Synopsis
Why did the newspaper with better writing and graphics than any other American daily go to an early grave?
Few American newspapers - and perhapsnone at all in the view of somestudents of the craft - have matched the many excellences of the New York Herald Tribune. In the crispness of its writing and editing, the bite of its criticsand commentators, the range of its coverage, and the clarity ofitstypography, the "Trib" (as media people and many of itsreadersaffectionately called it) raised newspapering to an art form. Ithad aninfluence and importance out of all proportion to itscirculation.Abraham Lincoln valued its support so highly during theCivil War hewent to great lengths to retain the allegiance of itsco-founder HoraceGreeley. And President Eisenhower felt it was sosignificant a nationalinstitution and Republican organ that while in the White House he helped broker the sale of the paper to its last owner,multimillionaire JohnHay Whitney.
It begins in pre-Civil War New York City with two bitter enemieswho,between them, practically invented the newspaper as we know it: the Herald's James Gordon Bennett, a cynic who brought aggressive honesty to reporting for the first time, and the Tribune's Greeley, whose passion for social justice and vision of anationaldestiny made him an American icon and the most widely readpolemicistsince Tom Paine. These two giant figures loomed above acolorful,intensely competitive age, and with a novelist's sense ofdetail andcharacter, Kluger gives us an engaging picture of them andtheir time.Here are Bennett breaking new ground in 1836 with hisextended coverageof the sensational murder of a well-known prostitutenear City Hall... the Tribune scooping the WarDepartment on theoutcome of the Battle of Antietam in 1862...Greeleygoing upstate totestify in a libel suit brought against him by JamesFenimore Cooper,then rushing back to the city in time to write ahilarious account ofthe trial for the next morning's edition...the birth of investigativejournalism as the Tribune's editors cracked the coded messages proving that Tilden's backers tried to fix the presidential election of 1876.
After the two papers and their twotraditions - political and reportorial -merged early in the twentiethcentury, the fate of the Herald Tribunebecame intertwined with that of the pride-driven Reid family and itsdynasticrule of the paper. In particular, it is the story of HelenReid, thesocial secretary who married the owner's son and became thepaper'sdominant force, and of her two sons, whose fratricidal struggleforcontrol helped bring about its downfall. To try to save it, oneofAmerica's richest men lent his name and fortune as a last wave ofstafftalent redefined the limits and redesigned the look of U.S.dailyjournalism.
The Tribunestory ispopulated with a Dickensian cast of characters: Ishbel Ross,the daintylittle woman who was the best and hardest-working reporter of hertime...the acerbic city editor, Stanley Walker, and his successor, L. L. Engelking, who set a standard of city-room fervor and ferocity for ageneration of newsmen...Homer Bigart, the stuttering copyboy whobecameAmerica's finest and most daring combat correspondent...thebeautiful,bitchy, and intensely competitive Marguerite Higgins, who won a Pulitzer Prize by the time she was thirty...as well as modern figureslikehumorist Art Buchwald, crack drama critic Walter Kerr,straight-from-the gut reporter and columnist Jimmy Breslin, and crackscience writer Earl Ubell.
Above all, The Paper is a rich and revealing work of social and literary history,andexploration of the "free" in free press, and an elegiac tribute tothefading world of print journalism that spawned and sustained whatwas,line for line, America's best newspaper.
Reviews
Since its mid-Sixties death, the Herald Tribune has grown in legend as the newspaperman's newspaper. This lovingly detailed valentine to its memory is written by a former reporter for the paper, who says that every time a newspaper dies, "the country moves a little closer to authoritarianism . . . and when a great one goes, . . .history is denied a devoted witness." A typical journalism history of a single paper, however good, doesn't quite make that point. Kluger's Simple Justice (1976) , which chronicled the judicial drive to end segregated public schools, grew in stature as the detail accrued; here the detail simply buries the import of the story. Still, while this may not be the grand social commentary Kluger would have liked, it is a splendidly told story of a newspaper. Dan Levinson, English & History Depts., Thayer Acad., Braintree, Mass.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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