Wreck of a Friendship

One of the most remarkable friendships in the newspaper business last week went on the rocks. Rare anywhere, let alone among publishers, has been the 35-year friendship of Tory Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick and Liberal Samuel Emory Thomason. Pals at Northwestern University law school, they founded the big law firm now known as Kirkland Fleming, Green, Martin & Ellis. McCormick took over management of the Chicago Tribune in 1913; Thomason followed him five years later as business manager, rose to vice president and general manager. Thomason left him in 1927, started the tabloid Chicago Times in 1929. Chicago's only New Deal paper, it was the Tribune's political antonym from the start. But Thomason never took a personal crack at his old friend Bertie McCormick.

Last fortnight the Times headlined Nazi and Italian praise of the Tribune's ("Save Our Republic") stand against the Lend-Lease Act, and published a devastating editorial attack on the Tribune's attitude.This time Friend McCormick did not follow his usual policy of ignoring Times criticism. His answer was a lead editorial titled "These Jackals Grow Too Bold." Calling the Times an inept, tottering pipsqueak sheet, the Tribune turned its contempt on "old fat men who sit in comfortable offices fanning hysteria."

Thomason, hopping mad, construed this as a direct slap at him. Waving aside his editorial writer, Warren H. Pearce, he took a day off to write a return blast, titled "The Integrity of Words." Excerpts: ". . . We proved that Hitler who stands for everything Americans don't stand for, likes the things the Tribune said it stood for. ... The ownership of rich properties does things to some people--to some newspapers. . . . Sometimes such owners mistake wealth and its power for greatness."

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