Invisible Government: Manipulator of Events and the Media Gatekeepers 243
magazine on then-Congressman Pierre (“Pete”) Du Pont IV’s presidential ambitions. The “writer” was also a spy reporting indirectly to the Du Pont family elders and had already been commissioned to write a book to answer Colby’s forthcoming book. That was just the beginning. The writer/spy hired Colby’s own agent, who failed to tell Colby about the conflict of interest. (Later, Prentice-Hall fired Colby’s editor for “nonproductivity” and hired Colby’s double-crossing agent as a full-time editor.) Along the way there was the Prentice-Hall salesman who, “under orders,” leaked the book’s unedited manuscript to the Du Pont family. “A series of phone calls ensued,” Colby writes. “The first was to the Book-ofthe-Month Club (BMOC), whose Fortune Book Club had contracted with Prentice-Hall to sell the book. Du Pont Company officials told BMOC that family members found the book “scurrilous and actionable.” BMOC quickly caved in to one of the most powerful corporations in the world and cancelled the book within 24 hours, unprecedented in BMOC’s history, according to later court testimony by BMOC. At this point the book’s fate was taken over by the editor-in-chief of Prentice-Hall’s trade book division, John Kirk, and the president of the trade book division, Peter Grenquist. They cut the planned press run of 10,000 by a third so that, according to their own documents, the book could not price profitably “according to any conceivable formula.” Rather than blow the whistle on Du Pont Company interference, these two cut the advertising budget in half and scaled back promotional efforts to just two cities. Bram Cavin, the book’s editor, was ordered to keep these moves secret from the author. One of Time magazine’s best investigative writers got wind of the interference going on and filed a story. Time killed it. The public might never have known any of this had not Prentice-Hall’s chief counsel, disgusted, taken his file to Gerard Colby