“Si,” as he was always called by those in his inner circle, and even beyond in a vast empire of magazines and books, would be easy to miss in a crowd. He was small in stature and awkward in social presence. But for decades in the twentieth and twenty-first century he was the most powerful person in publishing.

As the owner of Condé Nast and for years Random House, Si exercised absolute control, shared only with his brother, Donald, who oversaw the family’s lucrative newspapers. He died in 2017. The digital era has ended what, in its heyday, was a resplendent world in which the courtiers who benefited from his largesse were also disposable at his whim.

Two books this season tell the story of Newhouse and his empire with fascinating detail in the voices of Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New Yorker, and in the spirit of Spy (the brilliant satirical magazine of the 1980s), the New York Observer of the 1990s, the Styles sections of the New York Times, and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which portrayed its targets with a sneer, even when it so clearly envied their fame and fortune.

Graydon Carter’s memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, is his entertaining perspective on all his successes, written with candor and enough self-deprecation to render the triumphs bearable — and when vengeance is dispensed, a sense of what lurked below the bonhomie and glamour. There is no index, so if you want to read what he says about you, you’ll have to buy the book.

Michael M. Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, coming in July and available for preorder from bookstores everywhere, is an anecdotal feast. I have a cameo as the Random House editor of Si’s personally commissioned The Art of the Deal, the book that made Donald Trump a national celebrity.

The all-star cast of Graydon Carter, Anna Wintour, Tina Brown, David Remnick, and other luminaries reflects ambition, talent, and the consequences when everything depends on the favor of one man. For instance, when Si decided that Robert Gottlieb, the editorial legend he had put at the helm of The New Yorker, wasn’t working out, he let him go with a payout of $350,000 a year for the rest of his life, which turned out to be more than thirty years.

The tangled succession story about whether Carter or Brown was first offered the editorship of The New Yorker is in both books, with an unresolved dispute. When Brown left for the misfortune of launching Talk magazine (in collaboration with, Harvey Weinstein), Newhouse offered the position to Michael Kinsley, with a million-dollar salary and a $5 million signing bonus. Kinsley said he would respond overnight, and Newhouse then left him a message pulling the offer. This has been widely reported. Some version is doubtless true.

Tina Brown’s rousing Fresh Hell Substack reflects her prenaturally sharp eye and wit,

David Remnick, an exceptionally gifted staff writer, was elevated in 1998 and is still editor in chief. No succession is in sight. (This is the place to say that Si’s instinct for great talent justfied spending fortunes on them).

Si’s capacity for financial risk in reviving Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and the capriciousness with which he would summarily hire and fire editors and publishers, would not have been possible if he had been overseen by anyone besides his brother and their shared minions. Those days are over, but the Newhouse heirs are still dominant owners and billionaires because of investments that made money but are not interesting enough to be chronicled in the future in books like Carter’s and Grynbaum’s.

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As an editor and publisher at Random House in the eighties and nineties, I was not in the direct line of people who would reap rewards and regrets when Si dispensed favor and then disposed of those who no longer had it.

But I did get enough of a view to recognize the traits that in both the new books are portraits of power.

Si and his nephew Steve would attend Random House sales conferences, which in that period were held at resorts in Florida, Arizona, and the Caribbean. Learning that I was an early morning runner, he would ask me to join him. Our return coincided with breakfast, and others may have thought seeing us together that we had some special connection.

We did not. But in corporate politics, even a mistaken belief of influence can be a plus.

Si’s approach to those who ultimately were his employees was evident in the case of Howard Kaminsky, who was a close friend — as Howard would repeatedly remind us, with stories about their evenings at restaurants and watching old movies. Kaminsky was a cousin of Mel Brooks, with a similar comic banter but much less funny,

He was named publisher of the Random House Trade Division in the summer of 1984 and was immediately thought to be the heir to Bob Bernstein, the longtime chief executive of the whole enterprise, Random House, Inc. People would ask Bob about the arrival of a new head of the company, so it was not long before his own title began appearing on company documents as “Chairman, Chief Executive and President of Random House, Inc.” to certify who was who.

At sales conferences, Howard would take charge of who could join Si at meals. That was the vibe for three years, until in October 1987 Bernstein summoned Kaminsky and fired him.

Howard was dumfounded and was immediately on his way to Si’s office. He returned forty-five minutes later and tearfully told us that, yes, Si had confirmed that he was out. But he assured us Si was still his close friend — and that would always be the case.

It was then only a matter of time before Bernstein was replaced by Alberto Vitale, who lasted until the Newhouses sold Random House to the German company Bertelsmann in 1998.

As I heard it, Si could not understand how an enterprise of Random House’s excellence and clout was not making more money.

In 1980, Si and Don had bought Random House, Inc. (the assets included Alfred A. Knopf publishing imprint and the rights to Dr. Seuss and James Michener, two of the most successful authors then or ever) in 1980 for a reported $60 million — a front-page story in the Times when book publishing transactions were big news.

In 1998, Bertelsmann paid $2 billion for the enterprise, the number I was told by the executive for the buyer who negotiated the deal.

Business transactions reaching that scale, become the stories that Carter and Grynbaum tell, which are such fun to read. They are incidental to what really counts in 2025— power, for sure, combined with money and who controls it.

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Now that it is being aired, I found Netflix’s five-part series Turning Point: The Vietnam War more visceral in a way than other documentaries on the subject, particularly as scenes of chaos in Afghanistan and violence in Iraq are framed against the comparable episodes in Vietnam decades earlier. As a contributor, my last words in the documentary are these: “The story of the United States in Vietnam was a story of ignorance, hubris, and arrogance. So much of what we see now about the war in Vietnam was a function of the individual personality and characters of people and their inability to get tough with themselves.”

Times are different, but events are still being defined by the character of America’s leaders.

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