Squatting on Chicago's lakefront, like a massive fortress waiting an invading army from the East, is the city's sprawling convention center - named for Colonel Robert R. McCormick. It is a monumental testimonial to the political clout and journalistic muscle of a publisher both paranoid and powerful, reviled and renowned.

 Even his Tribune, celebrating its 150th anniversary, now reminds us that placing McCormick Center on lakeshore land violated a long-standing covenant to maintain the vista as "forever open, clear and free." Yet the building was erected five years after the Colonel's death in 1955 with bulldozer tactics that McCormick had taught his minions, and with the same power and persistence that had routed earlier generations of politicians in the Colonel's path.

 Thirty miles or so to the west, in Wheaton, is a far different monument to the publisher, one he lavishly fashioned from the farmstead that his grandfather Joseph Medill occupied. The farmhouse became a suburban estate that bespeaks a grandeur more at home in the English countryside that McCormick passionately detested than in his Chicagoland of sweaty backs and broad shoulders.

 It was at the 500-acre estate where he became an eager boyhood disciple of his imperious grandfather's pioneer Republican dogma, and enjoyed his happiest days. Renamed for the only World War I battle in which he served, it was a place of reverie and remembrance. It was also there he died - unloved and unmourned except by family retainers.

An architectural self-indulgence, Cantigny became a self-centered museum saluting the Colonel's self-perceived importance. Its expensive upkeep comes from McCormick's impressive financial legacy.Cantigny marks a rite of passage from frail boyhood to military manhood for the towering, gaunt figure who limped not from war wounds but from a polo injury.

McCormick Place celebrates the name and Cantigny preserves the fame. Together they are the symbolic bookends to an amazing career recounted in this engrossing biography of twists and turns. It is a story of the press and politics, personalities and perfidy, triumph and tragedy. The twists might surprise - the turns do not: they are doggedly to the right.

Richard Norton Smith was given unprecedented access to the Colonel's papers - many thousands of pages. From this vast archive he has drawn an intimate portrait that casts the Colonel in a light never seen by even many of his associates: a man who survived as a neglected child, despite a largely dysfunctional family, to become an office-holder and office-basher, engineer and entrepreneur, visionary and power-broker - all the while wrestling with the demons of doubt, insecurity, and self-imposed loneliness.

Smith, whose previous works include biographies of George Washington, Herbert Hoover, and Thomas Dewey, is at home ideologically with Republicanism. He was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, and his newest work is dedicated to Bob and Elizabeth Dole - whom he served as a collaborator on their own story. Yet Smith does not gloss over the perverse attitudes, the xenophobic isolationism, the blatant bias against Jews and immigrants, the unfairness of some Tribune crusades, and the Colonel's obsessive hate for nearly everything on the Eastern Seaboard and beyond, especially the United Kingdom.

More than a story of a man who built upon Medill's foundation to create a media empire that eclipsed his competition, Smith also has written the chronicle of an exciting period in American journalism - roughly, the first half of the twentieth century, a time of great technological change for newspapers with the advent of radio and television.

 Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were the pioneers who led the nation into its most rambunctious and raucous period of print. Theirs was an exciting yet passing phase. The Colonel often is identified with this Citizen Kane genre of publishers. But he more closely resembles a Rupert Murdoch kind of buccaneer - prizing political influence as much as financial gain, and using each to leverage the other.

 McCormick the Innovator could see the potential of the electronic media while other publishers were comatose in their blinders. In the mid-20s he bought an experimental radio station housed in a hotel, renaming it WGN (for "World's Greatest Newspaper") and steadily expanding its 1,000 watts to 50,000. Television was still in swaddling clothes when McCormick obtained the license for WGN-TV in 1948.

As a farsighted engineer who literally raked muck as the head of Chicago's Sanitary District before fate thrust him into the Tribune's masthead, McCormick invaded remote timberlands of Canada to build dams, pulp mills, and company towns to supply his ever-growing need for newsprint. By mid-century it was generally believed that the Chicago Tribune was the largest foreign investor in the Canadian economy.

 He was generations ahead of other publishers in sensing the value of spot color to enliven illustrations. He was among the first to introduce zoned editions - providing more space for local news, with more advertising at partitioned rates. And his successors are still pushing the high-tech envelope, putting the Tribune out front with a regional all-news cable channel and a boldly aggressive plunge into cyberspace.

His pioneer achievements, impressive as they were, shrink in light of zaniness and daffiness that are hard to fathom, let alone forget. William Shirer, then a Tribune correspondent in Paris, was dispatched to the French countryside to locate binoculars the Colonel had left in a barn nine years earlier. Once the Colonel mandated a reporter go to Madison, Wisconsin, which he regarded as a hotbed of effete radicalism, to determine whether the men wore lace panties.

Among the Colonel's obsessions was a love of gossip. For example, in late 1936 he dispatched two pencil-wielding paparazzi to stalk the future Duchess of Windsor and her royal lover. But the former king, Edward VIII, evaded the Colonel's correspondent, and Mrs. Wallis Simpson, confronted on the French Riviera, spurned the Tribune's offer to just "name her price."

His attempts to simplify the language remained Holy Writ in the Tribune style manual long after he died. Eventually, the protests of schoolteachers and widespread ridicule led the Tribune to return to Noah Webster. The surrender was formalized twenty years after the Colonel's death in an editorial titled "Thru is Through and So Is Tho." Yet an elevator within the Tribune Tower reportedly continued to bear the sign "FRATE."

One of the many paradoxes that dominated McCormick's life was the unusual partnership he formed with his cousin, Joseph Patterson, to preserve family control of the Tribune in a vacuum resulting from the mental illness that led Joseph Medill McCormick, the Colonel's older brother, to withdraw as treasurer of the newspaper.

 Patterson and McCormick, sons of the Medill sisters, could not have been more different - politically, personally, socially. Patterson, a creative editor with feeling for popular taste, was a self-described Socialist. Yet the two signed an "iron-bound" pact of mutual convenience and shared power that became the charter for the Tribune until they both were dead.

After a period of alternate leadership stints in Chicago, Patterson went to New York to establish the New York Illustrated Daily News and introduce comic strips and syndicated features that further enriched the company coffers. The Chicago-New York duo became a publishing trio when Joe's sister, Eleanor Medill (Cissy), gained control of the Washington Times-Herald.

The Washington foothold was tenuous, but in spite of family spats and financial strains, the three remained steadfastly united against Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and put up a solid front against intervention in the affairs of Europe. Roosevelt called them the "McCormick-Patterson Axis." To Henry Luce, they were "the three furies of isolationism."

Dealing with the three heirs of Joseph Medill often was akin to guerrilla warfare for Roosevelt - protecting his backside from a new media onslaught while battling the Germans and Japanese. The Tribune's attacks on the president were ceaseless and vicious. They began before his first inauguration, and continued long after Roosevelt was gone. Thousands of words were devoted, for example, to an attempt showing that Roosevelt was aware of an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor but welcomed the excuse for declaring war.

One of the dramatic episodes highlighted in the book is the effort by Roosevelt to nail the Tribune for wartime espionage: revealing that U. S. cryptographers had broken the Japanese war code. The case finally was dropped out of the U.S. Navy's concern over compounding the damaging disclosure with new publicity, more revelations. Somehow, the wartime blow to national security was overlooked in the Tribune's 1997 recap of its "famous scoops" during 150 years.

As many of the Tribune's news beats demonstrated during the Colonel's reign, he was nothing if not a ferocious defender of press freedom as he saw it. And he saw it pretty much the same way as did arch critic A. J. Liebling: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

McCormick's exclusionary zeal led to a landmark Supreme Court defeat for the Colonel in trying to foreclose the Chicago Sun of Marshall Field III from getting an Associated Press franchise to compete against the Trib. The issue was restraint of trade, not the First Amendment. Yet, for the Colonel, press freedom was often a property right more than a guarantee of free expression.

Smith deals only in a perfunctory way with the AP decision but treats another crusade with evident admiration: McCormick's role in the historic Near v. Minnesota case, also resulting in a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court. For once, there was nothing at stake financially for the Tribune. Powered only by his relentless zeal to eradicate a Minnesota gag rule, imposing prior restraint on a small radical publication, the Colonel underwrote the lengthy appeal and took great pride in his triumph.

The author has readily admitted to an "empathy" for McCormick, but describes a figure "exasperating" yet poignant. Throughout the book Smith seesaws in his epitaph, perhaps inevitably unsure given the Colonel's penchant for uneven, often baffling behavior. As he says of the Colonel, consistency is not a "hobgoblin" for Smith.

So, when Smith's evaluations swing between nasty and nice - between mere eccentricity and maddening extremism - we have to remember the distance between McCormick Place and Cantigny is not all that great. The ghost of the Colonel could traverse it easily, chortling with sardonic glee over his conflicted legacy.

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