The link below is to a group of essays about the late Marshall Shulman, just published by the Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum at Columbia University. The authors were specialists in what a half century ago was the USSR and is now Russia, a nuclear-armed autocracy as menacing as it was then, perhaps more so. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Russia was deemed less central to global order until Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Compared to the expertise reflected in these writings, current official U.S. policy and understanding of Russia is a dangerous mess.
https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/JervisForum-Tribute-Shulman.pdf
Here is my contribution:
Marshall Shulman entered our lives on a rainy night in Moscow in early fall of 1974. We had recently arrived. I was the Washington Post correspondent with a three-year assignment. By then, my wife Susan and I already realized that because so little was available from official Soviet sources and the very circumspect US diplomats working at the embassy, even the most esteemed American visitors wanted to be in touch with journalists representing the major US newspapers and magazines as providers of information and insight. They also welcomed the modicum of hospitality we could provide, including dollops of black-market caviar.
Our apartment was in a foreigners’ compound on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where militia at the entrance monitored the arriving guests. The clear understanding was that visitors and residents like us would have to accept the KGB reporting the American connection, perhaps for retribution. On that night, Marshall was waved through routinely by the militia. But in the process he was soaked, head to toe, in the torrential downpour. So it was that our first session with an enduring friend, whom we considered among the wisest American experts on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was conducted with him wearing a bathrobe that barely covered his knees.
US-Soviet relations in the 1970s, which in hindsight marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War that culminated in 1991 with the final implosion of the USSR, were a composite of intermittent forays at détente, navigating hardline American animus and the Kremlin’s defensive suspicions. There were many major issues: how to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet split, competition for influence around the developing world, the reality of enmity in the Indochina conflicts, and negotiations to restrain nuclear weapons, which everyone understood was essential to preserving civilization.
And what were broadly termed Human Rights. The movement in support of Jewish emigration was especially well organized. After the 1967 Arab-Israel war, a substantial portion of Jews in the Soviet republics sought the goal of a more enriching life, in every sense of the term, in Israel and the United States.
The emigration issue served purposes in both Moscow and Washington. Antisemitism had deep roots in Russia, and using exit visas to portray Jewish apostasy was cynically satisfying to the Kremlin. And, with the issue being led by Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash) and a fiercely anti-Soviet US political mainstream, measuring exit visas became a valuable asset in setting parameters for the relationship, particularly on trade benefits.
The Helsinki Accords in 1975 codified human rights as an area for East-West disputes and negotiation. With celebrated writers and scientists at the forefront, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, the dissident movement was an asset for demanding changes in the USSR and an excuse by the KGB to crack down on critics and criticism.
What was exceptional about Marshall, and unusual among other American scholars and officials who were monitoring the USSR, was that he understood the complexities of ideology and competition which framed the way superpowers maneuvered for dominance.
Everybody had to be placed in the categories of that time: Anti-Soviet, soft on communism, socialist leaning, liberal, conservative, leftist, rightist, hawk, dove. Marshall recognized that the autocracy of Leonid Brezhnev and his Politburo was flailing in many respects, especially economic policy and chronologically geriatric.
That the USSR was a formidable military adversary with the capacity to encourage global tensions and wage unspeakable destruction was undeniable. But Shulman had aligned himself with George Kennan’s view that exaggerating the Soviet threat tended to serve US political interests by providing the reasoning for defense expenditure and a sprawling intelligence apparatus.
In the 1980s, when the head of the USA and Canada Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that in Perestroika and Glasnost that the Soviets were “doing the worst thing we could do to you Americans, denying you an enemy,” I heard truth in his sly appraisal.
After Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 and his appointment of Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State, the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger’s years was replaced by the split between Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, which was marked by differences in personality as well as strategy. Carter’s emphasis on human rights, combined with Brzezinski’s deep anti-Russian animus, was a contrast to Vance’s more traditionally diplomatic approach. As a senior adviser to Vance on the Soviets, Shulman was on that side of the divide.
And here is a personal explanation for why Marshall’s assessment of US-Soviet relations resonated with me as it did: I admired and wrote about the dissidents and the repressive policies of the Kremlin. But I also sensed that focusing so heavily on those issues meant underestimating equally important aspects of Soviet reality. While the West tended to call the Soviet empire “Russia,” it was in fact an uneasy composite of nationalities and their histories that made Kremlin control less complete than it seemed.
In the twenty-first century, the war with Ukraine is the most striking example of the impact of the breakup of the USSR. From the Baltics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russia is no longer master of its once massive domain. In dealing with the Soviet Union as an indomitable and eternal entity, an imperial power that was comparable to Rome and Britain at their pinnacles, the US missed underlying weaknesses. The USSR did not work. It had an ersatz economy, its projection of unity was essentially superficial, and its leadership was sclerotic.
Shulman believed that engaging with Soviet society, within the broader context of the much-disputed term détente, served a positive purpose for the United States. He held that the US would gain much more than it could lose in that approach to the relationship.
An aside about the Kremlin’s cockeyed sense of wpower in that era: in the early years after the Soviet collapse, Central Committee archives were open to researchers. A friend found a Top-Secret Central Committee document signed by then KGB head Yuri Andropov about a 1977 Politburo meeting where the debate was about “Korrespondent Osnos,” Joseph Presel, who was a young diplomat at the American Embassy, and Natan Sharansky, a dissident who played a role in advocacy for democracy and emigration.
I was assailed in the Soviet media as a CIA agent but not expelled; Presel had a lengthy State Department career in the former Soviet republics; and Sharansky spent nine years in the Gulag after a trial for anti-Soviet activities before being released and moving to Israel. That the Kremlin’s most senior officials would devote so much attention to three young men with no discernible power, I concluded, reflected their profound insecurity and declining confidence.
Calling attention to the Kremlin’s weakness was less welcome in official circles than warning of the Soviet Union’s encroaching power. Preeminence in Washington is associated with ambition and an affinity for the limelight. Marshall was by nature soft-spoken and, from what we observed, genial. He was content to be a lodger at Averell Harriman’s Georgetown homestead, which made him ancillary to the capital’s elite. Combined with his sophisticated assessment of Soviet power rather than the reductive commitment to the Cold War that was then in fashion, Marshall’s influence was never great.
When Shulman became the first director of Columbia’s W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Susan and I continued to enjoy the company of Marshall and his beloved and formidable wife, Collette. We would discuss in depth what was happening in the USSR, but we were now observing this absorbing, infuriating country and no longer directly in the competitive fray for attention or impact.
Who knows what Marshall Shulman’s role might have been in managing President Vladimir Putin’s dangerously uncontrollable Russia? I am certain he would have advice and judgment that would be well worth taking seriously.
The history of Judaism has seen multiple cataclysms — the Inquisition, exclusion, expulsion, pogroms, genocide — but what is happening now is something different.
Israel is upending what it means to be Jewish in the United States, where the majority of the diaspora has lived and thrived. At issue is not Jewish identity. It is about how American Jews relate to the State of Israel.
The era that began after the devastation of the Holocaust, with the establishment of the State of Israel, is ending because the Jewish state has evolved into a land that many (probably a majority) of American Jews cannot fathom, given the scale of violence and vengeance that the government has chosen as policy.
This is not the place to argue who is most responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian enmity that is so pervasive and destructive, because that avoids what the inescapable consequence seems to be in the United States.
Biases toward and against Israelis and Palestinians are genuine, but they obscure the point: Israel is no longer, for many American Jews, the answer to Jewish hopes and aspirations. It has become instead the major source of angst, family disputes, and renewed broad-based antisemitism.
Every measure of the American Jewish population shows deep divisions by generation, by adherence to religious rituals, and by political principles from left to right.
The schism has been developing for decades, but the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s responses in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon are what have created an unprecedented crisis.
The protests on university campuses on behalf of Palestinians, the surge in harassment of Jewish students, the performative fostering of rage by Donald Trump and his cohort — all have combined to produce a deep divide between those who see Israel as a pariah led by a brutal despot and those who consider it a warrior state determined to protect itself and its interests.
The cause of Zionism has fostered disagreement for as long as anyone can remember or document. But Israel is an established and immutable reality, and that will not change. So what, actually, does Israel now represent to Jews who do not live there?
For the last half century, being Jewish in America reached an apogee of influence, prosperity, and acceptance in every sphere of life that in the past might have been restricted. Bigotry never fully disappears, but discrimination on religious grounds — quotas, enforced segregation in business and social circles — had become minimal.
For many American Jews, being Jewish did not have to be their primary identifier. How they were perceived in the whys and wherefores of politics was not tied tightly to their opinions about Israel. For decades, the percentage of Jews and non-Jews marrying and in every respect sharing their lives has increased dramatically.
The underlying issues have been simmering all along. Human Rights Watch, the largest and most important organization of its kind, was founded and strongly supported with money from Jewish philanthropists, and it has stumbled repeatedly on how to best monitor human rights in an Israeli democracy that avowedly discriminates against its Palestinian citizens and neighbors.
As foreign editor of the Washington Post in the late 1970s, a time when it appeared that there could be progress on an Arab-Israeli détente, I was assailed with complaints by readers about bias of one kind or another on this issue, more than every other matter combined.
The situation now is incomparably more contentious.
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I have just finished reading Nicholas Lemann’s soulful (meant as a compliment) new book, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries. The book portrays in breadth and detail the story of his family, who emigrated from Germany in the 1830s, settled in Louisiana, and prospered in many ways.
As time went on, the family moved away from its Jewish origins in pursuit of a social acceptance that being outwardly or observantly Jewish would make unlikely.
The Lemann family’s story is aligned with and recognizable to what I have seen and personally experienced in my lifetime among friends and family. “How Jewish do you want to be?” was the question.
I was born in a time when being Jewish was existentially threatened by Nazism and fascism. The threats now are of other kinds: values, respect, shame, obloquy, misapplied pride. Israel has been lost as a unifying feature, which it never completely was anyway, and has become corrosive to a dangerous degree.
Lemann’s personal response has been to embrace Judaism completely, which, as he describes it, is about religious ritual and association. His joy in doing so has shifted his life away from melancholy.
Adopting this as a solution is not applicable, from my perspective, for many American Jews, whose observances goes from rare to casual to regular, as a part of life but not its core, which is how Lemann now sees it.
And it does not answer the fundamental conundrum: What about Israel, the Jewish homeland, the refuge from centuries of persecution and isolation?
That is why this is a different Jewish crisis from those of the past.
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My good friend Steven Weisman, the author of The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion, is writing another book that addresses this theme. He summarized his thoughts for me:
“Judaism under Roman subjugation was rife with internal conflicts over how much Jews should assimilate, whether religious or civil authority should govern them, governance infighting among priestly class and heirs to the overthrown royal family of Hasmoneans (the ones that had ruled for a hundred years after Judah Maccabee kicked out the Seleucids).
“There were also class conflicts over objection to heavy tax burdens. These conflicts weakened Jewish society and allowed Romans to exploit their divisions and take over after the Jewish War of 67-70 CE.”
The challenge today is not from the Romans, the Arabs, or the Iranians. It comes from the Jews themselves, who find it so very hard to resolve what Israel means to them anymore.
“We believe that peace is at hand.”
— National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, signaling the end of a U.S. role in the Vietnam war, October 26, 1972
“We today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.”
— President Richard Nixon, announcing what he called the end of the war in Vietnam, January 23, 1973
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In the Paris Peace Accords, signed in January 1973, the United States recovered all of its prisoners of war from North Vietnam and from the Viet Cong in the South, and agreed to withdraw the remaining American forces from the country. Significantly, the agreement allowed North Vietnam’s troops to remain in the South, and the United States pledged continuing aid to its allies in Indochina to offset the North’s military presence.
On August 22, 1973, President Richard Nixon nominated Henry Kissinger to be secretary of state, in addition to retaining his post as national security adviser. He was confirmed by the Senate a month later. In August 1974, Nixon resigned under pressure from the Watergate scandal.
In a succession of votes over the following months, Congress blocked assistance to the Indochina countries. There was no interest in supporting them anymore. Entreaties from Kissinger and from the new president, Gerald Ford, were unsuccessful.
On April 30, 1975, the North Vietnamese army captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, and unified the country under communist rule. By then Cambodia had fallen to the communist Khmer Rouge, and in December the communist Pathet Lao seized power in Laos.
That is how America’s Vietnam war came to an end. Fifty years later, Vietnam is an authoritarian one-party state and economically strong. Cambodia and Laos are stable but essentially irrelevant in the global balance of power.
Tom Wells, a historian, has just published The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations, six hundred pages of transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls with President Nixon and others, starting in 1969 and ending with Nixon’s resignation.
Kissinger had the original tape recordings destroyed (recognizing what they had done to Nixon) and resisted releasing the transcripts until he was compelled to do so.
I read (savored, to be honest) the book, to understand how Kissinger (who died on November 29, 2023, at the age of one hundred) maintained his stature as one of the most consequential diplomats — if not the most consequential — of his very lengthy tenure on the world stage.
What enabled Kissinger to sustain his aura for so long, and against a record of abject failure in Indochina? How did he pull off this reputational endurance?
Kissinger was brilliant at many things. But his greatest genius was at spinning, shaping every conversation, with the president and everyone else, to meet his always self-referential requirements.
What that meant was a masterful skill at dissembling, misrepresentation, flattering, gossiping, and what seemed to be self-deprecating humorous asides, but was actually a tactical device to engage a critical interlocutor.
I was especially interested in the Kissinger-Nixon conversations about Vietnam from 1970 to 1973, the years when I was a correspondent in Indochina for the Washington Post. I could see the real-world implications of what they were saying about the war, the U.S. military, the bombing of North Vietnam, civilian casualties, and the South Vietnamese leadership as the pressure for a deal increased, whether they liked it or not.
In their conversations, Kissinger’s cynicism was a clever cudgel encouraging Nixon’s brooding, with sneering references to, among others, Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and the “pansies” in the State Department.
With war raging and hundreds of thousands American soldiers on the ground, I was especially struck by the way Nixon and Kissinger talked about the military, including the top U.S. commanders.
Kissinger characterized General William Westmoreland, the Army chief of staff and previously the commander of American forces in Vietnam, this way: “Completely played out. All he remembers is what happened in Vietnam and how nearly he won the war at Tet” in 1968.
General Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland’s successor as U.S. commander and the man responsible for implementing the Nixon administration’s policy of “Vietnamization,” turning over military responsibility to the South Vietnamese and overseeing the withdrawal of U.S. forces, fared little better. Kissinger said he was “finished,” to which Nixon agreed.
Nixon and Kissinger’s complaints about Abrams tended to focus on his reluctance to use all-out air power to pummel North Vietnam into an agreement. Along the way, Nixon said that Abrams was “drinking too much,” and contemplated sending another general to outrank him.
(In 1980, the Army named its new main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, to honor him.)
As early as 1969, only months after his inauguration, Nixon told Kissinger that the Saigon government’s belief in eventual victory “won’t happen . . . it is impossible.”
And after the 1973 peace treaty, it was widely known that Kissinger had said that there would now be a “decent interval” for the South to survive before the ultimate triumph of the North Vietnamese.
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The full panoply of the transcripts include, for comic relief as much as anything else, discussions of Kissinger’s dating of actresses and flirting with other notable women, including his efforts to inveigh the television journalist Barbara Walters to join him privately in various venues.
My favorite of these concerned a story that was about to appear in the Washington Post that one of Kissinger’s starlets had made her name in soft-core porn. Kissinger pleaded with the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, not to run the story.
There is no indication that the story ever appeared.
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I learned of The Kissinger Tapes through an interview with Tom Wells on Brian Lamb’s weekly podcast, Booknotes+.
“Every living thing spends a great deal of time and toil in maintaining its own life and the life of systems it depends on. Plants tend the life of the soil they grow in. Beavers maintain their dams and thereby the pond that protects them. Humans maintain their bodies, their vehicles, their homes, and their cities, along with much else.”
— From the introduction to Maintenance: Of Everything by Stewart Brand
In 1968, Stewart Brand and his colleagues published the first Whole Earth Catalog, which was essentially a guide to self-sufficiency during an increasing complicated time. Steve Jobs once called Brand’s catalog a sort of “Google before Google came along.”
Brand is now eighty-seven years old. So, I was surprised in December 2025 to read a laudatory review in the Wall Street Journal of Brand’s latest book, Maintenance: Of Everything, written in his signature style — eccentric but completely accessible.
I was especially pleased because over the past year or two, I have used “maintenance” in my personal lexicon of definitions: “repositioning” instead of retirement; “offspring” instead of children, for those who are now adults (Donald Trump Jr., et al.); and recognizing that calling something “old” was rarely a compliment.
Maintenance is the effort and practice of keeping things in as good shape as possible, beginning most basically with “brush your teeth,” if you want to keep them intact.
But maintenance extends far beyond self-care. My approach is to wrangle the daunting complexities of modern life, to make them manageable when I can. Tim Cook, Jobs’s successor as CEO of Apple, said it well, in reflecting on the company’s fifty-year history: “It’s hard doing simple; it’s easy doing complex.” The writer’s version of this is “If I had more time to finish this, I could make it shorter.”
I’ll get back to health.
But first, technology has become the dominant complicating factor for those of us who remember the before-times of analog. For example, when renting a car, I used to ask for roll-up windows and a simple dashboard. The more widgets, the more distractions, the more things that can go wrong: a loose gas cap and time spent at the dealership rebooting the safety systems.
How to be a safe driver? It took me decades to focus my total attention behind the wheel. The simple seat belt has doubtless saved millions of lives, just pull and click.
In the Vietnam era, GIs wore inexpensive “non-maintainable” watches — just the time, sometimes with the date and a night light. Those that remain are now vintage artifacts, fashionable and, as antiques, expensive.
Devices are indispensable but can be unfathomably complicated, defying even the experts employed by Apple. I recently replaced a pair of lost earbuds with a set that was slipping out of my ears; I went to the Apple store to get a pair with rubber tips. I had the receipt and the buds.
Over the next hour, as many as four Apple employees were deployed to figure out why my phone would not update the “find my phone” capacity, which had to be done for the buds to be exchanged, I was told. Finally, duffer that I am, I pointed out that my phone did not have the storage space for the just-updated app. I admit to leaving feeling superior on behalf of my cohort.
Segueing to health. When the first Covid vaccines for people over sixty-five became available, to get an appointment required uploading the front and back of a Medicare card. Under the circumstances, that requirement seemed to me ridiculous given the target constituency.
I now know how to upload, but I recently had a medical appointment cancelled because I did not meet a deadline in advance for uploading the front and back of my insurance cards. That provider earned a blistering one-star review on Yelp.
Maintenance in health can be manageable. Regular checkups, recognizing that when you take daily meds for high blood pressure or a statin for cholesterol — that does not mean you are frail or failing. Like any machine, the body needs maintenance.
Brand’s book is billed as “Part One” and is derived from a website called “Books in Progress.” The maintenance the book describes is specifically about a round-the-world sailing competition, in which the winner turned out to be the racer who was best at maintenance on the high seas and motorcycle maintenance.
Neither of these are relevant to me, but the principle certainly is, expanding the term “maintenance,” in Brand’s words, “beyond referring only to preventive to stave off the trauma of repair — brushing the damn teeth etc. Let ‘maintenance’ mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.
“From that perspective, occasional repair is part of the process. Close monitoring is part of the process. Changing the oil is part of the process. Eventually replacing the thing is part of the process.”
I’ll say here that there are some things that cannot be replaced. Body and soul are two. But they can be maintained.
This is how to buy Stewart Brand’s inspiring book.
There were more than four million books published in the United States in 2025 with an ISBN identifier, an increase of 32.5 percent over 2024, according to statistics compiled by Bowker, which tracks such data.
For all those who say that book publishing is dead, dying, deteriorating, or about to be overwhelmed by AI: clearly not yet.
What it does mean is an amazing democratization of how to be an author. Because most of the increase was in self-published books, for which the number of print and ebook versions rose to 3.5 million in 2025, from 2.5 million in 2024.
What used to be dismissed as “vanity” publishing (and still often is) has become a large and lucrative business, with a number of ways to publish, from a handful of copies to bestseller numbers, supported to one degree or another by the authors, financially and in spreading the word.
A bit more about the numbers to make sense of them. The total number of books published in traditional ways rose by 6.6 percent, to nearly 650,000; half of those had BISAC codes, which classify the categories, such as fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and self-help, to be sold, placed in libraries, and entered into databases to be searched.
So what does all this activity really mean in practice?
First, major commercial or trade publishers are increasingly being led by experts in technology, digital distribution, and data, with the books themselves acquired and edited by employee professionals.
In February I hosted a conversation with Jonathan Karp, the outgoing CEO of Simon & Schuster. Karp started his publishing career in the 1980s as an editorial assistant at Random House earning $17,000 a year. He rose through the editorial ranks to become a publisher and then a chief executive.
After a lengthy search Greg Greeley was named to succeed Karp at Simon & Schuster. Greeley worked for nineteen years at Amazon, in the distribution divisions of that enormous enterprise. “He and his teams pioneered print-on-demand publishing, launched the company’s self-publishing platform, and expanded the company’s global audiobook and books marketplace capabilities,” the corporate press release said.
I recently wrote a piece extolling Gayle Feldman’s new biography, Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, about the co-founder of Random House. The current CEO of what is now called Penguin Random House is Nihar Malaviya; his official biography says that he has “spearheaded the creation of a variety of industry-first capabilities in data science, supply chain, technology, and consumer insights.”
What do these executives know about the actual books?
Doomsayers will say that the companies see books as essentially roughage to be churned out, with minimal regard for content and quality.
Let me offer a different view. Books are commodities that people have to want to buy and read. It is the editors and publishers who acquire books and develop them into forms ready to be sold. Expertise in data and delivery makes the books more visible and accessible. Sure, crap will sell — it always has — but so will quality when consumers can find the books in the heaps that are appearing, in a format they want to read them.
Effective marketing a book from a single copy to millions is designed by people, assisted by the advances, for better and (alas) worse, in technology.
My belief has always been that the way to publish books well is to know who their prospective readers will be and then make sure they realize the book is available. Visibility and discovery are core to the process of reducing the enduring complaints of “I can’t find that book anywhere.”
What, then, is self-publishing in 2026, the overwhelming majority of those four million books last year?
The concept is still largely misunderstood. Explaining it fully requires much more than a post like this one. I can summarize it as follows: An author who writes a book finds a partner to render it in printed or digital form, with the costs partly or wholly carried by the writer. Self-publishing is not an author cranking out on a mimeograph machine or whatever today’s equivalent would be.
I am often contacted by friends (and some surprisingly notable acquaintances) who want to write a story, a memoir, a novel, a biography, or to share their experiences and expertise. This is a model I think can work for just about anyone:
Self-publishing in digital-only formats has its own infrastructure costs and reach, like the one developed at Amazon by Simon & Schuster’s new CEO. I know less about it other than that it delivers a finished text.
Books in print are still, for the majority of authors and readers, the preferred option.
Politics and Prose, a very popular bookstore in Northwest Washington, D.C., which I have written about before, has a service called Opus that offers a number of ways to publish a book at a base cost from $600 to $1,200, depending on what level of support the author wants, plus the cost of printing each copy, set by the page count and number of illustrations, with hardcover and paperback binding options.
Upheaval in book publishing aligns with the many other dizzying ways in which technology impacts our life and times. The reasons for concern, or even alarm, are apparent and emphasized.
The flip side is that if you want to write and publish a book, now you can.
Go for it!
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Matty (never Matthew) Goldberg, a good friend and esteemed member of the book publishing community, knows more about music than, I’m guessing, anyone you know. Every year he curates and sends out a playlist to his community. These are invariably excellent. He is now starting a Substack about music (about damn time!), and here is the subscription link.
The lives of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy have been chronicled in countless ways, in facts and gauzy mythology.
If you are old enough to remember where you were on November 22, 1963, then it is probably your middle-aged offspring and grandchildren who are now watching Love Story, the soapy streamer about the short and tragic marriage of John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.
By the numbers, the most read article in The New Yorker in 2025 was granddaughter Tatiana Kennedy Schlossberg’s account of the leukemia that was about to end her life.
Fascination with the Kennedy family persists long after its time, vexed now by the ignominy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role in Donald Trump’s cabinet.
JFK himself died long before he would have left a memoir. And Jackie, as she is always called, was considered more ethereal than practical or accessible in the way she was portrayed. As a woman of that era, she recognized that she was mainly examined for style.
That is why the book and audio Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, published in 2011, is so astonishing. The interviews were conducted in 1964 by the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a close friend and presidential aide, only months after the assassination.
With the approval and a foreword by Caroline Kennedy, the book was published by Hyperion, a publisher then owned by the Walt Disney Company. It was briefly a bestseller and, from what I can tell, was largely forgotten. I came upon it in a classically twenty-first-century way, in a clip of a friendly interview that Caroline Kennedy did on David Letterman’s late-night show when the book came out.
I downloaded the audio and the ebook, and I was mesmerized.
The interviews must be the most immersive account of the marriage and JFK’s presidency, as lived by Jackie, that can possibly exist.
Why? Because the conversations are so personal, kept private for decades and candid in so many ways. There is sadness, of course, but little that is maudlin. Kennedy’s image has been blurred over the years by the revelations about his trysts with women even while in the White House, a reflection of prurience in contemporary history.
But in these interviews there is a marital intimacy that cannot be contrived, a loving partnership in which Jackie was a much more significant participant than she was thought to be.
She was in her mid-thirties, soft-spoken with a feminine lilt in her voice. My sense is that she chose in every meaningful way to be JFK’s beloved wife and mother of his children. She was not his mistress, and I suspect (though we’ll never know for sure) that both of them understood the difference.
There are many moments of vivid history. Less than a hundred days into JFK’s presidency came the Bay of Pigs disaster, in which a group of Cuban exiles launched an operation to overthrow Fidel Castro, with CIA support, which was an utter and humiliating failure.
How that happened, and JFK’s response, has been written about extensively, but never so poignantly and with an understanding of the circumstances and politics that surrounded it. The image Jackie paints of JFK in tears over the damage to his presidency so early in his term and his musings on the fate of the hapless Cubans are exceptionally visceral.
That episode was to shape the president’s brilliant handling of the October 1962 crisis in which the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of a nuclear confrontation. The Bay of Pigs experience was the reason that Kennedy overruled the generals and the CIA, who were advocating a military response, and instead imposed a naval embargo.
You can hear Jackie describe JFK’s suspicion of the military brass as only she could describe it, in pillow talk.
One of the significant moments in Kennedy’s pre-presidential life was the controversy over the authorship of Profiles in Courage, the book that won a Pulitzer Prize in biography, which was published after Kennedy had spent months recovering from back surgery.
A widespread belief was that most of the book had been really written by Ted Sorensen, a young aide and speechwriter. In Jackie’s view, that suspicion was fostered by Sorensen himself, for which she never could forgive or really trust him.
In explicit and sometimes cutting detail, Jackie describes how she and her husband felt about the major personalities of the era and how JFK shrewdly navigated political relationships in Washington, where this week’s opponent may of necessity be next week’s ally.
Jackie’s perception of some illustrious figures was very critical, including (and especially) Lyndon Johnson as vice president and Kennedy’s successor; Secretary of State Dean Rusk, whom JFK had decided to replace; Adlai Stevenson, twice defeated in his own presidential campaigns, who was “irritating”; and lesser figures like Mamie Eisenhower, who called the White House “her home” and was reluctant to show the incoming first lady around.
The private Jackie could be acerbic and emotional. In his own memoir, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tells of the night in 1967 when Jackie pounded on his chest pleading for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Only now can I see that fierceness in her appraisal of the people and events of the period.
Over the years, and having worked on books with Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan and read much about other presidential wives, I take the view that while the husbands had the egos and ambitions that made them presidents, it was their wives who felt the fullest brunt of the political years, especially the lows.
Jacqueline Kennedy cherished her marriage and admired her husband greatly. Through this private account of their lives together, I can see that this was true.
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In June 1976, Communist parties from East and West convened in East Berlin to consider the growing tide of Eurocommunism in countries like Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Washington was very concerned.
I covered the event for the Washington Post.
On a spring trip from Moscow to Venice, my wife and I had stayed at the luxurious Gritti Palace, with a letter of introduction to the manager. He was in despair, certain that in a year or so Italy would have a Communist government and the hotel would go under.
That did not happen. Nearly fifty years later, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez spent millions at the Gritti Palace, apparently in lavish luster, for their over-the-top wedding last summer.
Since the end of World War II, epochs, situations, and national groups have been defined in shorthand: the Cold War, the non-aligned, the Axis of Evil, the Global South, the end of colonialism, ISIS, and so forth. This year we were supposedly on the cusp of the era of Spheres of Influence, the world divided among three domineering powers: the United States, China, and Russia.
As it happened, within a few years after that East Berlin meeting, Eurocommunism’s influence peaked and ebbed. It is now the far right that poses the greatest threat to democracy and security. Looking around, what we see everywhere are forces massing to the left, right, north, south, east, and west. All these threats and violence amount (updating a previous term) to the New World Dis-Order.
So, how will this chaotic era evolve? My sense is that it will end in a climax that will defy most of the predictions being made.
Donald Trump is increasingly frenetic. Vladimir Putin is intransigent and cruel. Xi Jinping is seemingly cool, presiding without public rambunctiousness but with dictatorial authority over China’s vast strengths.
And Benjamin Netanyahu, the belligerent leader of a country of ten million people, has shown extraordinary skills at political survival and fomenting mayhem in his region — and, to a great extent, in the United States, certainly among American Jews.
My great fear is that this period will explode rather than subside. Trump and Putin both have nuclear arsenals, with arms treaties having expired. When their control is directly challenged, I worry that one or both will do something no longer unthinkable: prove that they can mount a nuclear strike as a demonstration of what can happen.
I imagine that there are still restraints on Trump, though when I hear Pete Hegseth’s bluster, I’m not so sure. But who will stop Putin from doing whatever he wants? Of all the great dangers in the world — Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Taiwan, et al. — the gravest is Vladimir Putin’s nuclear cache and his absolute power over it.
I am, by instinct and experience, not an alarmist. Declaring crises of all kinds — foreign (Vietnam and Iraq, for instance) and domestic (illegal immigration) — has a self-fulfilling tendency, and usually does not solve the problems before making them worse, one way or another.
I believe the current Trump-Putin do-si-do is an exceptional relationship. This is not Hitler and Mussolini, a cliché of repetitive history, but it certainly does rhyme.
Their assembled weaponries — strategic, tactical, and cyber — can destroy civilizations with far less use of conventional military power than in the past. I do not know what Xi Jinping would do if he thought matters were really getting out of control, but I can’t imagine he would not take whatever action he felt he needed to protect his interests.
Here’s where I try to calm down, at least to myself.
Threats to civilization have been around since the beginning of recorded time, and great civilizations have collapsed. Think of Greece and Rome, the Aztecs, the Ottomans, the Romanovs, the Soviets. To some extent the “clash of civilizations,” as Sam Huntington so vividly foresaw, is inevitable, but at least before the nuclear age civilizations could regroup and progress would continue to a better world.
Will that happen now, when multiple civilizations are clashing and empires are asserting their influences?
Sometimes, in the midst of our vast political challenges. small signs — spring’s green shoots — become apparent, showing that societies can make surprising, peaceful pivots.
From 1945 until 1989, the fate of Berlin was considered a potential trigger for nuclear superpower confrontation. But on that 1976 trip to East Berlin, I encountered something completely unexpected, which I wrote about in a “Letter from Berlin,” as follows:
“Most evenings after work, Heinz, a young shop foreman, and his wife, Ellie, an English teacher, settle down with beer and pretzels in front of their big television for several hours of cops-and-robbers (Kojak is popular), commercials and the latest news.
“What makes the routine surprising is that they live in East Germany, not far from the Berlin Wall, and the television they watch is three channels beamed every day from the West. Heinz, moreover, is a Communist Party member.”
I wrote that as much as 80 percent of East Germany was receiving West German television channels on ordinary sets, and even senior party officials conceded that the programs were widely watched.
My coverage of the Eurocommunist summit was on the front page. My Berlin letter was somewhere inside the newspaper. On reflection, I have concluded that the television story was the one that had the really significant lasting impact on how East Germany would evolve.
I wish I could cite similar indicators that forecast a less chaotic future because of the way most people want to go about their lives. At the moment, though, I don’t have any in mind.
Jeff Bezos came to Washington last week and hosted at his mansion in the Kalorama neighborhood a four-hour meeting and lunch with the Washington Post’s (interim) CEO Jeff D’Onofrio, executive editor Matt Murray, and about thirty “executives, editorial leaders and journalists” for a presentation and discussion about the company.
The most detailed account of the occasion I found was in the Puck newsletter, behind a paywall, from which I will share what, to me, were the most relevant points. Attendees were not permitted to have their phones in the room and presumably chose not to publicly share what was said.
• Bezos made it clear that he wants to “save” the Post and has turned down seven offers to sell it.
• The layoffs of three hundred people from the news staff in February were based on results of data collected about what subscribers of the Post were reading. For example, readership of the sports section was judged not significant enough to be maintained.
• The data showed that the core of political and national security news and investigative reporting should be the Post’s focus and would be henceforth.
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Having watched the continuing tribulations of the Washington Post for more than two years, I have been thinking and consulting with Post alumni from its glorious past and others who might have ideas to share about a turnaround strategy that could restore the Post’s stature and financial viability.
What I have learned about the apparent plan for the Post partly reflects my thinking but is not nearly enough to resolve the crisis. Nor did what I heard in an interview with Murray on a Puck podcast just after the firings, the day before Bezos finally sacked the hapless CEO, Will Lewis, after he was spotted at a Super Bowl event in San Francisco.
Murray’s message was that with the layoffs, the “table had been set” for the Post’s recovery, which was apparently also Bezos’s message in the meeting last week.
So what would I argue is a different and better strategy? Let me start by saying with emphasis that this is THE WASHINGTON POST, the only major news organization based in the capital of the United States, where monumental decisions of global national consequence are made.
It is also (or was) far and away the most important news organization in a metropolitan area of roughly 6.5 million people — and what could be, with energy and innovation, a financial base again for a revived Post, as it was for so long in the past.
Recognizing the Post’s strengths and the limitations that have been revealed in the recent years of decline, this should become two news organizations, with subscription models for one or both.
Back to the Future
In its heyday, from the 1970s to the early 2000s, the Washington Post’s newsroom grew from about the size it is now, around five hundred people, to the larger numbers it was before this latest round of layoffs.
The Post had a formidable and eventually outstanding national and foreign staff, where I spent most of my eighteen years at the paper. The emergence of the Style section in the late 1960s was transformational, not just at the Post but also more widely in the world of journalism, because of its lively approach to feature coverage that was as readable as any in upscale magazines.
The Post also had a small but talented group of cultural critics, who were nationally known. Many won Pulitzer Prizes in their fields.
Over the years a common shorthand for newspapers of power and impact became “the Times and the Post,” as though they were virtually twins. (It has to be said that the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times resented being relegated to a second tier.)
In fact, those of us at the Post always knew that in many respects the New York Times was much bigger in scale and reach. New York was the cultural and financial capital of the country, which was reflected in the coverage of those subjects and the advertising base that they provided.
For all its stature and international reputation through its location in the capital and its joint publication with the Times of the International Herald Tribune, the Post was fundamentally a metropolitan paper with, by choice, virtually no national distribution.
The Times’s current dominance of sidelines such as puzzles and cooking has been longstanding. In the 1990s, when I was the publisher of Times Books at Random House, I (somewhat improbably) was responsible for a crossword and games franchise, which was one of the most reliably profitable pieces of the company.
We would occasionally slip in a Post crossword puzzle book.
Craig Claiborne’s writing about food for the Times was also enormously popular, as were his cookbooks.
Perhaps the greatest fallacy in this misbegotten era is that the Washington Post’s role is to compete with the New York Times — or anyone else, for that matter.
The Post should not try to match the Times, where it can’t do so and never has. At last count, the Times has 2,300 people in the news operation.
Instead, the Post should renew and expand its demonstrated expertise in politics, national security, international reporting, and investigative journalism, emphasizing depth and expertise. Breaking news is available everywhere. Murray has said that this is his intention. Good.
An interesting new model for global reporting in the digital age is Noosphere, the enterprise recently started by Jane Ferguson, who made her name at the PBS News Hour. She has assembled a group of experienced freelance correspondents in a number of places who provide video, podcast, photo, and text pieces that are distributed to subscribers.
Today’s generation of journalists have to be multifaceted, presenters as well as reporters.
A revived Style section should devote itself again to Washington in its current guise, where matters colorful, controversial, and bizarre are rampant. A Style signature was the publication of profiles of luminaries, with a captivatingly fresh voice. Today’s Washington is replete with likely subjects for portrayals of this kind.
How to attract the talent for these spirited coverage areas?
As I wrote months ago, most of the Post’s stars — the people who have left for other jobs or have recently been laid off — became stars through the work they did at the Post.
With a much-needed assurance of the owner’s support beyond what has been heard from Jeff Bezos so far, and a commitment to a determined outreach for possible hires and raising the morale of the many excellent reporters and editors still at the Post, the effect would soon become clear in this particularly turbulent era.
The Homecoming
The Washington Post’s other traditional great strength was its metro and sports coverage for what is known as the DMV — the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. Politics, education, business, and other local topics, along with major sports franchises, connected the sprawling region.
This metropolitan area, with a prosperous and diverse population, should be served by a news organization with resources appropriate to its size and, significantly, its enormous commercial potential.
This metro version of the Post would restore local news and sports coverage. (Under the rubric of “for further reading,” the Post as a good neighbor could cross-promote with the smaller and upstart news organizations in the region.)
Ultimately in any business, fiscal success comes from earned revenue. My much-repeated mantra about the Post, quoting the late Katharine Graham, was that it was “Woodward & Bernstein and Woodward & Lothrop” (the downtown department store) — great journalism and abundant advertising that made it so profitable.
The Post, like all news organizations, now relies mainly on digital news delivery, and the belief is that advertising online cannot match in revenue what it had been in print.
But an imaginative and aggressive approach to metro advertising solicitation and presentation would enable businesses across the region to reach all potential customers, the way zones were designed for the print editions in the past.
Craigslist famously replaced classified advertising in newspapers. How about a Post version of Craigslist across all the categories that people now need to search from any number of sites? Local tech support is as important today as plumbers and electricians always have been. Paid obituaries seem to be lucrative.
The Post maintained its extensive metro circulation for so long by keeping the price of the daily paper artificially low, at a quarter or so. Today, the Post’s online subscription price is also kept low with offers and gimmicks.
Continue that policy — but develop a different pricing strategy for the national and international version of the daily report, whose readers generally expect subscription costs that are somewhat higher.
A word about the opinion section. The reaction to Jeff Bezos’s announcement in February 2025 about the restructuring of the section to conform to his views on liberty and trade was intense, resulting in mass cancellations.
In our online news universe, opinions come from every direction. Every point of view is easily available. That is an accepted reality. The Post should accept this as well.
The print paper is still distributed. I subscribe. It makes me sad. There is a front section of news, but everything else is, bluntly, pathetic: the remnants of sports, comics, and the classifieds come before a couple of pages of local news.
Digital first and foremost is inevitable. But if you want to continue with a niche print newspaper, make it feel worth the price. To get the New York Times, daily and Sunday, delivered to your door now costs about $1,000 annually.
If you want a print paper, be ready to pay for it.
“Back to the Future” and “Homecoming” may seem awfully retro. But consider this: the current trajectory for the Washington Post is oblivion.
I always project myself to age eighty, but as I get older, I’m starting to do ninety — so I know that when I’m ninety. It’s going to be one of the things I’m most proud of, that I took on the Washington Post and helped it through a very rough transition.
— from Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos (Harvard Business Review Press and PublicAffairs, 2020)
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Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos Will Be Honorary Chairs of the Met Gala.
— The New York Times, February 23, 2026
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By now, everyone anywhere who could possibly care knows that Jeff Bezos is reducing the Washington Post to a remnant of what he bought and has owned for more than a decade. Explanations and theories of why he is doing this abound. The Post is losing money. Bezos is cultivating Donald Trump. Bezos wants Pentagon contracts for Blue Origin, his space passion. With his new wife and his own buff new looks, Bezos favors glamour over accountability.
The reality is that no one can really explain to me why Jeff Bezos has made this decision. I have asked the only people I know who might have an answer. Either they won’t say or their response is a chilling “He doesn’t care.” I find that hard to believe.
As a mogul who created Amazon from scratch decades ago, he must know that there are reputational aspects to business. Trashing a media icon is a guarantee of public vituperation. Combining it with the incessant self-portrayal of luxury living, which chairing the Met Gala symbolizes, is clueless and/or cruel, accompanied days later by the firing of hundreds of people at the Post and then the hapless CEO Will Lewis.
Bezos became executive chairman of Amazon’s board of directors in 2021, telling Amazon employees that the new position would give him the time and energy to “focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.”
My connection to Bezos was his book, Invent and Wander, which I conceived and published — a project that he said pleased him and was profitable to all concerned. His $750,000 in royalties went, I was told, to the New Orleans Public Library system. We have not been in touch since.
So, how to explain what has happened to Jeff Bezos?
My explanation is essentially these factors:
In 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie Scott, divorced after twenty-six years of marriage, with a financial settlement giving Scott 25 percent of his Amazon shares. In 2026, Bezos’s wealth is around $230 billion, about ten times what it was when he bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million.
Bezos’s affair with Lauren Sánchez went public in lurid detail in the National Enquirer immediately after he and Scott announced they would divorce. He was fifty-five years old. He married Sánchez in 2025 at a lavish wedding in Venice.
Whatever else Bezos had accomplished up to then, he plainly wanted a different style of life. He and the new Mrs. Bezos became fixtures at every conceivable venue of vast wealth, on his $500 million yacht, at new Gilded Age events around the globe, at the inauguration of Donald Trump to his second term.
By comparison, Bezos’s philanthropy received little attention, including his establishment in 2021 of the Courage and Civility Award, with $100 million each going to Van Jones, a lawyer, civic activist, and CNN contributor, and José Andrés, the chef and humanitarian, to distribute to charities and nonprofit organizations of their choice. Dolly Parton received $100 million, and the actress Eva Longoria and the retired admiral and bestselling author William McRaven received $50 million each, on similar terms.
After the Post achieved a major turnaround in scale and financial results, the situation there began to deteriorate. Marty Baron, the executive editor Bezos had inherited, who was credited with the enhancement of the Post’s journalistic achievements, retired. Bezos found a distant sinecure for the publisher, Frederick J. Ryan, who was deemed a failure in business and leadership terms.
Will Lewis, a British journalist with a background in the Murdoch publishing empire, was named publisher and CEO. Sally Buzbee, who had been hired from the Associated Press as Baron’s successor, resigned in an early dispute with Lewis. The simple summation is that matters steadily worsened from then on.
Instead of declarations of pride in the Post, Bezos said publicly he would “save” it a second time. He was quoted as calling the news organization a “complexifier” in his extensive professional and reinvented personal life.
Which brings me to the second factor in what has happened to the Post.
I think of it as the Michael Jordan metaphor. One of the greatest basketball players of all time was at best mediocre in baseball. Jeff Bezos is unquestionably one of the greatest entrepreneurs in American history. He has flailed in journalism because he demonstrably doesn’t understand how it is done — both in its role as an indispensable public asset and as a business.
And, from what little I have been able to find out in my efforts at excavating the Post debacle, Bezos is not prepared to listen and learn from people who could advise him on a now-essential transformation. His newly named interim publisher, Jeff D’Onofrio, joined the Post in 2025 after a career at the digital companies Raptive, Tumblr, and Google.
Matt Murray is the executive editor, and his view is that with the contraction in the newsroom the “table has been set” for the Post’s recovery. That will be the subject of my piece next week.
On Sunday, April 17, 1960, a four-column headline at the top of the front page of the New York Times declared:
Knopf, Random House in Publishing Merger
Deal Made on Handshake Over Luncheon
— Cerf’s Company to Buy Stock, but Knopf Will Stay on Job
The byline on the story was Gay Talese, who amazingly in 2026 is still doing journalism of distinction.
This was clearly a big deal, although the sale price was about $3 million.
In fact, Random House had acquired Alfred A. and Blanche Knopf’s illustrious publishing company, which had been established in 1915. Bennett Cerf and his partner, Donald Klopfer, had founded Random House in the 1920s. Random House was itself a major book publisher, but with a bit less literary panache than Knopf.
In 2026, Penguin Random House, which still includes Knopf, is owned by Bertelsmann, a family company based in Gutersloh, Germany, and is the world’s largest book publisher, with billions in global revenues and solid profits.
What was a transaction small enough to be agreed over lunch was arguably the beginning of the modern corporate multi-billion-dollar business that book publishing has become. Whereas the media and technology companies are enormous business stories, book company finances are now mainly footnotes.
Gayle Feldman has recently published Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, a masterwork of biography and a history of the evolution of book publishing in the twentieth century that in narrative and meticulous detail reflects the two decades Feldman devoted to writing the book.
For my purposes, I want to focus on the question of what made Bennett Cerf a great publisher — and what that means in today’s era, in which more books than ever are being sold.
The portrait Feldman provides of Cerf is of a man who wanted to enjoy life (and succeeded) and who had the talent for choosing which books to publish and how to do that best.
From James Joyce’s Ulysses, the controversial book that gave the fledgling publisher an initial boost, until Cerf’s death in 1971, with Klopfer as his less colorful but rock-solid partner, an extraordinary outpouring of books of quality (mainly) and notice appeared.
There were authors whose fame endures, from Gertrude Stein to Ayn Rand and literary geniuses like William Faulkner, John O’Hara, and William Styron. Cerf’s nurturing of Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and James Michener provided Random House with a stream of vastly popular and profitable books long past his death.
There was a flip side to Bennett Cerf. He wrote bestselling joke books, which were published by other companies. He was a regular Sunday night panelist on the game show What’s My Line?, which made him a recognizable, national celebrity.
(His equally formidable and entrepreneurial wife, Phyllis, originated “Beginner Books,” which established Random House as a leading children’s book publisher — a market that was then and is now indispensable to its business success.)
Cerf didn’t just publish books, he made them into events, drawing comparisons to Broadway and Hollywood producers. There was zeal in every format and in the advertising, publicity, and relations with booksellers.
I spent a dozen years at Random House in the 1980s and ’90s, hired by Cerf’s successor, Robert L. Bernstein, also a publisher of flair, when the company was owned by S. I. Newhouse of the Conde Nast dynasty.
These were the years of increasing consolidation and corporate domination in book publishing, but the industry still could generate media fascination and headlines. I especially remember the day when on the front page of the Times it was reported that Joni Evans, the publisher of the Random House trade division (not the whole company), was being replaced by Harry Evans. (The two were not related.)
I chuckled at the notion of the New York Times editorial meeting that day: “Evans is out! Evans is in!”
The era when book publishing had that level of fascination and notoriety is definitively over. There are famous authors, but the publishers and editors responsible for them are rarely visible, except when they are caught up in scandals or takeovers, or when the legendary ones die.
So, what does it take to be a great book publisher in 2026? I recently spoke with Jonathan Karp, the outgoing CEO of Simon & Schuster, and in my view the closest comparison today to Bennett Cerf.
Jon started at Random House as an editorial assistant in 1989, earning $17,000 a year. Over time and with demonstrated skill he rose through the editorial ranks and was made CEO of Simon & Schuster following the death in 2020 of Carolyn Reidy, herself an exemplary book person.
What is the comparison to Cerf? In our conversation, Jon described every phase of his publishing career as “fun,” sharing stories of acquiring and wrangling books and coping with author egos and literary agents’ demands that others found stressful and even excruciating.
He took a brief detour working for Scott Rudin, a famously difficult film and theater producer (with whom he got along), although he quickly decided he preferred books. Jon also wrote a musical called How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes and had it staged off-Broadway in 2006.
Cerf imagined how to publish in a variety of ways. Aside from Beginner Books, there was a young-adult history series called Landmark (which as a boy I read assiduously) and other innovations.
In 2005, Jon devised what he called Twelve, a publishing imprint that would release and promote one book a month, as a way to focus closely on each title, in recognition that getting the public’s attention for books was growing more difficult.
And now, as he leaves the CEO position, he is launching Simon Six, with a similar concept. In 2026, it is even harder to reach readers than it was when reviews and advertising drove sales, unless you understand social media and fragmented audiences.
This is what I consider the most significant aspect of my Cerf-Karp comparison. A great book publisher also has to be a very savvy businessperson. Cerf dealt with RCA when it acquired Random House in 1966, and Karp contended with Paramount’s determination to sell Simon & Schuster and the failed merger with Penguin Random House, which collapsed after a protracted antitrust trial.
A publisher has also to be able to select books that will sell, mass as well as class, and across our political and cultural divide. That explains how S&S could publish Mike Pence and Kamala Harris and the enormously popular genre called “romantasy” — romance mixed with fantasy.
Bennett Cerf would never have heard of romantasy, but like Jon Karp he would have known what to do with it.
