Beginning with the ascendancy of Life magazine during World War II, Morris offers the inside stories behind dozens of famous pictures, and intimate portraits of the men and women who took them, along with colorful anecdotes about his encounters with Alfred Hitchcock, General George S. Patton, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, Lee Miller, Andrei Sakharov, and many others. Morris has a few opinions as well about his powerful bosses - Henry Luce of Time Inc., Katharine Graham of The Washington Post, and A.

M. Rosenthal of The New York Times - and he reflects, often humorously, on his triumphs and losses inside various media empires. He observes how the press failed to tell the story of the Holocaust, and how it turned away in revulsion from images of what the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to the human body.

In addition, Morris details how The Washington Post fell for the Johnson administration's lies about the Tonkin Gulf "incident," and he notes how The New York Times initially missed its significance.