Anecdotes from the Press Club Bar
FRANK, REUVEN
Anecdotes from the Press Club Bar_ The Powers That Be By David Halberstam Knopf. 771 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Reuven Frank President, NBC News, 1968-73 This book aims to tell how the major...
...I don't know how accurate Halberstam's tales are, since I haven't spent seven years in seven-league boots interviewing 700 people for seven hours each, but in a few instances I do have some first-hand knowledge of the facts...
...Editors sit in New York (or Washington, or Los Angeles) where it is clean, and there is plenty of fresh paper, and copy boys to do their bidding...
...And profit is only one factor affecting the price of the stock...
...The Powers That Be makes marvelous reading for news groupies...
...Powers is also full of big names, and of little interesting bits of information you never knew (doubtless my little clutch of errors is uncharacteristic...
...The Old Brigands were after Power, and by godfrey, that's what they got...
...And gossip has always existed as part of organized news presentation, though never to the present extent...
...Reviewed by Reuven Frank President, NBC News, 1968-73 This book aims to tell how the major events of our recent past were shaped by the major journalistic institutions that reported them...
...Not only Huntley, who is Chet, or Rayburn, who is Sam, but almost everyone is recorded by the name his friends call him at lunch...
...After a few pages of this, I checked the title page to see if it said "By Dave...
...Often there is not even an initial mention of the full given name...
...This sort of stuff can come in very handy at cocktail parties, or on the morning commute...
...And if the rhythmic sentences run on and on, and the eyelids grow heavy and the head nods—well, that's what night-tables are for, isn't it...
...Halberstam loves reporters and hates editors, too...
...Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, for instance, were not brought together by Robert E. Kintner...
...And when the product is news...
...There is, however, one problem—one crucial story that Halberstam doesn't tell...
...In any case, it doesn't take long for the book's themes to become apparent: Halberstam loves the Old Brigands Who Founded The Dynasties, a common failure of liberal writers...
...Withal, The Powers That Be is fun reading, and the news groupies—who do indeed number in the hundreds of thousands—will get value for their purchase price...
...Although reading the CBS chapters may strike the laity as being a lot like going through a year's accumulation of People magazine in one afternoon, they actually are stories from the Press Club bar...
...What ails the major vehicles of American journalism today is that they are large, publicly-held corporations with all the attendant ills...
...The enlightened worry used to be the subordination of product to profit...
...There have always been star reporters—Winston Churchill, Floyd Gibbons, name your own—though there have never been so many as today...
...Now, profit is itself subordinated to the interests of shareholders—not the little old ladies who turn up at annual meetings and fuss about their dividends, but the big institutional ones—banks, union pension funds and the like, who care solely about the price of the stock...
...Some are juicy, or hint at juices Halberstam is too graceful to specify...
...It didn't...
...They, along with the author, can tell themselves that the book is important and informative, and assuage their guilt with the recognition that even the Mensa set needs its Rona Barretts...
...They had been jointly assigned to the anchor studio for the 1956 political conventions before Kintner was hired by NBC...
...Unfortunately, those are the ones that are wrong...
...Thus the product gets farther and farther removed from the purpose of the corporation...
...Nevertheless, he does not love Bill as much as Harry or Phil, because poor oldPaley really loved only money, while Luce and Graham loved Power...
...Put it all together, as Halberstam has done, and it spells Phil and Bill and Harry, not to mention Scotty and Russ and Dan and Doug and Abe and Ed...
...They twist to the direction of proprietors what reporters learn Out There—where it is dirty, and dangerous, and history is made, and truth exists...
...If this book were not too heavy to hold comfortably in a prone position, most of it would be excellent bed-time reading...
...For one thing, it offers a host of good anecdotes, thick as raisins in a Christmas pudding...
...Instead, using the history of the last 25 years or so as a guidepost, David Halberstam offers four great, gooey, gossipy stories—one about CBS, another about Time magazine, a third about the Washington Post, and a fourth about the Los Angeles Times...
...Halberstam does not seem to car much for copy editors, either...
Vol. 62 • May 1979 • No. 11
