by Gay Talese
For five years, beginning in 1925, James roved around Europe covering the best stories, and in 1927 he was at the Le Bourget Airdrome as Lindbergh landed (“PARIS, May 21—Lindbergh did it. Twenty minutes after 10 o’clock tonight suddenly and softly there slipped out of the darkness a gray-white airplane as 25,000 pairs of eyes strained toward it.…”); and then, in 1930, with his French wife and three children, and with a Legion of Honor ribbon in his lapel, Edwin James returned to New York as Birchall’s assistant, and in 1932 he was named managing editor. He held this position until his death in 1951, and during his tenure The New York Times became larger and more prosperous than ever before, expanding its coverage around the nation and the world. But James was easily bored by much of the necessary trivia of his job, and he permitted other men of talent and ambition, men with their own ideas of what was best for The Times, to move in and assume more responsibility. The Times, with Ochs dead, soon became splintered into several small office empires, little dukedoms, with each duke having his loyal followers and special territory to protect. One of the grand dukes of The Times, of course, was Arthur Krock. Another was Lester Markel, an autocratic figure who in 1923, at the age of twenty-nine, had been hired by Ochs as the Sunday editor with a staff of five; by 1951, Markel had a staff of eighty-four. This included fifty-eight editors, layout and picture crews, and special correspondents in Paris, London, and Washington. He had converted the Sunday department, which in 1923 had consisted of a slim magazine and a flimsy feature supplement, into a gigantic operation that published a book review, a review of the week’s news, a section on entertainment and the arts, and a thick magazine that, while often criticized for its ponderous articles and endless advertisements of ladies’ underwear, was nonetheless very influential and profitable. Lester Markel, in effect, had built a major newspaper within the newspaper, and his taste dominated his product and the men who helped produce it, and for forty years his authority within the Sunday department was unquestioned—he was the Sun King.
There were powerful individuals elsewhere within the building, too, men who had carved out their domains in or around the newsroom during World War II as the staff was increased and the workday was expanded so that The Times could publish the maximum amount of late-breaking news from around the world. This procedure resulted, among other things, in the staff being divided into “day side” and “night side” factions, each controlled by editors who ruled over a vast pecking order of subeditors, who in turn ruled over platoons of deskmen assigned to one of three competing desks—the foreign desk, the national desk, and the New York desk. Finally, there were dukes who operated with virtual autonomy across the sea, running their bureaus in foreign capitals where they could not be quickly reached or directed by New York due to the delayed pace of communications that then existed.
And so during James’s nineteen years as managing editor, a time when the job became much more difficult and complicated than it had been under Van Anda and Birchall, the dukes abounded in New York and Washington, London and Paris, and in other foreign cities. While they paid homage to the memory of Ochs and his principles of selfless dedication, they competed with one another in an amazing variety of ways, often influencing how a news story was covered, who covered it, how much space it was allotted, where it appeared in the paper; and sometimes, instead of conducting their campaigns quietly, the dukes or their henchmen played out their ambitions openly on the very locations where headline news was being made, providing journalistic sideshows that were as lively on occasion as the news happenings reported in the paper.
During the Korean war, for example, there were Timesmen at the front who were attached to Markel’s Sunday department, Krock’s Washington bureau, and the foreign desk in New York, and the hostility that developed between certain members of these factions was such that even now, nearly two decades later, these individuals rarely speak when they meet by chance in the elevators of the Times building. There was one incident in Korea during the winter of 1950 in which a Timesman from Washington, assisted by a colonel who was his frequent drinking companion, schemed to have a Timesman from New York removed from the theater of operations on the false charge that he was a psychotic who feared the sound of gunfire, a result of a combat wound he had received in the cheek of his buttock during World War II, and consequently he was covering the Korean War from his hotel room. The New York man, disliked by the Washington man for competitive reasons and by the colonel because his reporting of the war had seemed too pessimistic, was completely unaware of the plot until he received his notice of disaccreditation—and then he protested so loudly that it came to the attention of General MacArthur. MacArthur was also very annoyed because he had been kept uninformed of the disaccreditation order and because he had recently been called upon to arbitrate a similar dispute involving the Herald Tribune’s correspondent Marguerite Higgins. She had been asked to leave Korea but, after the protests of Tribune executives and other high-placed individuals, MacArthur had reinstated her, relieved to have the problem off his back. Now, in The Times’ case, MacArthur did not want a feud with the newspaper that had been giving him editorial support at a time when he greatly needed it at home; still, he was infuriated by all the journalistic backbiting of late, and as he listened to the Timesman’s plea to be reaccredited, he frowned, drawing on his corncob pipe. Finally MacArthur granted the correspondent his wish, but then he angrily waved him out of his office. “For God’s sake,” MacArthur cried, “can’t The New York Times wash its dirty laundry in private?”
The managing editor who succeeded Edwin James was a tall, smiling, dark-eyed charmer from Mississippi named Turner Catledge. Catledge was a man who liked to spend evenings with friends drinking whiskey and telling good stories, and some people misinterpreted this as a sign of his laxity or indifference to work. Actually, Catledge was probably the shrewdest managing editor of them all. While lacking Van Anda’s brilliance or the busy-beaver quality of Birchall, Catledge was their master when it came to handling men and manipulating situations without seeming to be doing so. He had covered politics in Washington through the Thirties and Forties, and he was a believer in the political organization, the coordinated team with unchallenged hard power at the top, and he was appalled by what had been going on within The Times during James’s final years. When James died in December of 1951, Catledge’s main problem was what to do about the dukes.
Had he been on another publication the solution would have been simpler, but on The Times it had never been easy to remove people, particularly people with power, or people who possibly had connections with the publisher or members of the family. Timesmen in key positions like to stay there, they fight to stay there, for employment on The Times is very prestigious—doors open elsewhere, favors are for the asking, important people are available, the world seems easier. Also, from the early days of Ochs, there had been a traditional delicacy toward faithful employees, and people with prestige on the staff were rarely humiliated. Many of the dukes, too, were valuable men who had made, and were still making, important contributions to the paper which, in addition, was a very successful enterprise, and many people on The Times saw no reason for change. If Catledge wished to stage a revolution and demote the dukes and thus bring the power back to the managing editor’s office in New York, he had better do it subtly, he knew, and he had better be lucky. Still, there was no alternative, he thought; the paper could continue with its factionalism for just so long before it would proceed to destroy itself. He had seen firsthand some of the abuses of the dukedom in Washington, having gone there in 1929 shortly after he had been hired by The Times. In those days, the Washington chief, Richard V. Oulahan, Krock’s predecessor, ran a bureau in which reporters did as they pleased, and if three of them wished to cover the same assignment on a particular day, they did, and sometimes all three versions would be sent to New York and be printed. When Krock took over the bureau in 1932 upon the death of Oulahan, he quickly converted this self-directed staff into a team, his team,
and the most ambitious young member of the team was Turner Catledge.
Catledge sometimes wrote four to six major stories a day, became an expert on tax law, developed news sources throughout Washington; and all this tremendous energy and ambition could have worked against him if he had not also possessed a quality that redeemed him. Catledge had a wonderful way with men. Particularly older men. Particularly older men with power. This is a quality that perhaps cannot be learned but is inherent in certain rare young men who, partly because they are very bright and do not flaunt it, and partly because they are respectful and not privileged, confident but not too confident, attract the attention of older men, self-made men, and receive from these men much advice and help. The older men probably see something of themselves in these bright young men, something of what they were, or think they were, at a similar age. And so they help the younger men up the ladder, feeling no threat because these younger men are also endowed with a fine sense of timing.
Turner Catledge had all this as no other young Timesman would have it until the arrival in 1939 of James Reston, and it is not surprising that these two would become, in their mannered ways, rivals throughout the Forties and Fifties, and especially during the Sixties.
One of the first important men to help Catledge was Herbert Hoover, who, as Secretary of Commerce in 1927, was on a survey of the Mississippi River flood area; Catledge was there for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Catledge had left his home state of Mississippi for Memphis in 1923, riding the rails with $2.07 in his pocket, and now four years later he had come into prominence as a newsman principally for his vivid reporting on the Mississippi flood. Hoover, an orphan who always admired initiative in young men, was so charmed by Catledge that he wrote a letter in his behalf to Adolph Ochs. It was not until 1929, however, after Hoover had been elected President, that The Times hired Catledge.
Krock also was much impressed with Catledge and by 1936, when Krock was fifty and Catledge thirty-five, Krock hinted that he did not intend to spend his whole life in Washington and that Catledge had the makings of an ideal successor as bureau chief. Catledge was very pleased but he still continued to call him Mister Krock, and was not encouraged to do otherwise, and this formality later stiffened a bit when Krock heard that President Roosevelt was also becoming enchanted with Turner Catledge. Krock disliked Roosevelt, and the feeling was returned, due in part to Krock’s turning against the New Deal in 1936, and due also to an episode prior to Roosevelt’s inauguration in March of 1933. Roosevelt suspected Krock of attempting to act as an intermediary between the outgoing President, Hoover, and Roosevelt on a future Presidential action Roosevelt was being pressed to make. Rooosevelt felt that Hoover did not have to go through Krock but could have come directly to the President-elect, and Roosevelt blamed Krock for agreeing to become a go-between in an effort to establish himself in an important role. So after the Democratic National Convention of 1936, possibly as a way of embarrassing Krock, President Roosevelt told Catledge to feel free to check out stories or acquire information directly from the President; in short, Roosevelt was offering a line of communication that Catledge should use on his own without going through Krock.
Catledge immediately felt uncomfortable and he went to Krock and told him about it, and he also told a very close friend on the United Press, Lyle Wilson. Catledge wanted first to let Krock know that he was not available for such double-dealing and he wanted some intimate friend to know the story, too, and he was lucky that he did. For Krock got the episode mixed up, or at least Catledge felt that he did, and the word got around that Catledge had been intrigued by Roosevelt’s proposition. Catledge, backed by Lyle Wilson, was able to counter Krock’s suspicion and to reiterate that, far from being intrigued, he was actually offended by Roosevelt’s move, even frightened.
Roosevelt’s antipathy toward Krock was actually aimed at others on The Times as well, including Arthur Hays Sulzberger after the latter became publisher in 1935. Roosevelt thought he had an opportunity to benefit by a less independent Times immediately after Ochs’s death during the settlement of Ochs’s estate tax. Roosevelt expected that the Ochs family would be forced to go into the money market or sell some of its stock in The Times in order to raise the necessary funds. But when the family got the money by the sale of some of its preferred stock, not its common stock, Roosevelt became very distressed, and he admitted as much to some of his confidants in the Senate. Some editors on the newspaper felt then, and feel now, that Roosevelt’s resentment of The Times was based on nothing more complicated than the fact that he could not control it. Few active Presidents actually believe in a free press—Truman did not, nor did Eisenhower nor Kennedy nor Johnson; nor do most newspaper publishers, including those at The Times, whenever their own personal stakes are involved, a fact soon discovered by any writer who has ever attempted to do a publisher’s biography.
Turner Catledge, at any rate, never became the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times. Arthur Krock, who in 1936 was saying that he did not intend to spend his whole life in Washington, was still there thirty years later. In 1938, in fact, a year in which he had condemned the Roosevelt administration for “official favors surreptitiously extended to syndicated columnists who are sympathetic,” Krock strangely got an exclusive interview with Roosevelt, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Catledge at the same time felt his career had stalled, and in the winter of 1941, at the age of forty, Catledge quit The New York Times. He left for Chicago to become chief correspondent and later editor-in-chief of the Chicago Sun. But even before he left, Krock telephoned Sulzberger in New York and told the publisher to keep the door open—Catledge would probably be back.
Looking at Catledge’s photograph in Clifton Daniel’s office today, one is impressed by the serenity of expression, the bright dark eyes and round face that is almost smiling, the neatly combed black hair graying at the temples. The nearby photographs of Van Anda and Birchall and James seem dated, there is a faded quality about their texture, a sense of the past in the faces and clothes of the men. But the picture of Catledge is sharp and contemporary, portraying a man who seems very much alive. And he is. On this summer day in 1966, he was still at The New York Times, sixty-five years old, looking no different from his picture in Daniel’s office, which until 1964 was Catledge’s office. When Daniel moved into it he changed the whole decor, eradicating all traces of the political-clubhouse atmosphere that Catledge had brought to it during his years as a benevolent boss. In the late afternoons, after the four-o’clock news conference, in the little back room, Catledge and some of his Times cronies—a few of whom, like himself, were having marital difficulties and were in no rush to get home—would gather around a bucket of ice and bottle of whiskey and talk for hours about life at The Times. How many important decisions were made in that little room is impossible to document, just as the character of Catledge himself has remained ill-defined even by those who think they know him. During his years as managing editor, from 1951 to 1964, it was never possible for them to know exactly what he was doing—big decisions were being made, they knew, but they did not know how or by whom. Catledge’s hand seemed to be in everything, but not his fingerprints. He was a smooth, behind-the-scenes administrator. He moved at oblique angles and shifts, never hitting things head-on, never making deals that he could not get out of. He so often seemed to be dragging his feet, or testing the wind, or leaning and listening; it would seem at times that nothing was being accomplished. And then it was done.
He rarely made enemies. He was well liked by the staff mostly because he greeted them warmly, knew all their first names; and sometimes he would stand outside his office door with a pair of binoculars raised to his eyes, bringing everybody in the vast newsroom into close, sharp focus. It was Catledge who initiated the four-o’clock conference in his office each afternoon, a maneuver toward bringing a large number of editors under his direct control, and this was one of his first acts toward centralization. Though Clifton Daniel removed Catledge’s big
table when he became the managing editor, the conference itself has remained a part of the procedure, it now being conducted at a more sleek table of Daniel’s choosing.
With the elevation of Clifton Daniel, there was some doubt about Catledge’s future. Many members of the staff assumed that Catledge had been kicked upstairs, inheriting an impressive new title, and an opulent new office, signifying nothing. But later, as the subordinate editors watched Catledge watching Daniel at the conference each afternoon, and perceived the effect it was having on Daniel, the impression changed. But they could never be sure. Where Catledge was concerned, there was no certainty.
3
After Clifton Daniel had finished his dictation, Miss Riffe stood up and, with that nice hip motion she has when she walks, left his office. Daniel sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes momentarily, his horn-rimmed glasses tucked up into his long hair like a tiara. He had almost ten minutes left before the four-o’clock news conference, so he busied himself with some of the papers that Miss Riffe had left on his desk. There were cables sent from the bureaus overseas, and memos sent from within the building. There was a tearsheet of an editorial in The Nation praising his Bay of Pigs speech, and there were a few letters from carping readers, one being from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that began, “Dear Clif.” There was also a letter from a lady in Fort Worth who had known Daniel almost forty years ago when he worked in his father’s drugstore in Zebulon, North Carolina. He remembered her, too. Hazel Perkins. She had been one of the belles of Zebulon in the Twenties, and for a town of its size, he had always thought, there had been a remarkably large number of very pretty young women. There had been Melba Chamblee, a blue-eyed redhead whom he had dated in high school and continued to date for a while after he had gone to the University at Chapel Hill. And there had been Sadie Root, who came later, and then had gotten into an automobile accident that had cost her an eye. And there was Betsy Anderson, the prettiest of them all, he thought, and he had often wondered what had ever become of her. She and Hazel Perkins used to sit at the curbside tables and he would serve them, and he remembered this as one of the more pleasant parts of his job at the drugstore—the walking back and forth and meeting people, and talking to the girls who gathered in Daniel’s drugstore that then, much more than now, was a center of social life in Zebulon. The deputy sheriff and the police chief also used to hang out there, as did the farmers talking about the price of tobacco and cotton, and the visiting politicians would drop in to shake hands. There was a piano in the front of the place and when Tad Chavis, a Negro, was not grinding ice for drinks or delivering things on his bicycle, he was usually playing ragtime on it, although he was sometimes competing with a loud and scratchy rendition of “In a Little Spanish Town” blaring from the Edison phonograph that stood not far from the piano. There was no radio in the drugstore then, and so young Clifton Daniel would occasionally slip across the street to the rear of a feedstore to hear the radio news and baseball scores, and it was there, too, that he remembers hearing about Lindbergh’s flight. He never stayed away too long, however, for the drugstore was busy, and when he was not waiting on tables he was inside taking telephone calls for the doctors, or listening to the deputy sheriff’s account of some local brawl, and one night Daniel saw walking into the drugstore a man whose throat was cut from ear to ear. Daniel called a doctor. He also called the Zebulon Record.