Except for an occasional meeting or special conference, the walnut-paneled office on the 24th floor of Tribune Tower in Chicago has been vacant for five years. The huge marble-topped desk behind which daily rose the gorge of the morning Tribune's high-cholered publisher, Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, is gone, replaced by a more modestly proportioned desk of wood. Unofficed, the colonel's ghost still walks restlessly through the Tower, but the paper has changed since that April day in 1955 when Bertie McCormick died at 74.
Change was inevitable, for McCormick carried an inimitable brand of muscular, sputtering, personal journalism with him into the grave. For 41 years he used the Tribune as the vessel of his wrath against the faults he found in Chicagoland, the world, and the 20th century. The paper fumed at foreigners (especially the British), Franklin D. Roosevelt and his kin, all Democrats, most Republicans, social security, the United Nations, Rhodes scholars and Ivy League schools. In between—and often despite—the colonel's crusades, the Tribune's big and expert staff did, and still does, put out the best newspaper in Chicago.
"His Ministers." At McCormick's death, three veteran hands, previously groomed for the succession, stepped into his shoes. They had no intention of really filling them. "He was the duke of Chicago," said one of the three, Indiana-born Editor William Donald Maxwell, 60, "and we are his ministers."
An able and hard-working newsman who broke in on the Trib in 1920 and rose steadily, Don Maxwell has charge of the Tribune's 476-man editorial staff, though not necessarily its editorial policy. Similarly, General Manager J. Howard Wood, 59, runs the business side, but he is answerable to the key man in the triumvirate: Chesser M. Campbell, 62, who is not only Tribune publisher but president of the Tribune Co., a complex of 14 corporations—among them two ship lines, a paper mill, and the New York Daily News —that last year grossed $320 million.
Under the triumvirate's direction, the paper slowly changed its flamboyant ways. The Trib threw out most of the phonetic spelling of which McCormick had been so fond—"frate," "photograf," "soder"—leaving only a few traces, e.g., "altho." The "policy" stories began to fade away, and the news got straighter play. When Chicago played host to Britain's Queen Elizabeth six months ago, no one gave her a more cordial reception than the once rabidly Anglophobic Tribune. The Trib's own news-column byliners and the editorial page at times even find themselves in disagreement. At the same time that Latin America Specialist Jules Dubois was buttering up Cuba's Fidel Castro on Page One, the editorial page, with far better judgment, was castigating Fidel.
All the while, the Trib has continued to cover Chicagoland better than any of its competitors and has untiringly followed the colonel's command to "furnish that check upon government which no constitution has ever been able to provide." No scent of corruption goes unchallenged by the paper's hard-toothed bloodhounds.