Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era Book

This week, I finished two books that both merit extremely high praise. One is Andrew Bacevich's most recent study of America's ineptitude at trying to subdue the Greater Middle East, and the second is this book by David Halberstam.

Halberstam's premature death from a car accident in 2007 marked a great loss for American journalism, and thus, I would argue, for America itself. Why did it not cause a greater uproar than it did? Nevertheless, he left behind a monumental library of books analyzing his most famous topic, Vietnam (The Best and the Brightest on the short list of books one must read, perhaps must read twice, to qualify as literate on the subject), baseball (several on wildly successful clubs during different eras of sport), the car industry (The Reckoning), the Korean War (The Coldest Winter)--which solidified for me a dislike of Douglas MacArthur I never expect to overcome.

But in this work, The Powers That Be, Halberstam centers his laser on his own profession: the media. He covers the major newspapers--the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times--the major television empires (CBS especially, charting its ascendancy out of Edward R. Murrow's timeless reportage from London during the Blitz)--and magazines, particularly Time and Life. His technique replicates the template that serves him so well across so many varied subject areas: to very minutely anatomize a handful of personalities. To understand the machine through the machinist. And I have always found Halberstam's instincts unparalleled. In The Best and the Brightest, he was able to divine the depths of men as murky as McNamara and Rusk, Bundy and Westmoreland, and most insightfully, the tortured President Johnson, in a way that served to illuminate motive and the ambush of intentions by reality. In The Powers That Be, he does this again and much more, culminating in his masterful examination of the Watergate crisis and Richard Nixon caught in the beartrap of his own paranoia and unease. Despite having read much about Watergate, and about Nixon, I can attest to feeling myself newly informed. It was a devastating portrait on one level, but ultimately heartening, because ultimately, as Halberstam so cleanly reveals, the system did in fact work and corruption and naked ambition were arrested. But this national tragedy incurred costs that remain with us today, at a time of similarly painful political dysfunction. I wish he were here to diagnose the players, to predict the outcomes.

I cannot recommend this book too highly. It's a tremendous foray into the basic assumption that the First Amendment's provision to protect the freedom of the press, in all its manifestations, is an implicitly healthy one and abandoned only with supreme disregard for the wellsprings of freedom.