Word: friedrich
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DIARY OF A MAN IN DESPAIR by Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen. 219 pages. Macmillan...
...three books published this year by former Post executives, none reflects the ugliness more graphically than Otto Friedrich's Decline and Fall (Harper & Row; $10). The others-Matthew J. Culligan's The Curtis-Culligan Story (Crown) and Martin S. Ackerman's The Curtis Affair (Nash)-are by two former presidents of the Post's parent, the Curtis Publishing Co. Though reputed swashbucklers in business, Culligan and Ackerman are plodders in print, offering little more than inarticulate exercises in self-justification. Former Managing Editor Friedrich's book is not without self-praise, but for the most...
Blair's Mutiny. Friedrich joined the Post in 1962, and he was still there when Marty Ackerman ("I'd sooner sell my wife") folded it in 1969. He thinks that the magazine's decline actually began in the '30s and '40s, when top management tried to turn Curtis into a great printing company instead of a great publishing company. But he contends that the Post could have been saved many times during its last few years, and it is the abortive attempts to save it that dominate his book...
...Friedrich tells the old episodes in new detail and also offers some that are not widely known. A Curtis consultant suggests that the Post convert scripts of TV's Bonanza series into short stories because of their "proven popularity." To save on paper, the Post is shaved in 1966 by one-eighth or an inch along the top and bottom and one-sixteenth along the sides. Ackerman, faced with the possible loss of $400,000 in Ford Motor Co. advertising, suddenly tells the Ford representative: "You know, I really can't understand why you'd take...
Such anecdotes are the most successful parts of a book that sometimes buckles under Friedrich's determination to make it definitive. Least successful is his attempt to blame the Post's death on the American corporate system, after he has clearly shown that the fault lay with nothing so abstract but with the temper of the times and individual mistakes...