The Kingdom and the Power

This is Gay Talese's history of the New York Times, tracing its growth from humble origins through the 1960s by which time it had attained the stature of America's most influential and respected newspaper.

When Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times in 1896, the paper was bankrupt. It had a circulation of only 9,000, $300,000 in accumulated debts and was losing money at the rate of $1,000 a day. In luminous and absorbing detail, former Timesman Gay Talese chronicles the fascinating story of the paper’s growth from very humble origins to its status mid-century as the most powerful and influential newspaper in the Western world. He examines the marriages, varied lives, and projects of the remarkable Ochs family, who are still majority owners in the 21st-century. He watches the rise and fall of famous by-line names and their struggles for power, the careful formation of august policies, and he reveals the inside story behind sensational news-scoops : the exposé of the New York head of the Klu Klux Klan who killed himself when the story of his Jewish origins made the front page; the eyewitness account of U.S.bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam that so profoundly affected public opinion of the war; the interview with an unknown revolutionary that brought Fidel Castro such renown that The Times was later accused of Communizing Cuba; and the controversial suppression of the Bay of Pigs story, which, if printed in full, might have prevented that fiasco. All the great American newspaper figures through the 1960s are here; from Carr Van Anda, a rigid scholar whose thoroughness uncovered an error in an Einstein equation to Edwin James, a dashing bon vivant who, in a routine first assignment, unmasked a phony Romanian consul-general by his scuffed boots and artificial accent, even down to‘the quiet clerk in the telegraph room, who, unknown to the newspaper, was employed by the CIA.