Book excerpt: "Kathryn McGarr reveals how the Cold War consensus was deliberately created, shaped, maintained, and protected by a coterie of influential journalists in Washington, DC, who calculated what they would do (or not do) for sustained access to information. The compact among journalists, elected officials, and other government operatives constrained knowledge for everyone in a time when political insight was centrally controlled and defined. Yet these reporters, many of them outsiders from the Midwest, did this not out of malfeasance but for social and political benefit, ever conscious of the need to cultivate, placate, and blend with their sources"--