Books in Brief

The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880-1955, by Richard Norton Smith (Houghton Mifflin, 597 pp., $35)

TO READ of the Chicago Tribune in the days of its great editor, Robert R. McCormick, is to be reminded of the healthy diversity of opinion that once characterized American journalism. For McCormick-heir to the newspaper that his grandfather used to make Abraham Lincoln President-the New Deal was Red, the Eastern Seaboard was effete, the Midwest was America, and the British Empire was the epicenter of a great threat to the American constitutional order. Richard Norton Smith, friend to Republicans of the Ford/Dole variety, often sides with Democratic Presidents Roosevelt and Truman in their contests with the Republican lord of Chicago, and accepts as true the economic claims made by apologists for the New Deal. The isolationism McCormick and his favorite politician, Robert Taft, once made synonymous with Midwestern Republicanism strikes Smith as unwise; but it has a certain appeal in a time when the U.S. Army of which McCormick was so proud has come to serve as a sort of international Meals on Wheels auxiliary. Vain, irascible, and energetic, the brilliant father of WGN television, WGN radio, Mutual Broadcasting, the Tribune Tower, and many an insightful editorial column, McCormick merits all 597 pages.

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K. R. Constantine Gutzman

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Gerald R. Ford

The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880-1955, by Richard Norton Smith (Houghton Mifflin, 597 pp., $35)

TO READ of the Chicago Tribune in the days of its great editor, Robert R. McCormick, is to be reminded of the healthy diversity of opinion that once characterized American journalism. For McCormick-heir to the newspaper that his grandfather used to make Abraham Lincoln President-the New Deal was Red, the Eastern Seaboard was effete, the Midwest was America, and the British Empire was the epicenter of a great threat to the American constitutional order. Richard Norton Smith, friend to Republicans of the Ford/Dole variety, often sides with Democratic Presidents Roosevelt and Truman in their contests with the Republican lord of Chicago, and accepts as true the economic claims made by apologists for the New Deal. The isolationism McCormick and his favorite politician, Robert Taft, once made synonymous with Midwestern Republicanism strikes Smith as unwise; but it has a certain appeal in a time when the U.S. Army of which McCormick was so proud has come to serve as a sort of international Meals on Wheels auxiliary. Vain, irascible, and energetic, the brilliant father of WGN television, WGN radio, Mutual Broadcasting, the Tribune Tower, and many an insightful editorial column, McCormick merits all 597 pages.