Laying the Colonel's Ghost

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.

"Pallid" & "Better." The changes in the Tribune rate mixed reviews. Says Larry Fanning, executive editor of the competing Sun-Times: "It's more pallid today than it was. The guy who hated the Tribune and used to read it to find out what the old buzzard was saying today has no reason to buy it." Fanning's boss, Sim-Times Editor Milburn P. Akers, takes a different view: "It was always a great newspaper, but now it's more objective."

Now and then, the colonel's ghost gets restless, and the old-style fire burns. It usually flares up on the editorial page, where the top hand is Leon Stoltz, who has been belting out Tribune editorials since 1928. "A habitual and unrepentant drunkard delivering a temperance lecture," sneered the Trib of President Eisenhower's 1957 State of the Union message, which expressed his alarm over inflation.

When Iowa and Minnesota, both states with Democratic Governors, used troops to maintain order in a meat-packing strike last month, the Trib gave both Governors the back of its hand: "The Democratic party in Iowa and Minnesota can justly proclaim itself the goon party." But such blazes are getting rarer. Tribune Publisher Chesser Campbell and his aides are far less interested in McCormick's shade than they are in improving the Trib's tight grip on Chicagoland. Circulation has slipped since McCormick's death--883,213 today against 892,058 then--but the competition has lost ground, too (the Sun-Times is off 10,123, down to 546,862), as Chicago's burgeoning suburban dailies, more than 80 in all, slice into the city papers' domain. The Tribune, always prosperous, is sleeker than ever. In the last five years, annual gross income rose $18 million to an estimated $91 million for 1959; in the same period, ad linage rose 14%.

Trib staffers are pleased with many aspects of the post-colonel era. "It used to be," said one upper-echelon executive, "that you would go to a cocktail party and someone would want to punch you on the nose just because you worked for the Tribune. That doesn't happen any more." But then he added with some nostalgia: "Those guys who used to take to their white chargers over an issue just don't seem to be around any more." Not many of them are.

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