John Hay ("Jock") Whitney was master of one of America's great fortunes, a sportsman, a philanthropist, an art collector, and a diplomat. He also, over the course of a decade, poured nearly $40 million and all of his enormous energy into a gallant, ultimately futile attempt to save the once great New York Herald Tribune in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Whitney took control of the Herald Tribune in 1959, when the Times and the Tribune were the last two serious, competing morning newspapers in the city, and the only two with national and international reputations. The Times had a distinctly Democratic tinge. The Herald Tribune--which traced its ancestry to the New York Herald, founded in 1835 by James Gordon Bennett, and the New York Tribune, established by Horace Greeley in 1841--was long a mainstay of the Republican party.

The Herald Tribune had a special place in the hearts...