The Race Beat or The War for Wealth

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

Author: Gene Roberts

This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities of racial segregation in the South — and the brutality used to enforce it.

It is the story of how the nation's press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen — first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media — revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court's 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South's mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama.

We witness some southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a handful of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderateforces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream.

The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South.

For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting country-wide outrage as The New York Times, Newsweek, NBC News, and other major news organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama.

The New York Times - David J. Garrow

"At no other time in U.S. history were the news media more influential than they were in the 1950s and 1960s," argues The Race Beat, an important study of how journalists covered the civil rights movement. One might imagine that influence was all to the good, but Gene Roberts, a former managing editor at The New York Times, and Hank Klibanoff, a managing editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, describe here in richly instructive detail how, more often than not, the professional performance of both Southern newspapers and national beacons like The Times left much to be desired.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

The stories of these men -- and with the notable exception of Hazel Brannon Smith, who owned a few small-town papers in Mississippi and wrote bravely against the racist White Citizens' Council, they all were men -- may seem inside baseball for journalists, but they are essential to the history of the civil rights movement and thus of broad interest. The authors are well qualified for the task. Roberts, who now teaches at the University of Maryland, had a long and distinguished career during which he often reported from the civil rights front lines; so, too, did Klibanoff, now the managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who began his career working on three different small Mississippi papers. At times, their attention drifts away from the press and onto rehashes of familiar stories -- the murder of Emmett Till, the march in Selma, the mob violence at the University of Mississippi, the church bombing in Birmingham -- but these may be useful to younger readers for whom, alas, these events are ancient and perhaps unknown history.

Publishers Weekly

This Pulitzer-winning chronicle of the role the news media played in shaping the civil rights movement makes its belated audio debut. Richard Allen undertakes the vocal depictions of the players from across the race-relations spectrum with tremendous skill. He manages to portray characters instead of caricatures as the sweeping real-life drama unfolds. Given the length of the recording and the density of the material, listeners should find it particularly helpful that Allen repeats the last few sentences of the previous disc at the start of each new CD. The solid production follows the authors' straight-ahead narrative approach. Journalism students and history buffs with at least some grounding in both the conventions of the news business or the civil rights era are the natural core audience. Others may wish to familiarize themselves with more general resources before tackling such an ambitious offering. A Vintage paperback (Reviews, Nov. 9, 2006). (Jan.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

Faced with "a flying wedge of white toughs coming at him" as he interviewed a black woman after the 1955 Emmett Till lynching trial, NBC reporter John Chancellor thrust his microphone toward them, saying, "I don't care what you're going to do to me, but the whole world is going to know it." This gripping account of how America and the world found out about the Civil Rights movement is written by two veteran journalists of the "race beat" from 1954 to 1965. Building on an exhaustive base of interviews, oral histories and memoirs, news stories and editorials, they reveal how prescient Gunnar Myrdal was in asserting that "to get publicity is of the highest strategic importance to the Negro people." The New York Times and other major media take center stage, but the authors provide a fresh account of the black press's trajectory from a time when black reporters searched "for stories white reporters didn't even know about" through the loss of the black press's "eyewitness position on the story" in Little Rock to its recovery with the Freedom Rides. Although sometimes weighted by mundane detail and deadening statistics, the book is so enlivened with anecdotes that it remains a page-turner. (Nov. 21) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Gloria Maxwell - Library Journal

In the late 1930s, the Carnegie Foundation commissioned Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to conduct a study of race relations in America. The result was the seminal 1500-page An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944. Myrdal exposed the unfair treatment of Negro people, particularly in the South. Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, coverage of Southern race issues fell almost solely to the black press. They reported on Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and other atrocities aimed at Southern blacks. As America participated in World Wars I and II, Southern blacks began to question why they were risking their lives to fight against prejudice, genocide, and discrimination in foreign countries while their own country refused to give them equality. In their 2006 hardcover, veteran journalists Roberts and Klibanoff draw on oral histories, memoirs, extensive interviews, and editorials to tell the story of dedicated black journalists who braved danger to bring stories to print, and they relate how the Northern press corps was finally drawn into covering the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. With a timbre close to that of James Earl Jones, Richard Allen brings authority and authenticity to his reading of this audio version. Some of the accounts are shocking to hear but are undeniable testimony to actual events. Incredibly detailed, sometimes to the point of overkill, this is undeniably a significant addition to civil rights history. Absolutely essential for all audio collections.

Library Journal

Reporters who covered the "race beat" during the volatile desegregation of the South put their principles and often their lives on the line to ensure that the Civil Rights Movement became imbedded in the American conscience. Distinguished authors Roberts (former managing editor, New York Times) and Klibanoff (managing editor of news, Atlanta Journal-Constitution) have written a sweeping, often engrossing narrative of the role that print and broadcast reporters played in the movement. Beginning with Gunnar Myrdal's indictment of Southern racial intolerance, An American Dilemma (1944), the authors describe how the white and black presses sought out and presented the stories that enthralled and divided America, from Emmett Till's murder in 1955 to "Bloody Sunday" at Selma ten years later. The white press replaced the black press as the source of timely civil rights news because Southern political leaders and murderous pro-segregation thugs more often prevented black reporters from covering events. In addition to providing exciting stories of times that have been well chronicled by Taylor Branch, most recently in At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68, the authors present fascinating accounts of editors and reporters-famous and little known, black and white, liberal and reactionary-who, in the words of Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), "changed this nation once and for all." Strongly recommended for larger public libraries and for academic libraries that support journalism programs. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/06.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Book review: Desafío de Colaboración:Como No ganancias y Negocios Tienen éxito Por Alianzas Estratégicas

The War for Wealth: Why Globalization is Bleeding the West of Its Prosperity

Author: Gabor Steingart

A rallying cry to renew the position of the West in the global economy

If globalization's cheerleaders are right and the world is indeed flat, then it's tilted heavily toward the East. In this provocative look at globalization and its discontents, agenda-setting journalist Gabor Steingart challenges the cadre of well-known globalization supporters-from Thomas Friedman and other media personalities to economists to the politicians that are enabling this transfer of jobs and wealth-to show how the same free-trade policies that are responsible for the Asian economic miracle are destroying the West's way of life and standard of living.

Using numerous examples, The War for Wealth demonstrates how China and other Asian powerhouses have turned the sources of our economic might against us, and shows how we will continue to lose wealth and prosperity if we continue down the current path. To resolve these issues, Steingart makes a strong case for controversial fixes, such as a NATO-like trans-Atlantic trade agreement and a rethinking of our most basic trade policies.

Lawrence R. Maxted - Library Journal

Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat synthesized academic work on globalization into a book for everyone. Now Steingart (Washington, DC, correspondent, Der Spiegel) examines the dark side of globalization for a similarly broad audience. Forcefully, he hammers home his thesis that globalization comes with many negatives and dangers. He warns that nations like India and China are aggressively setting the stage for a redistribution of wealth from the West to Asia. He explains that they and other Asian nations have gradually come to dominate first manufacturing and then services and will soon dominate research and development. He says that U.S. and European jobs lost to Asia are not being replaced with comparable ones: workers in general are losing their economic power as Asian businesses exploit their own glut of low-cost, easily controlled labor. Steingart cautions that in addition to economic strength, these Asian nations are building up their military might not unlike the European powers did before World War I. Ultimately, he provides a glimmer of hope with suggestions for how the West can regain its economic vitality. His cautionary work is deeply thoughtful, accessible to all, and highly recommended for all libraries. [This edition has additional material not in the original German one.-Ed.]

Table of Contents:

Ch. 1 Rethinking globalization : a question of survival 1

Ch. 2 Europe over all : the dress rehearsal for globalization 23

Ch. 3 The American century : a final appraisal 49

Ch. 4 New rivals : the Asian challenge 91

Ch. 5 The flat world is broken 127

Ch. 6 Aggressive Asia : a threat to world peace? 203

Ch. 7 The United States of the West : it's a journey, not a destination 223

Interview with Nobel Prize winner Paul A. Samuelson : "The market has no brain" 261

Acknowledgments 275

Sources 279

Index 289

Sandra Day OConnor or God in the White House

Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice

Author: Joan Biskupic

Sandra Day O'Connor, America's first woman justice, was called the most powerful woman in America. She became the axis on which the Supreme Court turned, and it was often said that to gauge the direction of American law, one need look only to O'Connor's vote. Drawing on information gleaned from once-private papers, hundreds of interviews, and the insight gained from nearly two decades of covering the Supreme Court, author Joan Biskupic offers readers a fascinating portrait of a complex and multifaceted woman—lawyer, politician, legislator, and justice, as well as wife, mother, A-list society hostess, and competitive athlete. Biskupic provides an in-depth account of her transformation from tentative jurist to confident architect of American law.

The Washington Post - Kathleen M. Sullivan

Biskupic gives a fascinating account of O'Connor's political astuteness; she was appointed and reelected as an Arizona state senator, then rose to become majority leader of that body. Later, she became a judge on an Arizona trial court and an intermediate appeals court. Diligent, alert, energetic and adept at politicking, she was a master of the telephone call and the handwritten note, and she helped organize everything from Republican presidential campaigns in Arizona to her classmate Rehnquist's confirmation to the Supreme Court.

The New York Times - Emily Bazelon

…if Biskupic lacks intimate confidences for Sandra Day O'Connor, she has something else: perfect timing. Her book appears as O'Connor leaves the bench and while her legacy is unsettled. Biskupic jumps into that opening with a well-researched and (no doubt to O'Connor's chagrin) revealing account.

Publishers Weekly

In the late 1980s, as the Supreme Court justices were discussing a case, Antonin Scalia ranted against affirmative action. Sandra Day O'Connor, the first and then still the only woman on the High Court, replied, "Why, Nino, how do you think I got my job?" This is one of the few revelatory moments in Biskupic's bio of the retiring O'Connor as sharp-tongued, humorous and utterly realistic. It's also, as Biskupic shows in a close study of O'Connor's jurisprudence, a bit misleading: for most of her career on the Court, the conservative O'Connor voted against affirmative action. With access to justices' once private papers, longtime court observer Biskupic, now with USA Today, sheds light on the internal workings on the Court, but not much on the internal workings of the very private O'Connor's mind and heart. Biskupic does show the justice gaining confidence and force on the Court, particularly after her fight against breast cancer in 1988. As O'Connor faces retirement, Biskupic clarifies her judicial legacy, sometimes seeing the glass as half full, sometimes as half empty: praising her lack of ideology but also noting a lack of vision in a justice who often "step[s] to the brink, and then back[s] away"-a mixed legacy that will be debated for years to come. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Veteran Supreme Court reporter Biskupic offers an insightful biography of perhaps the most influential associate justice in recent history. She cites O'Connor's frontierlike upbringing in Arizona and her ability to mingle with finesse in a male world as factors in her ascension to the de facto leadership of the Court's centrist plurality, which has swayed the majority opinion on a range of issues, including abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, and the death penalty. Biskupic underscores the nontraditional nature of O'Connor's credentials: her lack of high-level judicial experience and her brief career in the Arizona State Senate. But there were also her connections with the Republican Party and her inclination to avoid public positions on controversial topics. O'Connor was a consensus-builder and team player, but Biskupic nevertheless traces the theme of women's rights in her career-as when she exhorted President Nixon to name a woman to the Supreme Court. Once on the Court, she was frequently called on to write opinions involving sex discrimination and women's rights. On abortion, she carefully backtracked, allowing states more latitude than the approach taken by the liberals but rebuffing conservative efforts to gut abortion rights altogether. The O'Connor Court, Biskupic notes, thus moved the law-and society-in new directions. Highly recommended.-Philip Y. Blue, New York State Supreme Court Criminal Branch Law Lib., New York Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

"She was not raised to sit still," remarked a weary clerk of Sandra Day O'Connor. Indeed not, as this lively life of the just-retired Associate Justice relates. Supreme Court chronicler Biskupic writes, mostly admiringly but not unreservedly, of O'Connor, a tough but polite woman who grew up on an Arizona ranch headed by a never-pleased patriarch who, by most accounts, put the fear into everyone he met. Sandy Day was brilliant, a surprise to her classmates at Stanford Law School (including William Rehnquist, whom she briefly dated) and to hapless chauvinists in the Phoenix suburbs, to which she and her husband repaired in 1957. O'Connor served as a state legislator-a fellow senator, meaning to be complimentary, said of her, "this pretty little thing carries a disconcerting load of expertise"-and appeals-court judge before being shortlisted by Attorney General William French Smith to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1981. Though President Reagan had pledged to name a woman to the court, Biskupic writes, "O'Connor's credentials did not make her an obvious candidate." On closer examination, administration vetters found that she was politically well-connected and suitably conservative, though big-C rightists had fits when they discovered that O'Connor was generally pro-choice. No matter: she easily passed the audition, only to take a mostly independent course on the bench that put her at odds with doctrinaire types on the left and right alike. Biskupic does a solid job of charting O'Connor's evolution as a judge who, given her druthers, preferred to seek consensus and split the difference in a given dispute over the slash-and-burn approach of certain other jurists,notably bete noire Antonin Scalia. O'Connor shaped the law, Biskupic concludes, "with her Western pragmatism, her feel for the American center-and a shrewd but quiet negotiating skill."Fitting farewell to an influential jurist who may soon be very much missed.

Interesting book: Vegetarian Express or Painters Kitchen

God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush

Author: Randall Balmer

How did we go from John F. Kennedy declaring that religion should play no role in the elections to Bush saying, "I believe that God wants me to be president"?

Historian Randall Balmer takes us on a tour of presidential religiosity in the last half of the twentieth century—from Kennedy's 1960 speech that proposed an almost absolute wall between American political and religious life to the soft religiosity of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society; from Richard Nixon's manipulation of religion to fit his own needs to Gerald Ford's quiet stoicism; from Jimmy Carter's introduction of evangelicalism into the mainstream to Ronald Reagan's co-option of the same group; from Bill Clinton's covert way of turning religion into a non-issue to George W. Bush's overt Christian messages, Balmer reveals the role religion has played in the personal and political lives of these American presidents.

Americans were once content to disregard religion as a criterion for voting, as in most of the modern presidential elections before Jimmy Carter.But today's voters have come to expect candidates to fully disclose their religious views and to deeply illustrate their personal relationship to the Almighty. God in the White House explores the paradox of Americans' expectation that presidents should simultaneously trumpet their religious views and relationship to God while supporting the separation of church and state. Balmer tells the story of the politicization of religion in the last half of the twentieth century, as well as the "religionization" of our politics. He reflects on the implications of this shift, which have reverberated in both our religious and political worlds, and offers a new lens through which to see not only these extraordinary individuals, but also our current political situation.

Publishers Weekly

How did personal faith go from something John F. Kennedy needed to distance himself from to something recent presidential candidates have been eager to embrace publicly? Balmer, an eminent historian and first-rate storyteller, recounts familiar material in a way that's fresh. He wisely suggests that genuine blame for misuse of religion in public rests with voters, not politicians. But a running quarrel with the "religious right"-unannounced in the title-seems the real raison d'être for this book, and many arguments and examples will be familiar to readers of the author's Thy Kingdom Come. Balmer marshals impressive evidence that the religious right arose in reaction to government interference with racist religious schools. But he often tends to overstate and sometimes omits key facts. Balmer traces the right's slow response to 1973's Roev. Wadedecision by quoting the Southern Baptist Convention's initial support of Roe, without noting that the takeover of that church by fundamentalists came later and largely over that issue. Most oddly, Balmer describes the war in Iraq as America's first aggressive military campaign "in history." These eccentricities make the book feel agenda-driven, and render questionable even its many points of wisdom. (Mar.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

In Sickness and in Power or The Globalization of Poverty and the N W Order

In Sickness and in Power: Illnesses in Heads of Government During the Last 100 Years

Author: David Owen

The course of modern world history has been critically shaped by the physical and mental illnesses of heads of state, sometimes in the public eye but usually in secrecy. Democratic politicians as diverse as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Churchill, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Pompidou, Mitterrand, Blair, George W. Bush, Chirac, and Sharon all lied about their health. Between 1906 and 2008 seven Presidents are judged to have been mentally ill while in office: Theodore Roosevelt (bipolar disorder), Taft (breathing-related sleep disorder), Wilson (major depressive disorder), Coolidge (major depressive disorder), Hoover (major depressive disorder), Johnson (bipolar disorder), and Nixon (alcohol abuse). Many despots-such as Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Robert Mugabe-have been branded by the press and public opinion as suffering mental illnesses. Lord Owen argues neither Hitler nor Stalin were "mad" in any sense the medical profession recognizes (whereas Mussolini and Mao had depression, possibly bipolar disorder). Something happens to some leaders' mental stability while in power that is captured by Bertrand Russell's phrase, "the intoxication of power." Hubristic behavior with excessive self-confidence is almost an occupational hazard for heads of government, as it is for leaders in other fields, such as business and the military, for it feeds on isolation and excessive deference. Owen argues that a medically definable condition called Hubris Syndrome affects some heads of government the longer they stay in office or after a specific triggering event such as 9/11. Recent leaders such as George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Margaret Thatcher have developedHubris Syndrome. Symptoms include patterns of reckless behavior, bad judgment, and operational incompetence, often compounded by delusions of personal infallibility and divine exemption from political accountability. Lord Owen makes the cases that democratic societies need to implement new procedures for dealing with illness in their own heads of government, and that they need to empower the United Nations to use new procedures and means for removing despots whose behavior becomes so hubristic as to pose a grave threat to their own people or the world.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements     ix
Introduction     xi
Illness in heads of government during the last 100 years
1901-1953     3
1953-2007     60
Case histories
Prime Minister Eden's illness and Suez     109
President Kennedy's health     141
The Shah's secret illness     191
President Mitterrand's prostate cancer     220
The intoxication of power
Bush, Blair and the war in Iraq     253
Lessons for the future
Safeguarding against illness in heads of government     327
Conclusion     363
Notes     371
Index     393

Read also Citizen Worker or Investments

The Globalization of Poverty and the N W Order

Author: Michel Chossudovsky

In this new and expanded edition of Chossudovsky's international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.

This book is a skilful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.

In this new enlarged edition -which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction-- the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.

Published in 11 languages. More than 100,000 copies sold Worldwide.