The Murdochs: how Keith's legacy became Rupert's obsession

On 12 April 2012, following the News of the World phone hacking scandal, Keith Rupert Murdoch submitted his witness statement to Britain’s Leveson Inquiry into “the culture, practice and ethics of the press”. Its opening lines stressed that his grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister and supporter of the free press. Rupert then quoted the section of his father’s will in which Keith Murdoch laid down his expectations that his son “should continue to express ideals of newspaper and broadcasting activities in the service of others and these ideals should be pursued with deep interest”. The will, setting out Keith’s hope that his son should have the “great opportunity” of “ultimately occupying a position of high responsibility” in the field of the media, was dated 21 January 1948. It had been written when Rupert was still at school, aged just sixteen.

As a young man, Keith had rebelled against his own father’s hope that he would pursue a career in the church, believing the press was where he could serve his most “useful” purpose. Keith’s own son, however, would follow his father’s wishes. The intensity with which Rupert has pursued – and achieved – success on an unheralded global level is something that as a proud father Keith could only have dreamt of. But Rupert’s “high responsibility” in 2011 might have resulted in a more complicated emotional reaction.

In October 1952, Elisabeth had given Rupert’s tutor at Oxford the task of telling Rupert his father had died. Rupert returned to Melbourne as soon as he could, though unfortunately not soon enough to attend the funeral. Elisabeth, in her grief and shock, could only go along with the plans by Keith’s powerful friends and the Herald and Weekly Times (HWT) group, the media giant he had built and chaired but did not own, who wished to give him a grand, public and prompt send-off commensurate with his standing in Australia.

The funeral was held at Toorak Presbyterian Church on Tuesday 7 October. Present were representatives of the commonwealth, state and foreign governments, as well as heads of the leading Melbourne papers. The federal attorney general represented prime minister Robert Menzies who did not attend. Menzies would state, perhaps pointedly, that Keith had “left us in his debt.”

When Rupert arrived back there was at least some time for private grief with his mother and sisters before he had to undertake the difficult tasks of understanding Keith’s financial affairs and resolving the inheritance. Of Keith’s personal holdings, it was decided that News Limited should be retained, while the interest in Queensland Newspapers would ultimately be sold to the HWT. An auction sale of the exceptional collection of art and antiques would help discharge further debts and death duties. Rupert would return to Oxford to complete his studies before coming back to Australia to take up the reins. There was another, less tangible, inheritance, however. Keith’s influence and the network of contacts he had laid down around the world would live on beyond him, as Rupert would soon discover.

Even the route of Rupert’s journey back to Oxford via America provided an opportunity for Keith’s satellites there to help distract him from his grief and cement professional and political links. At the end of 1952 it was election time in America and Keith’s close friend the HWT’s New York bureau chief Randal Heymanson tried to get Rupert into one of the rallies “which will doubtless increase his prestige with his Oxford pals”. (In what proved to be his last letter to Heymanson, Keith had asked for copies of the presidential campaign speeches of Democrat Adlai Stevenson to be sent to Rupert in England.) With the young Rupert in town Heymanson also organised a luncheon meeting of the American-Australian Association – the elite networking group Keith had formed – at which tributes were paid to his father by the assistant secretary of state and “our own minister, Dick Casey”.

Richard, later Baron Casey, would later tell the first biographer commissioned by the family to write a life of Keith that Rupert “has inherited a great deal from his father”. Just a year before his death, Casey would still be sending letters of recommendation on Rupert’s behalf, emphasising that he was ‘the son of the late Sir Keith Murdoch’, to eminent Americans – including Nelson Rockefeller, the forty-first vice-president of the United States and grandson of the Standard Oil founder. (The year was 1975, a crucial time in Rupert’s expansion into America.)

As Rupert returned through America at the end of 1952, back in Canberra preparations were being made for the construction of the American Memorial. A money-raising campaign driven by the Australian-American Association had been topped up with funds by the Australian government. Keith, a major force behind the project, had foreseen “something soaring, something standing apart in lonely grandeur”. Just over a year later the 73-metre octagonal aluminium column surmounted by a brutalist American eagle with pointy wings aloft in the V of Victory was complete. (Before long the eagle was given the equally American but more prosaic moniker as the Bugs Bunny of Canberra.)

The knowledge held by two towering figures in Keith’s life would also be passed on to Rupert. While Heymanson was busy distributing the HWT’s rapidly produced hagiography of Keith to key figures in America – the book that described Keith as “the Lord Northcliffe of the Southern Hemisphere” – the prized bundle of secret notes on popular newspaper techniques that Northcliffe had given to Keith and that became his prodigy’s “bible”, had a new owner. Now the notes were being read by the next generation. Rupert could only read Northcliffe’s advice – the genius of the “new journalism” had died, in a fit of insanity, three decades previously – but he was able to tap directly into the mind of the other great media baron friend of his father. During the round-the-world dash home three days after his Keith’s death, Rupert had written a letter to Lord Beaverbrook.

After thanking Beaverbrook for his “most generous and kind” leader about his father in the Daily Express, Rupert explained he was going to Australia to do what he could for his mother and sisters and to help in settling “all the necessary matters”. He was unsure when he would be able to return to Oxford to finish his degree, or, whether he would ask for ‘further much needed training’ in Fleet Street.

All I know is that I am faced with much responsibility at an extremely early age, and it would be a great relief if I could feel – as I know I can – that I could rely on you for occasional and sympathetic advice.

Again many thanks for all your kindnesses.

In his reply Beaverbrook overwrote his secretary’s typewritten address of “Mr Murdoch” with “‘Dear Rupert”. He assured the 21-year-old of “any assistance” he could give “at any time” in the task that lay before him: “I shall always be only too willing to help you in any direction in which any activities may be of value to you.”

Beaverbrook had already written personally to Elisabeth, emphasizing that “here in London we grieve for [Keith] deeply”. He had “lost an honoured and trusted friend” and would miss Keith’s “wise advice, his independence, his quiet humour, his instinctive championship of freedom”. His friend had “built well, and he built for the future. His name and fame will long endure”. Elisabeth responded by saying that the warm reception her husband always received in Fleet Street had been “a great satisfaction” to him: “even a few days in and around that part of the world stimulated and impressed him to work harder and harder for the higher purposes of Journalism”. Some, however, would question the purposes Beaverbrook’s own journalism served and the example his career set.

Walter Murdoch, Keith’s uncle who had inspired him to pursue journalism and later supported him during his difficult first year in London, had developed an increasingly critical view of Beaverbrook and the trajectory of the British press over the previous three decades. Reviewing Beaverbrook’s self-help book Success (written “for the young men of the new age” seeking “the upward track”) in 1923, Walter noted that the son of a minister who extolled his Presbyterian upbringing had nevertheless embraced wealth as “an end to itself, the only conceivable end”. He quoted Beaverbrook’s edict that “[t]he money brain is, in the modern world, the supreme brain”. Dismissing the artistic or altruistic ambitions of ‘dreamers’, Beaverbrook, writing from what he termed “the golden pinnacle of success”, had addressed instead the “young men who want to succeed in business and to build up a new nation”. Walter thought Beaverbrook’s message of a world being laid out for the taking was nothing new: after all, it had “a very distinguished predecessor” in the Devil’s temptation of Christ in the desert.

Visiting London again a few years later, Walter had been struck by the “ominous … deterioration of the British newspaper … and the debauching of the public mind by the Beaverbrook and [Northcliffe family] Press. Fed on these newspapers the Englishman is in danger of becoming childish”. The country seemed to be losing its ancient wisdom in treating serious things lightly and light things, such as sport, seriously.

By 1936 Keith himself, at least in public, was sharing his uncle’s concern about the apparent direction of the British press. The trip during which Keith had first exposed the young Rupert to the world had allowed him to observe that despite its “circulation and technical excellence” the popular press had developed a much more strident tone:

In more than one instance this stridency becomes outright hysteria. This section of the Press goes for an exploitation of people’s private lives that has never before been known in England.

In private too, Keith had been scathing. He told Rohan Rivett, the young favourite tasked with keeping a watchful eye on Rupert, he did not like the “Daily Express types” among the compositors. Keith later deplored the “doctoring or ‘jerking’ of items to give them false interest”. This was “downright sensationalism and is practiced in the London Daily Express office”. However, despite his concerns, Keith retained his friendship with Beaverbrook and chose him as the man under whom Rupert should be blooded. Success was the key determinant. After all, the Express was the most successful daily newspaper in the world, its circulation by 1950 more than four million.

In early 1953 Rupert was continuing his Oxford studies. From his Worcester College address he wrote to Beaverbrook, taking him up on the offer of assistance, and seeking – as had his father 45 years earlier – the stimulation and training of Fleet Street. Turning to wider business strategy and keenly mindful of his inheritance, Rupert also wished to discuss “the Australian newspaper position” with the old hand.

The young Rupert was invited to Beaverbrook’s flat in the glamorous, modernist block just behind the Ritz. (Later, Rupert chose this same prized St James’s location for his own London base, his penthouse just yards from Beaverbrook’s original and sharing the same panoramic view across Green Park and over the roofs of Buckingham Palace.)

The meeting appears to have gone well with the old “Demon Beaver” instructing Edward Pickering, the deputy editor of the Daily Express, to take Rupert under his wing and “make sure he learns something of the trade”. One account has Beaverbrook saying: “Take care of him, Pick, you never know where he might end up.” (Working on the sub-editor’s bench of the Express, it was claimed Rupert was the only one of his colleagues who would head home to the Savoy at the end of his night shift.) Pickering would become Rupert’s “great mentor”, who was later invited to become an independent director and then executive vice-chairman of the Times after the turbulent Murdoch takeover in 1981. In mid-1953 Beaverbrook wrote to Elisabeth to relay a report he had received about Rupert’s progress: “He is a most likeable, lively, attractive young man and in my view will go far in his profession.” Elisabeth assured him that she was delighted that Rupert had been “able to do what his father would have wished”. As the decade progressed Rupert would revert to Beaverbrook for advice when needed.

When he returned to Australia, Rupert was soon forging ahead in his career. Keith needn’t have worried. Rupert’s young radical days were quickly put behind him after he finished his degree at Oxford and took up the reins of News Limited in Adelaide alongside Rohan Rivett, now editor of The News. Rivett confided to friends that “the metamorphosis of the young left-winger, in the space of just four weeks, to a right-wing, hungry, self-seeking conservative was the most remarkable thing he ever witnessed. He didn’t realise that a grub could turn into a moth so quickly.” Rupert’s appetite for power would turn voracious. Beaverbrook’s right-hand man Hugh Cudlipp recalled that when he first saw Rupert in the early 1950s, learning the trade from the sub-editors’ bench at the Express, he had thought him “rather shy, rather charming, rather nice. When I saw him 10 years later, one rather felt that he looked at one with all the sincerity of a boa constrictor contemplating his next meal.”

On 4 October 1957, five years to the day after Keith’s death, the history of communication took a great leap forward, one heralding the technology that Rupert would later exploit in order to extend his global power and influence. Standing with her son on the grass tennis court at Cruden Farm – the turf across which Keith had networked with powerful houseguests over the years – Elisabeth recalled, “We looked up into the night sky together and there was this white light passing overhead. It was the first satellite.” Sputnik I, “the simplest kind of baby moon”, was now orbiting the earth in a little over an hour and a half. “Rupert pointed the light out to me and said that this was one of the most exciting indications of what lay ahead for the future.”

At the outset of his career, frustrated by the chronic stammer that had stopped him from following his own father in preaching from the pulpit, Keith had determined that journalism, rather than the priesthood or representative politics, would be his means to exert an influence and “be really useful in the world”.

The timing of Keith’s choice of career coincided with the rise of the modern press. As my book has revealed, Keith was a central character in the power play that saw the first media barons Lords Northcliffe and Beaverbrook flex their muscle against elected government. Keith, later himself dubbed “Lord Southcliffe”, was a confidant of both. World War I had provided fertile ground for the development and refinement of propaganda and public relations techniques. Keith had forged his own role as a political agent, blurring the demarcation between press and politics, truth and propaganda. The will to influence and shape public opinion and political outcomes would continue.

A further lifelong obsession with business and technological development in the media industry, drawn from numerous research trips to America and Britain, informed the expansion and formation of Australia’s first media conglomeration. Its multimedia, synergistic and syndicated character foreshadowed the worldwide model of the later News Corporation. As we have seen, by 1931 this included embracing not only newspapers, to which most previous accounts of Keith’s life restrict their focus, but also wireless stations and talkie newsreels.

While Rupert has remained a self-avowed newspaperman and defender of the press, this Murdoch identification with other forms of media continues through the business passions of Keith’s grandchildren, particularly Lachlan, James and Elisabeth. A belief in standing up for commercial interests in the face of state-funded models also directly and remarkably echoes their grandfather’s early battles with the ABC.

Keith’s early recognition of the ascendancy of the media to its position of pivotal power in the modern world was inspired. His decision to pursue a career in journalism and to wield power as a self-appointed gatekeeper of public discourse and opinion was his most important decision. It is also Keith’s greatest legacy. His embrace of this concept, not the single Adelaide newspaper willed to his son on his death, as is the romanticised view, was Rupert’s key inheritance. It explains the trajectory of this remarkable media dynasty, and its sense of duty to act through, but also its entitlement to possess and wield, the power of the media.

• Tom Roberts is a media historian. His first book, Before Rupert: Keith Murdoch and the Birth of a Dynasty, is published by UQP.