by Gay Talese
Reston’s whole stance seemed so intertwined with The Times, his idealism and character so in keeping with the concepts endorsed by the Sulzberger, that to question James Reston would be to question The Times itself. If Reston’s hand seemed to be involved in some tricky office maneuver, as it would from time to time, particularly during the shake-up of the Nineteen-sixties, his participation would be from such a high moral position that it would be almost treasonable of any New York editor to call it office politics. For all they knew, Reston probably had cleared his moves in advance with the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, or after Sulzberger retired because of ill health in 1961, with Orvil Dryfoos. Reston and Dryfoos had become exceedingly close friends during the Nineteen-fifties, and when Reston came up to New York he often stayed at the Dryfoos home, serving as the new publisher’s confidant and adviser, and serving within the institution as part of its national conscience, its legate to the capital, its poet laureate. He sang the praises of the paper and the family that owned it in his speeches and writings, and, when workers struck The Times in 1963, Reston rebuked the labor leaders with an indignant lament: “Striking The Times is like striking an old lady.”
And so it was not surprising then, when the Bay of Pigs story demanded a big decision in The Times’ newsroom on that night in 1961, that Orvil Dryfoos, newly in command, would turn to Reston for advice—and Reston, so sensitive to the national interest and to The Times’ stake in that interest, would advise that the story be toned down; and it was. It would have been toned down, published, and forgotten, too, along with a hundred other big stories and delicate decisions made since 1961, if Clifton Daniel’s speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the spring of 1966, had not dredged up the issue once again, and if the New York editors who had been overruled five years before had not played up the story of Daniel’s speech as they did in The Times’ edition of June 2, 1966. They spread the entire four-thousand-word text of the speech across six columns inside the paper and also printed a photograph pertaining to the Cuban invasion and a seven-hundred-word story written by the AP man covering the speech in St. Paul, under a headline: “Kennedy Later Wished Times Had Printed All It Knew.” Such extensive coverage of Daniel’s speech, which surprised even Daniel when he returned from delivering it, was ostensibly justified on the grounds that it contributed an important footnote to history. But there was little doubt that another reason for its prominent display was that the speech made heroes of the New York editors who had been vetoed in 1961 by Dryfoos and Reston—it actually, in a subtle way, pointed a finger at the Dryfoos-Reston alliance, something that might not have occurred five years before; but now, in 1966, things were different. Orvil Dryfoos was dead.
2
Fortunately for Clifton Daniel, and The New York Times, most of what goes on in or around his office does not usually get beyond the thick walls of the Times building. If it did, if there were reporters and columnists from other publications each day watching and questioning the editors of The Times, following them around and analyzing their acts and recording their errors, if The Times were covered as The Times covers the world, then Daniel’s large office would lose much of the dignity and decorum that it now seems to possess. But Daniel is usually very skillful at concealing his thoughts and sustaining poise under pressure, and his suntan in the early summer of 1966 also helped obscure signs of tension, and only once so far had he lost his composure to a point where it was noticeable to the secretaries and subordinate editors who sit around the newsroom that adjoins his office door.
That incident had been unforgettable for Daniel. He had actually become so enraged at one of his younger editors, Tom Wicker, the new bureau chief in Washington, that he pounded his fists on the desk several times, screaming and shouting, his soft chin trembling. Even if it were true, as charged, that Wicker had not kept in close enough touch with the New York office, and had also been remiss in some of his other duties as a journalist and administrator, there was no justification for this reaction, Daniel knew, and he was sorry that it had happened, was astonished that he had allowed it to happen. This sort of thing is not supposed to happen at The New York Times. It happens in bad novels about big business, or it happens within some of the more high-pressure publications around New York perhaps, but not at The Times; not so openly anyway. And there was much more to the whole thing than merely the temporary displeasure with Tom Wicker. Wicker was no doubt paying part of the price for all those years of autonomy enjoyed by his predecessors, Reston and Krock. Still, what probably did not help matters was that Wicker, who can be very impulsive, had become angry at Daniel’s behavior, declaring that he was unaccustomed to being talked to in this way, and he added that he was not sure what he was going to do about it. Then he quickly turned and left Daniel’s office and took the next plane back to Washington.
Three or four days later Daniel was in Washington having dinner with Wicker, and the whole thing was officially forgotten, although it will never really be forgotten by either man. If Daniel were to be completely candid with Wicker, which he would never be, he would admit that from the beginning he had not been very fond of Wicker personally nor impressed with him professionally. When Wicker first applied to The Times for a job in 1958, Daniel had been one of the New York editors who had turned him down. Wicker was a tall, raw-boned, ruddy-complexioned Southerner with thick fingers and alert narrow eyes and a heavy jaw partially concealed by a reddish beard. He was then in his early thirties and had not been very experienced as a journalist, although he did have interesting credentials. He had already written five novels, three under a pseudonym, that captured some stark scenes of violence and sex and politics in rural settings, and in 1957 he had won a Nieman Fellowship in journalism at Harvard after having worked the previous six years on the staff of the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, his native state. Wicker was the son of a railroad man, and had been reared in the poverty of the Depression in a small place called Hamlet. Like Clifton Daniel, he had gotten his degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina, but this did not result in any preferential treatment for Wicker; it might have had a reverse effect, making Daniel more aware and critical, especially when Wicker came into The Times’ newsroom with that beard. Nobody on The Times’ reportorial staff then wore a beard except a foreign correspondent recently returned from Turkey, and he was quickly transferred to Jersey City.
Shortly after Wicker had completed his fellowship at Harvard, he joined the staff of the Nashville Tennessean, and then in 1960, his beard shaved off, he appeared again at The Times, this time in Reston’s bureau in Washington, and he was hired. He became one of Reston’s boys and four years later, at the age of thirty-eight, Reston’s successor as bureau chief. It was an incredibly quick rise made possible by The Times’ great shift in the Sixties and also by Wicker’s talent as a journalist. Wicker was a driven man, sensitive and tough, one who had become resigned without bitterness to the probability that he would never make it as a novelist, although he could never completely understand the success of some of his contemporaries, Updike and Roth and others, men who wrote well but, it seemed to Wicker, knew very little about the world around them.
But Tom Wicker had little time to ponder contemporary American taste in fiction once he joined The Times. Suddenly he became caught up in the current of journalism, the daily opiate of the restless. He traveled cross-country with politicians, wrote his stories on airplanes and in the backs of buses. He wrote easily under deadline pressure and liked this life that, through his position on The Times, brought him a recognition that would most likely have eluded him had he continued to take the long, solitary gamble of the novelist. As a journalist Wicker could usefully employ other assets, too, among them a disarming country-boy manner that he did not attempt to modify, it being no handicap in Washington, it being almost an asset, in fact, during the early administration of Lyndon Johnson, a fellow Southerner, the onetime farmboy and rural schoolteacher: Wicker’s coverage of Johnson through 1964 showed a de
pth of understanding that was not so evident during the Kennedy years.
In addition to Wicker’s great interest in politics and people, he possessed a quick mind and an ability to articulate what was on his mind. Like many Southern journalists, Wicker often talked better than he wrote. And he wrote well. He could probably have become a good television commentator, and he was effective when debating on panel shows, making his points with long Faulknerian sentences mixed with regional metaphors and wit, coated in a Carolina accent. One night, after a small dinner party in New York, Wicker became locked in a debate with James Baldwin, a smoldering scene in which Baldwin occasionally jumped to his feet to shriek insults down at Wicker, the white devil from the South, and the evening later became so filled with fury that Wicker’s wife left the table angrily in tears. But Wicker remained cool under the barrage of hysteria from Baldwin and another Negro at the table, debating them point for point, and he probably got the better of most exchanges that evening without ever resorting to rage.
But with all his qualities, Tom Wicker’s early success on The Times owed a great deal to luck, to the fact that he had been at the right place, at the right time. While this may also be generally true of many journalists who succeeded in a big way when young, it was extraordinarily true in Wicker’s case: he joined The Times just before its revolution, he joined Reston’s bureau just in time for the early excitement of the Kennedy era and the drama that followed, and he happened to be the only Timesman among the Washington press corps who traveled with Kennedy to Dallas. Wicker’s story of the assassination took up more than a page in The Times of November 23, 1963, and it was a remarkable achievement in reporting and writing, in collecting facts out of confusion, in reconstructing the most deranged day in his life, the despair and bitterness and disbelief, and then getting on a telephone to New York and dictating the story in a voice that only rarely cracked with emotion.
Wicker had chosen that day to be without a notebook, so he scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of Kennedy’s two-day tour of Texas. Today Wicker cannot read many of these notes, but on November 22 they were as clear to him as 60-point type. He wrote his story with other reporters in the pressroom of the Dallas air terminal, having gotten there after a half-mile run while lugging his typewriter and briefcase, jumping a fence along the way without breaking stride, remembering almost everything he saw and heard after Kennedy had been shot, although remembering relatively little of what had happened before that. Wicker had been riding in the Presidential motorcade in one of the press buses, he is not sure which one; and when Kennedy was hit, Wicker heard no shots, although another reporter in the bus noticed that the President’s car, which was about ten cars ahead, was speeding away.
The press buses continued to travel at a parade pace. But things quickly began to change. Wicker noticed a motorcycle policeman bump over a curb, dismount, and begin to run. There seemed to be some confusion within the crowds of people who had been lined along the road to get a glimpse of the President. The press buses stopped at the place where Kennedy was to address the crowd. Wicker noticed how the heads of the large crowd of people began to turn as the word was passed back. Wicker was literally seeing a rumor travel. It reminded him of wind sweeping over a wheat field. Then a stranger grabbed him by the arm and asked, “Has the President been shot?” “I don’t think so,” Wicker said, “but something happened.”
Wicker and the other reporters, about thirty-five of them, moved to where they were to hear Kennedy speak, and it was there that another reporter came running with the news. Then all the reporters ran. They jumped into the press buses that would take them to Parkland Hospital During the next few hours, the details began to pile up—the eyewitness accounts, the medical reports, the words of White House spokesmen, the recollection of one newsman that he had heard shots, the description of a Dallas television reporter who had seen a rifle being withdrawn from the corner fifth- or sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. There were truths, half-truths, errors, illusions, rumors, secondhand accounts, thirdhand accounts—all these were passed freely to the press, were circulated among them, and there was very little time to check these facts or allegations. Wicker and the rest had to go largely on instinct, the totality of their experience so far in life, their insight into others, a special sense that good reporters develop and use in a crisis. And Wicker’s instincts in this crisis served him well.
It is probably true that Wicker’s reporting from Dallas that day, one afternoon’s work, will live longer than any novel, or play, or essay, or piece of reportage that he has ever written or will ever write. It was not that he had produced a classic. He had not. He had previously reported as well, written better. But the test in Dallas was like no other test. It was the sort of assignment that could make or break a Timesman’s whole career in a few hours. Wicker was writing for history that day, and his story dominated the front page, was spread in double measure and set in larger-than-usual type, as was his by-line—this edition of The Times would not be thrown away by readers a day later, it was a collector’s item. It would be saved by hundreds, perhaps thousands of readers, and they would store it for decades in their attics or closets, and would pass it on as a family heirloom or a relic or a vague testimony to their existence on the day a President was shot.
If there were major errors in Wicker’s story, which there were not, they too would survive, degrading Wicker among his colleagues but degrading The Times much more among its readers, not only the million or so who would see the story that day, but also those who would read it a half-century from now, the students and historians who would be turning it up again and again on microfilm.
The Times is expected to cover this kind of story, the single spectacular event, as no other newspaper in the world. This expectation is partly based on The Times’ traditional commitment to being the paper of record, and partly on the fact that The Times has the facilities for meeting any emergency—its large reportorial staff with supernumeraries waiting in the wings; its many deskmen, rewrite men, and clerks in the infinite morgue, a combination that permits large volumes of copy to be quickly processed, checked, and fortified by background or sidebar material; its financial wealth that will support any expense in communications and travel; its echelons of editors who, while they sometimes seem to get into one another’s way during those days when the news is normal, nevertheless can transform themselves into a remarkably well-coordinated team during a crisis. And finally, mixed in with this mélange, is the unseen force of the ruling family, the ghost of Ochs.
Many years ago, after a task force of Timesmen had acquitted themselves very well on a big story, the editors sat around at conference the following day extending congratulations to one another; but Adolph Ochs, who had been sitting silently among them, then said that he had read in another newspaper a fact that seemed to be missing from The Times’ coverage. One editor answered that this fact was minor, and added that The Times had printed several important facts that had not appeared in the other newspaper. To which Ochs replied, glaring, “I want it all.”
It is this thinking, rigidly enforced, that has created an odd turn of mind and fear in some Timesmen, and has created odd tasks for others. For several years there were clerks in The Times’ newsroom assigned each day to scan the paper and count each sports score, each death notice, making sure that The Times had them all, or at least more than any other newspaper. At night there were Times editors in the newsroom pacing the floor waiting for a copyboy to arrive with the latest editions of other newspapers, fearful that these papers might have a story or a few facts not printed in The Times. When Tom Wicker’s story began to come in from Dallas, two pages at a time, he running down the steps of the Dallas terminal each time across the waiting room into a phone booth, miraculously never having to wait for a booth or a line to New York, the main concern was not with Wicker’s prose style—it was with whether he had it all, and had it right, even things that would have
seemed too trivial on any other day: the names of certain streets in the motorcade route; the fact that the Texas School Book Depository, from which the shots were fired, was a leased state building; the names of the witnesses, and where they stood, during the swearing-in ceremony of Lyndon Johnson in the airplane; the name of the judge who presided at the ceremony, and the date of judgeship; the names of the two priests who administered the last rites to Kennedy; the identity of witnesses who claimed to have seen this or that, and the precise time of each happening—and of all that happened during that long afternoon in Dallas, Wicker saw almost none of it. He was writing blind. He was feeling the facts and was guided by instinct. There were 106 paragraphs in his story in The Times the next day, and yet only slightly more than one of these paragraphs described what Wicker had seen with his own eyes. That occurred while Wicker stood with other reporters near the emergency entrance in the hospital as Mrs. Kennedy walked out, and Wicker later wrote: “Her face was sorrowful. She looked steadily at the floor. She still wore the raspberry-colored suit in which she had greeted welcoming crowds in Fort Worth and Dallas. But she had taken off the matching pillbox hat she wore earlier in the day, and her dark hair was windblown and tangled. Her hand rested lightly on her husband’s coffin as it was taken to a waiting hearse.”
After the assassination story that day, and the related stories that followed, Wicker’s stock rose sharply at The New York Times. He was then thirty-seven, having been on Reston’s staff only three years, and he had undoubtedly been lucky at being at the right place, at the right time; but in Dallas on that particular afternoon he had also been the right man. He had made the most of things as they exist in his somewhat bizarre profession, one that often bestows the greatest fame on chroniclers of the greatest chaos, and it was not surprising a year later when Reston selected Wicker to succeed him as the Washington bureau chief, although there were members of the bureau who were not enchanted by the choice. They believed that Wicker had been moved up too fast. And one of Reston’s bright young men, Anthony Lewis, disappointed that he had not gotten the job, arranged a transfer to the London office, becoming the bureau chief there. Another Reston protégé, Max Frankel, resigned from The New York Times altogether, accepting a job with The Reporter magazine, although Frankel suddenly had second thoughts about it a few days later, and asked The Times to rescind his letter of resignation, which it did. But there was no doubt that the meteoric rise of Tom Wicker, engineered by Reston, who was then also involved in some interesting executive choreography on a higher level, had bruised the egos of a few ambitious Timesmen, and it had also displeased some of the editors in New York, among them Clifton Daniel.