Even people who dislike the press seem susceptible to the romance of journalism. The image of the reporter as a nicotine-stained Quixote, slugging back Scotch while skewering city hall with an expose ripped out of a typewriter on the crack of deadline, persists despite munificent evidence to the contrary. Newsrooms have provided electric settings for popular entertainments: in the theater, The Front Page; Citizen Kane at the movies; Lou Grant on the tube. The public has even proved curious about the facts of the matter. The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese's anecdotal book about the New York Times, was a national best seller in 1969.
There was once another glittering paper in Manhattan. During its 131 tumultuous years, the New York Herald Tribune often seemed larger than the life it tried to record. Legends stalked its pages: Lucius Beebe, Walter Lippmann, Grantland Rice. Abraham Lincoln courted the paper's support; so did Lyndon Johnson. The Tribune was glamorous in part because of its precarious, hand-to-mouth existence. The paper's death in 1966 lent its history the final stuff of which enduring myths are made: a sad ending.
Author Richard Kluger, 52, is uniquely qualified to tell this tale. He was a Tribune editor during those final years. He has a nuts-and-bolts knowledge of journalism, acquired in jobs ranging from rewrite man on the Wall Street Journal to publisher of a suburban New York weekly. He is the author of Simple Justice (1976), an acclaimed history of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision outlawing segregation in U.S. public schools. Kluger, who has also published fiction, brings a novelist's imagination to some vivid material.
The author begins where the Tribune did, with Horace Greeley, a self- educated printer and "one of the nation's truly fabulous characters." Contrary to popular belief, Greeley never said "Go West, young man." He uttered a sentiment along those lines that was later paraphrased into immortality. But Greeley did found the Tribune in 1841; his thundering editorials against the spread of slavery helped set the climate for the Civil War; he was a prime mover in the creation of the Republican Party. Greeley's death in 1872 might easily have been followed by that of his now leaderless Tribune.
Instead, Whitelaw Reid, one of the paper's editors, seized control. The notorious financier Jay Gould almost certainly backed Reid's takeover, but the issue of such unsavory support soon became academic. In 1881 Reid married Elisabeth Mills, whose father had an immense fortune: "The Mills millions turned the paper into a hereditary possession . . . In that loss of dynamism were planted the seeds of its doom."