Editor's Letter

The New Establishment

In this issue, Vanity Fair has taken on the challenge of redefining the power center of America as it enters the Information Age. With an extraordinary 30-page portfolio by Annie Leibovitz, beginning on page 212, we have taken a group portrait of the New Establishment. Leibovitz's photographic tour de force took her more than 30,000 miles, from Herbert A. Allen's exclusive conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, to Rupert Murdoch's yacht off Ketchikan, Alaska, to David Geffen's Gulfstream IV, to Ted Turner's 100,000-acre Flying D ranch in Montana. It is accompanied by three provocative articles by David Halberstam, Nicholas Lemann, and Elise O'Shaughnessy which illuminate the fundamental shifts in our society as America has moved from its role as military-industrial giant to a new supremacy as the world's entertainment-information superpower.

For most of this century—indeed, right up until the end of the Vietnam War—the Establishment was a small group of Wasp men whose breeding grounds were the playing fields of prep schools such as St. Paul's and Groton and the ivied halls of Yale and Princeton. They were to be found on the East Coast, in the leather chairs of exclusive men's clubs, at the War Department, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Ford Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the white-shoe firms of Wall Street.

Halberstam, the renowned and veteran chronicier of the postwar era—The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, The Reckoning—examines why their dominion ultimately waned and charts the rise of a new breed of power player embodied by Henry Kissinger.

Lemann, an acclaimed journalist and author of The Promised Land, takes a look at what is left of the Old Establishment as it continues its earnest gatherings behind the oaken doors of exclusive think-tanks-cum-clubs. And Vanity Fair executive editor Elise O'Shaughnessy listens to the group of mavericks, college dropouts, and visionaries who constitute the New Establishment and who are defining and exploiting the frontiers of the Information Age. Members of this network are as likely to have sprung from the William Morris mailroom as from any New England prep school. They are in Silicon Valley and Hollywood, rather than Wall Street and Washington. They are on the information superhighway, feeding entertainment, ideas, trends, and news to the world. They are Michael Ovitz, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Gerald Levin, John Malone, Sumner Redstone, Barbra Streisand. It's their world now. Welcome to it.