PROLOGUE

ISTROS

It had been a remarkably chilly start to winter and there was a stiff breeze on Sydney Harbour when Lachlan Murdoch and his wife, Sarah, took a few friends out for a spin in their new $30 million motor yacht, Istros – a present for her fiftieth birthday.¹ On a Wednesday afternoon in early June, when most of America was fast asleep, Lachlan could afford to take time off from his day job running Fox Corporation, parent of the world’s most controversial cable television outfit, Fox News. Paparazzo Jayden Seyfarth watched through his long lens as Lachlan and Sarah helped their rugged-up guests aboard, settled in for drinks and took in the sunset.

At forty-three metres long, Istros was modest by today’s standards, when mega-yachts and giga-yachts two or three times the size can cost upwards of half a billion dollars. Oozing old-world charm, the ship was built in Holland in 1954 and originally owned by Greek shipping tycoons the Pappadakis family. In 2001 it won the grand prize for the best restored vessel at Monaco’s Classic Yacht Show but then fell into disrepair, sitting idle in Malta until it was bought for a song, gutted and completely refitted by van Geest Design – Dutch builders of super yachts for moguls, oligarchs and kleptocrats the world over. Lachlan had bought Istros in February 2022 and had it delivered down under, where it would entertain family and friends, a few lucky contacts from business and politics, as well as faithful toilers from across the Murdoch media empire, which had been founded in Australia by his grandfather, Sir Keith, and turned into the first global news conglomerate by his swashbuckling father, Rupert.

Nowhere did the Murdochs wield such concentrated power as in Australia, where the family had controlled two-thirds of newspaper circulation for nearly four decades and had an outright monopoly over pay-TV. Lachlan was a third-generation media mogul, living it up in his adoptive hometown – his older sister Prue had good reason to call him the ‘king of Sydney’. Istros took months to arrive, and on Lachlan and Sarah’s first outing the Daily Mail reported the couple looked as ‘happy as ever’. The next week, they took their teenage daughter Aerin and her friends around the harbour to see the Vivid festival, when Sydney’s world-famous Opera House, Harbour Bridge and Circular Quay were bathed in lightworks by visual artists from all over the globe. Papped by Seyfarth again, Lachlan stood by the gunnels of Istros and directly faced the cameraman, throwing his arms out wide as though surprised or annoyed at the attention. After spending his entire adult life in the spotlight, the man who employed as many journalists as anyone still bristled when he was the subject of their inquiries.

Beautiful as Istros might be, she was only a stop-gap runabout: Lachlan was awaiting delivery of the boat of his dreams, a 60-metre, $175 million, ultra-modern sloop under construction at another Dutch shipyard, Royal Huisman. The largest carbon-fibre yacht ever built in Holland, Murdoch’s new purchase was known only by the codename ‘MM597’ and would accommodate twelve guests and ten crew. According to the manufacturer’s website, distinguishing features included ‘a huge transom opening which … will give access to an expansive, lavish beach club.’ Lachlan and Sarah had paid a stunning $37 million for a boatshed and jetty at Point Piper, a few minutes’ drive from their $100 million Bellevue Hill mansion, Le Manoir. In the meantime, Istros would have to do.

While the Murdochs were relaxing on Sydney Harbour that Wednesday evening, it seemed America was going to hell. The following night, US time, in a throwback to the Watergate era, the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 would conduct its first televised hearings, revealing damning new evidence of an unprecedented attempt by a sitting president, Donald Trump, to stop the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Fox News Channel had announced earlier that week that it would not carry the hearing live at primetime, unlike every other network in America, opting instead to broadcast commentary on the hearing, even as it was underway, from its anchors Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Fox went so far as to make this programming ad-free, to avoid shedding audience to other channels during commercials. Millions of Fox viewers watching that evening would not have seen the opening statements of Democratic committee chair Bennie Thompson and Republican deputy chair Liz Cheney, the testimony of former attorney-general Bill Barr and Ivanka Trump, the fresh video footage of the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers who led the attack, or the evidence of Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, who was knocked unconscious and pepper-sprayed. Instead they heard Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham undermine the committee and downplay the hearings. Carlson had previously called the committee ‘wholly illegitimate’ and now told his viewers, ‘They’re lying, and we’re not going to help them do it.’

As CEO of Fox Corporation, Lachlan had undoubtedly okayed the extraordinary decision, which once again called into question whether Fox News was in the business of news or propaganda. Watching Fox’s coverage that night, it was hard to imagine how Americans would ever bridge the deepening divides over guns, abortion, the pandemic response, immigration, climate change, Black Lives Matter, gender and sexuality – and even over whether or not these disagreements could be resolved through democracy and the rule of law, rather than through violence and authoritarianism. If Americans could not even agree that Trump had lost the 2020 election, much less that he had then mounted an unprecedented and dangerous attempt to overturn the result, what could they possibly agree on? Fox News thrived on controversy, and of its primetime anchors none was more controversial than Carlson, one of Lachlan’s personal favourites and the highest-rating host in the history of cable television. Carlson had proved many times that he could make or break the careers of conservative politicians. His program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, had been described as ‘the most racist show in the history of cable news’.²

As Bloomberg journalist Tim O’Brien told MSNBC anchor Nicole Wallace, it was important not to focus too much on the Fox anchors, who were ultimately just the hired help: ‘You’re leaving the most important actor out: Lachlan Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch’s son runs that network. The family controls the company. If they wanted that network to do something other than engage in propaganda and to delude people and to serve other goals, he could put anybody he wants in that anchor seat. Tucker Carlson exists because Lachlan Murdoch wants him to exist.’³

Reports indicated the House committee believed it had enough evidence to indict Trump for sedition. His former campaign strategist Steve Bannon warned on his infamous War Room podcast: ‘We. Dare. You.’ As a ‘red wave’ of Republican victories loomed in November’s midterm elections – bigger than 1994 or even 2010, former House speaker Newt Gingrich told Laura Ingraham on Fox – Trump Republicans vowed to impeach Joe Biden over the alleged chaos at the Mexican border, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, or the influence-peddling of the president’s son, Hunter. Credible voices feared America, lurching from crisis to crisis, was spiralling into civil war.

Lachlan knew things were not getting better in America any time soon. Raised in the US from the age of three, he felt like an Australian and had divided his adult life between the two countries. Both his parents had grown up in Australia, and Australia was where he met Sarah and founded his own successful private investment firm after falling out with his father and turning his back on a career at News Corp in 2005. In 2015, he had returned to an executive role in the family business at Rupert’s express request, but after six years in Los Angeles, as the coronavirus ravaged America, Lachlan and Sarah decided they’d had enough and moved back to Sydney with their three kids … perhaps for good. Lachlan might not say so publicly, but in his bones he believed Australians had a better way of life. Although Carlson reckoned Australia had turned into a ‘COVID dictatorship’, the country had come through the pandemic with a death rate one-tenth that of the United States and a vaccination rate of 95 per cent. Schools were safe from gun violence. The politics of hate and polarisation had not yet split the lucky country down the middle.

Ironically, those things that made Australia a cocoon for Lachlan and Sarah, and a better place to raise their family, like tougher public health restrictions and gun control, were the very things that Fox News railed against in America, on a nightly basis. Running Fox Corporation from Australia suggested a fundamental disconnect: he was hardly practising what his network’s primetime anchors preached. At work, he was a ruthless five-star general in the culture wars, overseeing the Fox News juggernaut, pumping ‘America First’ and driving earnings growth in the family business – what Senator Elizabeth Warren famously called a ‘hate-for-profit racket’. At home, or on one of his many fabulous holidays, he was a laid-back Australian and all-round smooth operator: spectacularly rich, impeccably mannered, handsome, open-minded, adventurous, savvy, fun.

LACHLAN’S MOVE TO SYDNEY ALSO spoke of a fundamental ambivalence: he had never wanted to be CEO of the family business, or, if it came down to it, the CEO of anything. As the oldest son, he was the presumptive ‘first among equals’ of his siblings and had always aspired to be chairman, like his father – preferably non-executive, that ultimate position of power without day-to-day responsibility. Never your eighty-hours-a-week, chained-to-the-desk kind of manager, Lachlan was happiest in the elements, mountain climbing or sailing. Now, having racked up three years’ service as CEO of Fox Corp, and with Rupert at ninety-one taking a back seat, Lachlan could look forward to ascending to the role of non-executive chairman and owner of a controlling stake in the most powerful news business in the world.

What could go wrong? After years of jockeying over the succession, his brother, James, and sister, Liz, were out of contention – it seemed for good. If Carlson or any other host got too controversial, they could always be fired or redeployed – it was an iron law of the Murdoch empire that none of the talent was indispensable. If Fox or News shares slid, the family business could always be taken private or sold. Whatever happened to either company, the bulk of Lachlan’s fortune lay elsewhere: he owned a ton of Disney shares; his investment firm, Illyria, had made him a billionaire in his own right; there were mega-mansions in LA, Aspen and Sydney, and more yachts, cars and bikes than he knew what to do with.

As Istros lumbered around a blustery harbour, Lachlan knew it was only a matter of time before the succession was behind him and he could do as he liked.

PART 1

LACHIE

1

A SON IS BORN

London, 1971. The centuries-old newspaper industry was in crisis. Reporters and copy editors had imposed rolling strikes in response to a new minimum pay deal struck by the national journalists’ union, and a shutdown loomed. The cost of newsprint and wages was spiralling, and circulation and advertising were falling. The venerable Times was losing a million pounds a year, and the Daily Mail twice that.

While the lords of the British press – Thomson, Beaverbrook, Rothermere – racked up losses on their flagging mastheads, there was a bright spot. A brash new contender from down under, Rupert Murdoch, had taken over both the News of the World – the highest-selling English-language newspaper in the world – and The Sun. Alone among the national dailies, The Sun was enjoying a spectacular rise in sales. Murdoch turned the staid broadsheet into a raucous tabloid full of nudes and sports news. Newly arrived in England with his young Australian family in tow, he pushed into television and reported surging profits as The Sun’s circulation jumped to two million copies a day, forcing the other tabloids to play catch-up.

On 8 September, a crisp Wednesday in autumn, Murdoch had another reason to be proud: his wife, Anna, gave birth to their second child, Lachlan Keith Murdoch, at the Merton hospital in Wimbledon. A decade younger than Rupert, Anna was born in Scotland but emigrated with her family to Sydney, where she endured a tough childhood, looking after her siblings after their father’s business went broke and their mother left home. Anna had met Rupert while she was a cadet reporter on one of his tabloid newspapers, and they married in 1967. The couple’s daughter, Elisabeth – named after Rupert’s mother – was born in Sydney in 1968, and they were also raising Prudence, Rupert’s daughter from his first marriage, who had just turned thirteen. Lachlan’s younger brother, James, would be born fifteen months after him. Lachlan’s middle name was a nod to Rupert’s father, the late Sir Keith, a pioneering journalist who had towered over Australian politics for decades as editor of the powerful Melbourne Herald and as chairman of the Herald and Weekly Times, where he forged the country’s first national media chain.

Keith was not rich, however, and when he died of a heart attack in 1952 at the age of sixty-seven, all that was left for Rupert was control of a company, News Ltd, which held stakes in two small newspapers in Adelaide, the News and the Sunday Mail. From that modest base, Rupert expanded into Perth, then Sydney, then New Zealand and now the UK. As the first son, Lachlan shouldered the weight of Rupert’s expectations that the Murdoch dynasty would carry on into a third generation of newspapermen.

ALTHOUGH RUPERT BOASTED THAT NEWS’ business was making ‘good progress’, there was trouble on the home front. A pall was cast over the Murdoch family’s life in London after a terrifying attempt to kidnap Anna went tragically wrong. On 29 December 1969, two brothers from Trinidad, Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein, sons of a Muslim cleric, abducted Muriel McKay, the wife of Rupert’s second-in-charge in London, Alick. Alick had been using the Murdochs’ Rolls-Royce while Rupert was in Australia, and the Hosein brothers followed the car home. Breaking in one afternoon, they kidnapped Muriel, believing she was Anna, and demanded a million-pound ransom. The saga dragged on for weeks – the News of the World covered it in detail – until undercover police found and arrested the Hosein brothers. Muriel’s body was never found, and the men were convicted of murder. Even fifty years later, Anna was loath to discuss the kidnapping, telling Forbes magazine it was a ‘really, really terrible time’.¹ The episode put Anna off London; the feeling got worse after another tragedy, when she knocked down and killed an old woman while driving. Anna wanted to move the whole family to America, later admitting she ‘couldn’t wait to leave.’ Lachlan would hardly remember his early childhood in Britain and would joke as an adult that he was embarrassed to have been born there, although he retained his UK citizenship.

The family’s opportunity to move came in 1973, when Rupert bought his first American newspaper, the San Antonio Express, in the fast-growing sunbelt state of Texas. Applying the proven Murdoch formula, he juiced up the morning broadsheet; one edition carried the famous headline ‘KILLER BEES MOVE NORTH’. The following year, the family moved to Manhattan when Rupert launched the National Star, a tabloid rival to the National Enquirer. His private meetings with Dolly Schiff, the ageing proprietor of the New York Post, culminated in him buying the paper in 1976. He followed up with controversial acquisitions of New York magazine and The Village Voice in quick succession.

In 1977, Time magazine put Rupert on the cover, with his head on the body of King Kong above the strapline: ‘EXTRA!!! AUSSIE PRESS LORD TERRIFIES GOTHAM’. Lachlan, then five years old, later recalled seeing his father ‘on top of the World Trade Center with little planes trying to shoot him down’; he would come to realise that no one else’s dad was publicly portrayed as such a monster.²

The Murdoch children lived an enchanted life, spread across luxury apartments in New York and London, mansions in Los Angeles and Sydney, a ranch in northern California, a ski lodge at Aspen with a pool in the living room, and the historic Cavan cattle station near Canberra. For Liz, Lachlan and James, their home base for most of their childhood was a fabulous 1930s penthouse on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 88th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, overlooking Central Park. Across the road from the Guggenheim Museum, the apartment was described by The Washington Post as having ‘an understated elegance, a country feel of browns, beiges and peach tones, with mostly period furniture’:

There are 18th-century Chippendale bookcases from Rupert Murdoch’s father, Sir Keith Murdoch, filled with 17th-century china; two brown velvet couches flanking a mantel; and a French baroque couch covered in green and peach silk … A terrace surrounds the penthouse offering a glorious view of Central Park, its reservoir and New York’s skyline. The elevator opens into their apartment, its door tended by the butler, George.

Anna told the Post: ‘It’s just like being in a house once you’re inside. We like it.’³

From a very young age, the Murdoch kids understood they were in the media business. As Lachlan recalled in a 2001 interview for the ABC’s Dynasties program:

Liz, James and I would come up for breakfast before we had to get the bus to school and all the papers would come out and we’d have the New York Post, The New York Times, the Daily News and The Wall Street Journal, and as we read the papers my dad would be handing out the stories and saying, ‘Read that’ or he’d say, ‘Look at the headline, that’s a shocking headline.’

A similar ritual would play out in the evening – if the Murdoch children wanted their father’s attention, they needed to enter his orbit and talk media and politics. ‘We always had staff serving us,’ Lachlan told the ABC. ‘My father would come home; we’d have to get dressed to see him. We would have half an hour with him alone before the guests came over.’⁴ Rupert was affectionate, always ready for a big bear hug, but he was not a ‘wrestly daddy’, as Anna said once, for fear the kids might rumple his tie. He was often distracted. ‘Is Daddy going deaf?’ young James once asked his mum. ‘No,’ said Anna, ‘he’s just not listening.’⁵

‘We could never take our family life out of business,’ Anna said. ‘They were so intermingled.’⁶ In the same vein, Lachlan told Geraldine Brooks in a New York Times interview: ‘We’re a private family. We don’t talk about our personal affairs. But we can talk about business forever.’⁷

From his grandfather’s bookshelves to his father’s business deals, Lachlan was constantly surrounded by the history of his family, the closest thing Australia has to royalty. The Murdochs’ spiritual home was Cruden Farm, the charming property south-east of Melbourne which Sir Keith had bought for Dame Elisabeth when they married, where Rupert and his three sisters had grown up, and where the whole extended family sometimes gathered for Christmas. Lachlan liked to trace the family’s history back further, to the two great-grandfathers on his father’s side. Sir Keith’s father, the Reverend Patrick Murdoch, was a strict Presbyterian minister with a powerful work ethic who had emigrated to Australia from the Scottish village of Rosehearty. Dame Elisabeth’s father, Rupert Greene, was a hard-drinking raconteur with a chronic gambling streak, who gave his namesake grandson his legendary appetite for risk. In his 2001 ABC interview, Lachlan saw the genetic mix of Patrick Murdoch and Rupert Greene ‘playing itself out in all our lives every day. Everything from the fact we all tend to work too-long hours and sacrifice a lot for it, but at the same time we all enjoy … taking risks and making quick decisions.’⁸

As Lachlan got older, summers were often spent getting work experience in the family business. One year, he was sent to work at Boonoke-Wanganella, a century-old sheep stud in the New South Wales Riverina, where he earned his first pay cheque from News Corp. Lachlan loved the raw, rugged Australian bush. Bob Sefton, the manager, told one reporter that ‘Lachie’ was just like his father, even as a teenager: ‘He was always asking questions. He wanted to know how everything worked. We paid him a jackaroo’s wage of $150 a week, which he was saving towards buying a motorbike back in the States. Every night he’d want to know the latest exchange rate and was dismayed to find it was falling.’⁹ Another year, Lachlan cleaned the printing presses for Sydney’s Daily Mirror – he even joined the printers’ union – and worked as a cub reporter for the San Antonio Express. These brief immersions reinforced the sense that the young Murdoch was destined to follow his father and grandfather into the media, although not necessarily at News Corp; Anna’s plan was that her kids would work for other companies, at least initially.

Family holidays could be anywhere in the world – sailing the Mediterranean, skiing in Aspen, or relaxing on the farm at Cavan. One year, the family reportedly went on a guided trek high into the Rockies, and Lachlan was told that according to legend, young Native American braves had to scale a mountain to get their eagle feather. He climbed a nearby peak and on returning to camp was presented with the feather of a hawk. He would become an avid rock climber. Lachlan loved getting out into the wilderness: when a reporter cornered Rupert and the boys at a gala event in Los Angeles in 1984, he asked Lachlan the best thing about his dad. The teenager paused before deciding to play it safe, saying cheerfully: ‘Um, well, he always likes to go camping with us!’ James showed a bit more spark, describing his dad as ‘different to what the newspapers say and the TV shows. Well, I think the papers and the shows about him and stuff make him look too mean and dark and sinister and really he’s a really nice person, a fun person.’¹⁰

Close in age, Lachlan and James were ultra-competitive. Family Monopoly games were intense, and everybody was prepared to cheat.¹¹ According to one story, possibly apocryphal, the two boys would use the beams in the lodge at Aspen for chin-up competitions that went on until their hands bled.¹² Like most brothers, they sometimes fought – as an adult, Lachlan would brag that he usually won.

Anna was a devout Catholic and more conservative than Rupert in many ways – she didn’t like The Simpsons, voted Republican and thought abortion should be illegal. With Rupert so often at work, discipline was left to Anna. James described his mother as ‘tough as nails’.¹³ Although the kids were raised Catholic, they were not sent to Catholic schools, and Lachlan describes his own faith as Christian, rather than Catholic, atheist or agnostic. Anna’s strong influence on Lachlan is often overlooked and underestimated. According to a source close to him, Lachlan identified strongly with his mother’s Scottish heritage and felt ‘a strong pull towards the values of the Scottish people … that frugality [and] sort of being outsiders within Great Britain.’ Despite their wealth and influence, Lachlan felt he grew up in an ordinary family with ordinary family issues, albeit in extraordinary circumstances. ‘We were never badly spoiled,’ he would say, adding that his parents ‘never let us think that we were at all special or different in any way.’ Part of it was growing up in New York, which had a grounding effect on Lachlan, ‘because everyone moves around on the street level, and you can be sharing a bus or getting on a subway, and you don’t really see other people’s families or their homes, or no one has fancy cars or anything like that.’

For elementary school the Murdoch kids were nonetheless sent to Dalton – an elite, co-educational private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side – and then to exorbitantly expensive Ivy League preparatory schools. Lachlan went to the all-boys Allen-Stevenson School in his middle years and then to the co-educational high school Trinity nearby. He was an average kid at school, happy to try his hand at anything. As he later recalled, he was not an athlete, or focused on sport, but was ‘good enough to sort of spend time with those groups. Neither was I the best student ever, but I was good enough to hang out with studious types, and [nor] was I a totally social animal, but social enough that I got along with everyone in a sense.’ At high school there was plenty of chopping and changing. Biographies of Rupert contain varying accounts of their childhoods. Thomas Kiernan wrote that Rupert complained that the bad press he received in New York was affecting his kids, with the two boys showing behavioural problems and Elisabeth expelled from her Connecticut boarding school.¹⁴ According to Neil Chenoweth, she had smuggled in a bottle of rum.¹⁵ One year, when the Murdochs were considering a move to Australia, Elisabeth was sent to Geelong Grammar, Rupert’s old boarding school, while Lachlan and James remained in New York. The move never happened, and Liz returned to America.¹⁶

From his early days at Trinity, Lachlan showed signs he was leaning to the right, politically. In 1987, at the age of fifteen, he was one of five boys who formed the Trinity Conservative Society, believing that there was a ‘definite imbalance of political ideology in the school community’. The group’s statement in the school yearbook – alongside a photo of the boys, all with jackets and most with ties – explained:

Our school is based on the premise that one’s opinions should be based on a full understanding of all the facts. The Trinity Conservative Society was formed in an attempt to create a healthy balance between all points of view so that none can be given more attention or clout. T.C.S. is an organization with no budget, no activities, and few meetings. It is open to all those who share in our belief of equal representation of political views (Right or wrong!), and those with a clear conservative conscience.¹⁷

‘Few meetings’ turned out to be the guiding principle of the society, and there was no activity at all so far as Lachlan can recall. In the fall of 1987, as he was turning sixteen, Lachlan was sent to board at the Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, one of the top ten schools in the country. Phillips alumni include six presidents over more than two centuries, but Lachlan hated his time at Andover, a small town an hour north of Boston, where the winters are bitterly cold. Like his father, Lachlan was a middling student – albeit smart enough to get into the selective Phillips Academy – and now he found himself competing with the best and brightest kids from around the world. The discipline was strict and the academic demands relentless, but the opportunities were also boundless, with overseas exchanges, internship opportunities in Washington and a storied student newspaper, The Phillippian, which has produced many senior journalists.

Lachlan arrived at Andover during an unprecedented debate about the school’s culture, including high expectations, stress and a lack of diversity. In his first year, a student attempted suicide, and a thousand students signed a petition calling for a ‘moratorium day’ without classes and a ‘light week’ to ease the pressure. The school responded by embracing multiculturalism, overhauling the timetable to free up afternoons, and giving students a greater say in decision-making. But Lachlan did not get involved, either through the student paper or through any of the representative bodies – in fact, his only appearance in The Phillippian was a good-natured comment he gave for a story in mid-1988 about the school’s new martial arts club. Described as a devoted member of the club, Lachlan said he hoped to see more structure the following year – ‘bowing your head when you enter, that sort of stuff.’¹⁸ But there would be no following year: Lachlan left Phillips Academy after the fall. Attending Andover is a privilege; very few students turn their back on it. As a teenager, Lachlan showed he was prepared to defy expectations and walk away, even from the most extraordinary opportunities. Decades later, he would do so again.

Anna moved Lachlan to the small, unpretentious Aspen Country Day School in Colorado, where he was a boarder and where the focus was on outdoor learning. He was one of just eight students in the class of 1990; the school stopped teaching to year twelve the following year. The fact that Prue, Elisabeth and James all graduated from prestigious Ivy League feeder schools, while Lachlan went to Aspen, no doubt contributed to the perception inside and outside the family that he was less academically gifted than his siblings. Anna herself touted James as the smartest of her children in a profile for The New York Times, in which she pointed out that ‘[James] has his father’s powers of memory and intellect.’¹⁹

Growing up, young Elisabeth was more interested in the television side of the business. In a 2012 New Yorker profile, she told Ken Auletta that she watched television voraciously, especially reruns of I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family.²⁰ For work experience as a school student, she interned at Sky News.

James did a stint on Sydney’s Daily Mirror as a teenager, but it turned into a nightmare when a photo of the young intern asleep at a press conference wound up on the front page of a rival paper, The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘Everybody knew who I was,’ James recalled. ‘I wouldn’t do it again.’²¹

Lachlan, by contrast, had always had a genuine passion for newspapers. He fondly remembered standing in the loading dock of the New York Post as a six-year-old, among the trucks and stacks of papers, which he loved ‘not for the business but for the craft of journalism that they represented.’²² Straight after graduating from Aspen, he did a short stint as a junior reporter with the London Times. Asked to take care of Lachlan, one Times journalist took him to the pub and got a call from the news desk within ten minutes: ‘For God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t get him pissed!’ They need not have worried: Lachlan drank orange juice.²³ He also worked as a subeditor on the Sun, where he was slugged ‘MURDO’ in the computerised copy management system. He showed some flair for a headline – he got a few page ones – and earned the respect of the editors and subs. On the high-pressure, no-bullshit news floor of Britain’s highest-selling daily tabloid, Lachlan held his own. As one editor observed, ‘He loved them, and they loved him.’²⁴

For all his fondness for the craft of journalism, however, Lachlan’s time as a working journalist was short, and he never had a by-line. Reflecting later, he had no doubt that his newspaper jobs helped him to get a handle on the print side of the business: ‘I understand that I’m not the best subeditor in the world, but I certainly can appreciate good subediting.’²⁵

In 1990, Lachlan was thrilled to be accepted into his first preference and enrolled in an arts degree at Princeton University in New Jersey; he would get his Ivy League education after all. Established in 1746 on empty paddocks halfway between New York and Washington, Princeton’s main buildings are made from dark stone in the beautiful ‘collegiate Gothic’ architectural style – a delight to walk through. Lachlan chose Princeton partly because it was near New York, so he could get back and see his parents regularly, although as it happened Rupert and Anna started spending more time in Los Angeles in those years. Although he was the son of a media mogul, Lachlan found he could blend in at Princeton and was by no means the wealthiest guy there. He lived on campus for the first two years before moving into a rented attic unit in the cheerful little adjacent township, full of bookshops and cafes. Lachlan was a relatively straight arrow at college: he kept a low profile, with zero presence in The Daily Princetonian and no youthful hi-jinks to speak of. At Harvard, by contrast, James bleached his hair, pierced his eyebrow and penned an edgy cartoon series for The Harvard Lampoon before ultimately dropping out.

Lachlan started dating a history student from Atlanta, Kate Harbin, who had graduated from the elite Christian school Westminister and got into Princeton on a scholarship. Harbin was a go-getter: student chair of her residential college and heavily involved with The Daily Princetonian, where she was a junior editor. Lachlan and Kate were soon getting pretty serious about each other.

Lachlan also got serious about rock climbing, training eight hours a day, racing his friend Peter Hunt, a classics scholar ten years older than him, up a gym wall wearing weighted backpacks and spending weekends climbing in national parks. Lachlan got extremely good at it and considered going professional. ‘You’ve got to understand, this is a guy who could’ve been a world champion climber,’ says one old friend, Joe Cross. Years later, in a foreword for a book by legendary Australian mountaineer Lincoln Hall, Lachlan pondered why ‘some of us climb mountains while others are happy with a comfortable job and a decent retirement plan,’ concluding that the answer could not be taught or learned but ‘must be felt’. Denying the sport was for people who had a death wish, Lachlan acknowledged that a number of the great climbers he’d known over the years ‘prematurely met their end’.²⁶ Climbing would remain part of who Lachlan was, and he dedicated his Princeton thesis to Hunt, for setting an example ‘which led to the two most happy and fulfilled years of my adult life.’

Lachlan described himself as a decent student, getting mostly Bs and B-plusses, and it wasn’t until his final year that he really hit the books. Like a journalist, Lachlan would push his deadlines. ‘I tended to leave everything to the last minute,’ he recalled. ‘So I’d be finishing up my essays until, you know, the last second, the morning they had to be done.’ Arts students at Princeton must write a final-year thesis of more than ten thousand words, the culmination of their study. Lachlan majored in philosophy, and his thesis wrestled with Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. In an earnest paper, Lachlan rejected Kant’s narrow view that only autonomous actions, motivated by a sense of duty, are morally virtuous. Instead of such black-and-white extremes – autonomous and heteronomous, moral and non-moral – Lachlan argued there should be room for shades of grey:

for example, if I refuse to allow someone to steal from my family, or if I refuse to lie to my girlfriend, these actions are motivated by a healthy respect for the moral law … and also, at least in part, I am motived out of love. Because my love plays some role in my choice of maxim, my will would not be autonomous in Kant’s vocabulary, but it would be free, if we could succeed in loosening Kant’s notion of freedom to include heteronomy, and as free it would be a morally responsible and merititious action.

Lachlan wrote that his aim was to ‘ratify’ the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita that discipline is more important than renunciation of action. He quoted Lord Krishna: while the man of eternal renunciation is one who neither hates nor desires, the man of discipline ‘has joy, delight, and light within; becoming the infinite spirit, he finds the pure calm of infinity.’²⁷

The journalist Peter Maass interviewed some of Lachlan’s friends and teachers at Princeton, including his adviser, Professor Beatrice Longuenesse, who agreed to re-read a copy of the Kant thesis as they talked. ‘I had forgotten how good this is,’ she told Maass. ‘It’s a young man struggling with questions that are clearly his own questions but working on them through major issues in philosophy.’ Longuenesse remembered Lachlan as a poetic character, because of his interest in the outdoors. ‘It was quite clear that he wanted to be a decent person,’ she recalled, ‘and he was a decent person.’ At the same time, Longuenesse felt Lachlan was not about to rock the boat. As Maass observed:

his devotion to German philosophy and the spiritual questions of the Bhagavad Gita did not dominate the next phase of his life. Princeton, like other top universities, tends to function as an incubator of the status quo. After four years of apparently sincere immersion in history, philosophy, or literature, a large number of students from Princeton and other elite universities glide to the highest reaches of the business world, which they do not tend to disrupt with the lofty ideas they explored as undergraduates.²⁸

Longuenesse agrees: she says now that while she has happy memories of supervising Lachlan, she believes Fox News and the Murdoch machine have a ‘detestable’ responsibility for the increasing polarisation of the United States. Lachlan’s story, she says sadly, ‘has become very dark and gets darker by the day.’

2

‘WHY NOT?’

While Lachlan finished his degree, Rupert Murdoch was staking the future of News on television – which he saw as the dominant medium of the twentieth century – and with an increasingly conservative bent. Through the 1970s, as Lachlan was growing up, Rupert Murdoch’s politics had turned sharply to the right. At the start of the decade, when he bought UK tabloid The Sun, he had promised unions that the paper would retain its left-wing leanings. The Sun was against apartheid, against capital punishment, against the war in Vietnam and – most of all – against the establishment. The Sun backed Labour in Britain’s national election in 1970, although the conservative Edward Heath became prime minister in an upset.

In 1972, Murdoch’s flagship broadsheet down under, The Australian, strongly backed Gough Whitlam’s campaign to become prime minister; his famous ‘It’s Time!’ campaign ushered in the first Labor government in twenty-three years. Whitlam would prove the country’s most progressive prime minister, introducing far-reaching reforms including free public healthcare and university education, Aboriginal land rights and no-fault divorce, and a complete withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. However, by 1975, as the oil shock set in and Whitlam’s chaotic style and sweeping