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Robert Rutherford McCormick (July 30, 1880 – April 1, 1955) was a Chicago newspaper baron and owner of the Chicago Tribune. His grandfather was Tribune-founder and former Chicago mayor Joseph Medill, and his great-uncle was the inventor and businessman Cyrus McCormick. McCormick was born in Chicago. From 1889 through 1893, he lived with his parents in London where his father Robert Sanderson McCormick was a staff secretary to Robert Todd Lincoln. In 1899, McCormick began attending Yale University, following which he received a law degree from Northwestern University. In 1908, he co-founded the law firm that became Kirkland & Ellis. To this day, Kirkland remains one of the leading law firms in the United States. In 1911, he became the president of the Chicago Tribune. During World War I, footage of McCormick meeting with Tsar Nicholas became the first newsreel footage. On this trip, McCormick also began collecting pieces of historically significant buildings which would eventually find their way into the structure of the Tribune Tower. While politically McCormick was extremely conservative, when it came to his business, he was very innovative. McCormick bought a radio station in 1924 and was the first to broadcast the Indianapolis 500, the World Series, and the Kentucky Derby. He also established the town of Baie-Comeau, Quebec in 1936 and constructed a paper mill there. The giant convention center McCormick Place on the near South Side of Chicago is named after him. McCormick's Wheaton, Illinois estate, Cantigny, was named after the French city of the same name, where the First Division of the U.S. Army first encountered trench warfare during WWI. It has since been converted into a war museum and popular tourist attraction. Today, the Engineering School at his alma mater, Northwestern University is named in his honor. In Peter Bogdanovich's book, This is Orson Welles, he quotes in his introduction that Charles Lederer believed that it was McCormick who the original inspiration for the title character of Citizen Kane and not William Randolph Hearst. Some of McCormick's personal crusades were seen as quixotic (such as his attempts to reform spelling of the English language) and were parodied in political cartoons in rival Frank Knox's Chicago Daily News. Knox's political cartoonists derided McCormick as "Colonel McCosmic".
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