When William Loeb died in 1981, the Boston Globe said, "Not since the free-wheeling days of William Randolph Hearst Sr. has the United States seen a newspaper mogul as controversial and choleric as William Loeb." A year or so before his death that Hearstian image also appeared in a Washington Post feature that told readers of "the San Simeon of the Atlantic"--Loeb's thirty-room mansion on an estate that covered seventy acres of oceanfront land in Prides Crossing, Massachusetts. Visitors were welcomed by a German shepherd and a Doberman pinscher, which augmented a high-tech security system.

Although there seems to be no record of just what Loeb thought of such comparisons to Hearst, they were indeed apt in view of his career. Even though Loeb's newspaper empire was much smaller than Hearst's, the power that Loeb wielded over his territory--and over the nation--was almost as great. That power came...