Their first book together pierced the veil of secrecy cloaking one of the most closed presidencies in American history.
The year was 1974. The president was Richard Nixon. All the President’s Men catapulted reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to stardom.
Little credit at the time was given to the book’s editor, Alice Mayhew of Simon & Schuster, who had overseen what was arguably a new nonfiction type – a behind-the-curtains look at what really went on in the corridors of power.
As it turned out, it would be Woodward and Mayhew who would be the more important team.
As the editorial director of Simon & Schuster, Mayhew became a master at acquiring and editing books at the juncture between journalism and history, including more than a dozen by Woodward. Her stable of writers has also included Ron Suskind, Steven Brill, Judith Miller, David Brooks, David Rieff, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, among others.
Now Mayhew, 71, and Woodward, 65, are doing it again: The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 will be published Sept. 8 with a first printing of 900,000 copies. The publisher is keeping the book under strict embargo and even held back the title untiil yesterday.
“There has not been such an authoritative and intimate account of presidential decision making since the Nixon tapes and the Pentagon Papers,” Mayhew said yesterday in a statement. “This is the declassification of what went on in secret, behind the scenes.”
The book “takes readers deep inside the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence agencies and the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq,” according to Simon & Schuster press materials.
The Washington Post, where Woodward currently serves as an associate editor, will run excerpts on Sept. 7. That night, Woodward will be interviewed on CBS television’s 60 Minutes. (Both CBS and Simon & Schuster are owned by Viacom Inc.)
Unlike Woodward, however, Mayhew is keeping characteristically quiet about the book - or her own role.
Approached four years ago for a profile in the New York Times, she showed the flinty personality for which she is both feared and admired. “I don’t think that’s legitimate,” she told reporter Laura Secor.
Mayhew never did talk, but many of the writers who had worked with her did, lauding her talent for conceptualizing a book and structuring narrative. As Secor wrote:
She is particularly adept at unearthing submerged themes, developing swift transitions, unsentimentally pruning away digressions, even when — especially when — they are hundreds of pages long. Mayhew’s faith in chronological organization is said to be nearly religious; it’s unmistakable in the Woodward books, which sometimes seem to move relentlessly through time even when all other motors have stalled.
But she is flexible, her writers say; she thinks creatively about form. Steven Brill, most recently the author of After, recalls that when his 1978 book The Teamsters was in development, Mayhew, to his consternation, handed him a book on the sinking of the Titanic. ”You tell me what the sinking of the Titanic has to do with a book about the Teamsters,” Brill complained. ”She said, ‘Think of this as a narrative form.”’
Critics have suggested Mayhew puts too much faith in her writers, especially after Ambrose and Kearns Goodwin were accused of plagiarism. (In an ironic twist, it turned out that Ambrose had lifted from Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon by Robert Sam Anson, also a Mayhew acquisition.)
But if Mayhew changed the way she edited books as a result, she kept it inside her own publishing house.
Until recently, she had a team of nine editors reporting to her. But in January, Simon & Schuster named Priscilla Painton, formerly the deputy managing editor of Time, as editor-in-chief and gave her supervisory responsibilities. Mayhew continues to acquire and edit books.
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