RaveThe Washington PostMasterful ... Although aspects of this story will be familiar to some, Nagourney makes it irresistibly compelling by focusing on the people behind it — their motivations, their vulnerabilities, their quirks, and above all the epic power struggles among them ... Nagourney’s narrative benefits from the sheer drama of events: the nation’s most august journalistic institution, brought low first by its own blunders and then by economic circumstance, only to come back stronger than ever.
Kathryn S. Olmsted
PositiveWashington PostA damning indictment ... Olmsted...sometimes overstates the case that these publishers enabled Hitler. Opposing the president in wartime isn’t the same as aiding the enemy ... Yet in many ways, the members of the newspaper axis were especially despicable. Not only were their editorials extremist to the point of being unhinged, their news coverage was slanted too.
Donald A Ritchie
PositiveThe Washington Post... engaging ... Such details about Pearson’s personal affairs are peppered throughout the book, but Ritchie does not delve deeply into the columnist’s private or inner life. Even a shocker like Pearson’s admission (in a diary entry) that he slept with his former mother-in-law, Cissy Patterson, after his divorce — the woman who later became his patron, then his greatest antagonist in the capital — gets only a brief, offhand mention ... Still, Pearson’s professional travails provide plenty of drama.
Marvin Kalb
PositiveThe Washington PostKalb provides an engaging recitation of the Murrow vs. McCarthy saga ... Kalb mines some fascinating nuggets from the Trump-McCarthy vein ... What is to be done? Kalb offers few specific prescriptions ... To Trump, the journalists, judges and bureaucrats who try to hold him accountable and preserve democratic norms are \'fake news\' and \'the deep state.\' To Kalb, they are heroes. Reading this book may stiffen their resolve.
