by Gay Talese
Daniel had not even known of Wicker’s appointment until after it had been made, so quick had Reston been in arranging the details. But in the two years that followed, life was not so smooth for Wicker. His scene in Daniel’s office was just one of several disagreeable incidents that he had experienced since becoming the bureau chief, and by the spring of 1966 the persistent rumor in the New York office was that Wicker would soon be replaced. Daniel was in favor of this, but he knew it was a very delicate proposition. Regardless of whatever differences exist between Timesmen, they do share a concern for The Times’ image. Any executive shifting must be executed gracefully. It should not appear to be a hasty decision, for nothing is done hastily at. The Times, nor should it seem that The Times had made an internal mistake and was now trying to correct it. It must all be handled quietly and in a gentlemanly fashion, with no conspicuous bickering or open dissension that might produce office gossip and possibly leak out to one of the news magazines. If this happened, it would be most unfortunate. The Times is supposed to report news, not make it, particularly not this kind of news. And yet it was the considered opinion of Daniel and his subordinate editors in New York, among them Harrison Salisbury, his close ally, that Wicker was not the right man for the bureau-chief job in Washington and should be moved, gracefully, to some other position.
Precisely what position was a bit of a problem for New York. Wicker was a talented man, there was no question of that. He deserved an important place on the paper and he was young enough to be relied upon to carry a large part of The Times’ burden into the future. If only Arthur Krock would retire, the editors knew, Wicker could take over Krock’s column. That would be an ideal spot for Wicker. If Krock would retire. Krock was seventy-eight years old, but he seemed as nimble now as when he first joined The Times in 1927, and a relatively recent attempt by New York to get him to retire had failed. A letter concerning Krock’s retirement had been sent to Krock’s home in Washington but, according to the word in New York later, the letter had been intercepted by Mrs. Krock without her husband’s knowledge; she had told Reston about it, and Reston had pulled a few strings with the publisher’s office, and that took care of that. The durable Arthur Krock, who had survived ten presidents, four wars, countless rebellions, and various awkward events, had done it again.
Still, a place had to be found for Wicker somewhere. And this was one of the things that occupied Daniel’s thoughts now, in the early summer of 1966, although not to the exclusion of other more pressing problems, of which there were many, even if they did not show on his face or have a disquieting effect on his manner. Daniel seemed very much in control of things, sure of himself and the position he held. The memory of the outburst with Wicker had represented a rare bad day to him, a wildly distorted picture of the individual he imagined himself to be. He was by nature a man of containment and poise, he felt sure, and a more recognizable picture of himself would be one showing him as he was on this summer afternoon, seated sedately behind his desk in his black leather chair in his office, fifteen minutes before the four-o’clock news conference was to begin, dictating notes to his secretary, Patricia Riffe, an extremely pretty blue-eyed young woman who dresses impeccably. He chose her himself, and one is not surprised.
When Miss Riffe first appeared at The Times a few years before, there was hardly a reporter in the newsroom who was not aware of her—feminine beauty not being all that common in the newspaper business, at least not in front of the office door of The Times’ managing editor. Daniel’s predecessor had hired only male secretaries, and the editor before him had employed a dogmatic gray-haired woman whose hauteur conveyed the impression that she was the managing editor.
This woman had worked for various managing editors of The Times between 1928 and 1951, during which time she discovered where most of the bodies were buried and lost whatever awe of her superiors she might have once possessed, and she came to regard the younger executives on The Times as office boys, clerks, or worse. But she had made the mistake of including in this category one assistant managing editor who in 1951, upon the death of her boss, became his successor. One of the new editor’s first acts was to accept her resignation, replacing her with a series of male secretaries, and this went on until Clifton Daniel moved into the big office in 1964 and brought in Miss Riffe. Many staff members were anxious to date Miss Riffe, and a few did, but her obvious discretion and mildly aloof manner soon discouraged them, all but one forthright young copyreader who worked on the foreign desk. Soon he was taking Miss Riffe to lunch, and later they were exchanging little notes through The Times’ housemail, and chatting briefly during the day on office telephones—he sitting at one end of the newsroom behind a post that permitted him to peek at her without seeming too obvious, she sitting at her desk outside Daniel’s office looking straight ahead, striking a pose of rigid efficiency.
The Times’ newsroom is an odd setting for a courtship: it is an enormous, functional room stretching from Forty-third to Forty-fourth Street through the third floor of the fourteen-story Times building, and it is lined with rows and rows of gray metal desks, teletype machines, telephones, and a few hundred men sitting with pencils in their hands, or keyboards under their fingers, writing or editing or reading about the world’s latest horror. Every five minutes, it seems, there arrives in this room a late report of another disaster—a riot in Rangoon, turmoil in Tanzania, a coup d’état, or an earthquake. But all this seems to make no impression on the people within this room. It is as if so much bad news has punctured the atmosphere of this place for so long that now everybody within is immune to it. The news is just a harmless virus that comes floating into the building, is circulated through the system, in and out of typewriters, under pencils, into spinning molten metal machines, is imprinted on paper, packed in trucks, delivered to newsstands, and sold to worrisome readers, causing reactions and counterreactions around the world—but the inhabitants of The Times’ newsroom remain unaffected, uninvolved, they think of other things. Love. Or, in the case of Miss Riffe and the young man on the foreign desk, marriage. One day they went off quietly and got married. And then, with Daniel’s blessing, they returned, resumed their places behind their desks in the room, and proceeded to conduct their private lives in such a way as not to distract from the larger purpose of this place. Which is as Daniel wishes it.
He is interested in appearances, and this extends not only to an individual’s grooming or clothes, but also to the manner in which he conducts his private life. Daniel is not a puritanical man. It matters little to him if the whole staff of The New York Times is engaged in a vast assortment of pleasurable pursuits, sexual or otherwise. But how a thing appears is often as meaningful to him as how it really is, and this attitude has influenced his life, the things he has done, the way he has done them, his reaction toward people and places, his taste in objects, his choice in women, be they wife, lover, or secretary. Even his office reflects this. Traditional English, thirty-five feet long and eighteen feet wide, trimmed in draperies of a white linen stripe, it is lined with a blue-black tweed rug that conceals the inky footprints of editors who have been up to the composing room. Toward the front of the room is an oval walnut conference table surrounded by eighteen Bank of England chairs, modeled after one that belonged to Adolph Ochs. In the rear of the room, a long walk for visitors, is Daniel’s big desk and his black leather chair which, according to the decorator, was selected because it produces a minimum of wrinkles in Daniel’s suits.
To the right of the desk is a door leading into a small, tastefully appointed sitting room, on the walls of which are hung photographs showing Clifton Daniel and his wife at White House receptions with the Lyndon Johnsons, the Harry Trumans, the John Kennedys—these being but a sample of many such photographs that the Daniels have, a few of which, blurred, were taken by Jacqueline Kennedy. Behind this little room is a bathroom and also a small kitchenette and bar. On the walls of the kitchenette are posters representing the nations in which Daniel has worked as
a Times correspondent—England, Egypt, West Germany, Russia—and there are other personal mementos in this small room. But there is nothing that is conspicuously personal in the large room of Daniel’s suite. Everything in this room reflects the institution, Daniel’s taste here being infused with subtlety. The framed photographs along one side wall, blown up and changed periodically, are recent news pictures that appeared in The Times and caught Daniel’s eye. Lined along the shelves behind Daniel’s desk are many books written or edited by Timesmen, and when these men appear in his office their eyes invariably scan the shelves quickly, hoping that their books have survived his latest scrutiny. To the left of the bookshelves are hung the photographs of the publishers who have so far guided the paper through this century, Ochs and his three successors. To the right, overlooking Daniel’s left shoulder as he sits at his desk, are photographs of the four men who preceded him as managing editor, men who both presented their era and were representative of it.
In the first picture, Carr Van Anda. He was appointed managing editor by Ochs in 1904, having been hired away from the New York Sun, to which he had gone in 1888 after some distinguished years on the Baltimore Sun and on smaller papers in his native Ohio. Van Anda poses in this picture with firm lips and cool pale eyes, a formal man with a high forehead, rimless glasses, a high stiff collar, and a pearl stickpin piercing his tie. He appears to be a distant, impersonal man, and he appears as he most often was. One Times reporter of that period described Van Anda’s look as a “death ray,” and when a group of Timesmen petitioned Van Anda to put by-lines on their stories he snapped, “The Times is not running a reporters’ directory!” But if he was not a folk hero with his staff he was nonetheless respected as few editors would be, for he was not only a superb newsman but also a scholar, a mathematical genius, and a student of science and logic. It was he who pushed The Times toward its expanded coverage of the great feats in polar exploration and aviation, forming the foundation for the paper’s portrait of the space age. He was the first editor to publicize Einstein—and once, in checking over a story about one of Einstein’s lectures, discovered that the scientist had made an error in an equation. Van Anda, who read hieroglyphics, printed many stories of significant excavations, and one night, after examining under a magnifying glass the inscription of a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian tomb, he discovered a forgery, and this fact, later confirmed by Egyptologists, led to the conclusion that a young Pharaoh, Tutankhamen, had been assassinated by a military chief named Horemheb. It was Van Anda who disputed the new Titanic’s claim to being unsinkable and when the ship’s radio went silent, after an emergency call for help, he deduced what had happened and drove his staff to get the story of the disaster that would be a world scoop. During World War I, Carr Van Anda, equipping himself with every available military map, charted the course of battle, and he anticipated many future campaigns, getting his reporters there in advance, and The Times’ coverage during that time was unparalleled.
By 1926 Van Anda had gone into semiretirement, devoting more time to his lifelong study of mathematics, astronomy, and cosmogony, and his place at The Times was taken by his assistant of many years, Frederick T. Birchall. Birchall was an impulsive, quick, tiny Englishman who, because he chose to remain a British subject, never received the full title of managing editor from Ochs, performing for the next five years as acting managing editor. He had been a brilliant deskman under Van Anda in the 1890’s on the New York Sun, and he had joined The New York Times at Van Anda’s urging in 1905. In the newsroom Birchall always wore a green eyeshade that partially covered his bald head, and he also had an impressive Vandyke beard that, from the photograph in Daniel’s office, appears to be black. Actually it was pink. “Old Pink Whiskers” was Birchall’s nickname in the newsroom, and the staff felt a bit more relaxed around him than it had with Van Anda. Birchall was more liberal, a luxury The Times could then afford since the staff had been so thoroughly disciplined under Van Anda. Not being a genius, Birchall was more human, but he worked hard to maintain the standards of his mentor. Birchall worked at his desk half the night rereading stories for errors in fact or tone, and he read galley proofs upside down to see if any typos would come popping into his sharp scanning sight. Sometimes he would remain all night at The Times, sleeping in a little room down the hall from his office, and occasionally he would be awakened by a copy-boy as a big story broke. Then he would reappear in The Times’ newsroom wearing his pajamas, slippers, and bathrobe; suddenly alert, excited by the news, he would put on his green eyeshade and proceed to pad around the room giving instructions to his reporters and subordinate editors.
Outside the newsroom, Birchall was something else. There seemed to be some romantic fantasy trapped within him, and he was once spotted up in The Times’ library moving between high shelves of books with his eyes slightly closed, twirling tiptoe in a trance of secret ballet. With his British wife he lived, among other places, near the Hudson River in a large farmhouse around which he kept dozens of monkeys, birds, stray cats and dogs, and a parrot who would greet each of Birchall’s arrivals with a cockney call, “ ’Allo, dahling,” and then make click-click noises simulating the sound of the ice cubes that Birchall was dropping into a highball glass. Birchall’s eye for women was never a secret at The Times, and it was said that a particular woman, a German baroness, was a factor in his decision to vacate the acting managing editor’s job in 1931 and go overseas as The Times’ chief European correspondent. He saw a good deal of her in Europe, and one day while driving in his car with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the Baroness’s leg, and with two American friends in the back seat, Birchall rammed into the rear of a German bus. No one was seriously injured, but shortly afterward Birchall made the observation, “Foreign correspondents should be eunuchs.” He was a living refutation of that statement. He was an outstanding correspondent for The Times in the early Thirties, reporting perceptively the early rise of Hitler, and in 1933 he won the Pulitzer Prize.
Birchall’s place in the managing editor’s office had been taken by a flamboyant Virginia dude named Edwin Leland James. Of the four editors whose pictures hang on Daniel’s wall, James was undoubtedly the most popular with the staff and they referred to him by a variety of names—“Jimmy James,” “King James,” “Jesse James,” “Dressy James.” A stocky little man with blue eyes and suits tailored in Paris, where during the Twenties he had been The Times’ chief correspondent, James continued to live the life of the boulevardier long after he had returned to the New York office as an editor. He would appear each morning wearing one of his brightly colored suits and highly polished pair of shoes, sometimes carrying a cane that he rapped against the elevator when it moved too slowly. In his office, sitting behind an eight ball on his desk, he puffed cigars and talked at length to almost any visitor, and he also found time each morning to study the racing form and place a bet with a bookmaker who doubled as a clerk on one of the news desks.
It was in many ways remarkable that such a man could ever have attained such a demanding editorial position. One possible explanation was that Ochs, Van Anda, and Birchall had been both charmed by his personality and impressed with his reporting during World War I and through the Twenties. And when Ochs wished to escape temporarily from the Victorian citadel he had created, he would go alone to Paris and make the nocturnal rounds with James, then to the racetrack the following day. James was Ochs’s tonic.
James could do these things, and still succeed at his job, because he had great physical stamina and incredible speed at a typewriter. He never labored over his writing, and he was no stylist, but he did achieve a high level of readability by packing his stories with interesting details and by coming up with angles that gave his stories a twist. In fact, on his very first assignment as a Times reporter on the local staff in 1915, after he had been sent to the Astor Hotel to cover a reception for the new consul-general from Romania—an event attended by New York dignitaries and preceded by an eleven-gun salute from the b
attleship Wyoming—James became suspicious of the consul-general, wondering if he might be a fraud. The consul-general’s boots were scuffed and untidy, and his accent seemed artificial, and there were other things, too, that somehow seemed wrong to James. He later reported this to Van Anda, and then began to investigate further—and finally, with cooperation from government officials in Washington, James exposed the consul-general as a psychopathic poseur who had previously served time in the Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York. This story appeared in The Times the next morning under the headline, “Bogus Consul General Gives Dinner at Astor,” resulting in another jail term for the impostor, and quickly establishing James’s identity with Van Anda.
Three years later, when James was twenty-eight, he was getting by-lines regularly from Van Anda for his war reporting from Europe, an assignment that he sometimes covered on horseback, wearing jodhpurs and a hacking jacket under his trench coat. After the war he covered the conferences at Versailles, Locarno, and Geneva, bringing to his reporting a descriptive touch that is not unusual now in The Times but was then quite rare: “At the end of a perfect day, just as nightfall descended rapidly from surrounding mountains, two middle-aged figures, both stoop-shouldered, one with flowing hair, the other bald as can be, stood arm in arm framed in a brightly lighted window and looked out together on the lengthening shadows fast reaching across Lake Maggiore. There was Aristide Briand, Foreign Minister of France, and Hans Luther, Chancellor of the German Republic. Behind their backs secretaries were blotting the ink on the signatures of a treaty by which their two countries promised never to fight one another again.”