The Powers That Be is the transcript of a talkfest. One must imagine the raconteur among friends: The dinner was excellent, the drinks are plentiful, and the audience is sympathetic, eager to enjoy and to believe. Best of all, the storyteller has stories to tell. As he explains, he has spent five years cozing with the great and the near-the-great, mining stories comic and sad, racy and droll, but all touched by certified celebrity and therefore worthy of attention. Covering forty years of the movers and shakers, and the moved and shaken, in the communications media, the transcript is not unlike 770 closeprinted pages of People magazine. Pseudo-sophisticates who think themselves above that sort of thing ignore the fact that Halberstam's gossip is in the service of a very solemn thesis. That thesis, repeated frequently lest the drowsy miss it, is that the media, especially television, have revolutionized American politics and society. Indeed they have taken over.