Biography
McCormick was born July 30, 1880 in Chicago to a distinguished family, and known as "Bertie" to his family because he had so many relatives named Robert. His maternal grandfather was Tribune founder and former Chicago mayor Joseph Medill. On his father's side, his great-uncle was inventor and businessman Cyrus McCormick. His elder brother Joseph Medill McCormick (known as Medill McCormick) was slated to take over the family newspaper business but was more interested in running for political office. From 1889 through 1893, he lived a lonely childhood with his parents in London where his father Robert Sanderson McCormick was a staff secretary to Robert Todd Lincoln and ambassador to the Austria-Hungary, Russia, and France. In London, Bertie attended Ludgrove School. On his return to the United States, he was sent to Groton School. In 1899, McCormick went to Yale College, where he was elected to the prestigious secret society Scroll and Key, graduating in 1903. He attended law school at Northwestern University and served as a clerk in a Chicago law firm, being admitted to the bar in 1907. The following year, he co-founded the law firm that became Kirkland & Ellis, which represented the Tribune Company. He was a partner until 1920. In 1910, he took control of the Chicago Tribune, becoming editor and publisher with his cousin, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, in 1914, a position he held jointly until 1926 and by himself afterwards.
In 1904 a Republican ward leader persuaded him to run for Alderman, and he was elected, serving on the Chicago City Council for two years. In 1905, at the age of 25, he was elected to a five-year term as president of the board of trustees of the Chicago Sanitary District, operating the city's vast drainage and sewage disposal system. In 1907 he was appointed to the Chicago Charter Commission and the Chicago Plan Commission. However, his political career ended abruptly when he took control of the Tribune.
McCormick went to Europe as a war correspondent for the Tribune in February 1915, early in World War I, interviewing Tsar Nicholas, Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. He visited the Eastern and Western Fronts and was under fire on both. His father had been ambassador to Russia, and he used his contacts to attend formal dinners with Grand Duke Nicholas and Grand Duke Peter. On this trip, McCormick collected fragments of the cathedral of Ypres and the city hall of Arras. It is popularly believed that these pieces were the first of the collection of stones that were later embedded in the facade of the Tribune Tower. They are not, however, on display.
Read more about this topic: Robert R. McCormick
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)