Hearst is usually remembered as a flag-waving, jingoistic patriot who was anti-British, anti-French, anti-Oriental - anti almost everything except the United States. He was regarded as an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, and a staunch isolationist who believed that minimizing American contact with the rest of the world was the only sure way to achieve security. Using all the journalistic apparatus at his disposal, Hearst trumpeted his views about the conduct of other nations and peoples and, more particularly, about the conduct of his own country in relation to them. The Spanish-American War...

The Hearst newspaper chain, at its peak the largest in the history of American journalism, was a mouthpiece for William Randolph Hearst. He expounded his views on national and world events in editorials, becoming a major and ever-present figure in the political arena. Despise and hate him as they might - and many of them did - American presidents and politicians could not ignore him, even during his later years. In The View from Xanadu Ian Mugridge evaluates Hearst's attitudes towards U.S. foreign policy issues and the effect of his views on national foreign policy in the first half of the...