Book: The Kingdom and the Power

Overview
Gay Talese offers a richly reported portrait of The New York Times as a living institution, focusing on its leadership, newsroom culture, and outsized influence on American public life. The narrative moves beyond chronicle to dramatize how personalities, customs, and internal rivalries shape the paper's decisions and its role as arbiter of news. Scenes of meetings, corridors, and editorial rituals reveal how an organization that prizes objectivity nevertheless produces deeply human judgments.

Central themes
The interplay of power and principle is central: authority at the paper often rests as much on social networks, family ties, and newsroom traditions as on editorial philosophy. Talese explores how the pursuit of civic duty and journalistic excellence sits uneasily beside business pressures, proprietary interests, and the will of powerful individuals. The book repeatedly returns to the tension between the Times's self-image as guardian of public trust and the private ambitions and frailties that influence what appears on its pages.

Portraits of leadership
Talese profiles a roster of figures whose decisions and temperaments shaped the institution's course, portraying them with intimacy and nuance. Publishers, editors, and columnists emerge as characters who manage reputations, broker influence, and navigate the shifting politics of a great metropolitan institution. Rather than treating leaders as mere symbols, the narrative shows how their everyday choices, about what to run, whom to promote, and how to respond to outside pressures, cumulatively determine the paper's character.

Newsroom culture and ritual
The book captures the rituals that give the Times its identity: the cadence of editorial conferences, the deference to senior reporters, the code of professional secrecy, and the informal hierarchies that guide assignments. Talese emphasizes how habits of mind and modes of comportment are passed down, producing a distinct newsroom temperament that values decorum, accuracy, and a certain aloofness. Those rituals both preserve standards and create blind spots, shaping coverage in subtle and enduring ways.

Style and method
Working in the mode of literary journalism, Talese blends scene-by-scene reporting, reconstructed conversations, and character-driven narrative to render institutional life with vividness and texture. The prose privileges observation and anecdote, using small moments to illuminate larger institutional dynamics. This approach makes opaque administrative decisions intelligible by rooting them in human motives and social context.

Impact and legacy
The book altered how readers and journalists think about the press by revealing the human machinery behind a revered civic institution. It prompted reflection within journalism about transparency, accountability, and the influence of editorial elites. Over decades, the portrait has remained a reference point for discussions about media power, institutional culture, and the responsibilities of major news organizations in a democratic society.