Word: editor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Newsweek staffers arrived at their desks one morning last week, they found a cryptic memo from Editor Edward Kosner summoning them to a 10:30 meeting at Top of the Week, the conference room on the 40th floor of the magazine's Manhattan headquarters. When they arrived, they were surprised to find Katharine Graham, chairman of the parent Washington Post Co. Recounted one writer: "People began to murmur, 'God, we're closing down ... We've been bought...
...room to applause. The whole performance lasted perhaps two minutes. Then Graham took the podium and delivered another shock: Kosner's replacement would be Lester Bernstein, 58, a vice president for corporate communications at RCA who had left Newsweek in 1972 after being passed over for the editor's job. It was the fourth change in top editors at the magazine in the past ten years...
Kosner, a graduate of New York's City College, became editor in 1975, after twelve years at the magazine. He learned of his dismissal only the afternoon before, during a stormy, 2½-hour meeting with Graham and Newsweek President Peter Derow. He was described as shocked, but associates said that he may have missed subtle signals of Graham's displeasure. Under Kosner's predecessor, Osborn Elliott, now dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, Newsweek was briefly known on Madison Avenue as a "hot book" because of improved editorial vitality and attendant advertising...
Bernstein was known as an able and popular journalist in his ten years at Newsweek, first as national affairs editor and later as managing editor. Before that he had spent five years as an NBC public affairs executive and ten years as a writer, correspondent and editor at TIME. At Newsweek he is expected to steady both the editorial product and declining office morale. In a chatty, upbeat memo to the staff, he promised "some changes in tone, emphasis and operating style." Given his age and Graham's habit of replacing executives unexpectedly, Bernstein may turn...
Outlines of what went wrong have been sketched before, most notably by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in A Thousand Days. But Wyden, a former editor at the Saturday Evening Post, McCall's and Ladies' Home Journal, is not satisfied with shadows and rumors. He retraces every false step, sparing no one and no institution. The plot was conceived and crafted at the CIA largely by a cerebral chief of covert operations, Richard Bissell Jr. It had been passed on to President Kennedy by an unenthusiastic-but not disapproving-President Eisenhower. In the naive belief that U.S. involvement could...