Word: mccormick
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...ruler of a paper that historians have called "one of the most powerful journalistic voices of the past hundred years," Colonel Robert Rutherford ("Bertie") McCormick commanded the No. 1 fortress of personal, daily journalism in the U.S. He put the mark of his eccentric, sometimes pugnacious personality into every column of the Tribune. His skillful and intensely opinionated brand of newspapering might often be wrong, but it was never dull. Even those who violently disagreed with what the Trib said in its news and editorial columns candidly admitted that no one said it with more bounce and bite...
Signed: RRMcC. Colonel McCormick's real journalistic achievements were often lost in the tidal waves of vituperation that crashed around (but never engulfed) his tower fortress on North Michigan Avenue. In a 1936 poll of Washington correspondents, the Tribune was placed among the "least fair and reliable" newspapers in the U.S.; others denounced it as a "ceaseless drip of poison...
...McCormick himself was damned as an "Anglophobic, isolationist crackpot," and the "greatest mind of the 14th century." Once he had the dubious honor of being named No. 1 in a U.S. "hall of fame" by Rabble-Rouser Gerald L. K. Smith. In Europe McCormick was almost as well known as Senator McCarthy. But midst the crossfire, the Colonel, erect (6 ft. 4 in., 200 lbs.) and proud, had a simple way of summarizing his rank and station: "I'm the publisher of the World's Greatest Newspaper...
Feet off Desk. Bertie McCormick seemed to have come by his autocratic, opinionated ways by inheritance. His grandfather, Joseph Medill, one of the founders of the Republican Party, once characteristically hollered at Congressman Abe Lincoln "Take your goddamned feet off my desk, Abe." (The Colonel enforced his own Trib ban against feet on the desk.) Unlike his grandson, Medill led public opinion in the U.S. Almost singlehanded, he assured Lincoln's nomination for the presidency. Then, with the power of his Trib, he swung Midwestern opinion in support of Lincoln in the election of 1860, forcibly preached the abolition...
When Medill died in 1899, he left a $130 million estate, and the editorship of the Trib fell to Robert Patterson, Medill's son-in-law and uncle of Robert McCormick. When Patterson died suddenly, a group of stockholders had about decided to sell the Trib to a publishing rival when young Robert McCormick stepped in. He persuaded them to keep the Tribune in the family. From 1914 on, he and his cousin, Joseph Medill Patterson, took complete charge of the Trib...