Decline and Fall: The Struggle for Power at a Great Amaerican Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post

by Otto Friedrich

Friedrich was one of the top editors of the original Saturday Evening Post for about 10 years until its demise in the late '60s. The book is a description of all of the mis-steps that led to the collapse of the Post. It's also, inadvertently, about the change in American business that took place at that time when conglomerates were devouring (and later, evacuating) old-economy warhouses like Curtis Publishing (the publisher of the Post). It's a sad book with an elegiac quality--particularly moving are the last chapters when everyone sees the disaster coming but can't stop it. Friedrich clearly loved the Post and it shows in this wise book. The writing is fresh and clean as one would expect.

Genres: Business

500 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Otto Friedrich was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard, where his father was a political science professor. He took a while to find his literary stride. His career took him from the copy desk at Stars and Stripes to a top writing job at Time, with stops in between with the United Press in London and Paris and with The Daily News and Newsweek in New York.

But it was the seven years he spent with The Saturday Evening Post, including four as its last managing editor, that established Mr. Friedrich as a writer to be reckoned with.

When the venerable magazine folded in 1969, Mr. Friedrich, who had seen the end coming and kept meticulous notes, delineated its demise in a book, 'Decline and Fall," which was published by Harper & Row the next year. Widely hailed as both an engaging and definitive account of corporate myopia, the book, which won a George Polk Memorial Award, is still used as a textbook by both journalism and business schools, his daughter said.

From then on, Mr. Friedrich, who had tried his hand as a novelist in the 1950's and 60's and written a series of children's books with his wife, Priscilla Broughton, wrote nonfiction, turning out an average of one book every two years.

They include "Clover: A Love Story," a 1979 biography of Mrs. Henry Adams; "City of Nets: Hollywood in the 1940's" (1986); "Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations," (1989); "Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet," (1992), and "Blood and Iron," a study of the Von Moltke family of Germany that is being published this fall.

He wrote his books, as well as reams of freelance articles and book reviews, while holding down a full-time job with Time that required him to write in a distinct style far different from the one he used at home.

Mr. Friedrich, who joined Time as a senior editor in 1971 and retired in 1990 after a decade as a senior writer, wrote 40 major cover stories, the magazine said yesterday, as well as hundreds of shorter pieces, all of them produced on an old-fashioned Royal typewriter that he was given special dispensation to continue using long after the magazine converted to computers.

Mrs. Lucas, portraying her father as a New England moralist whose life and literary interests reflected his disenchantment with much of 20th-century culture, noted that his aptitude for anachronism did not end with typewriters. "We have five rotary telephones in this house," she said.

In addition to pursuing his eclectic interests into print, Mr. Friedrich also had a knack for turning his own life into art. When he tried to grow roses, the record of his failure became a book, "The Rose Garden" (1972). When relatives were stricken with schizophrenia, his frustration drove him to produce an exhaustive study of insanity, "Going Crazy" (1976).

Reviews

[Nog · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read some of Friedrich's other books and liked them, and the fact that I have an interest in journalism, I picked up this used copy - it's OOP. Well, OF must have kept a daily journal, for there's almost a day by day account of the last few years of the Post. It gets a bit dry and repetitive, but hey, it's about what really happened there. Sort of amazing to see the struggle the editors had to convince a bunch of dudes in their 80's who comprised the board of directors to modernize the magazines (not just the Post). Combative and stodgy, they were living in the past. Starting in 1962, three incompetent presidents drove the magazine into the ground. Having worked at a couple of small companies with presidents who thought they were geniuses, but were instead lousy businessmen, I found it's interesting to see this happen with a large corporation that owned several magazines and printing facilities.

[Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review TK