(FORTUNE Magazine) – Where is he now? I don't mean Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. He's dead--and likely worse. If Franklin Roosevelt (his nemesis) had any pull with God, McCormick is currently rotating on one of hell's rotisseries. Rather, I mean what's happened to media barons of McCormick's imposing grandeur?

To read Richard Norton Smith's fine biography, The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick (1880-1955), is to shed tears at how wimpy today's barons seem by comparison. McCormick reveled in his perquisites, electing and un-electing high officials, eradicating stray dogs from Chicago's streets, reforming spelling ("through" at the Tribune was "thru"). He traveled the world aboard his own B-17 bomber, which he outfitted with a bar, a library, seven-foot beds (to accommodate his extra-large frame), wall-to-wall carpeting, and a swivel chair mounted in the picture-window nose. From there he judged the nations of the earth, finding most filthy, lazy, and wanting in Midwestern virtue. From Libya he once sent home a postcard reading, "No water in river and country full of wops."

His talent for invective was extraordinary. The British he regarded as "pink-coated, horn-blowing, supercilious bankrupts." The Blessed Isles were, to him, just a "chalk-cliffed hell." The marriage of Edward VIII to mannish Wallis Simpson suggested "possibilities of a repulsive nature." Nor was he any too fond of Northeasterners in his own land, believing that the U.S. began somewhere west of the Alleghenies and that real Americans would happily cede the East should the U.S. ever be invaded. Hardly any foe was too big, too small, or too unlikely to excite his fighting spirit. (He'd earned his colonel's rank in World War I.) When a fellow veteran and beauty-parlor owner took issue with the Tribune's opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II, McCormick, an America Firster, dismissed the letter as "about what we would expect from a man in the beauty-shop business."

He cultivated enemies the way other men cultivated orchids, winning F.D.R.'s special hatred for having published secret War Department plans that put the lie to the President's professed neutrality. McCormick's crotchets--which were many--he shared graciously with readers. Five days before his death, he still was peppering editors with suggestions: "It might be interesting to know when high heels came into use. We know that Cleopatra, who was very vain, had flat heels on her slippers." He wondered if in spring the Tribune could, for the benefit of readers, "pick out some individual robin...and follow it through to the full growth of the eggs."

The only one among McCormick's contemporaries who outdid him in baronialness was William Randolph Hearst, whose masterwork, incidentally, is coming up for its centennial. In eight months we'll all need to uncross our bandoleers and observe a moment's silence in honor of the Spanish-American War. Hearst's famous telegram to Frederic Remington ("You furnish the pictures...") we know. Less widely known is that Hearst, to impede the Spanish fleet, was prepared to dynamite the Suez Canal.

What H.L. Mencken once wrote of Hearst applies, with nearly equal justice, to McCormick: "Instead of wasting his money upon hospitals and libraries and going in for social-climbing, he poured his millions into yellow journals, and was presently enjoying all the thrills of a mad King. Wasn't that better than playing golf? Wasn't it better than becoming an overseer of Harvard?"

The news business now is overrun with golf players. That's its problem. It needs more buccaneers, more adventurers--more cranks. I hold out hope for Conrad Black, owner of 106 U.S. dailies, including the Chicago Sun-Times. As readers can learn from Shades of Black, a new biography by Richard Siklos (McClelland & Stewart, $24.95), almost everything about him seems promising: his fixation with Napoleon; his having been expelled from prep school; his gift for writing funny, elegant, and savage invective; and best, his eagerness to take up cudgels for his crotchets, which include short skirts. (He's for 'em.)

If I were the Suez Canal, I'd be worried.