Word: halberstam
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...POWERS THAT BE by David Halberstam; Knopf; 771 pages...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...