The Hearsts: Father and Son.

• Author: Ghiglione, Loren

The Hearsts: Father and Son. William Randolph Hearst Jr., Jack Casserly. Roberts Rinehart Publishers, $29.95. It's hard to resist savaging this book by a son of the Hearst, the mythic media mogul, and Jack Casserly, a speechwriter for President Gerald Ford. Turning the pages is like turning on the lights in a Lower East Side tenement kitchen. The cliches, like cockroaches, dance everywhere.

William Randolph Hearst Jr., whose preface is addressed to "my fellow Americans," tells us that he has "thought long and hard," "lived in the lap of luxury," and "looked death in the face." His father, we learn, "called a spade a spade." San Simeon's architect possessed "a steel-trap mind and a will of iron."

As for content, this timid tome, which bills itself as a firsthand peek at Hearst Sr., never gets near him. That's not entirely Junior's fault. As a child, while his parents lived in a mansion-sized New York apartment filed with museum-quality furnishings, he and his four brothers were relegated to a nearby apartment with cousins. After Hearst Sr., age 55, began seeing--then living with--mistress Marion Davies, age 21, the son's access to his father was again limited. But Junior sees his father with the unquestioning eyes of a loyal son.

WRH, Jr., the 83-year-old editor-in-chief of Hearst newspapers, says his dad's anticommunist crusade, though it callously pilloried many Americans who were not Red, "has finally been vindicated." He cannot bring himself actually to view Citizen Kane, which portrays a Hearstian newspaper mogul, but he attacks the movie as superficial and inaccurate. He defends the fortune--today it would be valued in the billions--that his father squandered on San Simeon, saying, "It was his money."

While Junior writes a weekly column and won a Pulitzer Prize along with Joseph Kingsbury-Smith and Frank Conniff in 1956, in writing this book he seems to have forgotten the reporter's duty to dig for details and insights. The book settles instead for platitudes a publisher might spout--about, say, highway safety--to a Rotary Club luncheon.

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