Tower of Babel

SOMEHOW a rocking chair seems out of place in the repertoire of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Vietnam correspondent and monomaniacal reporter that David Halberstam is. But after a few telltale early-warning signs in The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam has finally lapsed into his anecdotage. The Powers That Be ranks as the ultimate politico-media gossip book, with a thousand jolly stories and vivacious quotes about four big-time media institutions--Time magazine, CBS, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times--and how they have interacted with politics, mainly presidential, during the last century.

But in analyzing the power of these institutions and the media in general--supposedly Halberstam's objective here--he does nothing new. All his major themes have been introduced and explored, usually with much more immediacy, by other writers. Take, for instance, the impact of television in reshaping American politics. Theodore H. White '38 in The Making of the President 1960 broke the story of the Kennedys' deliberate use of television and polls to pole-vault the regular party structure as well as time and space restrictions on national candidates. Joe McGinnis's The Selling of the President 1968, a case study of media merchandising, provided a much more chilling and prophetic account of Richard Nixon's packaging than all of Halberstam's hindsighted anecdotes put together. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s yin/yang books--1000 Days and The Imperial Presidency--described the consolidation of power in the Executive Office these last 40 years with much more historical veracity than Halberstam summons up. And, years before The Powers That Be, David Broder (The Party's Over) bemoaned the decay of the party structure, as television eliminated many functions of precinct workers, as civil service and federal aid programs cut out patronage as a source of party strength, and as pollsters, instead of party hacks, became Delphic Oracles on what the public was thinking.

Halberstam's basic problem in writing about media power comes down to his extravagant hyperbole of language, which, time and again, overwhelms his command of narrative and the telling (and telling, and telling) anecdote. In the relatively unploughed terrain of Los Angeles Times history (the most interesting parts of the book), Halberstam details how the unscrupulous Harry Chandler in the 1880s hooked and crooked his way to control over subscription lists for L.A.'s three morning dailies. Then, by combining forces with one of them, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis's Times, Chandler forced the Times's main competitor out of business. Later, with the help of a bribed federal reclamation engineer, Chandler stole the water from a distant Southern California valley in order to turn his thousands of desert acres into subdivisions--thus laying the basis for the Chandler real estate fortune and the Chandler dynasty.

HALBERSTAM has the makings of a great historical novel here. But after all those years of having his rhetorical flourishes cut by The New York Times's good, gray copy desk, he can't resist opening the floodgates. He writes of Harry Chandler as though he were the archetypical tycoon, when, actually, even more grotesque immorality founded thousands of American fortunes in these same years--Horatio Alger and Benjamin Franklin notwithstanding. Halberstam goes on (and on) to maintain that the Chandlers "in effect invented" Southern California, just like their political hired-gun/reporter Kyle Palmer invented Richard Nixon in the late 1940s, just like the Times's protective coverage of Nixon made him the paranoid schizo he turned out to be.

Halberstam's media-determinism (he had to justify that $300,000 advance somehow) leads him into some egregious mistakes in reporting and analysis. It's crucial to Halberstam's argument, for instance, that when the Los Angeles Times finally gave Nixon "fair" coverage in the 1962 California governor's race, asked tough questions, allowed his opponent equal space. Nixon would break down and reveal his paranoia. So Halberstam completely distorts the famous "you won't have Nixon to kick around any more" press conference after Nixon lost that race. Quoting only one Nixon sentence, Halberstam claims that Nixon completely lost control and launched into a screed against the press. Aha! the reader is supposed to say, the L.A. Times was the heart of darkness behind Agnew, the secret bombings of Cambodia, Watergate, the tapes!

Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes, however, gives the opposite interpretation and backs it up with several pages of the press conference transcripts. Wills points out that Nixon lashed out and backed off, lashed out and backed off, on the edge but never breaking, always hedging his bets. Wills notes that when Larry O'Brien in 1968 screened the film of the press conference, hoping to find a segment to use in Humphrey commercials, O'Brien came up with nothing, so thoroughly had Nixon covered his ass.

There are other errors in this sprawling book--errors easily forgiven but for Halberstam's reputation as a scrupulously accurate reporter, errors difficult to track down because Halberstam rarely attributes his stories (he simply includes a four-page list of people he interviewed, leaving it to the reader to mix and match). For instance, Halberstam completely rewriters the late Louisiana governor Earl Long's great line about Time/Life's Henry Luce ("Mr. Luce is like a man that owns a shoestore and buys all the shoes to fit himself. Then he expects other people to buy them."), adds a few Southernisms for that authentic ring, and puts it in quotes. It would have been just as easy to check A.J. Leibling's Earl of Louisiana (1961), in the chapter "Henry Luce's Shoestore," to get the quote right. In another case, 100 pages after Halberstam has convinced the reader that Kyle Palmer was the Chandlers' right hand in matters political, he reveals that Norman Chandler refused Palmer a pension when the latter was retired and destitute. Either Palmer wasn't as powerful as Halberstam makes out, or there was more to the Chandler/Palmer relationship than Halberstam would have us believe.

THAT ONE CAN QUIBBLE so much with Halberstam is a real shame, because his talent as an interviewer and reporter gushes from every page like Old Faithful. From interviews with The Washington Post's Kay Graham, among others, Halberstam has drawn an engrossing and remarkably full account of her husband Philip's manic-depression and tragic suicide in 1963. From Dorothy "Buff" Chandler, he elicited the real reason her husband Norman dropped Robert Taft in 1952 to go for Ike--Buff simply refused to sleep with Norman until he came around. From friends and colleagues of Ed Murrow, Halberstam relates the details of CBS chairman Bill Paley's horning-in on the memorial program to Murrow the day after he died--when it was Paley who had virtually forced Murrow off the air.

Every time the narrative picks up steam, though, Halberstam blows the pipes with hyperbolic cliche. In the space of four pages about Henry Luce, for example, Halberstam calls him "large on the landscape," "brilliant," "incredible," "legendary," "shrewd," "muscular," "powerfully influential," and describes both Luce and Life magazine as "dazzling" within six lines of each other. Almost every one of Halberstam's media moguls are "geniuses," one way or another. Almost every reporter in the book is described as "brilliant" and "fiercely independent." Halberstam's villains, like CBS programmer James Aubrey, fairly drip bile off the page.

Basically, Halberstam has provided a thousand politicians and media junkies with Rolodex-files-full of inside stories and one-liners to try out on the chicken-and-green-beans circuit. The Powers That Be piles detail after detail, quickie quote on top of one-liner, superlative onto cliche, in an attempt to construct the ultimate tower of power. As in the case of an earlier group of tower builders aspiring to heaven, however, a divine curse (or was it hubris?) turned all the words into babble.