by Gay Talese
No perceptive editor on The Times, however, made this mistake, particularly after Ochs’s death. It was not that Iphigene Sulzberger was ever intrusive. In fact she was hardly ever seen in the newsroom and her visits to the Times building were usually limited to social calls to her husband’s office or to meetings of The Times’ board of directors. And yet the impression was shared by nearly all senior Timesmen that Iphigene, in her gentle way, her friendly hints and reminders, in her very existence as Ochs’s only offspring and the direct heir to his fortune, exerted a tremendous influence on the character of The Times and on the three men who had followed her father to the top—her husband Arthur Hays Sulzberger, her son-in-law Orvil Dryfoos, and finally, in 1964, her son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. She was the living link in their lives with the spirit of Ochs, and during the century she had grown from Ochs’s little princess into the grande dame of The Times, its good gray lady, and the editors and executives were courtly in her presence and mindful in her absence, and some of them would quote from her favorite stories or observations when they made speeches in public. One of her favorite stories that they used was the medieval tale about a traveler who meets three stonecutters along a road one day and asks each of them what he is doing. The first stonecutter says, “I am cutting stone.” The second stonecutter, when the question is repeated, replies, “I am making a corner stone.” But when the question is asked of the third stonecutter, he answers, “I am building a cathedral.” The strength of The New York Times, Iphigene Sulzberger always said, lies in the fact that most of its staff are cathedral-builders, not stonecutters. And of all the cathedral-builders to join The Times in the last twenty-five years, perhaps her favorite was James Reston.
She admired his idealism, his devotion to The Times and the nation, his solid middle-class values that were not unlike those of her father. Reston and Ochs had never met, their generations separated by a half-century, but both had made their own way from the smaller cities to the Eastern seaboard, and both had been guided by many of the same principles and inspirations. Much of what Ochs had understood and admired in America, but could never put into words, would later be written by Reston, and if Adolph Ochs had lived long enough to read Reston and know him personally he would have undoubtedly shared Iphigene’s enthusiasm for him. Reston was just right for The Times. His writing expressed faith in the nation’s future, was gentle with the Establishment—he did not rock the boat. He wrote interestingly, often humorously without being excessively cutting or clever. Reston, like Ochs, saw the spirit of America not in the large cities with their teeming tenements, their angry demonstrators and tough labor unions, but rather in the smaller towns with their God-fearing families, their sandlots and Rotary clubs. Having emerged from this America, and having accepted it, James Reston reflected much of its mood in his writing, and thus his America was a land in which the citizens seemed not so disenchanted, the police not so brutal, the United States’ bombing of Vietnam not entirely unjustified, the politicians in Washington not so self-serving, the age of Jefferson not so long ago or lost in essence. The fraternity houses on college campuses, as Reston saw them, were not perpetuators of prejudice but were places where poor young men such as he had been could learn to use the proper fork, and his attitude toward women was, like Ochs’s, both romantic and puritanical. Reston thought that a woman’s place was in the home, and when one of the best reporters in the country, Mary McGrory, appeared for a job on his Washington staff he said she could have it if she would work part time on the telephone switchboard, which she refused to do. The heroines in Reston’s world did not work in offices—they were mothers and wives who excelled in their roles, who inspired their husbands as his wife had always inspired him, and he was deeply saddened when, as he first began to work in Washington, it occurred to him that the women of that city, the wives of newly arrived Congressmen, would now have to lie to protect their husbands. He could not condemn them for it, for this was their duty as wives, but he was saddened by the thought.
There was much in Reston’s lofty outlook that quietly piqued some of his fellow journalists, but both Iphigene Sulzberger and her husband were very proud of him and that was what mattered. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, to be sure, liked Reston in a somewhat different way than his wife. He was awed by Reston’s talent and admired him personally, having gotten to know him quite well in the Nineteen-forties during Reston’s days as his young administrative assistant and occasional traveling companion, although there were times when Reston’s early-to-bed habits and rigidly moral character palled on Sulzberger a bit, the latter being an extremely sophisticated man who drank well and had an eye for an ankle, and who, away from his work, knew the art of relaxation. But Reston’s shortcomings, such as they were, could not detract from his overwhelming assets. Sulzberger recognized that he had a preacher on the payroll who could pack the church, and he also knew that Reston was much harder on himself than he was on others. For example, during Reston’s first year on The Times, in 1939, he and a fellow Timesman in the London office committed an indiscretion that most journalists would have soon forgotten, or would have laughed off or bragged about, but the incident remained on Reston’s conscience for the next twenty-five years.
It happened in the late fall of 1939 when, after a Nazi submarine had penetrated the British sea defense around the Firth of Forth and damaged a British cruiser, Reston and a colleague contrived a way to get the news past British censorship. They accomplished this by cabling a series of seemingly harmless sentences to The Times’ editors in New York after having first sent a message instructing the editors to regard only the last word of each sentence. Thus they were able to convey enough words to spell out the story. The fact that the news of the submarine attack was printed in New York before it had appeared in the British press sparked a big controversy that led to an investigation by Scotland Yard and the British Military Intelligence. But it took the investigators eight weeks to decipher The Times’ reporters’ code, an embarrassingly slow bit of detective work, and when it was finally solved the incident had died and little was done about it. The Times’ editors in New York, though they had given the story very prominent play, later expressed dismay that the reporters had risked so much for so little; and the incident left Reston deeply distressed. It was so out of character for him to become involved in such a thing. The tactics were questionable and, though the United States was not yet in the war, Britain was already established as America’s close ally and breaking Britain’s censorship seemed both an irresponsible and unpatriotic thing to do. A more mature Reston, such as the one who in 1961 opposed the publication of The Times’ Bay of Pigs story, would never have indulged in such journalism.
As far as anybody on The Times’ staff knew, this incident in 1939 was Reston’s last and only claim to fallibility, for not long after that, particularly after the publication of Prelude to Victory in 1942, Reston’s career took a sharp turn upward and his fellow reporters would never again get a level look at him. Following the book, which the critic Clifton Fadiman said established Reston as a “valuable propagandist,” Reston left The New York Times Temporarily to help the United States government reorganize the London bureau of the Office of War Information. While there he greatly impressed the United States Ambassador John Winant, who later praised him to Sulzberger, and not long after that Reston had come to New York as Sulzberger’s assistant. It was during this period that Reston met Orvil Dryfoos, the future publisher, then just beginning his career on The Times, a somewhat shy thirty-year-old son-in-law of the son-in-law. By 1944 Reston was working again as a reporter, this time in the Washington bureau under the durable Arthur Krock, soon becoming the young star of Krock’s staff and winning a Pulitzer Prize and receiving impressive offers from other publications, one being the editorship of the Washington Post’s editorial page. Reston found this very tempting in 1953 and he told Krock about it. Krock did not want The Times to lose Reston, but Krock suspected that the only job that could keep Reston was Krock’s own. K
rock was then sixty-six years old, having been the bureau chief in Washington for twenty-one years. During this time he had achieved much of the social and professional status he had dreamed about during his younger days in his native Kentucky. He had first come up to Washington for the Louisville Times during the administration of President Taft in 1910, and in 1927, on the recommendation of Bernard Baruch, Krock had been hired by Adolph Ochs, who in 1932 asked Krock to reorganize The New York Times’ bureau in Washington. Krock did so with reluctance, preferring at that time to remain in New York, but for his willingness he received almost carte blanche treatment from Ochs. Since things change very slowly at The Times, Krock was still running his twenty-four-man bureau with autonomy long after Ochs’s death, taking very little advice and certainly no nonsense from the editors in New York, even those who outranked him. Outranking Mr. Krock was of dubious value so long as Krock was unwilling to be outranked; to oppose him would cause a scene, and nobody likes scenes on The New York Times. And so Arthur Krock year after year ran the bureau as his private principality, establishing a relationship with the New York office that continued until the Nineteen-sixties, at which point it became one of the most dramatic and bitter issues in The Times’ interoffice power struggle. But it 1953 things were going as Krock wished and, having reached that age when important men so often become magnanimous, or if not magnanimous, realistic, he voluntarily relinquished his title to Reston, though continuing to write his column and to occupy a revered position within the bureau as its éminence grise. In James Reston, then forty-three, Krock believed he had a successor who had enough stature as a journalist and more than enough stature with the Sulzberger family to stave off any attempt by the New York editors to encroach upon the Washington bureau; and Krock was right.
Smoothly, discreetly, rarely ruffling feathers, Reston not only preserved the bureau’s autonomy but also increased its prestige within a very few years. To Krock’s staff he added many new men and, as was soon obvious, a special breed of man, an almost Restonian species: they were lean and tweedy journalists, usually quite tall, educated at better universities and brighter than they first seemed to be. They were deceptively aware and low-pressured, slow nodders and ponderous puffers of pipes, very polite and altogether disarming. Most of them had been reared in the Midwest or South, or at least they affected the easy manner of small-town America, contrasting noticeably with the many fast-talking, citysharp men who had emerged from crowded urban neighborhoods and worked on The Times’ staff in New York, a city that, as time went on, Reston began to loathe almost as much as did Arthur Krock, who, in later years, saw New York as a city of decadent aggression.
Having hired such men, Reston, unlike the editors in New York, did not let them languish in a large impersonal newsroom waiting for another Titanic to sink; with a staff one-twentieth the size of New York’s, Reston could and did get to know each man personally, and he assigned each of them to cover an important phase of government activity that would guarantee them ample space and a byline in The Times, and this in turn gave them an identity in the newspaper and an entrée to the influential circles of the capital. To work on Reston’s staff was to be a member of an elite corps of Timesmen, and Reston used his considerable influence with top management to see that his men were well paid and appreciated, and he expected nothing in return but loyalty to The Times, pride in the bureau, and he also asked that they please call him by his nickname—“Scotty.” Even the office boys called him that. Scotty Reston. They idolized him.
To the younger men on the staff, it was Reston who personified whatever grandeur The Times had, not the high priests in New York, and when one of his reporters was offered a much better job on another paper, he was very slow in accepting it. It meant leaving Scotty. Some reporters were so inspired by Reston’s manner and talent that they tried to imitate him, one going so far as to dress like him, switching to bow ties and button-down shirts, to smoke a pipe like him, to walk with his bounce and glitter, to try to mimic the way he spoke, the latter being an impossible undertaking—for there was something in the timbre of Reston’s wonderful distant voice, the words he slowly chose, the way he paused, that gave to almost everything he said the ring of instant history.
Many New Yorkers, not unexpectedly, were envious of Reston’s staff, and would have loved to become a part of it. On those rare occasions when New York reporters would be working with Reston and some of his men on a special out-of-town assignment—such as a big space shot from Cape Kennedy, Florida—the New Yorkers would become the benefactors of certain little conveniences rendered by Reston’s mere presence; for example, in the morning outside of Reston’s motel door there would be a fresh bundle of twenty-five copies of The Times flown to Florida from New York at Reston’s request. Reston understood the journalists’ ego—he knew that what most of them miss when working on a remote assignment is the breakfast pleasure of their own words and by-line.
Several New York reporters tried to be transferred to Reston’s bureau, but very few made it. Reston did not have to accept any applicants or choices from the New York office, and he usually did not, preferring to make his own discoveries in the smaller towns closer to the heart of America, and Reston could also prevent New York reporters from moving into the Washington area to cover news. In 1959 he even did this to one of New York’s specialists, A. H. Raskin, generally regarded as the best labor reporter in the nation. Raskin had then been covering the daily developments of a big steel strike, moving with the story from New York to Pittsburgh, and then he followed it into Washington as a Presidential panel was about to hold hearings on a possible emergency injunction. But when Raskin appeared in the Washington office Reston informed him, politely but unmistakably, that the strike story would now be taken over by one of the Washington reporters. Raskin telephoned New York for instructions. He was told to return home. There later was much fuss in New York about this incident, one editor declaring loudly that The Times was being run from New York, not Washington; another editor observing that The Times, after all, was one newspaper and not a cluster of feudal fiefs—but this talk was mostly out of embarrassment or resentment, and none of the editors wished to have a showdown with Reston at this time, all being cognizant of Reston’s closeness to the ruling family. As for A. H. Raskin, he was not really surprised by what had happened in Washington; like most veterans on the New York staff, he had previously experienced difficulty with the bureau, finding them slow or reluctant to help him reach sources in Washington to check facts, or quick to dismiss as insignificant almost any news tip he offered—and, if anything, the scene with Reston had been far more cordial than Raskin would have expected had Arthur Krock still been the bureau chief.
Raskin remembered one experience with the Washington bureau back in 1949 that was so awful it was comic. During that year, a period of national economic decline marked by substantial unemployment, Raskin learned from a friend in the Federal Security Agency that President Truman was preparing to send to Congress a special message urging that the Federal government appropriate funds to help the states and cities run emergency work-relief programs for the first time since the WPA in the Great Depression. Suspecting that it would be hopeless to get anybody on Krock’s staff to help confirm this tip, Raskin did his own research by telephone and he finally got enough facts together to write the story from New York. This story made page one of The Times, appearing at the top of the page under a two-column headline, and when it reached Washington there was fury in Krock’s bureau. Krock’s deputy, Luther Huston, quickly assigned reporters to prove that Raskin’s story was a hoax. Huston even went to the length of having The Times’ White House correspondent, Anthony Leviero, put a press-conference question to President Truman in a negative enough way to invite, and get, a negative response. Then Huston sent an irate letter to New York listing the names of high-ranking officials in Washington who had told the bureau that there was absolutely nothing to Raskin’s story. The letter ended with a strong reiteration of the theme t
hat trying to cover Washington from Times Square was bound to result in disaster and when would New York learn its lesson? (On the same day that Huston’s letter arrived in New York, President Truman sent the work-relief message to Capitol Hill, and everything in it corresponded to Raskin’s forecast.)
But James Reston would never have condoned such pettiness, nor would he have permitted his bureau to function with such haughty arrogance, which was bound to boomerang sooner or later. Reston presented himself and his staff as team players. And his artistry as an administrator could not be measured simply by the fact that he usually got his own way—what was more interesting was that Reston’s way, as he presented it, seemed solely designed for the greater glory of The New York Times. Reston, after all, was a cathedral-builder, not a stonecutter, and it would have been highly imprudent of any New York editor to openly challenge Reston’s motives. They might be angry at him, as when he prevented Raskin from writing the steel-strike story in Washington, but they could never catch Reston in an act of arrogance or selfishness or power-building. He might have indulged in such things, but they could never catch him. Everything he did seemed of high purpose and sound principle. In taking the strike story away from A. H. Raskin, Reston did not deprive The Times’ readers of knowledgeable coverage; Reston had his own labor specialist.