The Press: All in the Family

A quarter-century ago the fantastically rich Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick and the fantastically rich Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, first cousins, began squabbling, ten years later parted. Of their contrasting characters legend has flourished ever since—Cousin Bertie McCormick, aristocratic, aloof publisher of the die-hard Republican Chicago Tribune, and Cousin Joe, masses-minded, erratic, lusty, ex-Socialist, publisher of the arch-New Deal New York Daily News. Each in his own way was a crass sensationalist. Joe got the biggest circulation in the U. S., Bertie the biggest in the Midwest. Said Friend-of-the-People Cousin Joe, onetime intimate...