Click 1 DECEMBER 1961
President John F Kennedy, Rupert Murdoch
words by Michael Epis photo by Getty
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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU
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he most extraordinary thing about this photo is not simply that Rupert Murdoch was once a young man – it is from nearly 60 years ago – but just who Murdoch was at the time. He owned a few Australian metro newspapers – two in Adelaide and one each in Perth and Sydney. It would be seven years before he owned a British paper (News of the World, shuttered in 2011 because of the phone-hacking scandal), and 12 years before he owned one in the US, in San Antonio, Texas. But Murdoch knew the importance of political connections. When Rupert was just out of school, his father Keith, also a newspaperman, lunched with Prime Minister Robert Menzies, in which inside information about Australia’s exchange rate was shared. Rupert caught on quick. Months later, he was at a White House press conference when President Harry Truman announced the Korean War. Murdoch has met every American president since. Kennedy let Murdoch (who had just been to Cuba) know that the US was amending policy on the Dutch withdrawal from West New Guinea. Murdoch prepared to write up his scoop, but Kennedy’s press secretary insisted it was off the record. Murdoch held his ground, and flew off to New York. On landing, Secret Service agents boarded the plane
and ordered Murdoch to phone Australia’s ambassador – who informed Murdoch that if he wrote the story he would never get a US visa again. The story remained unwritten (and West Papua remains non-Communist in Indonesian hands, as Kennedy wanted at the time). Murdoch no longer needs a visa; he has long been a US citizen. His ties with presidents are too long to list, but briefly: the man who created Murdoch’s Fox News, Roger Ailes, also engineered Richard Nixon’s TV campaign in his presidential win in 1968, and did likewise for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George Bush Sr in 1988. Then there’s Donald Trump. They shared a lawyer, Roy Cohn, whose dark deeds dated back to 1950s McCarthyism. Trump became a celebrity thanks to the Page Six gossip column in Murdoch’s New York Post. To that degree, Trump always was Murdoch’s creation. According to journalist Michael Wolff, Murdoch has long derided him privately (not publicly) as a fool, even while boosting him on Fox when it suited. Despite his recently discontinued daily/weekly chats with Trump, Murdoch tipped Biden to win this election, which will make it 14 presidents of his acquaintance – nearly one-third of all US presidents – if and when they meet. He likes winners.