The Powers That Be
by David Halberstam
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Book Summary Information
Author: David HalberstamEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-10-19
ISBN: 0252069412
Number of pages: 792
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Book Reviews of The Powers That Be
Book Review: A BIG AMERICAN BOOK
Summary: 5 Stars
Wow. The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, written after some seven years of research, in 1979, is the quinetessiantal big book . . . the big American book! It is a masterpiece, a triumph, a work, a magnum opus by a superstar of the genre. I do not stand eye-to-eye with Halberstam politically. I am a staunch conservative, he was center-liberal, but unlike so many nabobs of the left, in Halberstam's case his sheer knowledge, his education, his talent, passion, and the undisputable fact that he was there . . . he saw it happen, he experienced it; well, whether one agrees or disgrees with his politics or not, only a fool would argue his merits, his imprimatur.
Is Halberstam our greatest 20th Century chronicler? The best writer? This is hard to say. He was a historuan, a reporter, so comparing him with Ernest Hemingway, or Eugene O'Neill, or sports writers like Jim Murray, is problematic. He is different from a Tom Wolfe, whose non-narrative written-in-novel style, like Norman Mailer penning a true story, is also different, yet Halberstam's books are not, as in the case of, say Bob Woodward, not unlike a 300-page Washington Post report. He is engaging, forceful, entertaining.
Halberstam and this particular book are of the American Century, a term coined by one of the book's subjects, Time-Life founder Henry Luce. This is where Halberstam is at his best; the breadth and scope of history, outlined against America . . . or was it the other way around? The big picture, a country, the New Rome, an unlikely empire shaping events, shaping history, changing thousands of years of powerful notions in a red, white and blue image that will stand for the next 1,000 or more. Halberstam is modern, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, and reading The Powers That Be in 2010 is done with knowledge of what he wrote afrter, how he felt about Iraq and other 21st Century issues before his recent, untimely passing. In so doing he is prescient and, while not outwardly religious (perhaps not religious at all), nevertheless he descrcibes a story that is religious, as all the big stories are. The America he describes in this, in The Best and the Brightest (his Vietnam classic written before The Powers That Be) is to large to be merely secular, it must be part of a cosmic destiny, like the way Heorge Patton looked at his role in history.
Halberstam's 745-page classic describes the histories of Time under Luce, the Columbia Broadcasting System under William Paley, the Washington Post under Phil and Katharine Graham, the Los Angeles Times unders the Chandlers, and while not headlined on the book's cover, the New York Times. It is a story of the media in the media age. He outlines the shaping of Los Angeles under the Chandlers from the 19th Century on, and in the case of the other empires, after World War I, when they were either consolidated, bought or created, as in the case of Luce and Paley out of a sheer American vision.
It concludes with Watergate and the corporate re-structuring demanded by Wall Street stock values of the 1970s. It was a fitting time to end the story, then. It is sad that Halberstam is not here to write the much-necessary volume two: the fall of the papers and magazines, the question of liberalism in the main stream, the rise of conservative talk radio and media, the politicization of the dominant culture - movies, music, comedy - and of course an explanation as best one exists for the Internet. Alas he is gone and some other giant must step up and take on this challenge, but does such a giant live amongst us still?
The Powers That Be describes giants like Dwight Eisenhower and George C. Marshall, near-giants like John F. Kennedy, and disappointments like Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson; how they used and were shaped by the media. It is a constant struggle. Does the tail wag the dog? Who has the power, the control? An Eisenhower comes and goes, a Luce stays. The book is filled with wonderful anecotes and personal stories, but the overriding theme is the notion of seismic struggle, of th shaping of the empire by forces of politics, journalism, mass communications; how military maneuvers are effected by coverage, how the American mind is formed.
Perhaps Luce's role is the most extraordinary. While the Chandlers were almost accidental king-makers, separated by geography from the action, they were happy to invent Southern California in their own WASP image. But the building of Richard Nixon, as like Frankenstein, thrust them into the new age. Otis Chandler responded by re-making his paper from a Republican rag to the world's greatest. But Luce was not accidential. He was a Calvinistic force of destiny and knew it. He was convinced he was a prophet of God. He coined the term "American Century," laughed at first as provincial, but after World War II the most apropos of experessions.
The son of Chinese missionaries, devoutly Christian, he rose by din of sheer will and excellence to his place in the world of power. He determined to use the images and power of both Time and Life magazines to promote a propagandist view of American Exceptionalism that was vitally necessary to defeating the Nazis and Japanese. Ater victory was attained, his jingoism became a source of liberal irritant, exemplified by his role in "selecting" Ike over the popular Senator Robert Taft as President in 1952, then Nixon's rise, amid much consternation.
But the book's theme, or argument, where one falls in the political litany, can be summed up by response to an argument between Luce and his star reporter, Theodore White after World War II. Luce made China his special project. White's writings about Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Tse-tung and the Nationalist-Communist civil war were brilliant, but he started to report that Chiang was corrupt, his leadership poor, his military ineffective, while Mao, to Luce's horror, was making gains.
Luce flew out to China on several occasions, to "straighten out' White. They finally had a confrontation in which White told his boss his commitment was to honest journalism. Luce said no, the stakes were too high. A little propaganda, not the word he used but what he felt was needed, as in the battle with Adolf Hitler, was what was needed. To lose China was too horrible to contemplate and could not be risked by honest journalism.
All normal coinsiderations woul seem to favor White in this argument. The truth, after all, shall set ye free. In the end, White got his way. He wrote it his way, then detailed it in a book called Thunder Out of China. It dismayed Luce, but he was too honest and decent to censor his people. Righteounses prevailed, right?
Not so fact. China was lost to Communism in 1949, causing enormous political hatred and more than any factor McCarthyism. Mao murdered 55 million human beings. Communism killed 100 million worldwide in the century. In light of that knowledge, if it was at all possible Luce could have kept Chiang and his army together enough, through American popular support, to stop such a thing fron happening; well, was this not worth just a little bit of jingoistic propaganda?
This was the nexus of much angst over the years, and could be found in conservative anger towards liberal media during the Iraq War. Was the honesty and "integrity" of a liberal, yet safe, reporter more important than the life of a soldier in the field, fighting an enemy aided and abetted by his reporting? This argument does not appear to be going away any time soon.
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