by David Nasaw
Hearst was suffering at the time not only from heart disease but from pneumonia. Billy Haines, Marion’s old friend from Hollywood and a regular visitor at San Simeon in its glory days, was shocked at how much he had changed. Even after he recovered from the pneumonia, he remained ghastly thin. “It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope,” Billy recalled. “There was this little old man ... Originally he was a really big man ... He came towards me and I said, ‘Oh, how nice to see you,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I’m a very old man.’ It was rather destroying for me.” When Merryle Rukeyser, his financial columnist and long-time friend, asked how he felt, he replied simply that “the process of age and disintegration [was] at work.”46
Bill, Jr. believed that his father was suffering from depression as well as his other infirmities. He had been moved out of his home into a strange house where he was marooned in a second-floor bedroom. Though handicapped by ill health, the Chief still tried to run his publishing empire from Beverly Hills, as he had from San Simeon and Wyntoon. In March of 1948, he informed his publishers and editors that the Hearst press was going to back General Douglas MacArthur for the Republican nomination for president. “I think we are going to have war with Russia,” he wrote Richard Berlin in New York. “I think MacArthur would be the only President who could avert war with Russia and, if it cannot be averted, I think MacArthur would be the only President who could win the war for the United States. You see, therefore, my advocacy for MacArthur for President is not a matter of political expediency. It is a matter upon which the safety of our Country might depend. I am going to advocate MacArthur to the last moment and, if necessary, go down with flags flying.”47
“He is terribly thin,” Richard Berlin wrote Karl von Wiegand after a visit to Beverly Drive in December of 1948, “but he seems to be active in all respects and interested in everything that is going on.... His doctor tells me that his physical condition is unchanged although his weight is still too low. He is around 140 pounds, which of course is not enough for W. R.... They keep him on digitalis constantly. His doctor feels he could easily live a few more years and then of course like all of us, he could pass away in his sleep at any time.”48
Bowing to the inevitable, Richard Berlin in July of 1949 asked Bill, Jr. to take “personal charge” of preparing an obituary for his father that would satisfy family members as well as corporate executives: “I agree with you the name is all important, and should be perpetuated. This is exactly what I have been doing and trying to accomplish for the last five years, and have set up the mechanics so that that could be accomplished.”49
Bill solicited drafts from various writers in the organization and consulted with his brothers. In the end, the obituary in the Hearst papers, as expected, would praise the Chief as the “greatest figure in American journalism,” a friend to the people, and a caring employer.50
Writers outside the Hearst organization must also have begun to prepare their advance obituaries at about this time. Their task was more difficult, as they were going to have to do more than speak good of the dead. At the very minimum they would have to describe the Chief’s political shifts and provide some assessment of his career in publishing.
The political obituary was the most difficult to compose. It had been a full half-century since Hearst, in the spring of 1899, had declared his “internal policy” for the nation. He had, at the time, claimed that he was more in touch with the American people, their likes and dislikes, their fears and dreams, than the nation’s politicians. As events were to demonstrate, he had not been entirely wrong. Within two decades of the publication of his “internal policy,” every plank in it had been implemented: the federal government was regulating the activity of the trusts; municipal regulation, if not ownership, of public utilities had become widespread; the Constitution had been amended to permit the levying of a federal income tax and mandate direct election to the United States Senate; the nation’s public school systems had been improved and expanded; and Congress had established the Federal Reserve Board to oversee the nation’s banking and currency.
It would, ironically, have been easier to assess Hearst’s influence as a progressive had he retired from politics early. But he did not. After setting the progressive agenda—and promoting it so effectively in the early years of the twentieth century—he turned toward the Republican center and then, in the middle 1930s, veered sharply to the right. Reversing or at least modifying the positions he had taken at the dawn of the century, he proclaimed now that government, having reined in the “criminal trusts,” had no right to interfere with the honest businessman’s pursuit of profit. Further state intervention in the economy, he argued, was unproductive, undemocratic, un-American, and probably fascistic and/or communistic. Although he was less successful in turning back the New Deal than he had been in promoting the progressive agenda that preceded and prepared the nation for it, he set the terms for the counter-progressive ideological assault that would enter—and, at times, dominate—the nation’s political discourse from the mid-1930s onward.
While the ideological positions—and concrete policies—he proposed shifted dramatically in the course of the century, the fervor and frequency with which he espoused his positions did not. In 1932, a former New York Times reporter writing for Vanity Fair had left open the question as to whether journalism in the years to come would follow the Ochs style of professed objectivity or the Hearst style of outspoken advocacy. By the end of the decade, the question had been decisively answered. While the New York Times had grown steadily in circulation and revenues, the Hearst morning papers had not. Hearst, unlike his colleagues in publishing, had not learned that in mass circulation journalism it was best to disguise one’s political opinions. The more a publisher paraded his views, the more likely was he to alienate those who disagreed with him. It was better to hide behind one’s editorial writers, to cultivate the appearance of objectivity, to claim to give both sides of every story.
Though his publishing colleagues would, in their obituaries, be generous in assessing his career, few could resist pointing out that his newspapers, once dominant in their markets, were no longer so. The major assets in the Hearst estate were those that were least identified with the Chief—and his politics: his magazines, including the highly profitable Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping; his Sunday supplement, the American Weekly; and King Features, his syndicated feature service. His eighteen newspapers were the least valuable part of the estate; most of them would be liquidated in the decade to come.
What then was Hearst’s legacy as a publisher? He had, as Mencken had earlier argued, changed the face of American journalism, and nothing that had happened in the next two decades could erase that. “There was scarcely a newspaper in America, in 1900, that did not show his influence,” Mencken had written in 1927, “and there is scarcely one today that has quite gotten rid of it. He debauched journalism in the Republic almost as certainly and brilliantly as the movies have debauched the theatre.” But that was not, Mencken continued, a bad thing. Hearstian journalism
shook up old bones, and gave the blush of life to pale cheeks. The American newspapers, for a generation before its advent, had been going down hill steadily.... The American mob was rapidly becoming literate, but they were making no rational effort to reach it. Here Hearst showed the way.... He did not try to lift up the mob, like Pulitzer; he boldly leaped down to its level. Was the ensuing uproar all evil? I doubt it. Hearst not only vastly augmented the enterprise of the whole American press; he also forced it into some understanding of the rights and aspirations of the common man. A rich man himself, he combated the corruptions of wealth, whether political or social.... His papers, publishing exposure after exposure and following them up with denunciations of the utmost vigor and effectiveness, completely broke down the old American respect for mere money, and paved the way for many reforms that are still in being.51
In emphasizing the connection between Hearst’s journalism and his politics, Mencken located th
e critical element that distinguished this publisher from his contemporaries. Though the daily press had always played a central role in politics, it had been a dependent one. Hearst was the first publisher to understand that the communications media were potentially more powerful than the parties and their politicians. Through its long history, the daily press had sorted through the positions and candidates offered by the established parties and chosen to boost one or the other. Rarely, if ever, had it set its own political course. Hearst was different. He was not interested in reporting the news, but in making it. And he understood as well as anyone else in the republic how critical a role the messenger played in formulating the message.
In his New Yorker obituary for Hearst, “The Man Who Changed the Rules,” A. J. Liebling argued that the Chief’s primary contribution to journalism had been to “demonstrate that a man without previous newspaper experience could, by using money like a heavy club, do what he wanted in the newspaper world except where comparable wealth opposed him.” Liebling was correct. Hearst had changed the rules, in politics as well as in publishing. He had demonstrated decisively, over the course of a halfcentury, that “by using money like a heavy club,” an individual could, with the mass media as a loudspeaker, make his voice heard in every corner of the nation. In the age of the daily newspapers, the radio, and the newsreel, the political party was no longer the most influential political vehicle. With money, anyone could buy access to the public and try, as Hearst had, to influence elections, set the national agenda, and shape political discourse.52
The irony in all this was that Hearst, by holding his publishing empire hostage to his politics, lost much of it. Had he been less courageous—or less foolhardy—in branding his newspapers with his views, he might not have lost the confidence of the banking community that he needed to bail him out of the financial crisis of 1937, as it had bailed him out of other crises for more than a quarter century. But he continued to pursue his own path, regardless of the consequences for his newspapers. In the end, as Life magazine put it in its obituary, he “managed to antagonize just about every existing segment of informed opinion.” And that was not good for business.
“Hearst was the last American journalist who dominated his medium,”
H. L. Mencken had written in 1927. “His successors ... are only well-oiled mechanisms. There is little more difference between one and another than there is between two Uneeda biscuits.” What Mencken did not fully understand in 1927 was that no one would follow the Chief’s path, because it had led him to bankruptcy in 1937. The next generation of publishers and media moguls would learn from Hearst’s negative example to keep their politics out of their publications, so as not to offend potential readers, advertisers, or investors.53
As W. R. grew frailer, his working hours became increasingly eccentric. He would stay up late into the night, as he always had, but instead of communicating by telegrams—which could be put aside and read in the morning—he phoned his executives, Bill, Jr. recalled, “at ungodly hours ... long after we had gone home and to bed. Since his voice had weakened, Pop didn’t repeat instructions. So editors and publishers had to snap out of their slumber quickly; several kept notebooks beside their phones. We feared missing any instructions because the old man would surely recall them.”54
When Hearst was too weak to make these calls, Marion made them for him. She had become his gatekeeper, listening post, and liaison with his editors. The more he discussed the papers with her, the greater her interest: “I used to put in my two cents every once in a while....He might ask me what I thought about something, like the antivivisection thing or the Roosevelts. I usually agreed with him.”
Inevitably perhaps, Marion began to relay her own opinions to the editors, convinced that because she and the Chief agreed on so much she was speaking for him. In 1949–50, when Marion heard that a women’s club was going to ban Ingrid Bergman because she was in love with another man—Roberto Rossellini, with whom she had had a child—and would marry him except that her husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, was standing in the way, Marion called the Los Angeles Examiner and asked that an article be published defending Bergman. The article appeared in an early edition, but was pulled by the head of the legal department. When Hearst heard what had happened, he called the lawyer directly and, according to Marion, warned him not to overrule Marion. “When she gives an order to the Examiner, it has to go through. And don’t you dare countermand it.”55
No one in the organization knew quite what to do with the instructions Marion called in from Beverly Hills. Merryle Rukeyser, who remained close to Marion, recalled in his autobiography that the four years she spent in Beverly Hills with Hearst were difficult “because she had the responsibility of making decisions, but she didn’t have any legal authority ... It was difficult for the organization, too, because when a paragraph of instructions would come signed ‘W. R. Hearst,’ you wouldn’t know whether he was signing them or whether she was.”56
In October of 1950, the Chief asked Marion’s nephew, Charlie Lederer, to find a noncompany lawyer who could draw up a trust agreement for Marion. That agreement, which was signed in November of 1950, gave Marion 30,000 shares of Hearst preferred stock, the same amount of stock he had willed to the Hearst Family Trust for his five sons and their heirs. Where the boys, however, had to divide the income from their 30,000 shares, five ways, Marion got the undivided income during her life. More important, she was given full voting rights over her stock as well as over all the remaining stock, which, on the Chief’s death, was going to be distributed among the trusts set up in his will.57
It is impossible to know what was on Hearst’s mind when he signed this agreement, the existence of which remained a secret to family members and corporate executives. The agreement gave Marion total control of the Hearst empire. Her power would be equal to his own. She would have the sole right to hire and fire company directors, to set editorial policy, to make all financial decisions. Did Hearst believe that Marion was interested in or capable of running his empire? Was he playing the ultimate dirty trick on his wife, his sons, and his business executives? Or was he simply giving Marion the leverage he thought she might need to survive in the hostile environment that would envelop her once he was gone?
With Hearst no longer able to supervise their work as closely as he once had, his New York editors ignored his advice and extended their already extensive coverage of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and the Alger Hiss case. Although W. R. had, in the past, never permitted nonpolitical columnists like Walter Winchell to write about politics, that directive was thrown overboard. Every Hearst columnist was expected to join the witch-hunting. Some, like Victor Riesel, who wrote the “Inside Labor” column, and Igor Cassini, who had taken over the Cholly Knickerbocker society column, did so with glee. As Cassini admitted in his autobiography, he took enormous pleasure in exposing “the rich parlor pinks [who were] traitors to their class.” No one dared refrain from the new Hearst party line. Louella used adjectives like “pink” in her gossipy columns about new film projects. Even the Broadway columnist Dorothy Kilgallen joined the campaign, though with some reluctance.
When Senator Joseph McCarthy, in early 1950, charged the Truman administration with harboring Communists in high positions, the Hearst papers not only championed his cause but Bill Hearst, Jr. volunteered the services of his anti-Communist reporters and shared with the senator’s staff the Hearst papers’ voluminous files on Communists and fellow travelers. On March 16, 1950, the Daily Mirror, in an editorial entitled “Go to it, Joe McCarthy,” announced that “the Senate investigation of the State Department, forced by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, fighting young senator from Wisconsin, is one of the most important events of our time.” From this point on, scarcely a day passed without Gunner Joe receiving favorable coverage in Hearst’s news and editorial pages and from Sokolsky, Pegler, Winchell, Cassini, and Riesel. Every charge, every rumor, every innuendo was dutifully reported with no questions asked.
Just as the Hearst papers shared their files with McCarthy, the senator gave his reporters and columnists inside information on his investigations. “Analysis of 3,000 letters to Senator McCarthy,” Victor Riesel wrote in the March 21 Daily Mirror, “reveals as much concern over infiltration of homosexuals as worry over Stalinists.” The following week, Riesel notified his readers that the State Department, pushed by McCarthy, was “directing its security agents to get out into the big cities (especially New York) and discover everything possible about Communist-led white-collar workers’ outfits.”58
The old man, failing now but still able to read his papers, was appalled. On April 23, 1950, he directed Raymond T. Van Ettisch, editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, to cable his editors:
The Chief instructs not, repeat not, to press the campaign against Communism any further. He wishes the campaign held back for a while, particularly in editorials. He feels we have been pressing the fight too hard for too long and might be arousing war hysteria. Chief says, “All papers must be very careful not to use any editorials against Communism unless specifically ordered. Communism is not to be displayed too much in the news. Of course, we must print the news, but henceforth we must not emphasize our general attitude against Communism to the point where it might become irritating to the people. When we stress a point too strongly, it loses its effectiveness. We have been hammering Communism very hard for a considerable time. Now it is time for us to halt the fight for awhile and take a breathing spell until we can more fully determine the international situation. This is a must for all the papers. These instructions must be obeyed to the letter.”59