Names That Make the News

THE POWERS THAT BE by David Halberstam; Knopf; 771 pages; $15

One day at the White House, President Franklin Roosevelt noticed a radio reporter named Robert Trout holding a microphone that bore unfamiliar initials. F.D.R. stopped and asked: "CBS? What's that?" Some 40 years later, President Richard Nixon believed that CBS and other news organizations were trying to drive him out of office. Clearly, a lot happened in between. What, precisely, forms the subject of The Powers That Be, a narrative that is long enough to be two books and in fact is: a serious history of recent changes in U.S. news reporting and a gossipy, mostly engrossing chronicle of office politics and high-level power struggles.

David Halberstam, 45, first won notice in 1964 as a Pulitzer-prizewinning reporter for the New York Times, then eased out of daily deadlines toward the writing of books, including the bestselling The Best and the Brightest (1972). Halberstam retains the good reporter's eye for color, for the pithy anecdote or quotation that can make facts sit up and breathe. He still digs hard for his material; he put five years into this project, read more than 80 books and conducted extensive interviews with well over 500 people. But he listens very selectively, and at times relentlessly forces his material in the direction he wants it to go. He plays to the public curiosity about journalists as celebrities, a phenomenon that many reporters consider unfortunate. Names, as the saying still goes, make news, and The Powers That Be is full as a phone book.

Though Halberstam glances occasionally at the big picture, he stares hardest at four especially successful news organizations and, more particularly, at the people who shaped or reshaped them: TIME and its co-founder Henry Luce; CBS and Board Chairman William S. Paley; the Washington Post and successive Publishers Philip Graham and his wife Katharine; the Los Angeles Times and Publishers Norman Chandler and his son Otis. (Curiously, Halberstam largely ignores the New York Times, explaining that much has been written about the paper in the past and citing his "personal and ambivalent" feelings toward his former employer.) Journalism critics may argue that a newsmagazine, a TV network and two daily papers on opposite coasts are not strictly comparable, and they will be right. But Halberstam does not compare them. Instead, he constructs a vast mosaic out of the things they have in common.

These include, of course, deadlines, talented and strong-willed personnel, powerful friends and enemies. Most important, they include the tumultuous past four decades of U.S. history. "Until March 1933," Halberstam writes, "through a world war and a Great Depression, the White House had employed only one person to handle the incoming mail. Herbert Hoover had received, for example, some 40 letters a day. After Franklin Roosevelt arrived and began to make his radio speeches, the average was closer to 4,000 letters a day." After F.D.R. and radio found each other, the faster news was reported the faster it began to occur.

Since they had helped create it, Paley and CBS adapted quickly to this new pace. Within a few years, Edward R. Murrow had become a star and his network basked in the reflected glow. As it happened, one of Murrow's college speech teachers had written him and suggested the slight pause in the introduction that he made famous: "This . . . is London." No one at the time seemed troubled by this hint of theatricality; years would pass before politicians began frisking TV anchormen for hints of raised eyebrows or smirks.

Luce and TIME found that radio was a friend rather than a competitor. The magazine had been founded in 1923 on the faith that busy people would welcome a weekly distillation of their daily news, a concisely written guide that would put headlines in context, and garnish them with TIME'S vivid prose and Luce's strong opinions. Halberstam traces the magazine's success and its development far beyond this early formula.

Newspapers responded more slowly to changing conditions, and two of the slowest were the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. The Post had the advantage of its location in the nation's capital, but the paper could not seem to translate the wealth of its new owner, Eugene Meyer, into a voice that anyone but die-hard subscribers would hear. On the other hand, the Los Angeles Times spoke loud and clear, but it was far from the center of things, and its deafening bias against any news or newsmaker that might threaten the interests of the Chandlers or their land-holding friends had become a joke to outsiders. Humorist S.J. Perelman recalled stopping at Albuquerque during one train trip: "I asked the porter to get me a newspaper and unfortunately the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles Times."

The war's end brought prosperity but not a return to pre-Depression normalcy. News, most of it threatening, came thicker and faster: the cold war, Mao's revolution in China, the Alger Hiss case, Korea. At their 1952 conventions, the first to be covered by TV, both parties were forced to consider potential nominees who had challenged the old-line bosses by going over their heads and reaching the public through the channels of journalism. The Democrats stopped Estes Kefauver, but the G.O.P. accepted Dwight Eisenhower. In the end, it mattered less to the delegates that Ike was only a nominal Republican than that he was a genuine war hero with a dazzling, telegenic grin. His running mate, almost incidentally, was a young Californian named Richard Nixon, whose seats in the House and Senate had been won with the help of the Los Angeles Times.

How did journalists and their employers respond to their increasing power and prestige? Halberstam's book will disappoint those expecting to hear the worst. The Post, for instance, was handed down from Eugene Meyer to his brilliant son-in-law Philip Graham. Eventually Graham used Meyer's money to buy out the competition and create a morning monopoly in Washington. According to conventional wisdom, that is the time when publishers kick out the reporters and make room for the advertisers. Graham did nothing of the sort; he used his newfound security to take on better journalists and increase his paper's authority. Graham's suicide in 1963 suddenly pushed his shy wife Katharine into the job of publisher. To nearly everyone's surprise, she rose to the challenge, hired the editors who hired the reporters who took on, eventually, the house that Nixon built. Similarly the Los Angeles Times achieved a monopoly in its morning market; already rich under Norman Chandler, it grabbed for respectability under Son Otis. Democrats seeking office in California soon had the unaccustomed thrill of reading about their efforts in the news columns of the Times.

Halberstam can be rough on his principals, who sometimes emerge as caricatures, but his harshest treatment goes to Paley. While acknowledging Paley's genius and eminence ("the supreme figure of modern broadcasting"), Halberstam also insists that the chairman coldly let highly profitable entertainment programming elbow out the news division. Murrow, who helped invent broadcast journalism and became a symbol of integrity to colleagues and the public, eventually left the network in despair. Much later, Bill Moyers told Paley that he wanted to quit CBS and return to public broadcasting. Paley asked what it would take to keep him. Moyers said a regular primetime news show, "much like Murrow had." Paley's response: "I'm sorry, Bill, I can't do it any more. The minute is worth too much now."

Because he concentrates so heavily on owners and proprietors, Halberstam's portrait of the press is full of big money. This presence unquestionably adds spice. And his guarded sympathy for publishers also offers a useful corrective to many books about the press. Seeking profits, in Halberstam's story, is no crime; a news organization that goes broke can no longer do any harm or good. "It was a curious irony of capitalism," he writes, "that among the only outlets rich enough and powerful enough to stand up to an overblown, occasionally reckless, otherwise unchallenged central government were journalistic institutions that had very, very secure financial bases." Hence the rage that so many politicians have felt when major news outlets threaten the status quo.

Halberstam's picture is educational but also highly interpretive and in some ways misleading. He loves conflict for the drama it creates and elevates squabbles into titanic confrontations. Reporters in the field fight valiantly against the pencil-wielding dunderheads at headquarters. Nearly a decade at TIME is summarized as an arm-wrestling match between two executives. Paley abuses CBS President Frank Stanton, who despises Murrow, who feels the same way about Stanton. All of this was surrounded by much greater complexity than Halberstam suggests. If some of these figures were as exclusively bloody minded as they appear in this book, they would have wiped themselves out years ago.

Still there are all those anecdotes to cushion the bumps: J.F.K. chewing out Columnist Hugh Sidey, then TIME'S White House correspondent, for an item in the magazine's People section, while a TV set near by carried John Glenn's splashdown from his historic orbital mission; Paley advising a bemused correspondent to buy Rembrandts rather than Picassos; Nixon meeting Walter Cronkite and nervously ordering a double sherry to prove he was one of the boys.

Halberstam's constant switching back and forth among different organizations leads to dizzying repetition. His prose often shouts when it should whisper, and his obsession with details sometimes takes him far down the road to trivia. His narrative does not really require, for instance, a minibiography of CBS Correspondent Dan Rather's father. But the excesses of the book are, in part, the excesses of journalism itself. Better, perhaps, to have too much rather than too little. Halberstam admiringly quotes Philip Graham's hardly original definition of news: "The first rough draft of history." His book lives up to that description.

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