familiar Linotype process.
First employed two years earlier to frustrate a work stoppage in San Antonio, the advanced typewriter represented the cutting edge of newspaper technology, which threatened the union and its members with obsolescence.
Tribune news editor Stewart Owen was a good man to have by one’s side in a journalistic knife fight. Fresh from a reconnaissance mission to San Antonio, Owen had joined forces with Pauline Ferber, head of the paper’s stenographic department, to launch the whimsically titled Manhattan Project, a crash course secretly administered to 20 crack typists. Tripled in size, and renamed Operation Musk Ox, the program came to be supplemented by copy readers who were taught the intricacies of an alternative method of setting headlines, called Fototype, and by students from Northwestern University hired to set classified ads.
On the night of Nov. 24, 1947, as clattering typesetting machines in the composing room fell silent, Operation Musk Ox went into overdrive. Long wooden tables, hastily crafted in the Tribune carpentry shop, were set up in the fourth-floor newsroom. A ragtag force of stenographers, secretaries and typists drafted from throughout Tribune Tower worked 10 or 12-hour shifts at their typers. The sound was deafening. To McCormick’s relief, other unions stayed on the job.
Daunting printing task
The improvised Tribune relied on photoengraved copy in place of traditional printing plates. The obstacles to converting overnight to a new form of production were daunting. Yet the first strike issue ran 24 pages, double prestrike expectations. And as the type operators became comfortable with their machines, the paper gradually lost its haphazard appearance. The rest of the nation took notice. During the first month of the strike, representatives from 47 other newspapers visited Tribune Tower to verify rumors that McCormick and his staff had found a way to publish a professional-looking product without recourse to the printers, Linotype or composing machines that for nearly 60 years had been indispensable tools of the newspaper trade.
Whatever else divided them, McCormick and Harry S. Truman were as one in their aversion to understatement. Before the 1948 campaign ended, the Tribune would castigate the president of the United States as “a nincompoop”–also a warmonger, coddler of communists and political hack unable to rise above his unsavory origins in the Kansas City machine run by Tom Pendergast.
Truman hurled a few verbal Molotov cocktails of his own, calling McCormick’s the worst newspaper in the country, skilled in character assassination, and its proprietor a right-wing crackpot fronting for native fascists.
In the closing days of the campaign, Truman carried his fight on to McCormick’s home turf. Twenty-five thousand screaming partisans filled Chicago Stadium on the night of Oct. 24 to hear the president hint darkly that a Republican victory would usher in a totalitarian state. The crowd lustily booed McCormick as the unnamed but obvious target of Truman’s scorn. Thomas Dewey, the GOP candidate, made no effort to defend his reluctant ally. On a campaign visit to Chicago that same month, McCormick confided to Alf Landon, Dewey acted “as though he was not in his right mind. The governor and senator met him at the station, and he put them in the fourth and fifth cars in the procession behind some New York state policemen. At the meeting, he came on the stage just as he was introduced and left immediately afterwards without speaking to anybody.”
Notwithstanding these reservations, on Sunday, Oct. 31, the Tribune editorialized “Mark It Straight Republican.” That evening a crew drawn from the production, mechanical and editorial staffs gathered in a special news assembly room in the unfurnished Tribune Tower annex to rehearse election night procedures. Under ideal circumstances election coverage is an editor’s nightmare. Hundreds of races must be monitored, trends spotted, and analysis supplied even as the votes cascade in. Speed and flexibility are essential.
For the Tribune in 1948, as for its Chicago competitors, the challenge was magnified by the continuing effect of the typographers strike. The cumbersome process whereby so-called monster type was set on the Tribune’s varitype machines, then rushed to the engravers so they could make a page plate, meant going to press long before the polls closed. In practical terms, recalled Tribune executive Harold Grumhaus, “it took a good two hours to get a story into the paper.”
This was not expected to be more than an annoyance on the night of Nov. 2-3, 1948. So confident of the outcome was Arthur Sears Henning, the 71-year-old dean of the Washington press corps, that he wrote the Tribune lead confirming Dewey’s victory before 9 a.m. on election day. The first actual returns came from the Republican bastion of Kansas. They showed Dewey clinging to a small lead. Editorial writer Leavering Cartwright heard the news on a radio he had brought along to the pressroom.
“Your guy’s in,” Cartwright told the crew, Democrats to a man.
`Dewey Defeats Truman’
A different logic prevailed in the composing room, where news editor Stu Owen appeared with a paste-up of the eight-column headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman,” just as Harold Grumhaus concluded a dispiriting phone conversation with his wife, who was attending a Republican victory party that more nearly resembled a wake. Grumhaus could barely credit what she was telling him. To rebut her gloom, he described the first edition headline calling the race for Dewey.
“You must be talking to the wrong people,” replied Helen Grumhaus.
“Oh, no,” Owen piped up. “Arthur is right on this one.”
Managing editor Pat Maloney had his doubts. As the evening wore on, Maloney gave less thought to scheduled poll closings than to the scheduled departure of trains to points throughout Chicagoland. On such nights the Tribune was held hostage to its distant readers; successive editions had to be ready to go when trains pulled out for Dubuque and Grand Rapids. Eleven separate 54-page editions were printed that night, with their lead stories rewritten four or five times to reflect the historic upset in the making.
Accepting Henning’s unqualified prediction had led Maloney to kill stories reporting sweeping Democratic gains in Congress. Now, with Truman opening a firm lead in the presidential contest, Maloney modified the front page to suggest an upset in the making.
The veteran journalist was “aghast,” said Maloney, but too much of a gentleman to raise a fuss. In any event, Stu Owen’s headline awarding victory to Dewey remained unchanged.
At 9 p.m. Robert Taft called Tribune Washington correspondent Walter Trohan seeking a Tribune forecast of the final vote in Illinois. What he heard only confirmed Taft in his suspicion of a Republican debacle. Still, Maloney held back, desperately wanting to believe Henning’s thesis that the late-breaking farm vote would save Dewey–and the Tribune.
Sure of defeat
McCormick entertained fewer illusions. At home that evening, he took grim satisfaction in an outcome he had predicted for months. Convinced that Truman had won, McCormick went to bed at 11 p.m. Afterward he told Alf Landon that he had never seen the early Tribune headline.
It was nearly midnight when Maloney left the Tribune, about the same time Henning went before WGN-TV cameras to reiterate his belief in Dewey’s election. Don Maxwell, slipping into the editor’s chair vacated by Maloney, took advantage of Henning’s absence to junk the embarrassing headline hailing President Dewey. For the rest of the night the Tribune emphasized state and local results.
For McCormick the election was an unmitigated disaster. His proteges in Springfield and Washington had been tossed from power. The next Congress would be heavily Democratic, internationalist and sympathetic to organized labor. Most galling of all was the sight of Truman winning photographic immortality by holding aloft a copy of an early Tribune edition with its famously inaccurate headline declaring Dewey elected.
What a jubilant Truman flashed from the rear platform of his train during a brief stop in St. Louis (“That’s one for the books”) was already well on its way to becoming a collector’s item. All told, more than 1.1 million copies of the Tribune were printed election night. Some 150,000–not 30,000, as McCormick tried to claim later–contained the “Dewey Defeats Truman” banner.
There was precedent for the Tribune faux pas: the Chicago Daily News had mistakenly called Charles Evans Hughes the winner over Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
But that was for the historians. A popular legend had been hatched, arrogant pollsters humbled, the unreliable press given its comeuppance. A Milwaukee woman made her feelings known to McCormick succinctly, in a 10-word telegram that spoke for millions: “HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.”
Long career ended
As the sun rose on the morning of Nov. 3 and McCormick got his first look at the front page which so delighted Truman, red-faced Tribune executives asked themselves whether heads would roll. Answers were not long in coming. That day McCormick telephoned Arthur Sears Henning to inform him that his long career with the newspaper was over. As of Inauguration Day 1949, Walter Trohan would be in charge of the Washington bureau, with Henning pensioned off at full salary.
Maloney survived the election night fiasco, but not for long. In 1950, using Maloney’s deteriorating health as a cover, McCormick told his managing editor to take a year off, before returning to the 24th floor as a trouble-shooter on his personal assignments.
LUNCH WITH THE CARDINAL
On one memorable Friday, he invited Cardinal George Mundelein and one of Chicago’s leading rabbis to join him for lunch. As the two men sat down, McCormick, with a poker face, enthusiastically sliced into a platter of ham.
The clerics pleaded a lack of appetite. Their host, barely able to repress a snicker, motioned to a waitress, who returned with a freshly cooked salmon. “I guess they got their appetites back again,” said the Colonel, chuckling to himself as the cardinal and the rabbi polished off their lunch.
GAPS IN HIS KNOWLEDGE
On one occasion McCormick urged his readers to invest funds in a bond issue producing an annual income of $3,000. Or he would have, had not chief editorial writer Leon Stoltz gone to the 24th floor and told his boss point blank that he couldn’t run such a piece.
“Colonel,” said Stoltz, “do you realize that 75 percent of your readers haven’t got $3,000 today to live on?”
“Well, how do they live?” responded McCormick, genuinely surprised.
THE COLONEL IN CONTROL
Whatever course he followed, the Colonel was unlikely to be distracted from his ultimate objective. Early in 1930 he displayed his single-mindedness before a writer sent to interview him on the value of color printing in newspapers. Having developed his story sufficiently, the reporter tried to solicit McCormick’s views on freedom of the press, a subject with which the Colonel was identified by millions of Americans who had never seen a copy of the Chicago Tribune.
“Young man,” snapped McCormick, “I like my whiskey straight. Let’s stick to color.”
THE ANGLOPHOBE
At one point McCormick expressed fear that hungry people in wartime might make off with Cantigny’s chickens and cattle. A British guest observed that no such outrages had taken place in rural England.
He was hardly surprised, said McCormick; the English were less enterprising than Americans.
McCormick took comfort from the failure of organized labor to stir worker resentment against employers. “They tried to work up class feeling in this country, but they didn’t succeed,” he declared smugly. “It is easy to work up class feeling in England because of ingrained social and economic distinctions, but that is not the case in the United States…why, I’ll bet there’s hardly a man on the Tribune who doesn’t own a dinner coat.”
THE COLONEL AND FDR
Even at the end the Colonel found it hard to be generous to his old enemy. McCormick telephoned his wife, Maryland, at Cantigny with news of FDR’s death. In response to her query about a previously scheduled dinner party, he said that the only change would be to replace the usual champagne with a Montrachet. He didn’t want it gossiped about Chicago that they were drinking champagne on the night of Roosevelt’s death.
What should she do about the flag outside the Colonel’s library, asked Maryland. Other flags were flying at half-staff. “There’s no one I’d rather fly a flag at half-staff for,” remarked McCormick. Before leaving the building late that afternoon, he spontaneously handed out $10 bills to elevator operators and workmen in the press room.
