Walter Annenberg, son of a very successful gangster and newspaper distributor who made his bones back in the day when those two occupations were synonymous, inherited the Daily Racing Form and the Philadelphia Inquirer when his father went away on tax charges. He built his publishing interests into a phenomenally successful enterprise — he had the foresight to launch TV Guide at just the moment it was needed — and ended up so wealthy that he gave away not millions but billions of dollars to good causes. He was, for a while, my neighbor in Lower Merion, Pa., though in spite of our both being newspapermen, our paths never crossed; strangely, I had hardly any nonagenarian billionaire Nixon cronies in my social circle at all.
I have always admired Annenberg, and to some extent his father, Moe, as well: Walter was a devil-may-care young man who quit Wharton to chase skirts (one of which was draped upon the person of Ginger Rogers), while Moe was an immigrant and self-made man who settled disputes with baseball bats and read Spinoza in his spare time. (Christopher Ogden relates many amusing anecdotes about the two.) The newspaper racket will, alas, never see their likes again. The disappointing thing about Walter Annenberg was that he spent so much of his time and energy trying to buy his way in to an attenuated social caste whose good opinion wasn’t worth his time. (If you own a major newspaper and still feel the need to rent status, you don’t know what to do with a daily broadsheet.) He could afford to live among the Biddles and Dorrances and Penns — indeed, he could have bought and sold all those old Main Line clans many times over — but he was always the felon’s son, the Jew, the arriviste whose money came from TV Guide. They never forgot, and he never forgave. Eventually, he leased himself an embassy and was installed as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. He was not obviously well qualified to occupy that diplomatic aerie, but he thrived in the position, and added a KBE to the slightly dented name his father bequeathed him.