by Gay Talese
He had been sending news items into the paper during the summer months of his high school years, earning five dollars a week; the drugstore, a great clearing house for local gossip and news, was a perfect place for a young reporter. When he returned to high school in the fall he continued to write for the Zebulon Record, covering student activities and sports. He was never an athlete himself. From the age of twelve he had been a little deaf in his left ear, and he also was built along frail lines, although for a while he did calisthenics in his bathroom at home. One morning, however, he leaned over too far and slipped and broke a front tooth against the bathtub. This ended his physical-culture program for a while, and he sought to satisfy his ego by describing the actions of others, by getting his stories published, seeing his name in the paper. Sometimes, when writing a story that was a collection of local news items, he would separate each item with a small design bearing his initials—ECD—for Elbert Clifton Daniel—and a few people in Zebulon thought this was a bit much.
There was something a little cute and fancy about young Daniel, they said, those few who were put off by his formality in this so informal town. They saw him developing, too early, a sense of self and a manner that seemed mildly patronizing. But the pretty girls whom he knew liked him very much, liked not only his fine clothes and politeness but also his respect for older people, especially his parents, and they liked the fact that he was the brightest boy in the class and voted the “best looking” in the Wakelon High School yearbook of 1929. But the girls sensed that they did not have a chance with him, not from anything he said or did but from what he did not say or do. He did not get involved. He seemed to have big plans in distant places, a smooth country boy’s sense of getting ahead, and many years later, after he had begun his rise at The New York Times and had married Margaret Truman, some people back in Zebulon smiled and nodded knowingly.
But Margaret Truman was also a small-town girl, and she and Daniel were more alike in their origin and attitude than most people realized. Margaret had been an only child, as had Daniel, and both had received a surfeit of attention and guidance from their parents, confidence in the values of the community, and little self-doubt, and they grew up in a rather prim setting in a fixed society with an awareness that their families were a bit better off than most of their neighbors. Both of their fathers had begun as small shopkeepers, sharing many provincial notions about life and the Negro, and the elder Daniel was once also active in politics. Twice he served as mayor of Zebulon, getting the city to put in running water in the early Twenties, then to replace the kerosene street lamps with electric lights, and Harry Truman once told him, “Hell, you did just as well as I did—you just stayed down in your little town helping the poor people, and I went up and mixed with those rich bastards.”
When Margaret was eleven her father, a newly elected Senator from Missouri, began taking his family to Washington for the first half of each year; but this experience, as well as her later years in the White House and her career in show business, did not remove from her the aura of her region. If anything, her local allegiance might have become even more pronounced as she got older and solidified her views. She moved to New York, but was not moved by New York. She occupies it as a kind of permanent tourist. She responds to New York’s cultural offerings and challenges but is quick to see signs of New York’s coarseness or the gaucherie of its people. She is unimpressed by the sophisticated glitter that encircles her East Side address, and after her marriage and the birth of her children she has rarely invited to her home the social butterflies that her husband has long found so fascinating. A few have resented this, and they have spread unflattering stories—Margaret cannot keep her help, Daniel does most of the cooking—but she continues to do as she wishes and, in a gracious way, to protect her privacy and be very selective of those invitations she accepts: yes, with some hesitation, to the Capote ball; yes, without hesitation, to the supper-dance in New York honoring England’s Princess Margaret; no, with regret, to Bennett Cerf’s party for Frank Sinatra, the Daniels being otherwise occupied on that occasion. While Margaret Truman Daniel has a closet full of well-designed clothes, her simplicity dominates them. Like her father, she is forthright and opinionated; unlike her husband, she is open and casual, although in recent years her influence, coupled with his own success, may have led Daniel to reveal himself with greater ease.
He still is a formal man, however, and still is fascinated by people who are privileged and rich—a decisive factor in the exhaustive coverage The New York Times now gives to news of society—but he is also more at home with himself and his past. Occasionally, when in high spirits, he even refers to himself as a “country boy.” He was never really that in its fullest sense, although there is no telling what he might have become had his father, a proud man, not helped clear a path through the rustic tobacco tract of Carolina to the more lush land in the distance.
Elbert Clifton Daniel, Sr., is now in his eighties. His facial features, particularly his eyes, strongly resemble his son’s, although his gray wavy hair is shorter and his clothes far less conservative. He will sometimes appear at his drugstore wearing a pair of formal gray-striped morning trousers and over them a brown double-breasted jacket, and under it a blue-striped shirt and pale polka-dot bow tie, and also a brown hat, black shoes, a brown cane; all of which, on him, looks fine. He is thought of as the town’s most distinguished living landmark, being the first man in Zebulon to have a telephone, and nearly everyone is very fond of him, although there are a few, very few, who find him somewhat patronizing, a characteristic he may have passed on to his son. In addition to his ventures into politics, he had a brief fling at owning the Vakoo movie theater, and he once merchandised his own brand of liver pills and a diarrhea cure. Had it not been for an attack of appendicitis, however, when he was about eighteen years old, he might never have escaped the rugged farm life of his father, his grandfather, and nearly all the other Daniel kin who had sailed during the previous century from England and settled in this area of the South; but the illness enabled him to meet a young doctor from Raleigh who befriended him and later encouraged him to go into the drug business. And in 1905, after borrowing some money from his grandfather, Zachariah G. Daniel, an illiterate but industrious tobacco farmer who sometimes peddled his product by horse wagon through Virginia, and after acquiring a drug “permit” from the doctor friend, Clifton Daniel, Sr., bought an interest in his first drugstore. He practiced pharmacy on his permit until 1911, when he supplemented his training with schooling at Greensboro; in the same year, in the drugstore one day, he saw seated at the counter with other girls, sipping a soda, Miss Elvah Jones. She was the daughter of a tobacco warehouseman, had attended junior college at Raleigh, having once been the May Queen, and she was very pretty. He quickly courted her and in December of that year, at her grandmother’s home in the next county, they were married and off to a honeymoon in Richmond and Baltimore, and during the following September was born their son, the future managing editor of The New York Times, Elbert Clifton Daniel, Jr.
He was an agreeable child, and he did most of the right things. He had his first tooth at nine months, was walking within a year, but carefully, revealing a caution that would always be with him, and he displayed a premature aversion to dirt. There was nothing of the farmer in him. He was like his mother in his quiet manner, neat about his clothing, clean and precise, and his father later worried about him when he preferred to remain near his mother, indoors, much of the time sprawled on a rug reading a book. But the boy was very bright in school and obedient at home, and after school he helped out in the drugstore and also sold Grit and other magazines around town, saving his pennies, and when it came time for college, in the fall of 1929, with money scarce and the Zebulon Record offering a year’s subscription for a fat hen or a bushel of potatoes, he was able to contribute sixty-five dollars from his side earnings toward his tuition.
Most of what he wanted out of college life, he got; and that which he did not get,
he did not miss. He joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity, did well in class, wrote for the Daily Tar Heel. He would have liked to become editor of the Tar Heel but not long after joining it he was fired for being too haughty with a senior editor, and by the time he was reinstated to the staff he was out of line for the editor’s job. He did become editor of the campus literary magazine, The Carolina, and, backed by the interfraternity political machine, he was elected vice-president of the student body over the clamorous objections of one independent candidate who went around telling everybody: “I don’t care if you don’t vote for me, but for God’s sake don’t vote for Clifton Daniel!”
Daniel could also have gotten the nomination for the presidency later but he declined because he had the notion—“somewhat presumptuous,” he later conceded—that he was a newspaperman, and he believed that newsmen, in the interest of objectivity, should stay out of party politics and never become irretrievably committed to any one cause or person, a policy shared by nearly all journalists, although at a cost. For this detachment from the world they observe robs them of a deeper experience that springs from involvement, and they sometimes become merely voyeurs who see much, feel little. They take death and disaster as casually as a dock strike, and they take for granted their right to publicize the weakness in others but they never have to lay it on thé line themselves. Of course if journalists become identified with a cause or a great figure they may become apologists or propagandists, flunkies for the famous. Clifton Daniel would know some journalists to whom this would happen, but it would never happen to him. He was always too cautious, too sure of what he wanted, and he was possibly assisted by a natural aloofness, perhaps even lack of passion. If he ever made a compromise in his professional or private life, few people would know it, there would be no scandal, he would cover his tracks well.
After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1933, and after a year on a small newspaper downstate, Daniel joined the Raleigh News and Observer. There between 1934 and 1937 he covered politics and crime, a variety of assignments, meeting many interesting people, among them Katharine Cornell, the first famous actress he ever interviewed, and Thomas Wolfe, whose novel Look Homeward, Angel had been published a few years before. By 1941, Daniel had left Raleigh and was working for the Associated Press. He had come up to New York in the spring of 1937 but had been turned down by nearly all the dailies, including The New York Times. The one paper that offered him a job was the World-Telegram, and he turned it down when the offer was only $35 a week, $10 less than he had been making in Raleigh.
His interview at the New York Times building had been short. He had visited the newsroom but had not gotten in to see the managing editor’s office that he would one day occupy, nor did he meet the man himself, Edwin James. He had seen one of James’s subordinates, a night city editor named Bruce Rae, a small, self-possessed man who had been a first-rate crime reporter in the Twenties and now aspired to become in time James’s successor, not suspecting that James quietly abhorred him. The exact reasons were vague but easily understood—James was a cocky little man and what James least desired nearby was another cocky little man. Rae would get as high as assistant managing editor but then, as Catledge was brought into the home office as James’s assistant, Rae was sent to Guam and put in charge of the Pacific correspondents during World War II. When Daniel succeeded Catledge as the managing editor, Rae was still on The Times in a lesser editorial position, mellowed by time and quite pleasant, and if he remembered having not hired Daniel in 1937, he never mentioned it, nor did Daniel, who did remember it. But it had been only a routine meeting, the usual institutional once-over, a mild mixture of politeness and noncommitment, and Daniel was not really disappointed when he was rejected. As a newsman in Carolina, Daniel had been very conscious of The Times but not awed by it. His father’s drugstore in Zebulon did not sell The Times, and it still does not. Daniel had recognized the dignity and importance of being employed by The Times, but he did not regard it as a place where he would particularly want to work. The journalists whose work he knew best in those days were either working on the afternoon papers or on the Herald Tribune, such writers as H. Allen Smith and Joseph Mitchell, the latter a 1929 graduate of the University of North Carolina who would become the great reporter on The New Yorker. The Times had, as always, many fine reporters but almost no fine writers. Its one notable exception, Meyer Berger, whose descriptive coverage of Al Capone’s tax trial in Chicago in 1932 had quickly established his credentials, had quit The Times in 1937 for The New Yorker, although he would return a year later, discovering that he worked best when surrounded by noise, distractions, and the constant pressure of a newsroom and a daily deadline.
The New York Times, when Clifton Daniel applied to it in 1937, was a paper in slow transition. Adolph Ochs had been dead for two years, and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, though introducing changes. was making them gradually and quietly, wishing to avoid any impression that The Times was shifting from its Ochsian course. The daily edition was selling for two cents a copy in 1937 and was about to go up a penny. Its circulation had gone over 500,000 for the first time in its history, and the Sunday edition was almost 770,000. The appearance of the newspaper, its front-page makeup and design, was not radically different in those days from what it would be when Daniel would become its managing editor twenty-seven years later, although photographs were still a rarity on page one. Ochs had preferred it that way, relenting only when a very special news event seemed to demand a photograph of the principal, such as a two-column front-page photograph of Lindbergh after his flight in 1927; a two-column photograph of Roosevelt after his Presidential victory in 1932 and a one-column photograph of New York’s newly elected Governor Herbert H. Lehman; a two-column picture of the German President Paul von Hindenburg upon his death in 1934, and no picture of his successor, Adolf Hitler; a four-column photograph of Adolph Ochs upon his death in 1935.
Sulzberger liked pictures, as future editions of the paper would show, but he infused his taste with such a subtle sense of timing that few readers would notice the transition from the era of Ochs to Sulzberger. One of the more startling moves that Sulzberger did make by 1937, one that would undoubtedly have been rejected by Ochs had he been alive, was the appointment of a woman, Anne O’Hare McCormick, as a foreign-affairs columnist. Perhaps nothing would have appealed to Ochs less than the authoritative tone of a lady columnist in The Times. Still, Mrs. McCormick had been getting articles published in The Times on a free-lance basis from Europe since 1921, and the clarity of her reporting, the depth of her perception, had impressed not only Sulzberger but also the three editors who presided during these years, Van Anda and Birchall and James. They were all aware of the fact that she had been one of the first journalists in Europe to note the rise of fascism in Italy and to write about its new young spokesman, then referred to in The Times as “Professor Mussolini”; and so Sulzberger, with absolutely no resistance from his advisers or from his wife, Iphigene, who had politely deplored many of her father’s Victorian reservations about lady pundits, assigned Mrs. McCormick in 1937 to the important job in Europe—as The New York Times continued to build up its foreign staff for the great war that seemed inevitable.
This was the big news of 1937—not what had happened, but what was going to happen. And The Times, unlike much of the nation, was getting ready. Hanson Baldwin, then beginning his career as the paper’s military specialist, was sent to Europe in 1937 to learn all he could about European military establishments while he still could. Herbert Matthews, covering the Spanish Civil War in 1937, was already writing in The Times and in a book that this was just a warm-up for the larger conflict to follow, and in one appraisal from Spain he warned: “You who stroll along the Great White Way, thinking complacently how far away it all is from peaceful America—you, too, will feel a tap on your shoulder one of these days, and will hear the call.… War has a long, long arm and it is reaching out for all of us.”