The Man Who Owns the News (38 page)

There’s also the sense that his politics are more about whom he is aligned against—which person annoys him most—than of what policies he is for. In politics, as in business, he needs an enemy, or at least a clear opposition that he can demonize. Conveniently, his political enemies, so often representing the establishment (or, anyway, his construct of the establishment), are often his business enemies (i.e., the
New York Times
). Red Rupert—who would become, as the ultimate fifties dad, the very opposite of Red—was the son of a thirties dad. Rupert’s politics were one of the most basic and divisive issues between him and his father. His father was an Edwardian sort of conservative, very much part of the royalist, upper-class Australian tradition—a tradition in which Rupert’s mother grandly continues. Keith Murdoch found his son, with all the accoutrements of anti-establishment radicalism, to be distasteful and alarming. Rupert’s politics, to his father, were part of the boy’s entire pattern of lack of discipline, focus, purpose.

Undoubtedly all this was true—he certainly wasn’t much of a student—but he was reacting then, as he would for the rest of his career, to entrenchment. It is hard to stand out by behaving yourself—by following everybody else. That’s not an efficient avenue for ambitiousness. To be his father’s son, to adapt to upper-class Melbourne society, would require a controlled and docile and patient temperament. This is true too of Oxford, heavy as it is with ritual and propriety. As an Australian, he didn’t fit in anyway.
So
, he reasoned,
I might as well hang my hat on not fitting in
. Hence, at university in postwar England, he became a radical—a theatrical radical, an obnoxious radical (with a really fancy car). The point, or among the points, was to be noticed—and, as well, to piss off his father. The only way you really got Sir Keith’s attention was to annoy him. As a media lesson, this would be invaluable: If you annoy the establishment, it listens to you.

But a key point about Rupert’s anti-establishmentarianism is that he’s never removed from the establishment—or, that is, never removed from power. His views certainly aren’t shaped by powerlessness. His acquaintanceship with the levers of power, even as a young man, is deep and practiced. Australia is a small country where power and politics,
success
and politics, are, for all practical purposes, one and the same. That’s an argument about the quid pro quos and incestuousness and mutual back-scratching and conspiracies often made about the power elite in the United States. But it wouldn’t be an argument you’d have to make in a small country. It’s obvious and understood that all the powerful and successful people know each other and are involved with each other. It’s a fully networked society. Rupert, as the son of one of Australia’s most important businessmen and one of its undisputed press lords, has had, from an early age, access to everybody who counts in the country. What’s more, he understands, because he’s witnessed it, that nothing happens without a systematic program of influence among the people with influence.

Murdoch doesn’t have a conception of reality, of performance, of achievement, that doesn’t involve a layered involvement with politics. His business discussion is always shifting into a political discussion—not just because he enjoys political gaming, but because this is business reality. Your political connections are as germane as your balance sheet. This really has nothing to do with ideology at all. The measure of his business success, of his rise, is his ability to influence politics.

But, first, there is his early lack of ability to have meaningful clout and influence.

The 1950s conservative Australian government of Robert Menzies, largely in the pocket of established media companies—the Fairfaxes, the Packers, and the Herald and Weekly Times, Murdoch’s father’s old company—has little interest in helping Murdoch. As the
Adelaide News
becomes more determinedly left-wing, Menzies becomes more determined to hinder Keith Murdoch’s son—including forcing Murdoch into a major fight to win the single television license available in Adelaide. (Fifty years later, Murdoch, who has little interest in the past, can remember every detail about Menzies’ efforts to thwart him.)

At the same time, the
Adelaide News
enters its first serious journalistic campaign: a defense of Rupert Max Stuart, an Aboriginal man sentenced to death in the murder of a nine-year-old girl. It’s a campaign begun by Murdoch’s editor Rohan Rivett—his father’s handpicked editor, who was given the job not least of all because, while living in England, he befriended and looked after the young Murdoch at Oxford at Sir Keith’s behest. Murdoch, in an early instance of editorial interference (and enthusiasm), takes direct control of the Stuart campaign. He coordinates the
Adelaide News
’ ferocious attack on Sir Thomas Playford, the longest-serving premier of South Australia.

Playford has Murdoch and Rivett brought up on charges of seditious libel. While they are ultimately acquitted, the boy publisher is held up to calculated ridicule. It’s an ordeal meant to remind him how much he’s overstepped his place. (Murdoch’s frustration and helplessness result in, among other things, his firing Rivett, the person most responsible for the early success of the
Adelaide News
.) Murdoch, the simple machine, learns such lessons well: You’ll always be vulnerable to people who are more powerful than you—hence, you yourself must become ever more powerful.

Then, in a more worldly lesson about power and about the nature of the big time and the small time, Murdoch goes to the Kennedy White House.

Murdoch stops in Washington after a trip to Cuba in 1961 with a Sydney
Daily Mirror
correspondent because Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, has promised the young publisher an audience with the president. In the Oval Office, Kennedy—“very, very charming, he showed us around his office, quite an experience, I was only thirty years old”—starts talking expansively about West Papua, a big story at the time in Australia. Indonesia wants to get control from the Dutch, who have held control since 1895. Kennedy says he’s sending his brother Bobby out there and he’s going to tell Indonesian president Sukarno that the United States is going to change its position.

Murdoch intends to write the story himself, but the
Mirror
’s local stringer, a reporter at the
Washington Post,
realizing its import, alerts Salinger, who blows his top, insisting what Kennedy spoke of was off the record. Murdoch holds his ground until, flying to New York’s Idlewild Airport, his plane is met on the tarmac by Secret Service agents who hold everyone on board as Murdoch is directed to call the Australian ambassador. Murdoch will recall that the ambassador is “pissing his pants” about the story—and he tells Murdoch that Salinger has pledged that if Murdoch runs the story, he’ll never get another visa again.

Murdoch, in the retelling, will break into hysterical laughter at this point, remembering his own sense of his place in the world, his sense of how far he had yet to travel, and his certain sense of when to fold. Hence he does come to
understand
that Kennedy’s talk
was
off the record, later allowing as how—more laughter—“this was one of my weaker efforts in journalism.” There will be no bitterness or resentment in the retelling, just enjoyment at the adventure and even gratitude for the lesson: The big time is different from the small time.

Then there’s his first clear act of using his papers to gain influence—to project and to seize power. This is the story of Gough Whitlam, the left-wing Australian prime minister, who is elected in 1972 with Murdoch’s support. But it is also, in its way, the story of Watergate. The backdrop to one of the greatest demonstrations of press power in Australia—Murdoch’s deposing of a prime minister—is the greatest assertion of press power in the United States.

Murdoch is aghast at the press’s politicking in the campaign against Richard Nixon. (Murdoch is back and forth to the United States during the Watergate investigation, and moves here with his family in 1974, just as Nixon resigns from office.) But as likely, Murdoch’s ire here is competitive too. What he’s witnessing is the paramount example of press influence. And he’s nowhere near it; he’s not a player on this level. But we know he wants in. Indeed,
Rolling Stone
founder and editor Jann Wenner meets Murdoch in 1974 and compliments him on the newly launched
National Star,
telling him he’s especially impressed by the
Star
’s political column and is curious about its writer. Murdoch tells Wenner, proudly and sheepishly, that he’s been writing the column himself under a pseudonym. (Then Murdoch inquires about buying
Rolling Stone
.)

In the aftermath of Watergate, Murdoch, harrumphy about the U.S. press and the Woodward and Bernstein putsch (“The American press might get their pleasure in successfully crucifying Nixon, but the last laugh could be on them. See how they like it when the Commies take over the West,” he will tell friends), finally steps up to being a true political player. “The Dismissal,” which is what this historic moment in Australian politics is called, is the Australian Watergate.

Edward Gough Whitlam is, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the model of Murdoch’s sort of politician. Ideology aside—Whitlam is the leader of the Australian Labor Party—he listens to Murdoch, confers with him, huddles with him at the Murdoch sheep farm outside Canberra. Whitlam becomes the darling of Murdoch’s
Australian,
Murdoch’s left-leaning quality paper.

But having gotten elected, Whitlam promptly stops speaking to Murdoch. Having, in Murdoch’s view, “single-handedly put the present government in office,” he is now snubbed.

When Australia’s maritime union, in protest against the resumption of American bombing in North Vietnam in 1973, organizes a boycott against U.S. ships coming into Australian ports, the Whitlam government, crossing both Murdoch and Nixon, sides with the union. The Nixon government tries to enlist Murdoch’s help—but the Whitlam government resists its most important supporter.

Murdoch, still in the Labor camp, begrudgingly supports Whitlam once more in 1974, when he is reelected. But they continue on a fast slide into acrimony. There’s Murdoch’s odd venture, in 1974, into bauxite mining with Reynolds Aluminum, which needs licenses that the Whitlam government resists granting. And then, later that year, there’s the Whitlam devaluation of the Australian dollar, which costs Murdoch in his foreign exchange dealings.

And then there is the theory that Murdoch is in cahoots with the CIA. That when, in 1975, Whitlam begins to use Australia’s deep anti-Vietnam sentiment to agitate against a major U.S. spy station located in the Australian outback, the CIA enlists Murdoch in a regime-change strategy.

Murdoch’s
Australian,
once firmly liberal, moves, in the campaign against Whitlam, dramatically to the right (where it will mostly remain). The foremost example of Murdoch’s capacity to be a principled publisher becomes the primary weapon in the battle to get rid of Whitlam. With intimations of sexual and financial scandal (the sexual part turns out not to be true, the financial part equivocally true), the
Australian,
in a campaign led personally by Murdoch—who himself takes to writing articles—breaks the government, which has been paralyzed by a budget crisis. Sir John Kerr, the governor-general of Australia, the figurehead appointee of the British Crown over the Commonwealth, does what has never been done before—he fires the elected government in 1975, precipitating a constitutional crisis.

Seventy-five members of the
Australian
’s newsroom write a letter protesting the anti-Whitlam campaign, which is followed by a demonstration and a one-day walkout by all the journalists at Murdoch’s Sydney-based papers.

Murdoch, dismissing the protests, prevails.

In 1975, shortly after he moves from his summer house in East Hampton to the more isolated property in Columbia County in upstate New York, Murdoch gets a recommendation to call a young woman, with a house nearby, who works in state government. “State government” must have been what made the tumblers click here—in Australia, regional governments are significant power centers—because he’s not somebody who’s just looking to be sociable with the neighbors. Her name is Marian Faris Stuntz, otherwise known as Cita—she’s a Democrat, working for then New York governor Hugh Carey—and she begins to give him a tutorial on New York state government. (This is even before he’s bought the
Post
.) “He would ring me up three or four times a day,” Stuntz will later recall, “and would say, ‘Who is this guy Mario Cuomo? What is this? I heard something about this, I heard something about that.’ He was sucking up information about state government like a sponge.”

Within his first year of owning the
Post,
he entirely alters the political landscape in New York. In a precise calculation, he decides to use the
Post
as an instrument to elect somebody—he understands that it doesn’t really matter whom, just that the
Post
be responsible. After interviewing each of the prospective candidates for New York City mayor, he settles on the perhaps least likely guy—that is, the one who needs him the most. It’s Ed Koch, a congressman from Greenwich Village, single, rumored to be gay (Murdoch has a typical old-school Australian man’s antipathy to “poofters”), funny-looking, with a counterintuitive campaign style: He whines, complains, cavils. The entire paper is put in service to the Koch election. The
Post
is transformed into an ebullient narrative of Koch’s presence, charm, and inevitability. The least charismatic man in the city becomes the most charismatic. Thirty years later, Joyce Purnick, the
Post
’s political reporter during the Koch campaign, will still be shaking her head: “Murdoch didn’t change a word of my copy. But my copy was irrelevant—it was dwarfed by, hidden beneath, this package of huge pictures of Koch and great personal stories about him. And relentless day-by-day celebration.”