Tag Archives: Stephen B. Shepard

An era passes

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The death of a brilliant colleague highlights our losses in media

Source: Anne Power

In the opening issue of The Pennsylvania Magazine, a monthly published from January 1775 until July 1776 in Philadelphia, editor Thomas Paine wrote: “A magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius; and by constantly accumulating new matter, becomes a kind of market for wit and utility.”

As a modern nursery of genius, there were few equals to BusinessWeek in its heyday, a couple centuries after Paine’s words were published. BW garnered National Magazine Awards four times between 1973 and 1996. From 1958 to 2004, it picked up nine Gerald Loeb Awards, regarded as the Pulitzer Prizes of business journalism, including five in the glory days between 1987 and 2004. Since being sold to Bloomberg News in 2009 and rechristened as Bloomberg Businessweek, it has picked up another couple NMAs and several Loeb Awards, including two this year.

Alums of BW – graduates of that “nursery” — have gone on to illustrious stints at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, and The New Yorker, as well as online outfits including Poets and Quants, and elsewhere, including Bloomberg, of course. Some moved into substantial academic careers, including longtime editor Stephen B. Shepard, who founded and led a journalism graduate school at the City University of New York. Others have become novelists or gifted nonfiction authors. All of their work has been filled with wit and utility, indeed.

As someone privileged to work for the magazine for 22 years, until 2009, I was reminded recently of the place’s unique culture, sadly, by the death of a colleague there. Chris Power, a BW stalwart and international editor for most of the best years, died on Oct. 13 at 68. His passing drew more than 120 comments on a BW Friends site, most celebrating his wit, his skills, his easy way with people and his remarkable intellect. Some referred to his short stature – something he joked about – which reminded me of how a colleague once described Chris to me: “5-foot-3-inches of brain.”

Another coworker, a man I succeeded as Chief of Correspondents, described Chris as “an excellent editor who knew when to push fellow journalists to do their best work,” adding “he was always the gentleman.” Saying he was blessed to work with 35-year BW veteran Chris for decades, he added that “a key piece of what BusinessWeek was is now missing.” Yet another workmate called him “smart, fast and unflappable, no matter how tough the story or tight the deadline; all around one of the best.” Still another called him “the kindest, gentlest and cleverest editor I had.”

As Chris guided stories that a copydesk veteran called beautifully edited, he did so with style. “But most of all, I’ll remember Chris dropping by the desk and doing his soft shoe,” she wrote. “Even under the tightest of deadlines, he could lighten a heart.” At a goodbye party for a former top editor bound for Texas, another colleague reminisced about how the folks were all given hats. “When it was Chris’ turn to talk, he came up hatless and said, ‘When you’re 5’3”, you know better than to wear a cowboy hat,’” he wrote. Yet another former workmate wrote of Chris’s recipe for an extra-dry martini: “pour the gin, wave the vermouth bottle over the glass.”

Stephen Shepard, source: The Virtual Memories Show

The extraordinary outpouring of respect, affection and admiration for Chris reflected well on him, of course. But it also said a lot about the collegial and high-powered culture at BW, something that our top editor – Steve Shepard – fostered.

Sure, people brought a lot of brain power to the job. Our chief economist had a Ph.D. from Harvard, our finance editor earned his from The New School, others there had taught at Columbia, and the staff was filled with Ivy Leaguers of all sorts. As a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard who had been trained by Jesuits at Boston College High School, Chris fit in. He “was one of the gifted minds that made BusinessWeek BusinessWeek,” as one commenter put it.

But brains weren’t enough. To work at BW, you also had to be able to get on well, to work in a group, to produce the best damn stuff we could. When candidates interviewed for jobs, they would sit down with as many as a half-dozen people, I recall. The book, as we called it, was a team effort. “Chris was always smart, funny and – most vital to a young reporter trying to find her footing – helpful,” one former colleague wrote. “Farewell to a true gentleman!”

It was no wonder that BW won so many awards. It’s no wonder that it produced such good work.

Sadly, as veterans of the glory days are aging, we are seeing our numbers decline. The man who hired me (Keith Felcyn) died last year, as did a former assistant managing editor (Dave Wallace) and a former Tokyo bureau chief (Robert Neff). Earlier, we lost a former science editor (Emily Thompson Smith), a former managing editor (Jack Dierdorff), a much-respected Washington bureau chief (Lee Walczak) and a finance editor (Chris Welles). Such things are inevitable, of course, as the clock ticks on us all.

But, more than just the passing of such admired and often beloved people, these losses say something about the declines we are seeing all around in journalism. I can’t speak to the culture of Bloomberg Businessweek, but I suspect it’s rather different than the old BW (for one thing, Bloomberg let go or reassigned much of the staff and, for another, the magazine is entirely online now, so we don’t see the powerful blend of imagery and text that helped tell stories so well).

On a more troubling point, even with the exceptional journalism machine of Bloomberg News behind it, BBW and other magazines have lost the extraordinary power and reach they once had. It’s been a long time since they could make big-name CEOs and politicians alike anxious when that was appropriate, and their influence on public attitudes is dubious at best (as is the case with many newspapers).

Thanks to the Net and political changes, so many big-name publications in journalism have seen their influence shrivel. Organizations for which credibility, fairness and thoroughness were core values have lost subscribers and seen their staffs shrink, their economic wellbeing eroded. Today, lies from those at the top levels of politics gain traction because on the Net all voices seem equal and the loudest and least credible don’t even bother going through the responsible media. Instead, they take their distortions and distractions directly to the public.

Consider the appalling list of media outlets that have bent the knee to Donald J. Trump and whose inclination will be to pull punches. Paramount agreed to pay $16 million for a Trump library to settle an absurd CBS case and now the company and network are owned by Trumper David Ellison. He installed rightwing opinion journalist Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief at CBS News and is now pursuing an acquisition of CNN, jeopardizing its independence. ABC similarly agreed to pay $16 million to settle another dubious Trump lawsuit.

The broader media have similarly acquiesced. Facebook parent Meta agreed to pay $25 million and X $10 million, both related to lawsuits over the post-Jan. 6, 2021, suspensions of Trump accounts. Alphabet, the parent of Google and YouTube, agreed to pay $24.5 million to Trump and others over a similar suspension.

Encouragingly, Trump’s legal assaults on some media outlets have gone nowhere. This year, he sued The Wall Street Journal, a Fox property, in July over his 2003 letter to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a longtime friend of Trump’s. He’s seeking $10 billion. The president also sued The New York Times, demanding $15 billion for allegedly undermining his reputation with stories raising questions about his business acumen.

While he filed the defamation suits in federal court in Trump-friendly Florida, he’s been set back in both. Lawyers for the WSJ have filed for dismissal of that case, while Trump was forced to refile the Times case after a judge threw out his original 85-page complaint, saying it was laden with “florid and enervating” prose. The judge wrote: “A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective.”

But Trump has a long history of using the courts – or trying to do so – to intimidate the press. In 1992, a colleague at BW, Larry Light, got hold of financial information about Trump that showed he had a negative net worth. As recounted by another colleague, Light’s inquiries drove Trump to march into Shepard’s office at BusinessWeek. There, the future president (whose companies went through six bankruptcies) launched into a three-hour tirade that included an anti-Semitic gibe about Light (who was, in fact, Episcopalian). Trump also threatened to sue but backed off after our lawyer told him his finances would then be opened to public disclosure in court.

After Trump objected, Time changed a cover photo; source: Deadline

Our editors at BusinessWeek and its owners at McGraw-Hill were not cowed or beholden to Trump. Shamefully, some of today’s media leaders are. Consider, for instance, Time owner and billionaire Trump backer Marc Benioff, under whose leadership the magazine recently replaced a jowly cover photo of the president that offended him with a more complimentary one. Benioff, who acquired Time in 2018, recently flip-flopped on backing Trump’s since-abandoned plans to deploy National Guard troops to San Francisco.

Much has changed in the media since Chris Power and leaders of his caliber set a demanding standard at BusinessWeek. Some magazines – The Atlantic and The New Yorker, for instance – and newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal continue to prize careful and thorough, if critical, journalism. Indeed, I am indebted to The Atlantic for the Paine comment, which appears in its wonderful November issue, which is devoted to the founding of the United States 250 years ago next year.

Source: The Atlantic

But the ability of such outlets to act as a check on unbridled power-seeking and self-dealing by Trump and his minions has been gravely diminished as much of the public and GOP politicians seemingly turns a blind eye on the excesses. In their war on the press, the rightists have sadly succeeded in defunding NPR, a key source of independent news. And the marketplace has savaged the economics of so many other media outlets.

Will some magazines – whether online or in print – remain or ever again become nurseries of genius? Some may. But Chris’s passing is yet another troubling sign of the passing of an era.

Holden Caulfield’s flawed creator

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A new book offers insights into J.D. Salinger

Source: Google Books

On D-Day in June 1944, J.D. Salinger landed at Utah Beach with 23,000 other Allied soldiers. They were the lucky ones, as the Germans only lightly defended that stretch of seafront. Some 197 of them were killed or wounded, far less than the 2,400 gunned down at Omaha Beach, five miles away. Still, the trauma of that battle – and gorier ones to come – left deep scars on the budding writer, then 25.

Salinger explored his wounds a bit in “The Magic Foxhole,” an unpublished short story in the archives at the Princeton University Library. In the piece, a chaplain wanders among the dead and wounded on that bloody beach, frantically searching for his eyeglasses. He is shot to death.

“Critics have pointed out the symbolism of God’s messenger finally being killed—the death of God—after searching for the clarity of battle that his eyeglasses might have provided,” Stephen B. Shepard writes in Salinger’s Soul: His Personal and Religious Odyssey.

In Shepard’s superb analysis of this enigmatic and much-read writer, Salinger comes across as something like that fictional chaplain. Spiritually lost and seeking relief amid the ugliness of the world, he wanders about, damaged and confused.

Salinger, for his part, abandoned the religion of his youth, trying to soothe his chronic depression in various Eastern creeds. He ran through a string of wives and lovers. He alienated or cut off friends and family.

It’s no wonder that he lived most of his life in hermitic seclusion on a mountaintop in New Hampshire.

“Passionate yet detached. Raised Jewish, but a practitioner of mystical Hinduism,” Shepard writes about Salinger’s many contradictions. “No sex in his books, but plenty in his life. A great believer in the power of love, but not so ready to give it. An adult with sophisticated views, but a man of arrested development in his romantic interests. A person with ‘a cast-iron ego’ who spent a lifetime seeking solace in God.”

Under Shepard’s unsparing eye in this short but absorbing work of literary analysis and journalism, Salinger emerges as self-centered and selfish, often disloyal, more than a bit creepy, and sometimes quite cruel.

Of course, he gave us memorable characters, most notably Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey Glass and their family. Indeed, Catcher still sells 200,000 copies a year, totaling 65 million, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. Salinger made the cover of Time in 1961, when Franny and Zooey was published.

Joyce Maynard, now 70. Source: The New Yorker

But the writer’s life was a mess. To take just one example, Salinger famously seduced an 18-year-old college freshman Joyce Maynard, when he was 53. Then, after living with her for 10 months, he callously dismissed her.

While vacationing with him in Florida, Maynard broached the idea of having children. “I can never have any more children,” the father of two told her. “You better go home now. You need to clear your things out of my house.” He gave her $100 the next morning and put her in a cab to the airport.

Maynard was one of many young women the thrice-married Salinger wooed and won. Each was “in the last minute of her girlhood,” a phrase he memorably wrote in one of his stories

Claire Douglas, source: Digital Commonwealth

Salinger couldn’t abide pregnancy, it seems, perhaps because it shattered his idealized vision of (or one might say his lechery for) girls on the cusp of adulthood. His marriage to Claire Douglas, whom he had met when she was a high school student and he was in his thirties, ended in 1967, a few years after she gave birth to their second child. Salinger’s sister told his daughter Peggy that Douglas had “a suicidal depression when she realized that her pregnancy only repulsed him.”

Claire couldn’t handle the isolation he imposed on them in their home in rural Cornish, New Hampshire. When their daughter was born, Claire was 22 and he was 37, and he seemed to leave her largely alone, abandoning her to spend his days in a cinderblock writing studio he had built.

“Up by 6:00 AM, he ate breakfast, packed his lunch, then went to his writing bunker, where he worked nonstop—draft after draft—until dinnertime, often returning to his bunker after dinner,” Shepard writes. “He had a phone installed in his bunker, along with an army cot, but made it clear to Claire that he didn’t want to be disturbed for anything less than a dire emergency.”

Salinger racked up a lot of broken relationships, often with people who had helped his career.

As a 20-year-old taking night courses at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, he was mentored by an adjunct professor, Whit Burnett, who cofounded Story magazine and published a few Salinger stories. But, when Burnett ‘s partner in a book imprint, the Lippincott Company, vetoed the idea of publishing a collection of Salinger’s pieces in a book, Salinger blamed the late Burnett and didn’t speak to him for years.

A.E. Hotchner

Salinger in 1948 told A.E. Hotchner, an editor at Cosmopolitan, that he planned to submit a story he called “Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record” about the death of blues singer Bessie Smith. Sounding much like a prima donna, Salinger said not one word could be changed.

Unbeknownst to Hotchner, however, the title was changed to “Blue Melody.” When Hotchner shared the magazine with him, Salinger blew up, accused the editor of deceit. The late Hotchner never saw him again.

Margaret “Peggy” Salinger, source: Simon & Schuster

Salinger even became estranged from his only daughter, who described him in a memoir as cold, manipulative and abusive, as Shepard tells us. The father Peggy describes is weird, drinking his own urine and sitting in an “orgone box,” a closet-sized cabinet for storing psychic energy.

Perhaps his driven self-absorption was necessary for Salinger to give us such fascinating and enduring characters. Despite his many successes, he endured a lot of rejections in the competitive post-war publishing world, one dominated by such figures as Ernest Hemingway, whom Salinger befriended in wartime Paris, and Norman Mailer (who dismissed him as “no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school”).

The wartime experiences of both the latter writers – and many others — did much to shape their work. With Salinger, only a modest bit of his combat experiences appears in his fiction. Indeed, as he focused on young fictional characters, he seems to have tried to suppress the ugliness he saw in Europe. Instead, he seemed to immerse himself in imagined youthful innocence, perhaps taking refuge in it.

But the psychic ravages of the war may well be the key to understanding this peculiar man.

After landing on D-Day, Salinger’s regiment fought its way toward a French port city, Cherbourg, Shepard tells us. As the men moved street by street, under German fire the whole way, many were slaughtered. Of some 3,000 of Salinger’s fellow soldiers, only 1,100 remained by the end of June 1944; the rest were killed, wounded or missing. The regiment suffered the highest rate of casualties of any in the war.

Soon after, in January 1945, Salinger fought in the especially ghastly Battle of the Bulge. Then, in April, came what Shepard calls the author’s most devastating wartime experience. He saw the horrors that fleeing Nazis left at a slave labor camp that was a satellite of Dachau. Bodies of Jews, starved or shot, lay about the camp. Others, too sick to leave, were burned to death in their barracks.

“You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live,” Salinger told his daughter. He was hospitalized for a time in Germany for combat stress,

Salinger did draw on such wartime experiences in crafting a few of his stories, including one of his most famous, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” In it, the fictional Seymour Glass, an ex-sergeant like Salinger, suffers a nervous breakdown and commits suicide.

Of course, Salinger didn’t kill himself. He died in 2010 at 91. At the time, he was married to Colleen O’Neill, whom he had met when she was 22 and he was in his early 60s. They married in 1988, and that marriage endured.

Whether Salinger ever found the personal peace that he thought his Eastern religion, Vedanta, promised is unclear. His son Matt, in a family statement upon his death, said: “Salinger had remarked he was in this world but not of it,” evoking that philosophy.

Matt, a successful actor, has been combing through his father’s unpublished work with an eye toward releasing it in the next couple years. Though he wrote constantly, Salinger didn’t publish anything after 1965, so we may soon see a wealth of material emerge.

Stephen B. Shepard; source: CUNY

Shepard’s work is well-timed to anticipate the flood.

The former longtime editor of BusinessWeek (full disclosure: I worked for him for about 20 years) and the founding dean emeritus of the graduate journalism school at City University, Shepard draws on biographies of Salinger. He also alludes to most of the author’s work, using it to flesh out his personality.

Much about the man still puzzles Shepard. But this reclusive figure who made an enduring mark on American literature has given us all much to puzzle over.