The Powers That Be by David Halberstam

David Halberstam was one of the most impressive authors of his time. With an ability to write about sports, politics, and history that few posses the one thing you always know about a Halberstam book is that it will be researched well, written in a perfect pristine prose, and you will walk away much more knowledgeable than you were before you started.

In the early seventies Halberstam published the non fiction tome The Powers That Be. In this book the author follows four of the major players in the National media as they grew through the twentieth century. For many this would appear to be dry prose when fresh and certainly as it covers a time period up to its publishing certainly it can feel dated.

When one takes the longview however and realizes that technology is always changing and that the same issues that challenged newspapers as they moved away from labor intensive production to cold press technology challenge them now in an even more important and to the papers frightening way.


I will write of each of the entities that Halberstam speaks about and then address the commonalities that arose despite the media format.

Halberstam introduces us to Bill Paley a cigar maker's son who convinces his father to advertise on the radio and before long somehow has become heavily involved in the early days of radio. Eventually pulling together a network of stations to compete against the much stronger NBC Radio Paley soon shows himself a genius. Soon CBS not only challenges but passes NBC. During World War II CBS found great acclaim with the work of Edward Murrow in London reporting on the airstrikes. The book also chronicles the struggles of Murrow after the war leading to his confrontation with the network. What happened is fairly typical. As the network became larger and larger they were no longer the outsider but the entrenched. With sums of money involved that would have been astonishing just years earlier Paley became more and more conservative. Upsetting the applecart with wide ambitious news coverage was something to fear. We see CBS news shrink in the late fifties and early sixties as with the entertainment division dominating on a great scale each minute of network time was worth a fortune. Time to be eked out for news specials shrank and NBC soon surpassed them. The emergence of Walter Cronkite brought the network back into a leading position but it was never a comfortable relationship between the aristocracy of the network and it's news division. Be it Morley Safer in Vietnam or Dan Rather on the trail of Nixon there was a constant pressure from the top to pull back on it's coverage to be balanced against a news staff doing what news people do.


The Los Angeles Times is the story of the modernization of what was in terms of journalistic integrity a farce into a real newspaper by the late sixties and early seventies. The Times empire was owned by the Chandlers. Norman Chandler and his socialite wife Buffy were good Republicans. It is remarkable to see how during the early days of Nixon how this paper created and propped him up. Democrats were simply not covered, not even to respond to whatever charge Nixon was throwing that day. As the leading paper in the state it was a remarkably powerful entity basically controlling all the coverage of the political season. It is also pointed out that when Otis Chandler took over the paper in the sixties, and in an attempt to become a more fair minded publication started to give Democrats coverage and actually ask questions of the then national Nixon campaigns Nixon did not know how to respond. Otis succeeded in placing the paper on more even footing from an intellectual standpoint but there would always be a division between the naturally conservative editorial board and the more liberal reporting staff.

Time Magazine, the House of Luce was also a very conservative publication. Luce the son of missionaries took that same sense of zeal and promoting what was right into his paper. Luce was a strong Republican and Time was a Republican magazine. As Vietnam became a major story the frustrations of the Time reporters in Saigon to get any story published that was factual about what was happening on the ground was at its highest. Time had traditionally been a newspaper with the highest sources. What they did not realize or did not care to know was that of course the higher the source the more likely it was the governments information. The men on the ground in Vietnam would send in stories and the high placed source in the government would deny or refute the story and Time would go with the official version. When Luce died in the late sixties his paper rapidly changed and in the days of Watergate Time would move on the story in a way so aggressive it would have been impossible to foresee in Luce's time.

The Washington Post is perhaps the most compelling story in the book. Telling the story of the brilliant Phillip Graham who after marrying the publishers daughter soon became the publisher of a paper that was flawed. Graham's energy and friendliness soon made him a man in the know. His friendship with LBJ is often cited as being one of the main reasons that Johnson ended up on the Kennedy ticket. Grhaham however was sick, suffering from a mental illness, bi polar perhaps but eventually as he slipped more and more into fits of depression he was hospitalized. After his suicide his wife Kay took over. After a rough transition and as she slowly got her feet under her she became a force in her own right. Of course a large measure of her success came from employing Ben Bradlee as her editor. Bradlee a fiercely independent man, a man with a competitive streak like no other editor of his time, was the editor who allowed Woodward and Bernstein to dig deeper and further on the Watergate story when no one else saw or smelled was underneath the bungled break in. The stories of Woodward and Bernstein are compelling. Bernstein the misfit who many on the paper felt would soon just fade away but who added to the story with Woodward because of his great talents on the phones turned out to be the perfect counterpart to the young and hungry Woodward. The two made history and might well have been the only people who could have accomplished what they did.


Outside of the media stories in this book however there is one other figure that looms over this entire book. The time frames predominantly told of in this book is the time of Richard Nixon. From his beginnings being propped up by the Los Angleles Times and Time Magazine to his being chased by Dan Rather of CBS to his eventual comeuppance under the leadership of The Washington Post it is Richard Nixon who tells the tale of the media in the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed his rise and fall is the story of the change in the media and what the people felt the media should be. It is, as you read this book, the unwritten angle. As he stretched out across a quarter century of American history Nixon also tells the tale of the media in that same time frame.