The Magnificent Medills: America's Royal Family of Journalism During a Century of Turbulent Splendor

Ink, booze and eccentricity flow through a newspaper dynasty's veins in this lively, gossipy clan bio. Journalist McKinney chronicles four generations of Medills, including patriarch Joseph Medill, owner of the Chicago Tribune and confidant of Lincoln; his grandsons, legendary Trib publisher Col. Robert McCormick and New York Daily News founder Joseph Patterson, one an archconservative, the other a socialist who dressed like a hobo; and Patterson's daughter, Alicia, aviatrix, big-game hunter, and founder of Newsday. There's lots of rambunctious newspapering lore, from Patterson's invention of the sex-and-sleaze tabloid formula to bloody circulation wars in which rival Chicago papers hired gangsters to gun down each other's vendors. But McKinney is more taken with the family's glitzy, scandal-strewn private lives, offering succulent stories of alcoholism, suicides, extra-marital affairs, luxurious country houses, and glittering imperial balls. (The prize for melodrama goes to Patterson's sister Cissy, another headstrong debutante turned pioneering newspaperwoman: married to a handsome Polish count who borrowed money, beat her, and kidnapped their daughter, she finally got the czar himself to intervene.) Like her subjects, McKinney blends canny fact-finding, well-paced narrative and colorful detail into a compulsively readable confection. Photos. (Oct.)