The Bickering Binghams : THE PATRIARCH: The Rise and Fallof the Bingham Dynasty <i> By Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones (Summit Books: $24.95; 560 pp.)</i>

Until recently, the history of daily print journalism in the United States has been personal as much as it has been corporate. To consider the press, distinguished and dreadful, is to study its owners or (rarely) principal editors: Greeley, Bennett, Dana and Ochs-Sulzberger in New York; Graham in Washington; Pulitzer in St. Louis; Otis-Chandler in Los Angeles; Hearst in San Francisco, Los Angeles and across the rest of the country; Copley in San Diego; McCormick and Field in Chicago; Cowles in Minneapolis and Des Moines, and Bingham in Louisville.

They were not merely colorful, but influenced history (or tried to). Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune used the same piece of type for every one- and two-line “filler” throughout the paper during the months before the 1948 election. It read “ELECT DEWEY,” to absolutely no avail; Truman carried Chicago, the state of Illinois and the election. Hearst, proud that the Spanish-American war was known as the New York “Journal’s war,” was fond of throwing famous, and expensive, writers at a story: He sent no less than Mark Twain to cover the 60th-anniversary celebration of Queen Victoria’s coronation. Horace Greeley is remembered primarily for his exhortation that young men should go West, the full realization of which can be seen on any Southern California freeway at rush hour, but his series of editorials chiding the New York City sanitation department for not cleaning horse manure from the streets is no less worthy of recognition.

Louisville is a medium-sized city out of the media mainstream, and the Binghams were never as flamboyant as Hearst or McCormick, so they didn’t get as much national attention--until, in a public eruption of family recriminations, they sold their papers. Their sad story over the past 70 years is compelling reading in the hands of authors Susan Tifft and Alex Jones (married to each other, she is an editor at Time magazine, while he reports on the press for the New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for a feature on the Binghams).

Through prodigious research, they have written the best kind of family history--one so packed with archival fact and telling anecdote that a reader can be excused for believing that at times he or she understands the Binghams far better than they seem to have understood themselves.

Judge Robert Bingham had little money when his wife Eleanor was killed in an auto/train wreck. Three years later, the judge married a rich widow, Mary Lily Flagler, allowing him to rear his three children by Eleanor in absolute comfort. Mary Lily’s health soon began to fail. The judge had signed away his right to her $100 million fortune, but on her death it was suddenly revealed that he benefited from a codicil to her will, executed just before she died: He would get $5 million. Her family promptly accused the judge of murdering Mary Lily for the money, a story that would follow him for the rest of his life.

Tifft and Jones make a persuasive argument that Mary Lily’s family did not pursue the case because, after ordering her body exhumed for a second autopsy, they discovered she had died of the effects of syphilis, apparently contracted from Flagler years earlier.

The judge immediately used a million dollars of his inheritance to buy the Louisville Courier-Journal and the afternoon Times. Barry, the judge’s younger son, became the object of his devotion; rather than his wastrel older brother, he would inherit the newspapers. Barry married Mary Caperton, a member of a poor family that prided itself on its roots in antebellum Southern aristocracy. They had five children, three boys and two girls, none of whom was favored with either the love or intimacy that Barry and his wife shared only with each other.

After the judge died, Barry used the papers to advance his, and his wife’s, political and cultural agendas. Barry and Mary were Stevenson liberals; so were their papers, which they encouraged to show a high sense of moral purpose even on controversial local issues, such as school integration and mine safety, where advertisers and friends of the publishers put a direct economic and social price on principles.

Barry intended stewardship of the papers to go to his first-born son, Worth. But Worth was killed in a freakish accident (a surfboard, extending from his car window, hit a parked car and bounced off his neck, breaking it) only a couple of years after Barry’s youngest son, Jonathan, died when he mistakenly touched a high-voltage line.

That left the last living son, Barry Jr., a dyslexic, to step into Worth’s place. Barry Sr. seems not for a moment to have considered his daughters for the job. One of them, Eleanor, drifted into video production. Although the other, Sallie, was thought the brightest of the five children, her ambition was not to work on a newspaper. She wanted to write fiction. She married, moved to New York, and had a novel published to indifferent reviews.

It took 20 years for the family to disintegrate into warring factions. Barry Jr. and his sisters (who held non-voting company stock) could not get along; well into middle age, all three were competing emotional supplicants to their aloof parents.

Tifft and Jones paint an especially bleak portrait of Sallie, a woman who seethed continually at what she saw as the injustices of her life, which she believed to be the consequence of sexism. Why, for example, was her dyslexic brother running the papers rather than she?

Her revenge was to insist on peddling her stock to the highest bidder, rather than living on the $300,000 in yearly dividends her holdings paid; lacking emotional satisfaction, she would at least get her financial due. But the only way that could be accomplished was to sell the entire company, largely because Barry Jr., in a paroxysm of self-destructive inflexibility and fiscal short-sightedness, refused to take on enough corporate debt to pay her the $32 million she demanded, or even the $28 million she apparently would have accepted.

The Gannett chain paid $305 million for the newspapers. Other properties, including a printing plant and TV station, sold separately, brought the total to $448 million.

Barry Sr. and Mary got $209 million, which they began giving to charities. Barry Jr.’s share was $51 million, with which he founded a small newsletter. Sallie and her sister each received approximately $64 million. Eleanor and her husband began living like grandees.

The publicity surrounding the sale resulted in Sallie getting a book contract for a memoir, in which she not only resurrected the story that her grandfather murdered his second wife to get the inheritance but also claimed that the judge’s first wife committed suicide by hurling herself in front of the train that had crushed the car in which she was a passenger. Sallie had no evidence for either allegation--she once airily proclaimed: “The truth lies in many places”--but the fictions conveniently reinforced her dark, raging vision of the relationship between men and women.

On the day of the sale, the staff of the Cincinnati Enquirer, acquired by Gannett in 1979, sent a funeral wreath of black carnations to the Courier-Journal and Times. They knew what was coming.

Within a year, Gannett closed down the afternoon Times. It set a goal of 25% profit after taxes for the Courier-Journal (Barry Jr. ran fine papers, but couldn’t make double digits), which had the effect of driving a number of employees into early retirement. The Courier-Journal was overstaffed, and all those editorial bodies weren’t needed, not with a smaller news hole to fill.

There is a larger issue here than the story of one rich and emotionally crippled family. The authors’ message is clear: As family-run newspapers are sold--because of inheritance taxes or internal disagreements--the effect can be to hand over individual, sometimes idiosyncratic (but rarely, these days, as obstinately right-wing as they once were) media voices to the bottom-line executives in impersonal, publicly held newspaper corporations. Because these executives measure their success only by quarterly earnings, editorial passion, whether for covering the news or taking a strong political position, makes sense only if it is good--that is, very profitable--business.

Barry Sr. outlived owning his papers by only 27 months. Members of the surviving family are barely polite to each another.

Who won?

Only the readers of this powerful, disturbing book.