David Halberstam, The Powers That Be Quotes

If he had gone to the old school, he was by no means old-school.

He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy.

In the old days, it had been talent and style and brilliance and now it was more and more productivity.

He was perceived to be intellectually promiscuous, a little too eager to please all groups.

Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person—the two are often different.

He could tune her, bringing out her better instincts and filtering out her lesser ones.

The faster the motion, the less time to think. Fuselage journalism, Hugh Sidey of Time later called it.

Elliston thought consistency less important than vitality and intelligence and passion.

It was a wonderful combination for a reporter, the exterior so comforting, the interior so driven.

Young man, Mr. Aubrey has made us so rich that we can now afford to worry about our image.

He was very good, it turned out, at outlining the flaws in the government as long as someone else was in charge of the government.

The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.

the ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter’s career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished.

his was a profession in which a good leader constantly had to adapt to new weapons, whether he liked them or not,

One successful writer said he would never be a millionaire because he liked living like one too much.

He never, even in the most casual conversation with friends, spoke a sentence which did not sound as if it was ready for the air.

You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.

He was "more passionate than most intelligent men, and more intelligent and reasoned than most passionate men.

Hughes might discuss Calvinism ably, but he did not live it, he was—by Time corporate standards—just a little lazy.

Bobby Kennedy said that when he had been a boy there were three major influences on children – the home, the church, and the school – and now there was a fourth – television.

Newspapers might have as much to do in shaping the course of public events as politicians,

If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.

Education was central to reporting.

Until he (Time's founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.

Lippmann was very good at staying young, at not aging and becoming a prisoner of his past experiences.

The closer journalists came to great issues, the more vulnerable they felt.

All professions have some element of theater to them.

If the Times gave readers far more news, then Lippmann at the Trib made the world seem far more understandable.

(I. F. Stone had once called it an exciting paper to read because you never knew on what page you would find a page-one story),

Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.

The telephone was a sign of being rushed.

The author writes that the central conflict within journalist and seller of the American way Henry Luce was between his curiosity and his certitude.

he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

he was so obsessed by the action in front of him that he had no awareness of the growing reaction to his performance.