by Gay Talese
Matthews was thirty-six years old when he wrote this. He was a tall, very thin, solemn, and scholarly man, a student of Dante, and he had a lean ascetic face and dark sad eyes and a romantic fatalism about the world and his place in it. He was both quietly fascinated by the heroics of war and deeply concerned about its victims, and this concern, together with his sense of history and hypocrisy, brought a dimension and edge to his reporting that was involving and memorable. He was not a reporter’s reporter, he was a writer’s reporter, and during the Spanish Civil War, covering it from the Loyalist side, he was greatly admired by the literary left and others in Europe and America who despised Franco. Hemingway, a friend of Matthews’, called him the “straightest, the ablest and the bravest correspondent, a gaunt lighthouse of honesty,” but Matthews at the same time was being called a Communist along the Catholic front in New York and elsewhere. A year earlier, in 1936, when Matthews had been the only correspondent to serve throughout the Ethiopian campaign on the Italian side, he had been called a fascist by many Times readers. There was something in the chemistry of Herbert Matthews that could activate readers, provoking them to extravagant praise or scorn. Matthews did not, like so many correspondents, play it safe with the official version of things, and perhaps only The New York Times could absorb within its ranks for so long such an endlessly controversial figure; but by the Nineteen-sixties, during Clifton Daniel’s years as the managing editor, after Matthews’ reporting on Castro’s Cuba had again hit the raw nerve of the nation, there was some question as to how much even The Times could take. It was not that The Times hierarchy would ever dismiss Matthews. He was too much a part of them for that. There were other ways. But in 1937 Herbert Matthews was one of the exciting young men on The Times, an inspiration to his juniors if a trial to his seniors, and his reporting from Spain was dramatic, his insight into its consequences prophetic.
Also reporting from Europe in those days, though he was sixty-five years old, was the former managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, crossing and recrossing Europe as energetically as he had ever since replacing Edwin James as the chief correspondent five years before. In the process Birchall became as familiar with Cracow as Paris, Dublin as Geneva or Berlin, and from these places he cabled stories that at times focused on the visible signs of a tense Europe—such as when German customs officers held him up at an airport and forced him to strip to the skin while searching for a nonexistent supply of money they believed he was trying to smuggle out of the country. At other times Birchall’s stories caught the quiet eerie hours of Europe waiting for war. In one story from London Birchall described how, while walking through the park that after-noon, he had suddenly become aware of a strange new change in the city. At first he could not perceive what it was. He knew that it was not the result of the obvious preparations for war that he saw all around him—the sandbag craters, the wheel tracks, the balloon barrages, the shelter trenches. Then, he wrote, it began to occur to him as he walked “that in the whole park, formerly at this hour filled with laughing children playing ball, chasing each other and making merry in all sorts of ways, there was not a child in sight. Thinking back,” he went on, “it was also certain that throughout this week one had not seen anywhere a boy or girl below the age of 16. This was a childless city.”
Frederick Birchall’s reporting in the Thirties, particularly from Paris, was so often denigrating to the Germans that one night a Times editor in New York, anticipating the harm that might come to Birchall from the German agents in Paris, did something that Timesmen are warned never to do. The editor falsified a dateline. He scratched out “Paris” and wrote in “London” at the top of Birchall’s story preceding the date, thereby violating what was perhaps Sulzberger’s pet rule. A dateline on a Times story was sacred, Sulzberger had often said, adding that readers were always entitled to know precisely from where and when a dispatch had originated. Had Sulzberger known of the editor’s act, the editor would have been severely reprimanded or fired, which is what had happened, and would happen, to other transgressors. But Sulzberger never learned of it. Nor did the editor, a large and resolute man named Neil MacNeil, reveal it to his colleagues. This was possible because during the Thirties MacNeil was a senior editor answerable to few others in the newsroom; he also worked the night shift, arriving in the newsroom at 6 p.m. just as Edwin James was leaving, and James, anxious to get out, was pleased that he had such experienced subordinates as MacNeil to hold the fort through the night.
MacNeil worked in a section of the newsroom known, for no apparent reason, as the “bullpen.” It consisted of three or four desks arranged to form a right angle in the southeast corner of the newsroom, and these desks were occupied by senior editors who read the news as it came in and then determined how much of it would be printed and where it would appear in the paper. Technically the bullpen editors were under the managing editor, but during Edwin James’s era their judgment went unquestioned. It was not until Turner Catledge succeeded James in 1951 and established the daily news conference in the managing editor’s office, on the opposite side of the newsroom, that the bullpen editors lost their exclusivity as receivers and appraisers of news, desk dons sans reproche; and when this happened Neil MacNeil, who had been on The New York Times for thirty-three years, asked to be retired, and he was.
But during the Thirties the paper was governed at night by the bullpen editors—men who, through the years, had slowly and patiently worked their way up through what was probably the most tedious and unheralded craft in the newsroom. Copyreading. Copyreaders were a special breed of journalists. They were indoor creatures, retainers of rules, anonymous men. Many had come to New York from all over America seeking some greater fulfillment, and when this did not materialize they ended up, through circuitous and often bizarre circumstances, on a copydesk at The New York Times. Educated men, well-read travelers, they were ideally suited for the work, though few would admit it. They had not planned on becoming copyreaders. Nobody planned on that. And they often spoke of quitting or getting an outside job as a reporter, which a few of them had once been in smaller cities. But most of them remained for years on the copydesk, and secretly they liked the sedentary life, this almost monastic existence of measured words and precise routines and quiet rewards. Here, within the insular atmosphere of The Times, they had security and isolation from uncertainty. They spent their nights reading bulletins and editing stories about the world’s latest calamity and chaos, threats and failures, but their only contact with this reality was with the point of a pencil. They did not seem to mind working late at night, the most miserable hours in the newspaper business, missing the theater and dinner parties, arriving in the newsroom at a time when most of the staff was preparing to leave, and leaving when the charwomen arrived. The charwomen and the prostitutes in Times Square were usually the only females who crossed their path, but they did not mind this either, seeming perfectly contented within the male circle of deskmen when away from the daytime distractions of wives and children. After work, copyreaders joined other copyreaders for a few drinks in taverns around Times Square or Broadway, savoring a special intimacy about New York at this hour, and mingling with an interesting crowd around the bar, actors and musicians, rogues and hustlers and tipsters, and these people considered it a privilege of sorts to meet Timesmen, and thus the copyreaders felt themselves a part of a rather gamy night scene in New York; but they felt it from a distance. They remained copyreaders, introspective men, careful men, dreamers not doers. Which is not to degrade them. They were more valued on newspapers than most reporters, and they made more money at the start. Many copyreaders were scholarly men, and nearly all possessed a wealth of information and knowledge of law that helped the newspaper avoid errors and libel. Still, the copyreader could not go very far. If he was diligent, he might during a decade move from one end of the curved copydesk, where he began his career, to the middle of the desk, becoming slotman, and this permitted him to distribute stories as they came in to other copyreaders
for editing and headlines. If he was diligent and lucky, he might someday be promoted to the head of the desk and be given a title. And if he was very diligent and lucky, he might finally end up one night sitting in the bullpen. This is what had happened to Neil MacNeil. And it was understandable, once he had worked his way through the maze and reached the top in the Thirties, that he would appear to be a man of great certainty, pride, and confidence.
MacNeil had been born in Nova Scotia, a big muscular man with none of the bad posture and pallor of so many copyreaders. He had a deep commanding voice, and on his desk in the bullpen he had a little bell that he would ring with his thick forefinger when he wanted a copyboy. The copyboys, in deference to his position, were quick in responding, and because he had a gentle manner and did not address them in the peremptory tone used by some lesser editors of that time, they liked him and tried hard to please him and did not resent it when he occasionally sent them out at midnight to a food shop on Eighth Avenue to buy him a small bag of apples.
As was the case with a high percentage of editors in the newsroom in the Thirties, MacNeil was a Roman Catholic, and it was often said of The Times during these years that it was a paper “owned by Jews and edited by Catholics for Protestants.” The bullpen was lightly styled the “Catholic bullpen” within the office and, though no one could prove it, Neil MacNeil, Raymond H. McCaw (the senior bullpen editor), and others were said to reflect a Catholic viewpoint when appraising the news, with the results ranging from the playing down of stories about birth control to the playing up of stories expressing alarm over communism. If a Times reporter was even rumored as leaning to the left, his stories were vigilantly read and reread by the bullpen editors, and they were no less scrupulous with the controversial dispatches from Spain by Herbert Matthews than with the less noticeable stories from New York by such younger men as A. H. Raskin, the latter having gotten onto the staff after having served, during his undergraduate days, as The Times’ campus correspondent at the City College of New York, the Berkeley of the Thirties.
In Matthews’ case, his difficulty with a large portion of the pro-Franco Catholic readership in America was no secret at The Times, there having been several organized campaigns and statements at tacking Matthews, and on one occasion the Catholic Press Association made an official protest to The Times’ publisher. It had “no confidence” in Matthews’ reporting from the Loyalist side, it said, and it was particularly annoyed, among other things, by Matthews’ repeated suggestions in his stories that the Fascists in Italy and even Germany were participating heavily on the side of Franco. The New York Times’ correspondent covering the war from Franco’s side, William P. Carney, had denied this, and one night a message went out to Matthews from the newsroom reading: “Why do you continue to say Italians are fighting in Spain when Carney claims there are no Italians in Spain?” Matthews’ subsequent dispatch repeated the claim—“These troops were Italians and nothing but Italians”—but this sentence in The Times was changed to read: “These troops were insurgents and nothing but insurgents.”
When A. H. Raskin, who had been an aggressive campus correspondent at City College, was promoted to The Times’ staff in 1934, an official from the college asked Neil MacNeil why The Times would tolerate such a political risk as Raskin. MacNeil said he had no idea Raskin was a risk, and for several years afterwards MacNeil watched Raskin’s reporting very carefully, finding no justification for the inference. Still, for whatever reason, it took Abe Raskin a long time to get a by-line in The New York Times, even by the slow editorial procedures of that period.
One day in 1936 Raskin had five front-page stories in The Times, none of which carried his by-line. Then in 1939 there was a story by Raskin that was particularly well liked by Raymond McCaw in the bullpen, and McCaw walked over to the city desk to ask who had written it.
“Abe Raskin,” was the reply.
“Put a by-line on it,” McCaw said, and then, as an afterthought, he asked, “What’s Abe’s middle initial?”
“H.”
“Well,” McCaw said, “sign it ‘A. H. Raskin.’ ”
McCaw’s saying “sign it ‘A. H. Raskin,’ ” and not “sign it ‘Abraham Raskin’ ” or “ ‘Abraham H. Raskin’ ” was interesting, because it raised quietly a question that would not have been raised aloud in The New York Times’ newsroom. There was a feeling among some Jewish reporters in the Thirties, however reluctant they were to discuss it openly, that Ochs and Sulzberger, sensitive men, did not want The Times to appear “too Jewish” in public, and one small result of this was the tendency of editors to sign stories with initials in place of such names as Abraham; although, again, the reporters could not prove it and they were wise to keep this theory to themselves. To mention it to an editor might expose the reporter as an ungrateful paranoiac, one who was completely ignorant of The Times’ policy against discrimination of any kind, to say nothing of the fact that there were Christian staff members who used initials, it being quite customary in those days; and further, to make a Jewish issue of this trivial point might put a reporter in the same category with those cranks and special-interest groups who endlessly seek to embarrass The Times by doubting its purity, groups who charged consecutively through the Thirties into the Sixties that The Times was a tool of Wall Street, was pro-British, pro-German, anti-Labor, pro-Communist, anti-Zionist, an apologist for the American State Department.
In actual fact, a case could have been made against The Times on any of these charges, but a weak case, for it could easily be counterbalanced with evidence to offset it—but not always. The Times in principle tried to be objective in its news coverage, but in reality it could not always be. It was run by humans, flawed figures, men who saw things as they could see them, or sometimes wished to see them; interpreting principles to suit contemporary pressures, they wanted it both ways; it was the oldest story of all. Ideally, The Times desired no opinions within its news columns, restricting opinion to its editorial page. Realistically, this was not possible. The editors’ opinions and tastes were imposed every day within the news—either by the space they allowed for a certain story, or the position they assigned to it, or the headline they ordered for it, and also by the stories they did not print, or printed for only one edition, or edited heavily, or held out for a few days and then printed in the back of the thick Sunday edition between girdle advertisements and dozens of Bachrach photographs of pretty girls just engaged. The reporter’s ego was also a factor in the news coverage—he wrote what he wrote best, he wrote what he understood, reflecting the total experience of his lifetime, shades of his pride and prejudice; he wrote sometimes to please the editor, at other times to call attention to his own style, reducing stories that did not suit his style, and at still other times he wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in The Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day, alive in The Times through that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm.
The Times was a very human institution, large and vulnerable. Even by the Nineteen-thirties it was too big not to be vulnerable. Every working day hundreds of decisions were made within the Times building, each of which, if singled out, could lead to misconceptions—which was also the inherent problem of news coverage itself—but it was equally true that The Times nearly always tried to be fair, and sometimes without reason or design things just happened at The Times. There were no villainous editors behind the deeds. No acts of vanity. Things just happened. Or the happening was the result of one man acting unofficially—a Neil MacNeil changing a dateline from Paris to London. Or it might be a Raymond McCaw saying, without ulterior motive, “Sign it ‘A. H. Raskin’ ”—as other Times editors, years later, would sign the by-line of Abe Weiler, a movie critic, “A. H. Weiler,” and of Abe Rosenthal, a foreign correspondent, “A. M. Rosenthal.” It was perhaps pure coincidence, too, that since Ochs’s paper had become the bible of the American establishment, no Jew had been elevated to the position of managing editor, even as Jewish subordinate editors would begin t
o outnumber other ethnic and religious groups on the paper. Some Timesmen interpreted these things as more than mere coincidence but no case could be made. Nothing could be proved. There was no policy, there was an almost conspicuous lack of policy on so many things within The Times, and this led to assumptions about the paper that were not true, causing some Timesmen to obey rules that did not exist—causing other Timesmen, the less inhibited ones, to operate freely and then suddenly discover rules did exist, hundreds of them, thousands. But there was nothing fixed within the institution despite all of its exterior commitment to tradition. Every generation of Timesmen was subject to the changing interpretations of the rules and values of the men at the top. And The Times in the Thirties was a paper in transition. There was an atmosphere of vagueness.
Sometimes Ochs seemed to be running the paper from his grave. At other times it seemed that the strings were being pulled by Arthur Hays Sulzberger and, not to be ignored, his wife, Iphigene. The great Van Anda was long retired by 1937, devoting himself to astronomy and cosmogony, living in Manhattan or in the country, spending hours at night squinting up at the sky through his telescope pondering, as he described it, “planetary parentage”; but his influence was still strong in the newsroom, and two of his apostles from the copydesk, now risen to the bullpen, were McCaw and MacNeil. The staff was quickly expanding, and there were more subeditors, specialists, critics. Bosley Crowther, who had joined The Times as a reporter in 1928, sharing a desk in the overcrowded newsroom with Hanson Baldwin, had moved into the movie department in 1937. Brooks Atkinson, a tweedy gentleman from New England, a scholar and bird watcher whose one extravagance was a lemon-colored roadster he raced wildly on weekends in the country, was the drama critic. The dour-looking Olin Downes, the world’s worst typist, was the music critic. The religious-news editor was a puritanical woman named Rachel McDowell, known within the office as “Lady Bishop.” A reporter in the Science department was William L. Laurence, a modest, shaggy-haired little man who would become the paper’s expert on the atom and journalism’s only witness to the destruction at Nagasaki. The Times’ ship-news editor was an old English sea captain, Walter “Skipper” Williams, the son of a lawyer who, rather than follow in that profession, had gone to sea, working as a boatman on the Nile, a gold hunter up the Orinoco, a lightning-rod installation man in Central America, a foreman during the Panama Canal digging, and finally a journalist for Hearst. In 1905, with an introduction from an English nobleman who knew Ochs, Williams came to The Times, settling down, although on rare occasions he was again led astray by his imagination. One of his stories, a collector’s item that somehow slipped past the copy-desk, reported the sighting of a huge sea serpent in the Caribbean from the bridge of the liner Mauretania. The story was quickly questioned by several newspapers but Mr. Williams stuck to it, producing an excerpt from the ship’s log and a drawing of the monster done by the ship’s senior first officer.