Current disclosure practices require me to mention that the author of The Uncrowned King, Kenneth Whyte, is a friend of many years and that we happily worked together on several publications.[1] He is a brilliant editor and publisher, as is abundantly clear from his many insights in this ground-breaking book about William Randolph Hearst. If it were not an excellent book, I would have declined to review it.
The picture of Hearst that emerges here is far more credible and nuanced than any that has been seriously advanced before. The Hearst legend preceded any serious consultation of primary sources by many years, and Ken Whyte has very assiduously gone through thousands of editions of all the New York titles in the first several years of Hearst’s ownership of the New York Journal and an enterprising breadth of relevant correspondence. The long-accepted take on Hearst relied on Orson Welles’s “fine but scurrilous film” Citizen Kane, W. A. Swanberg’s 1961 biography, Citizen Hearst (evidently a sequel to the film though somewhat more favorable in its conclusions), and David Nasaw’s The Chief (2000).
Previously, the conventional wisdom was that Hearst raised up the circulation of the Journal to over a million and sometimes higher in three years, simply by digging lower, defaming more vituperatively, and stirring base mass passions more shamelessly than his competitors, as well as by throwing his parents’ money out of the windows in herniating packets, and that it all came easily.
