Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Not much of a newspapering memoir, all in all, which is unfortunate after so rich a career. Bradlee has the maddening habit of hinting at close friendships with important players like JFK but never revealing quite enough of what would be truly useful to know: the relationship of the press to power in America.

Bradlee shrugs off the issue, remarking, 'It should be possible to identify Deep Throat simply by entering all the information about him in All the President's Men into a computer.'' Neither is there much analysis or self-reflection in the author's uninspired recitation of events. Carl, with his Hippy, conspiratorial, Rolling Stone exterior disguising his inventive, intuitive, analytical technique.'' There is no news here, especially not about the current buzz of the Beltway: the identity of Deep Throat. Bob with his square, all-American midwestern 4-H friendliness disguising, for the most part, the relentless determination that is his trademark. Yet of this important work we learn little we are instead treated to truisms like, 'A newspaper is not referred to as `the daily miracle' for nothing.'' Bradlee is candid about having been scooped by the New York Times on the Pentagon papers and the role that scooping had on the Post's devotion to Watergate: 'We found ourselves in the humiliating position of having to rewrite the competition.'' But his other remarks on coverage of Watergate affair, in which his coordination was crucial, are mostly unhelpful there is little to learn from his cheerleading: 'You really haven't been interviewed until you have sat across from Woodward and Bernstein. Further evidence that good editors do not necessarily make good writers.īradlee is, of course, the now-retired, legendary editor of the Washington Post, the man who took the paper from Sputnik to Watergate to Iran-Contra and beyond.

A Good Life by Ben Bradlee