***
In the past, women concentrated on church work and left fraternities to men, but in the 1960s the American Journal of Sociology noted that the higher a wife’s social position, the more tribal activity was expected of her. Masculine stubbornness has merely swelled the rolls of such organizations as the National Association of Women Lawyers and the League for a Woman for President. Undoubtedly the monasticism of Rotary is responsible for Soroptimists and Pilot International, the businesswomen’s booster clubs, which European men regard with glazed horror.
Pilot International for grown girls, Key International for female teenagers—so the web spreads, and the men of the tribe have less and less they can call their own. The Key clubs suggest a further devaluation of the coin of male status. Children’s singing acts no longer satisfy children; they want lodges of their own. It is now possible for them to start associational activity in grade school. They become Little Leaguers, Cubs, Brownies, Future Teachers of America. In the brotherhoods boys belong to De Molay, the Junior Knights, the Junior Odd Fellows; their sisters are Rainbow Girls, Sunshine Girls, Job’s Daughters or Theta Rhos.
If they don’t have memberships of their own, they just tag along with Dad. Atlantic City hotels employ masses of baby-sitters, because entire families arrive for conventions, and a recent Lions get-together in Chicago staged a rock-’n’-roll dance for six thousand. The Lions had brought their prides.
This togetherness is having a zany effect on the orders. On the one hand, most of them note a decline in attendance at meetings. The old masculine haunt, with its starred mirror, glass chandelier and shabby card tables, is suffering. Red Men offer engraved tomahawks to encourage recruiting; some societies are electing local officers by mail. On the other hand, social membership is rising. Lodges with Bingo, slot machines and rathskellers aren’t worried about backsliding, and those with ballrooms and swimming pools—attractions for the whole family—report that knighthood is in flower.
Observing all this, what would the tribesman of another land think? We can picture him ceremoniously slitting the throat of a white cock in Malaya, or enjoying an old-time circumcision rite in Samoa, or squatting solemnly with his fellow studs in the Naga Hills to touch a tiger’s tooth and munch a bit of his ancestors’ bones. We can imagine him turning to examine American pageantry, and we can predict some of his reactions. He would understand Dekes whacking pledges with inch-thick paddles. He wouldn’t understand the Klan vision of ghostly riders in the sky, but he would be impressed by it, and the cabala of the Kickapoos and the Lu Lus and the Bagmen of Bagdad would send him groveling in the village dust, convinced that he was in the power of superior sorcerers.
But suppose he then glanced up and beheld the ladies of the Marine Corps League Auxiliary cakewalking by in dress-blue uniforms? Suppose the ranks parted to reveal an Elks’ mixed bar and bar-b-q, and suppose this was followed by a glimpse of family bowling night at a cotribal lodge, with all the Nobles, Queens, Princes and Daughters cavorting together in unisex pants suits?
What could the overseas brother possibly infer? Would he regard it as a hex, a hoax or the greatest marvel of all? The answer is as obscure and inscrutable as omertà, the Black Hand’s terrible oath of secrecy. We can’t even speculate. The cultural castration of the American male doesn’t bear thinking about. To invoke the motto of the now defunct Get There America Benefit Association: “Mum’s the Word.”
The New York Times
Most newspapermen secretly admire The Front Page, and in one of the lines they cherish a Chicago police reporter growls, “I was on a New York paper once—the Times. You might as well work in a bank.” Laymen may think this churlish. The Times, after all, is our one pukka newspaper. But that is precisely the problem. Its awesome majesty is disquieting to raffish members of the sodality, whose attitude toward their craft was eloquently expressed in a filthy Korean press hut by Homer Bigart, when he plucked a louse from his person and declared, “Let’s face it, gentlemen. This is a low profession.”
The Times disagrees. In its editorial chambers a few dark steps from the wanton glare of Times Square, journalism is upper church and pinstriped. It has never been otherwise. Henry J. Raymond, starting his straight news sheet ten years before the Civil War, set out to please “the best portion of our citizens.” Adolph S. Ochs, the former Chattanooga typesetter who snatched it from its creditors in 1896, rejoiced that reading it was “a stamp of respectability.” Today circulation posters recommend it to “rising executives,” and even Consulting Editor Ted Bernstein, a crusader against flat prose, says the paper “does not entertain; it informs.” That means no Zsa Zsa, no Love Nests Bared—and, as the small son of any subscriber can tell you, no funnies.
It also means an éclat which is the envy of the bawdiest tabloid. Virtually every President since McKinley has started his day with the Times. An Eisenhower train passing through Grand Central Station paused while Secret Service men picked up armloads of first editions, and Winston Churchill, out of touch for a few days, cabled for back copies. It was to the Times that Charles Lindbergh turned when he wanted photographs of his kidnaped baby distributed, in the Times that official Washington has read important state documents from the British White Paper of 1914 to the Pentagon Papers. People in the know either tell Times men or, as often, find out from them. The late Anne O’Hare McCormick once asked a diplomat if he could add anything to an account in the paper. “Good heavens, no, Anne,” he said. “Where do you think we’re getting our information?” And when Sputnik I was successfully launched, Russian missile experts meeting in their Washington embassy heard about it from the Times reporter who was covering them.
One reason people confide in the Times is its prestige—its men have won over two-score Pulitzer prizes—and another is its integrity. The Times is devoted to news. Its editors often chuck anywhere from eight to forty columns of advertisements for a good yarn. But if they think an article will damage the public interest, they scrap it. Among the stories they have suppressed over the years are an exclusive interview with Kaiser Wilhelm, a New York scandal which would have shaken municipal credit, and the imminent failure of a city bank—though the paper had $17,000 on deposit there and lost it when the doors closed. Other newspapers were delighted to print tart notes from Harry Truman; Editor Charles Merz acknowledged receiving several “lively letters” from him, but none was published. He wouldn’t have dreamed of needlessly embarrassing the White House. The Presidency, after all, is a national institution, like the Times.
Like the Presidency, the paper has had to pay the price of eminence. It bears the traditional scars of journalism—Winston Churchill’s American grandfather, an early stockholder, for example, defended the office with a primitive machine gun during the draft riots of 1863, and a recent letter to the editor bore the piquant address, “Left-Wing Department, Un-American Fluoridation Director.” Being the Times, however, it has acquired enemies more august than plug-uglies and crackpots. As a world newspaper it has been threatened by potentates, dictators, and offended governments, including its own. James “Scotty” Reston attracted the professional interest of the FBI after he was slipped the Dumbarton Oaks documents, and twice Times men have been haled before Senate committees—in 1915, on the charge that they had been bought by British gold, and in 1956 when Senator Eastland hunted Reds on the staff. More recently, of course, it was on the receiving end of the Nixon administration’s big guns. Under fire the Times is serene. Its attitude toward traducers is reflected in a note Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Ochs’ son-in-law and the publisher between 1935 and 1961, wrote to himself before testifying at a hearing. “Keep calm,” it read. “Smile; don’t be smart.”
Even Times gentility is an inviting target. Hecklers dub the paper The Old Gray Lady, The Good Gray Times and, meanest of all, The National Biscuit Company. Those taunts don’t come from the rabble, who rarely see it; Harrison Salisbury, covering juvenile gangs for the Times, became known to them as “the man from the News,” because
that was the only daily the cats read. The paper’s critics are literate, but titillated by the reluctance with which the Times yields to the times. It was twenty years old before it carried a headline wider than one column; once it ran six years without a byline. In 1945 it was still spelling “Dunkirk” “Dunkerque” because the newsroom atlas said so. “Eisenhower” and “Rockefeller” were cast in narrower type to squeeze them into manageable headline space. The world might call them “Ike” and “Rocky,” but Times men dasn’t.
New Yorkers are proud of the paper’s starch. When the late Meyer “Mike” Berger quoted someone as saying that the racketeer “Dutch” Schultz was a “pushover for a blonde,” Dutch was outraged. “What kind of language is that to use in the New York Times?” he protested. Old subscribers would take satisfaction in knowing that as late as 1937 the chief editorial writer worked in a frock coat, striped trousers, and wing collar, that Merz wrote his editorials in longhand, and that he and Sulzberger occasionally composed Double-Crostics, though once they lost an answer and had a terrible time solving it. Now and then, however, Times conservatism gets a bit thick. It is all very well to outlaw such newly created words as “percentagewise” and “finalize,” but too often fidelity to style ends in what Bernstein acidly calls “deadheads”—“Symposium Scheduled,” “Institute to Open,” or, disastrously, “Flies to Receive Nobel Prize.” Sometimes the determination to be correct has ended in outright fiasco, as when the paper insisted that an ad featuring a futuristic line drawing of a nude be enhanced by a futuristic bra, or when Sulzberger, lunching with an eminent Latin American, decided it would be gracious to say something in Spanish. Unfortunately, as Arthur Krock later recalled, the publisher had memorized the wrong phrase, and at the door he murmured a dulcet farewell which, translated, meant, “Wipe your face, you dirty pig, your snout is greasy.”
It is easy to exaggerate this sort of thing. Tweakers of the Times do. They rejoice in the music critic who wrote learnedly of the “diapasonic profundities” of a howling Times Square mob. They relish telling how Brooks Atkinson was sent to Asia as a war correspondent and cabled back a review of a Chinese Hamlet, and how Judge William D. Evans, the late chief of the obituary desk, discovered he was the second-oldest living alumnus of Yale and began eagerly polishing up the ranking man’s obit. A composite picture of priggish men in black alpaca, wiggling quill pens emerges. It is entertaining. It diverts other reporters, bored with the mediocrity of their own papers. The image, of course, is entirely false, not just because the alpaca has a scarlet lining, which it sometimes has—at his death the seraphic Henry J. Raymond was being blackmailed by a fancy woman, and the composing room tacks up as many bawdy pinups as the News—but because, for all its occasional turgidity, the Times remains the world’s greatest newspaper.
It has, indeed, no rival. In its role as historian of the present it is a journalistic miracle, bringing readers in some twelve thousand American communities a faithful record of each day’s events. Since the Times’ two-week beat on Sherman’s March to the Sea, it has published a remarkable number of exclusives, among them accounts of the Battle of Port Arthur, the sinking of the Titanic, the Versailles Treaty, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the formation of the UN, the Marshall Plan, the Truman-MacArthur talks on Wake, and Stilwell’s break with Chiang—a Brooks Atkinson triumph, after Hamlet.
But now and then the Times has had to hang its head. It thought the Teapot Dome scandal a red herring, thought Hitler washed up in 1932. Hanson Baldwin had just finished impressing readers with the might of Nasser’s new army when Israel annihilated it in the Hundred Hour War. Yet no paper hates being beaten more than the Times, and none is readier to remake at the ring of a teletype bell. The emulous instinct even infects the Sunday Departments—the Magazine has its own bureaus in Washington, London and Paris, and on Saturday nights The Week in Review closes fifteen minutes after the news section.
Competition, however, is naturally strongest on the daily paper. In a newsroom filing cabinet is the home telephone number of just about everyone in the country a reporter might want to rouse at edition time. At three o’clock each morning, when the Late City Postscript nears the end of its run, a red light flashes in the bedrock cave thirty-four feet below street level where the massive presses are anchored. They rev down, sigh to a stop, and fifty thousand copies are held until the last possible moment—just in case. In one year about twenty major stories broke after trains had left for Washington with the first edition. Daily circulation in the District is only twelve thousand, but each time the managing editor ordered the copies that had gone by train scrapped and the replate flown south by chartered plane. Even in other cities the Times asks no quarter.
Save for explosive stories that are taken to the Times by canny officials because they know it will handle them properly, most Times exclusives are trophies of individual initiative. Admiral Peary, off for the Arctic, and Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, flying the Atlantic, were under contract to the paper before they left the country. Herbert L. Matthews found Fidel Castro in the wild Sierra Maestra because he grew tired of writing editorials and flew down to learn what was really what. And Carr Van Anda, the Times’ great managing editor of a generation ago, seized on the Theory of Relativity because he was one of the few men in the country who could understand it. V. A., as he was called, was a mathematical prodigy. Once, after reading a report on an Einstein lecture, he phoned Princeton and corrected an equation. Another time he was studying photographs of hieroglyphics from King Tut’s tomb and discovered an ancient forgery, which scholarship later confirmed. “Only the Times,” said Mike Berger, “could have scored a scoop on a story three thousand years old.”
The incomparable V. A. did all this at his desk—not even the Times could have had a witness at the forgery—but most of the paper’s historic accounts have come from reporters who were there. Times men were at Harpers Ferry and Gettysburg, at Los Alamos for the first atomic bomb, on Cape Canaveral for the moon shot; and a foreign correspondent went down with the Andrea Doria. Assignments take men to the ends of the earth—once a reporter left for the North Pole as another started for the South Pole—and you never know where you may bump into one. Southerners discovered Times correspondents were living in scores of communities in the South, watching their reaction to integration; Jehovah’s Witnesses wading to their baptisms off Orchard Beach were accompanied by a Times photographer in a bathing suit; treasure seekers working in eighty feet of water off the coast of Scotland noticed a London Bureau man gravely peering through the window of his diving helmet. In New Jersey a Herald Tribune promotion man thrust a copy of his paper at a random passerby and was about to snap him for a poster when he realized he was focusing on a Times reporter.
The ubiquity of Times men is scarcely surprising. Nearly a thousand are in the news department alone. In the block-long city room the news editor looks distantly across the endless desks. The city editor summons his men over a P. A. system; the managing editor keeps opera glasses in his desk and sometimes squints around like a huge bird watcher. The Times has eighteen regional offices in the United States, including the Washington bureau on K Street, which has more reporters than most metropolitan dailies, and the sun never sets on its thirty-one foreign outposts. The paper, an editor explains, makes a point of being represented in every important capital. Just keeping its reporters’ names straight is a problem; the composing room maintains a byline bank, 160 names cast in metal.
None, however, is a cipher. With so much talent there is little room for panjandrums. Everybody has got to do his share of slogging. Homer Bigart was greeted with routine local assignments when he moved uptown from the Herald Tribune, and when Clifton Daniel, Harry Truman’s son-in-law, was being groomed for a Moscow assignment, he was packed off to a Russian class like any tyro. After twenty-one years of lofty journalism he studied next to Columbia undergraduates and pored over books nights. Daniel wound up with a B-plus. He was, he said, gratified that the managing editor didn�
�t cut his allowance. Even the Times copy boys are college graduates. They write editorials on the sly, and sometimes see them printed. On a typical evening the newsroom garrison will include a dozen former war correspondents and ex-bureau chiefs, though until his death the star was Mike Berger, who made his name as a local reporter. To the city he was a second O. Henry, a Manhattan legend.
When I was a correspondent in New Delhi, the Times man there was Bob Trumbull, whose air-conditioned suite always seemed to me to be crowded with emissaries of the Prime Minister, maharajas bearing gifts, turbaned bearers, and whiskey wallahs in splendid robes. Trumbull’s position in India roughly corresponded to that of the American ambassador, and no wonder; he knew more about the country; and his influence, there and in America, was at least as great. His important dispatches were read by everyone who saw the diplomatic pouch from Delhi and were delivered to an international Who’s Who of subscribers: premiers in Africa, scientists in Europe, explorers in lonely outstations near the slab of Antarctic ice Admiral Byrd christened Adolph S. Ochs Glacier.
The only catch was that his stories had to be significant; otherwise they were likely to be spiked. Plenty of worldly correspondents and prize winners fail to make even the Times first edition, just because there are so many of them. Everyone cheerily admits that the paper is overstaffed. It is set up for the big story—the New England hurricane of 1938, when thirty-five reporters were used, or the pre-election surveys, which take a score of men. Other times idle hands play pinochle, or congratulate the nearest copy boy on his latest editorial, or write B matter—background material, to be used if and when.
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