NO ORDINARY JOE

Pfaff (Joseph Pulitzer II and the Post-Dispatch, 1991) paints a beauty-marks-and-all portrait of the least consequential Pulitzer.

Even as he began his 31-year reign as editor/publisher of the staunchly liberal St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Joseph Pulitzer III confronted a media landscape vastly different from the one dominated by his father and even more famous grandfather. Through his financial strategies, diversification into television and cautious stewardship, he managed to keep his family's empire intact. Otherwise, it's difficult to see how anything other than his last name, connoting as it does the very best (the Prize) and the very worst (the yellow) in journalism, recommends him for inclusion in the discussion of great newspapermen. Born to privilege, educated at all the right schools (St. Marks, Harvard), at home in the usual playgrounds of the wealthy (Paris, Zermatt, Bar Harbor), Pulitzer appears to have resignedly entered the family business. Left to his own inclinations, it's likely his knowledge of and passion for art—even as a youth he had a discerning eye, and his wealth enabled him to become an early collector of Picasso, Klee, Mondrian and other modern masters—might have led to a more genuinely accomplished, if more modest, career. Pfaff (Emeritus, Journalism/Penn State Univ.) attempts to persuade us that Pulitzer was other than the ordinarily competent, self-absorbed, aloof, humorless fellow who emerges here, but the author relies principally on interview subjects who owe their lives, fortune, career or portions of their soul to Joe III. Almost completely devoid of the common touch, a not unimportant quality in a newspaperman, he reached his 60s before experiencing the novelty of a bus ride. Charming.

The mini-portraits of the paper's four managing and four editorial-page editors constitute the book's strongest section. Only followers of the fortunes of 20th-century media companies or the most devoted students of journalism will warm to Joe himself.