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The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune
Why did the newspaper with better writing and graphics than any other American daily go to an early grave?
Few American newspapers – and perhaps none at all in the view of some students 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 critics and commentators, the range of its coverage, and the clarity of its typography, the “Trib” (as media people and many of its readers affectionately called it) raised newspapering to an art form. It had an influence and importance out of all proportion to its circulation. Abraham Lincoln valued its support so highly during the Civil War he went to great lengths to retain the allegiance of its co-founder Horace Greeley. And President Eisenhower felt it was so significant a national institution and Republican organ that while in the White House he helped broker the sale of the paper to its last owner, multimillionaire John Hay Whitney.
From Karl Marx to Tom Wolfe, its list of staffers and contributors was spectacularly distinguished, including Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Thompson, Virgil Thomson, Eugenia Sheppard, Red Smith, Heywood Broun, Walter Kerr, Homer Bigart, and brothers Joseph and Stewart Alsop. At the close of World War II, the Herald Tribune, which represented the marriage of two newspapers that had done more than any others to create modern daily journalism, was at its apex of power and prestige. Yet just twenty-one years later, its influence still palpable in every newsroom across the nation, the Trib was gone. It is this story – of a great American daily’s rise to international renown and its doomed fight for survival in the world’s media capital – that Richard Kluger tells in this sweeping and fascinating book.
It begins in pre-Civil War New York City with two bitter enemies who, 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 a national destiny made him an American icon and the most widely read polemicist since Tom Paine. These two giant figures loomed above a colorful, intensely competitive age, and with a novelist’s sense of detail and character, Kluger gives us an engaging picture of them and their time. Here are Bennett breaking new ground in 1836 with his extended coverage of the sensational murder of a well-known prostitute near City Hall… the Tribune scooping the War Department on the outcome of the Battle of Antietam in 1862…Greeley going upstate to testify in a libel suit brought against him by James Fenimore Cooper, then rushing back to the city in time to write a hilarious account of the trial for the next morning’s edition…the birth of investigative journalism 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 two traditions – political and reportorial – merged early in the twentieth century, the fate of the Herald Tribune became intertwined with that of the pride-driven Reid family and its dynastic rule of the paper. In particular, it is the story of Helen Reid, the social secretary who married the owner’s son and became the paper’s dominant force, and of her two sons, whose fratricidal struggle for control helped bring about its downfall. To try to save it, one of America’s richest men lent his name and fortune as a last wave of staff talent redefined the limits and redesigned the look of U.S. daily journalism.
The Tribune story is populated with a Dickensian cast of characters: Ishbel Ross, the dainty little woman who was the best and hardest-working reporter of her time…the acerbic city editor, Stanley Walker, and his successor, L. L. Engelking, who set a standard of city-room fervor and ferocity for a generation of newsmen…Homer Bigart, the stuttering copyboy who became America’s finest and most daring combat correspondent…the beautiful, bitchy, and intensely competitive Marguerite Higgins, who won a Pulitzer Prize by the time she was thirty…as well as modern figures like humorist Art Buchwald, crack drama critic Walter Kerr, straight-from-the gut reporter and columnist Jimmy Breslin, and crack science writer Earl Ubell.
Above all, The Paper is a rich and revealing work of social and literary history, and exploration of the “free” in free press, and an elegiac tribute to the fading world of print journalism that spawned and sustained what was, line for line, America’s best newspaper.
Few American newspapers – and perhaps none at all in the view of some students 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 critics and commentators, the range of its coverage, and the clarity of its typography, the “Trib” (as media people and many of its readers affectionately called it) raised newspapering to an art form. It had an influence and importance out of all proportion to its circulation. Abraham Lincoln valued its support so highly during the Civil War he went to great lengths to retain the allegiance of its co-founder Horace Greeley. And President Eisenhower felt it was so significant a national institution and Republican organ that while in the White House he helped broker the sale of the paper to its last owner, multimillionaire John Hay Whitney.
From Karl Marx to Tom Wolfe, its list of staffers and contributors was spectacularly distinguished, including Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Thompson, Virgil Thomson, Eugenia Sheppard, Red Smith, Heywood Broun, Walter Kerr, Homer Bigart, and brothers Joseph and Stewart Alsop. At the close of World War II, the Herald Tribune, which represented the marriage of two newspapers that had done more than any others to create modern daily journalism, was at its apex of power and prestige. Yet just twenty-one years later, its influence still palpable in every newsroom across the nation, the Trib was gone. It is this story – of a great American daily’s rise to international renown and its doomed fight for survival in the world’s media capital – that Richard Kluger tells in this sweeping and fascinating book.
It begins in pre-Civil War New York City with two bitter enemies who, 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 a national destiny made him an American icon and the most widely read polemicist since Tom Paine. These two giant figures loomed above a colorful, intensely competitive age, and with a novelist’s sense of detail and character, Kluger gives us an engaging picture of them and their time. Here are Bennett breaking new ground in 1836 with his extended coverage of the sensational murder of a well-known prostitute near City Hall… the Tribune scooping the War Department on the outcome of the Battle of Antietam in 1862…Greeley going upstate to testify in a libel suit brought against him by James Fenimore Cooper, then rushing back to the city in time to write a hilarious account of the trial for the next morning’s edition…the birth of investigative journalism 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 two traditions – political and reportorial – merged early in the twentieth century, the fate of the Herald Tribune became intertwined with that of the pride-driven Reid family and its dynastic rule of the paper. In particular, it is the story of Helen Reid, the social secretary who married the owner’s son and became the paper’s dominant force, and of her two sons, whose fratricidal struggle for control helped bring about its downfall. To try to save it, one of America’s richest men lent his name and fortune as a last wave of staff talent redefined the limits and redesigned the look of U.S. daily journalism.
The Tribune story is populated with a Dickensian cast of characters: Ishbel Ross, the dainty little woman who was the best and hardest-working reporter of her time…the acerbic city editor, Stanley Walker, and his successor, L. L. Engelking, who set a standard of city-room fervor and ferocity for a generation of newsmen…Homer Bigart, the stuttering copyboy who became America’s finest and most daring combat correspondent…the beautiful, bitchy, and intensely competitive Marguerite Higgins, who won a Pulitzer Prize by the time she was thirty…as well as modern figures like humorist Art Buchwald, crack drama critic Walter Kerr, straight-from-the gut reporter and columnist Jimmy Breslin, and crack science writer Earl Ubell.
Above all, The Paper is a rich and revealing work of social and literary history, and exploration of the “free” in free press, and an elegiac tribute to the fading world of print journalism that spawned and sustained what was, line for line, America’s best newspaper.
801 pages, Hardcover
First published September 12, 1986
10 people are currently reading
226 people want to read
About the author
Richard Kluger
28 books55 followersRichard Kluger is an American social historian and novelist who, after working as a New York journalist and publishing executive, turned in mid-career to writing books that have won wide critical acclaim. His two best known works are Simple Justice, considered the definitive account of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision outlawing racially segregated public schools, and Ashes to Ashes, a critical history of the cigarette industry and its lethal toll on smokers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
Born in Paterson, N.J., Kluger grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Princeton University, where he chaired The Daily Princetonian. As a young journalist, he wrote and edited for The Wall Street Journal, the pre-Murdoch New York Post and Forbes magazine, and became the last literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune and its literary supplement, Book Week. When the Tribune folded, Kluger entered the book industry, rising to executive editor of Simon and Schuster, editor-in-chief of Atheneum, and publisher of Charterhouse Books.
Moved by the cultural upheavals sweeping across the U.S., Kluger left publishing and devoted five years to writing Simple Justice, which The Nation hailed as “a monumental accomplishment” and the Harvard Law Review termed “a major contribution to our understanding of the Supreme Court.” It was a finalist for the National Book Award, as was Kluger’s second nonfiction work, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. It was followed by Ashes to Ashes and three other well received works of history,
Seizing Destiny , about the relentless expansion of America’s territorial boundaries; The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek, about a tragic clash between white settlers and tribal natives in territorial Washington, and Indelible Ink, about publisher John Peter Zenger and the origins of press freedom in America.
Of his seven novels, the most widely read were Members of the Tribe, warmly praised by the Chicago Tribune said, and The Sheriff of Nottingham, which Time called “richly imagined and beautifully written.” He also co-authored two novels with his wife Phyllis, a fiber artist and herself the author of two books on needlework design. The Klugers live in Berkeley.
Born in Paterson, N.J., Kluger grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Princeton University, where he chaired The Daily Princetonian. As a young journalist, he wrote and edited for The Wall Street Journal, the pre-Murdoch New York Post and Forbes magazine, and became the last literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune and its literary supplement, Book Week. When the Tribune folded, Kluger entered the book industry, rising to executive editor of Simon and Schuster, editor-in-chief of Atheneum, and publisher of Charterhouse Books.
Moved by the cultural upheavals sweeping across the U.S., Kluger left publishing and devoted five years to writing Simple Justice, which The Nation hailed as “a monumental accomplishment” and the Harvard Law Review termed “a major contribution to our understanding of the Supreme Court.” It was a finalist for the National Book Award, as was Kluger’s second nonfiction work, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. It was followed by Ashes to Ashes and three other well received works of history,
Seizing Destiny , about the relentless expansion of America’s territorial boundaries; The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek, about a tragic clash between white settlers and tribal natives in territorial Washington, and Indelible Ink, about publisher John Peter Zenger and the origins of press freedom in America.
Of his seven novels, the most widely read were Members of the Tribe, warmly praised by the Chicago Tribune said, and The Sheriff of Nottingham, which Time called “richly imagined and beautifully written.” He also co-authored two novels with his wife Phyllis, a fiber artist and herself the author of two books on needlework design. The Klugers live in Berkeley.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 26, 2015
This book cover so many aspects of the business, art and ruin of journalism. Plodding in places, but the book is at its best when Kluger focuses on the human stories that add up to a full equation of the story of American newspaper journalism.
September 12, 2018
Just as I was reading about the calamitous financial state of the newspaper industry in New York, I stumbled on a reference to a book I never read before: “The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune’’ by Richard Kluger, a former New York Herald Tribune and Wall Street Journal reporter. He left journalism to concentrate on writing books. His 1996 examination of the tobacco industry, "Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris," earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1997.
“The Life and Death of the Herald Tribune” is hardly a new book. It was actually published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1986, over thirty years ago.
Though an oldie, it’s certainly a goodie.
The New York Herald Tribune was published between 1924 through 1966. Its 20-story building was located at 230 W. 41st Street.
As I made my way through this rich and colorfully written history of the Tribune, its celebrated tradition, prize-winning writers, its biting editorials, and thorough foreign coverage, especially its unmatched war coverage, I gained a much greater appreciation of its pioneering journalists and its reverence for editorial integrity.
During its celebrated history, the Herald Tribune won nine Pulitzer Prizes for exemplary journalism.
As testament to the enormous talent housed inside the Herald Tribune newsroom, four writers for the paper, after it folded, went on to win Pulitzers, including Jimmy Breslin, Red Smith, art critic Emily Genauer and Art Buchwald.
So, after finishing Richard Kluger’s scrupulously researched, brilliantly written history of the New York Herald Tribune, I can’t help but mourn the immense talent that has gone down the drain at the N.Y. Daily News and the Village Voice in a city that was once fertile ground for talented reporters and thriving newspapers.
--Bill Lucey
“The Life and Death of the Herald Tribune” is hardly a new book. It was actually published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1986, over thirty years ago.
Though an oldie, it’s certainly a goodie.
The New York Herald Tribune was published between 1924 through 1966. Its 20-story building was located at 230 W. 41st Street.
As I made my way through this rich and colorfully written history of the Tribune, its celebrated tradition, prize-winning writers, its biting editorials, and thorough foreign coverage, especially its unmatched war coverage, I gained a much greater appreciation of its pioneering journalists and its reverence for editorial integrity.
During its celebrated history, the Herald Tribune won nine Pulitzer Prizes for exemplary journalism.
As testament to the enormous talent housed inside the Herald Tribune newsroom, four writers for the paper, after it folded, went on to win Pulitzers, including Jimmy Breslin, Red Smith, art critic Emily Genauer and Art Buchwald.
So, after finishing Richard Kluger’s scrupulously researched, brilliantly written history of the New York Herald Tribune, I can’t help but mourn the immense talent that has gone down the drain at the N.Y. Daily News and the Village Voice in a city that was once fertile ground for talented reporters and thriving newspapers.
--Bill Lucey
November 25, 2007
It's out of print now, but if you can find a 2nd-hand copy buy it! The best history of a newspaper.
December 30, 2017
Excellent history of the New York Herald-Tribune from its beginnings in the pre-Civil War era to its end in the 1960's.
May 4, 2022
I doubt there is a more comprehensive history of an American newspaper in existence. Richard Kluger's exhaustively researched, sympathetic but objective study of the New York Herald-Tribune from its pre-Civil War origins to its mid-1960s demise in the hyper-competitive New York media scene is as much a history of New York, and the country, as the rise and fall of a newspaper hailed as one of the most literate, most important publications in the county during its life. Great sketches of the newspaper staff through the years, Kluger concentrates on the personalities who advanced, protected and, eventually, acted in ways that led to the paper's demise. He spends a lot of time on the owners, from Horace Greeley to Whitelaw Reid and his family, and, finally, to John Hay Whitney (grandson of a Secretary of State), who oversaw the paper in its final years, but didn't. For current or former media types, particularly some of us who casually studied media history, the names who passed through the Herald-Tribune are a revelation -- Dick Schapp, Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin -- dozens more over the paper's century-plus existence. Ultimately, competition from the New York Times, a family that treated the paper as a public trust but wouldn't invest in it to keep it alive and union wars in the 1960s, as well as the change in people's media consumption habits that came with the advent of television, made the Herald-Tribune expendable to the reading public. Kluger's story telling is clear, and though he clearly has affection for many of the characters, he doesn't spare them when their action, or inaction, sets up the paper's ultimate demise. It's a well-written book that creates tension as the ending looms even when you know how it ends.
July 11, 2023
Long, informative history of the New York Herald-Tribune. Up until the 1950s the NY Herald Tribune was the paper of then Northeast WASP elite. In the late 40s, for example, more Yale Students read the NY-HT than the New York Times. The newspaper was instrumental in getting Wilkie and Dewey nominated in the 40s.
Kluger writes from a liberal/left perspective and isn't exactly a great writer. But the rise and fall of this important newspaper is a fascinating historical tale. The first 170 pages cover the rise of the paper till 1900. The next 170 pages bring us to 1941. The meat of the book, when the paper was at its mort important (1941-1958) is 200 pages. The final decline and collapse 1959-1966 takes 200 pages, as Kruger details the seemingly endless attempts to make the paper profitable in the era of TV, and competition from the NYT which had overtaken it.
Probably one reason for the decline and eventual death of the NY-HT, is that the differences between it and the NYT weren't exactly huge. The Tribune was an internationalist paper that supported WW II and the Cold war. On everything except support for big business, the NY-HT was centrist/liberal. It was probably more anti-communist than the New York times but even that was balanced by its dislike of Joe McCarthy. In summary, it supported Dewey/Wilkie. and the NYT was FDR/Truman. Like I said, not a huge difference.
I can't complain too much about Kuger's liberalism except when it comes to Joe Barnes, who was the
foreign affairs editor in the 1940-1948. A favorite of Mrs. Reid, the publishers wife, he was extremely pro-communist. So, pro-communist, it was later discovered he was a member of CPSUSA, with contacts with Soviet Intelligence. He's the man who "Guided" Wilkie on his tour of the USSR and helped him write "One World". Kuger absurdly presents him as victim of a "Witchhunt" and badly treated.
Kluger writes from a liberal/left perspective and isn't exactly a great writer. But the rise and fall of this important newspaper is a fascinating historical tale. The first 170 pages cover the rise of the paper till 1900. The next 170 pages bring us to 1941. The meat of the book, when the paper was at its mort important (1941-1958) is 200 pages. The final decline and collapse 1959-1966 takes 200 pages, as Kruger details the seemingly endless attempts to make the paper profitable in the era of TV, and competition from the NYT which had overtaken it.
Probably one reason for the decline and eventual death of the NY-HT, is that the differences between it and the NYT weren't exactly huge. The Tribune was an internationalist paper that supported WW II and the Cold war. On everything except support for big business, the NY-HT was centrist/liberal. It was probably more anti-communist than the New York times but even that was balanced by its dislike of Joe McCarthy. In summary, it supported Dewey/Wilkie. and the NYT was FDR/Truman. Like I said, not a huge difference.
I can't complain too much about Kuger's liberalism except when it comes to Joe Barnes, who was the
foreign affairs editor in the 1940-1948. A favorite of Mrs. Reid, the publishers wife, he was extremely pro-communist. So, pro-communist, it was later discovered he was a member of CPSUSA, with contacts with Soviet Intelligence. He's the man who "Guided" Wilkie on his tour of the USSR and helped him write "One World". Kuger absurdly presents him as victim of a "Witchhunt" and badly treated.
January 27, 2025
A millionaire who owns the news--
How much money's he willing to lose?
How much money's he willing to lose?
October 10, 2013
Finally - this is a well written book but would not be of real interest to most people. It did make me want to find books written by several of the Herald Tribune reporters.
October 12, 2013
I love this book!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews