Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Worldly Power: The Making of The Wall Street Journal. Edward E. Scharff. Beaufort Books, $18.95. A Wall Street Journal reporter once theorized that it was impossible...
...You wonder what he would have made of the yuppies who today are such numerous and worshipful readers of his newspaper...
...To accomplish Gorbachev's purpose would involve eliminating the massive government subsidies that keep a lid on food prices and keep rents extremely low...
...A Wall Street Journal reporter once theorized that it was impossible to write an entertaining book about the Journal, simply because it wasn't the kind of place where people threw spitballs, made memorable comments, or did colorful things...
...Halberstam has performed the amazing feat of making Iaccoca a far more appealing character than he is in his autobiography, yet his outbursts of temper, his bullying, and his rule by fear are carefully chronicled...
...Halberstam is .a meticulous interviewer, and obviously has a knack for drawing out the most reticent participants...
...Fortunately, this theory is proven false by Worldly Power, which not only documents the history of Dow Jones & Co., but also manages to catch the personalities, gossip, newsroom plotting, and backstage bickering that have gone into the making of America's bestselling newspaper...
...That's too bad, because what Hollywood is all about—the pursuit of creativity—is also something that other industries, in less extravagant ways, aim for...
...He is probably justified in his impatience with his Washington editors when they distract him with requests for "reaction" to the latest U.S...
...Yukata Katayama, architect of Nissan's success in America, punished and ignored because he failed to play company politics the right way...
...Don Frey of Ford, the man who really invented the Mustang, was forced out of Ford, as was Harold Sperlich, the current president of Chrysler, who was solid, highly competent and, here at least, a little• naive...
...William Morrow, $18.95...
...Among the best of a long line of good Washington Post correspondents assigned to the Moscow beat, Doder's instinct for nuance and intrigue suited him admirably for the post during a series of power struggles within the Kremlin hierarchy...
...Andropov's initiatives—interrupted temporarily after his death by the brief rule of party hack Chernenko—enabled his protege, Gorbachev, to hit the ground running...
...Doder is an astute observer of the dynamics of Soviet society...
...The book also has two stylistic flaws...
...According to Scharff, Feemster was also the only Dow Jones executive to openly oppose launching the illfated National Observer, an editorially superb but financially disastrous weekly that resulted from Kilgore's boredom after the Journal had achieved huge success...
...Leonard Reed The Reckoning...
...The auto industry isn't about cars...
...Moscow correspondents figure things out by comparing rumors and clues...
...Correspondents in the outside...
...To grab their attention, producers need "high-concept" ideas that can- be expressed in a sentence, or, even better, a "jingle" —a story that can be reduced to a single phrase...
...For all the ink that is spilled chronicling Hollywood, very little gives readers a sense of how the movie business operates on the nuts and bolts level...
...Douglas MacArthur, the generous victor reforming Japanese society to make it liberal and prosperous...
...the monthly rent for a onebedroom apartment, Doder notes, is about equivalent to the price of a bottle of vodka...
...How fast and to what effect Gorbachev can run is part of the larger question of the degree to which Soviet society is amenable to change...
...To make that kind of change in the Soviet pricing system would stir up resentments that the Soviet leadership is wary of...
...On the one hand, there is a sense of practicing the craft of journalism at its best, of writing well-researched and thoughtful stories, and of having one's byline featured as one of only three front-page stories each day...
...As late as the 1950s, business in America was mostly a local and regional affair...
...A thinly-veiled satire on Brezhnev's lax rule appeared in the Leningrad magazine, Aurora...
...The KGB and the armed forces in particular were alarmed by the drift in policy and the growing economic weakness under Brezhnev...
...By putting together a number of clues—such as Moscow radio canceling a jazz program, then a humor program, and substituting classical music, and all the lights being on in the offices of the Ministry of Defense—Doder concluded that the ailing Andropov had probably died and wrote a story to that effect...
...What is harder to understand is why Doder scarcely mentions the Afghanistan war, which paralleled his watch, and offers no insight into how the various factions stood on an event which certainly must have been a significant source of argument, friction, and politicking in the Soviet inner circles...
...Litwak has taken a thoughtful look at the movie business, without getting sucked in by the glamor of Tinseltown on the one hand or the power politicking of corporate executives on the other...
...Unlike many journalists, Kilgore had an intuitive feel for how far he could push his readership without overloading them with the volume or the complexity of the information...
...Some of his characters are larger than life: Henry Ford, the cramped and mean-spirited puritan who put the world on wheels, changed society for all time, destroyed his only son, Edsel, and had the war not intervened, in his senility would have destroyed his own company...
...We see the industry chew up some of the best men in the business, the ones who knew and loved cars, not money and power...
...The newspaper's circulation and advertising figures are flattening, its newsroom is top-heavy with editors, and The New York Times is seriously challenging its preeminence in business reporting...
...Much of the story concerns the late Bernard (Barney) Kilgore, who had a vision for a national business newspaper aimed at a middle-brow audience back when the Journal was a sleepy publication written for specialty investors in New York and California...
...world get their stories through legwork, leaks, interviews, and press conferences...
...David Halberstam has produced the best and most important book ever written on the auto industry, but making cars is not its subject...
...The desire of the general population for economic reform is exceeded only by its unwillingness to bear the short-term costs of such reform—a tendency not unique to the Soviet people...
...The studio system is today largely extinct, having been replaced by a proliferation of independent production companies...
...And although he offers some criticisms of Hollywood unions (which parody the wage demands and work rules of the rest of American labor), he does not hit them as hard as he should...
...In 1982, after a corruption scandal involving the lover of Brezhnev's daughter, a Pravda article contained this sentence: "Children reveal, as if in a mirror, the psychological conditions and convictions that prevail in their families...
...For one thing, the years of rich living and corruption had made too many Party officials vulnerable to the ire of the ascetic Andropov...
...But, aside from party ideologues, the public itself exerts a strong and sometimes overriding influence...
...William Gorham, the American inventor who created the first Nissan car almost single-handedly in 1933...
...Most Americans spent their careers in the same town or small area where they were born and raised...
...Henry Ford II, savior of his grandfather's company, and finally very nearly as destructive as the old man...
...Serious business journalists tend to avoid Hollywood, probably because they figure it's too weird to offer lessons for the rest of us...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Worldly Power: The Making of The Wall Street Journal...
...His book works extremely well as journalism history, as the story of an American institution, and as the biography of a talented iconoclast, Barney Kilgore...
...and its allies to win WWII, and that now has led Japan to world economic mastery...
...Curiously, Doder found in the ascension of this former KGB chief a certain similarity to the election of John F. Kennedy, in that it created an electric feeling that change was in the air, that things were on the move again...
...In choosing the paradigmatic auto industry to tell his story, Halberstam singles out the force— sheer productive capacity—that allowed the U.S...
...In the waning years of Brezhnev's rule, clues of the maneuverings about the various centers of power—the KGB, the military, the Party, the intelligentsia—were there for perceptive observers to see...
...for another, the Party ideologues were afraid that the reforms Andropov stood for would take on a life of their own and get out of control...
...Joseph Dodge, the parsimonious Detroit banker who in three months established the tenor of the Japanese economy for the next 40 years...
...And many of the author's opinions are softened by the word "perhaps," as in, "Pageone editor...was perhaps the best job in all of newspaperdom ." Surely the author could have gone out on a limb on a few of these...
...I asked a number of people involved in American parts of the drama whether they found his version plausible...
...On the other hand, there is a feeling of being on the outs with mainstream journalism, of still being tied to the infernal news ticker and the knowledge that stardom and clout will more likely go to reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, or the news magazines...
...And there is Lee Iaccoca, ambitious, driven, able, and filled with rancor over real and fancied slights to his ethnic background...
...Mark Litwak...
...Feemster, who died in a 1963 airplane accident, was a pushy Sammy Glick type much disliked by the Journal's editorial staff, but his exceptionable business skill and hustle persuaded skeptical advertisers to support a newspaper that had no home town, no photographs, no sports, and a gray, unchanging front page...
...William Morrow & Co., $19.95...
...Describing one screenwriter's triumph over the Hollywood system, Litwak quotes him without irony as saying, "I drive a Mercedes, I feel good about myself...
...There is a distressing inverse symmetry to Halberstam's history: the American standard of living declined as financially-oriented bureaucrats took over power in Detroit, while the growth of Japanese industrial superiority was fueled by a single-minded desire to do a better job and a religious following of American teachings...
...arms proposal...
...But while Litwak's Naderite sensibility makes him reluctant to ridicule Hollywood's working class pretensions, it also leads him to discover that Steven Spielberg's film "The Goonies" received $100,000 from Nabisco in exchange for depicting a young boy and his gruesome friend sharing a Baby Ruth...
...Back when screenwriters were studio employees, one former Columbia - contract writer told Litwak, "We would have lunch together and talk about our mutual problems...
...For all of his skill as a business journalist, Kilgore never invested in the stock market, had a diffident attitude towards personal wealth, and was suspicious of anyone who seemed overly concerned with getting rich...
...As a writer, he shows special solidarity- with .oppressed screenwriters, who get paid far more than writers in any other field...
...Random House, $19.95...
...David Graulich Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics Inside the Kremlin from Brezhnev to Gorbachev...
...Many young journalists, such as Warren Phillips, Dow Jones's current chairman, took jobs at the Journal only because they couldn't get hired by "real" newspapers...
...The movie business would seem to represent the entrepreneurial ideal...
...he recognizes that as part of a rather meaningless propaganda war...
...they exclaimed they were surprised he could be so right without having been there...
...How that pursuit is corrupted or goes awry in Hollywood can help us understand how creative impulses ought to be nurtured in other businesses...
...Kilgore's good fortune was that Dow Jones was able to stay afloat-thanks largely to its financial news ticker—until reality caught up with his vision...
...In his 15-month tenure, Andropov broke the old guard's control of the Politburo, forcefully set in motion social and economic changes, and put new, young people in positions of power to make sure that the changes would go forward...
...But, as Doder notes, a coup—as in the Khrushchev affair—would have been so traumatic that the various elites preferred to wait for the death of a leader...
...it's about money and men, and Halberstam gives us the men so clearly and truthfully that it is difficult to believe that he has not been a Detroit—or Tokyo—insider all his life...
...If you ran into a script problem you would have somebody to go and bullshit with:' Most writers today work for themselves at home, without the benefit of such mutual support...
...He tried desperately to do his job as well as he could at Ford, only to be tossed aside because he annoyed autocratic Henry Ford II with his championing of the sort of product Ford needed but did not want...
...Andropov was indeed dead, but the Post checked out the story in Washington, with Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who checked with the American Embassy in Moscow and told the Post: "It's bullshit ." The Post then toned down the story and played it on page 28...
...Too many anecdotes include the qualifying word "reportedly," even when the story appears to have been confirmable...
...Meanwhile, the executives who remain at the studios, now reduced largely to-making deals to market and distribute films made by outsiders, don't seem as passionate about movies as the unschooled immigrantmoguls of the past...
...Worldly Power would have benefited from a more detailed look at the Journal's current leadership and problems...
...The tight formula he devised for the Journal's front page was so awesomely successful that a later editor told Scharff, "Kilgore had given us a perfect thing...
...Scharff does a big service by recognizing the role of the late Robert Feemster, the man responsible for the Journal's sales and marketing during its growth years after World War II...
...Timothy Noah...
...Rather it is about the decline of American wealth and productive capability, the apparent inability of the richest nation the world has ever seen to maintain the ethic and attitudes that created its strength, and about the unexpected rise of a totally defeated and starving near-feudal Japan to a position of supreme economic power in the same 40 years...
...Others amaze by having acted in ways seemingly inconsistent with their characters: Gen...
...If he can be faulted at all it is for being absorbed in the machinations of Kremlin power politics to the point of having tunnel vision...
...We thought, don't tamper with it, don't screw around with the formula!' Scharff, an editor at Institutional Investor, points out how unconventional Kilgore's ideas were for their time, although we take them for granted today...
...Litwak's book, funded in part by Ralph Nader's Center for the Study of Responsive Law, helps fill the gap...
...His indepth studies of the number-two companies in each country, Ford and Nissan, allow us to see exactly how, and above all why, the balance of productive power shifted so sharply...
...Scharff describes the mixed feelings of arrogance and inferiority that mark life as a Journal reporter, which I can confirm from my own stint on the Journal's staff in the mid-seventies...
...David Halberstam...
...But as a result, much of what was good about the old, oligopolistic ways has been lost...
...Robert Cumberford Reel Power: The Struggle for Influence and Success in the New Hollywood...
...Even Indecent Exposure, probably the best business book about Hollywood, is really more about the pathology of corporate boardrooms...
...From 1981 to 1985, he saw the leadership of the Soviet Union shift from the tired rule of Leonid Brezhnev to the dynamic but short reign of Yuri Andropov, then give way to a last gasp of the old guard under Konstantin Chernenko, and finally revert to Andropov's young protege, Mikhail Gorbachev...
...There are the Whiz Kids, the best and brightest of whom was the inhumanly perfect Robert McNamara, who knew all the numbers and none of the essence of whatever he undertook, who demanded false reports to fit his view of the world and got them...
...Bodycount Bob of Vietnam destroyed Ford's productive capacity—the strength that had made the company—before he switched to Washington and the business of war...
...The Reckoning is as easy to read as a summer novel...
...Litwak unfortunately relies too much on quotes, rather than analysis, to prove his points...
...Overall, however, Scharff has done for the Journal what Gay Talese's Kingdom and the Power did for the Times...
...There is no doubt that Gorbachev is set upon drastically reinvigorating the ailing Soviet economy...
...When Andropov succeeded Brezhnev, it was with the support of the military and the KGB rather than the Party...
...Dusko Doder...
...but it is far better...
...timorous, fumbling Philip Caldwell, who rose through the Ford bureaucracy to become chairman by not making decisions, yet who decided to allow Ford to build the radical Taurus and Sable...
Vol. 18 • January 1987 • No. 12
