Murdoch: Like father, like son?
ARTICLES FLOOD the presses. His name is on every Wall Street lip. His face beams at us from the cover of Time Magazine: "The Last Tycoon . . . Rupert Murdoch's quest for the Wall Street Journal." Seldom has there been so much drama over a business take over. The Journal plays the role of the shy, impoverished maiden trying to avoid the fate worse than death, while the smiling Murdoch is portrayed as the moneyed, mustachio-twirling seducer bent on deflowering virtue.
Time calls him "the ultimate outsider, the ink-stained interloper who started in 1953 with a single paper in Adelaide, Australia, [who] would add capitalism's daily chronicle to an empire. . ." Murdoch himself says he is just "lucky and nimble."
I have been thinking of the tree from which this acorn fell recently, for Rupert Murdoch's dad, Keith, played a crucial role in one of the most serious allied defeats of World War I, a military catastrophe that cost more than 250,000 allied casualties. Not unlike the Vietnam War, or even Iraq, it is still argued over. Was it a good idea poorly executed? Or was it destined for failure from the start?
The allies, under the urging of Winston Churchill, hoped to force a fleet through the Dardanelles, the narrow strait separating Europe from Asia, and then on to Constantinople to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. By removing a key German ally, a way around the slaughter of trench warfare on the Western front could be reached, and a sea route to embattled Russia could be opened.
It was a daring plan, but the Turks mined the strait, and when allied ships began to sink the navies called off their attack. It was thought that only by holding the shoreline could the ships be secure. So British troops, French, and a contingent from Australia and New Zealand, were put ashore at several beaches on the narrow peninsula of Gallipoli . At the time it was the biggest amphibious operation ever mounted. For the Australians and New Zealanders it was something of a debut on the world stage and, as such, it is celebrated still "down under."
The Turks, aided by the Germans, held fast, however, and the allied armies were never able to move far from their beachheads. A brilliant Turkish commander, Mustafa Kemal, out maneuvered the allies at every turn. As Kemal Ataturk he went on to become the founder of modern Turkey, born from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
Keith Murdoch, fresh from Australia, showed up in Gallipoli and wangled his way to accreditation as a war correspondent, subject to the strict rules of military censorship which the allies imposed. As Alan Moorehead writes, Murdoch was to prove to be "a very dangerous man." For Murdoch soon found out what other war correspondents knew, that the campaign was going very badly, that the allied troops were simply pinned down in appalling conditions of filth, disease, and under constant fire from the Turks who held the high ground.
Murdoch felt that disaster was in the making and that something had to be done. He and a man from the Daily Telegraph, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, cooked up a scheme to circumvent censorship. Murdoch, when he left, would smuggle out a report Ashmead-Bartlett had written and get it into the hands of the British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, in London. Another correspondent overhead them scheming, however, and Murdoch was stopped in Marseilles and the letter taken from him.
Upon reaching London, however, Murdoch knew enough to write his own 8,000-word report on the horrors, inadequacies, and stupidities of the Gallipoli adventure, which he addressed to the Australian prime minister, Andrew Fisher.
David Lloyd George, chancellor of the Exchequer, saw the report and urged Murdoch to send it on to Asquith, who promptly circulated it. Official London was horrified, and those who had opposed the Gallipoli landing, and Churchill, all along had their day.
After nine months of horror, the allied forces were evacuated all in one night and the hopes for an easy end to the war died.
What influence might this have had on Keith's son Rupert? Perhaps the rebelliousness and the determination to make his own rules might have been passed on from father to son.
Any agreement the Wall Street Journal might reach with Murdoch to maintain some control over standards stands a chance of going the same way as did the military censorship rules in that long ago campaign at Gallipoli.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 