Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [213]
Up until this point, Dick had left the buying of books to other people—not that he didn’t second-guess them or that he didn’t reserve to himself the final decision about money—since that was, after all, their job. He hadn’t ever stepped out of the careful structure by which books were reviewed and considered to make an offer for one himself. I divined that he wasn’t seeking my approval—the idea would not have occurred to him—but wanted to cover his ass just in case the whole thing blew up on him—he could at least say that he had discussed it with me. After all, I was editor in chief.
“Well, given that I haven’t a clue if it’s worth buying,” I said, “how much is Obst asking for?”
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
“That’s no big deal, Dick,” I said.
“I know it’s not a big deal. Should I do it, though?”
I thought for a moment. So far as I was concerned, Dick could buy anything he liked; besides, he was right—he did know more about politics than anybody else at S&S except Alice Mayhew, and his gut instinct about books, despite the fact that he did not always bother to read them, was impressive. “Listen,” I said, “when I called you about Carlos Castaneda, you said the only thing that matters in this business is having the guts to back your own hunch when it really matters. So back your own hunch. I don’t see how you can go wrong, frankly. And if you do, what the hell, it’s only one book, right? Say Obst got you drunk.”
Dick laughed. “I’m getting Obst drunk, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I’m going to screw world rights out of him.” It was the last time I ever caught that note of hesitation in Snyder’s voice, at least when it came to political books, because what he brought back from Washington was Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men, which did indeed change America and played a major role in bringing down Nixon. More important, it transformed book publishing into a red-hot part of the media.
In the newspapers, in the weekly magazines, and on the television networks, journalists had always considered the book to be a kind of lumbering dinosaur, slow and irrelevant. Books contained history, not news. With surefire instinct, Dick made All the President’s Men (and later The Final Days) not only newsworthy but news. This was publishing what the French call les actualités, news as it happens. The book was “embargoed” until publication day, there were no advance galleys for reviewers, the papers had to send people to stand in line at stores on publication day. In the meantime, every magazine and newspaper fought over the serial rights, the movie rights were bought, and nobody talked about anything else. Dick’s bet paid off as never before in the history of publishing. It changed a lot of other things as well: for a time, our offices were bugged by who knows which government agencies; we became perhaps the first book publisher where certain offices had to be regularly swept for bugs; Woodward and Bernstein became major celebrities (even before they were portrayed so glamorously by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman that a whole generation of young Americans decided to go to journalism school); the newspaper business, which had been declared dead by television journalists, received a new lease on life; and Snyder’s judgment about books, never tentative to begin with, became an article of faith at S&S.
As the decade wore on, S&S became the Watergate publisher: John Dean, Maureen Dean, John Ehrlichman, and John Mitchell all became S&S authors, David Obst was launched—briefly—into superstar orbit as an agent, and money poured in—very fortunately, since G+W was not the kind of company that would have wanted a “showcase” publishing house that broke even, however proud Bluhdorn might be of owning it. Indeed, it was Dick’s peculiar genius that he at once understood that if growth was what Bluhdorn lived and breathed, growth is what he would get, and that the fastest way to grow was not