The view from Xanadu

The Hearst newspaper chain, at its peak the largest in the history of American journalism, was a mouthpiece for William Randolph Hearst. He used the editorial page to expound his views on national and world events, becoming a major and ever-present figure in the political arena. Despise and hate him as they might - and many of them did - American presidents and politicians could not ignore him, even during his later years.

In The View from Xanadu Ian Mugridge evaluates Hearst's attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy issues and the effect of his views on national foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century.

Hearst is usually remembered as a flag-waving, jingoistic patriot who was anti-British, anti-French, anti-Oriental - anti-almost everything except the United States. He was regarded as an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, and a staunch isolationist who believed that minimizing American contact with the rest of the world was the only sure way to achieve security.

Using all the journalistic apparatus at his disposal, Hearst trumpeted his views about the conduct of other nations and peoples and, more particularly, about the conduct of his own country in relation to them. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was often described as "Mr Hearst's war" because of the role he apparently played in pushing the United States into the war.

Mugridge investigates Hearst's journalistic tactics, which seldom varied, and concludes that ultimately Hearst's flamboyant style militated against his being taken seriously by those responsible for the nation's affairs.

Exploring the personal side of this very public figure, Mugridge argues that Hearst was a far more complex individual than previous biographers have assumed. He probes beneath Hearst's largely self-created image to delineate the aspirations, anxieties, and vanities that led Hearst to embrace and advance his positions on U.S. foreign relations.