A Natural Force

THE WORLD OF SWOPE by E. J. Kahn Jr. 510 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.50.

He was the most spectacular journalist in an era of spectacular journalists. He dressed like a dandy and collected famous friends the way a connoisseur collects old masters. He was an addicted gambler who once won $470,000 in a Palm Beach poker game with

Florenz Ziegfeld. He entertained like an emperor, and required guests and family alike to rise when he entered the room. He was a dropper of names and a picker of brains whom a friend once proposed for the egomania championship of the world. Somewhat muffled in this irritatingly bland and overextended biography by The New Yorker's E. J. Kahn Jr. (The Big Drink; A Reporter Here and There], the late Herbert Bayard Swope nevertheless emerges as a personality of extravagant proportions.

Wayward Spirit. He was born in St. Louis in 1882 to German Jewish immigrant parents. As a freckled, gangling boy, he was unruly in school, argumentative at home, and neither his passive watchmaker father (whose nickname was "Silent" Swope) nor his bustling, matriarchal mother could ever really cope with him. His elder brother Gerard (later president of General Electric) took him in hand, tried to infuse a little discipline into this wayward spirit. Instead, Herbert strayed into journalism, then one of the more undisciplined professions, and eventually surfaced as a cub reporter for the New York Herald.

In New York he roomed (and went brawling) with John Barrymore, table-hopped at all the best restaurants. What reporting he did was stunningly successful--"Where there's life," somebody noted, "there's Swope." His eye was sharp, and his sense of moral outrage came easily to the boil. He was soon tapped by Joseph Pulitzer's crusading, spirited World. Fascinated by crime, he helped investigate and solve the murder of Gambler Herman Rosenthai; even more fascinated by politics, he sailed for Europe in 1916 to cover Germany's side of the war, won the first Pulitzer Prize for reporting. In 1920 Swope was installed as the World's executive editor, and during eight succeeding years he made the World in his own image: argumentative, boisterous and usually entertaining. He gathered a staff that eventually included Walter Lippmann, Franklin P. Adams, Heywood Broun and Alexander Woollcott, won the paper two more Pulitzer Prizes for its exposes of the Ku Klux Klan and of prison conditions in Florida.

Policy Consultant. But to Swope, the World was not enough. His energy was legend (an English observer called him a natural force second only to Niagara). He could not bear, he said, to be "a hired boy," and he resigned in 1929. By then, the World was approaching its end--which Swope helped to bring on. Sensation seekers came to feel the paper was too pretentiously intellectual, and defected to the tabloids. The intelligentsia found it lightweight, and defected to the Times and Herald Trib une. Swope had got out just in time.

Just in time for the crash. In 1929 he lost some $15 million in the market, but for the rest of his life did very nicely as a "policy consultant" to a number of mammoth institutions (among them: Old Friend Bernard Baruch).

Swope was only happy when he was dealing at the top, and Kahn suggests that he was arrogant beyond his rights. He was also a compulsive intellectual show-off who loved to embarrass his guests ("By the way," he would ask, "when did they stop using bagpipes in the Turkish army?"). One night his noisy grilling of a guest on the topic of obscure German poets distracted Franklin P. Adams, who sat in a nearby room trying to concentrate on a cribbage game. "Who was Kleist?" demanded Swope. "The Chinese messiah!" roared Adams. It was one of the few occasions when words failed the insuperable Swope.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.