War at the Wall Street Journal Read Free

and Hugh Bancroft Jr., who had lived comfortably off the fortune, entertained in their Boston Back Bay mansions and tended their horses. (Hugh, Jessie, and Jane died in 1953, 1982, and 2002, respectively.)
    Their sparring heirs formed the three branches of the family—each with a roughly equal share of the family fortune—who had faced down Murdoch. His $5 billion, $60-a-share offer boosted the value of the original Bancroft fortune by over half a billion dollars, enough to allow the thirty-five adult members of the family to envision a few more years in the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. But the family had been deeply divided by the offer and was even further torn apart now that the decision had been made.
    Rupert Murdoch was a suitor more similar to their founder, Barron, than any of the Bancrofts would have liked to admit. (The year of his death, Clarence Barron broke with Dow Jones's late founder Charles Dow's decree that the
Journal
never endorse a political candidate and called for a vote for Herbert Hoover.) Like Murdoch, Grandpa Barron had multiple residences and an elaborate entourage. He traveled with sixty pieces of luggage, a secretary, a chauffeur, and a male nurse who buttoned his pants and tied his shoes for him since his girth prevented such exertions.
    As his company passed through the generations, Barron's descendants turned their lack of interest into a virtue, protecting their precious heirloom with a policy of noninterference. "Leave it to the professionals" became the mantra. Such benign neglect worked as long as the family had a clear leader, and for much of the newspaper industry's halcyon years that leader was Barron's granddaughter Jessie Bancroft Cox—irreverent, boisterous, and horsey in the Boston way. As her family gathered in April 1982 at Manhattan's '21' Club to celebrate Dow Jones's hundredth anniversary, the round grandmother entertained with characteristic stories—she once caught future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt trying to cheat her in a game of mahjong. She had lived her life in Boston and spent the summers a short drive away at the family's lavish twenty-eight-room summer home, "The Oaks," on Cohasset Harbor, complete with tennis courts, a boat dock, and equestrian-inspired china that acknowledged Jes
sie's passion for horses. The house, originally designed by Barron as a wooden Victorian, had been torn down after his death by his son-in-law Hugh Bancroft, who rebuilt it in brick as a wedding present for his daughter Jessie. She had entertained President Eisenhower there and hosted elegant equestrian events, helping create what the local historian in Cohasset called "an illustrious chapter" in the town's history. At the time of the dinner at the '21' Club, Dow Jones was at the height of its success and power. Jessie's son, William Cox Jr., called the
Journal
"the best damn paper in the country."
    But that evening, Jessie was in a foul mood. As a Bostonian and a sports fan, she had developed a strong affection for the hometown baseball team. The Red Sox had lost six out of the last ten games and she was upset about the losing streak. When another dinner guest mentioned the losses, she responded angrily.
    "What the fuck's the matter with my Red Sox?" she cried, promptly knocking against the adjacent table before falling to the floor. She was rushed past her stunned relatives and died shortly afterward. With her died any remaining cohesion in the Bancroft family, and the "professionals" slowly adopted an ever more powerful role, dictating many of the family's financial decisions. That was until thirty-two-year-old Elisabeth Goth, the great-great-granddaughter of Clarence Barron, descended from the Hugh Bancroft branch of the family, decided to join forces with her third cousin Billy Cox III, Jessie's grandson, to challenge "the professionals."
    Despite their occasional eruptions, the Bancrofts had become one of the lesser-known dynasties, lacking the