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Kluger is largely critical of the three generations of Reids who owned the Tribune, and he marshals the evidence to support his charges. True, Whitelaw's son Ogden acquired the Herald (founded 1835), the Tribune's archrival during Greeley's days, in 1924, thus consolidating against competing morning papers. But the Reid family never saw fit to do adequate battle with the growing threat of the Times, which had been founded in 1851 by one of Greeley's disaffected lieutenants and bought in 1896 by Adolph Ochs, who had no private fortune but possessed a vision of what the future might bring. While the Reids lived like royalty (one of their getaways, a summer home in the Adirondacks, sported 23 bedrooms), Ochs and his successors plowed profits back into the Times. In the long run, it was no contest.
But the Tribune did not go down without a fight, and Kluger's account of this final struggle is the high point of The Paper. In 1958 collapse was postponed by the intervention of John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, a multimillionaire then serving as U.S. Ambassador to Britain under the Eisenhower Administration. Ike himself urged Whitney to save the nation's oldest and most eminent Republican organ. Jock tried. In its death throes, the Tribune emanated an eerie, phosphorescent brilliance. Fledgling reporters like Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin were given all the latitude they could handle, with results that shook up journalists across the country. The benign, calming presence on the paper was Whitney, who emerges from Kluger's history as a gallant and, given his fortune, oddly self-effacing proprietor. As Breslin said, "He was the only millionaire I ever rooted for."
When the Tribune went under, fingers were pointed everywhere. Unions and their strikes killed the paper; advertisers, more interested in reaching customers than in maintaining tradition, let the Tribune die; the New York newspaper-buying public did not know a good thing when it saw it. Kluger gives all of these complaints fair play. But the burden of his report bears a melancholy message. In the end, the Tribune lost touch with the world it was supposed to reach; it mattered passionately, but almost exclusively, to those who worked for it.