The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  While this might have been regarded as insubordination in another editor, Bernstein could get away with it because he was special: he was The Times’ technical genius, its supreme authority on grammar and rules, he was not an easily interchangeable part in the big machine. Catledge knew this and he gave Bernstein great latitude; indeed, there were times in the Nineteen-fifties, before Daniel’s ascension and during Catledge’s drinking days before his divorce, when Theodore Bernstein seemed to be running the entire News department.

  But Robert Garst, after being made an assistant managing editor, did not appear to have authority comparable to Bernstein’s. Garst also seemed increasingly remote as a person. While he had never been gregarious, he now had even less to say. It was as if he had been promoted into obscurity, or was deeply bothered by some private problem. Each morning he would come walking into the newsroom in his soft, loping stride, a bit stiff and proud and with a slow roving eye scanning the rows of reporters’ desks as he headed toward the men’s locker room; then, seconds later, he would be out again walking toward his desk against the south wall, forcing a smile at the people he met. along the way, and then he would be seated behind his desk occupying himself for the rest of the day with tasks that were a mystery to nearly everyone on the staff. He seemed to be responsible for scrutinizing the expense accounts of the staff, and he also had something to do with office equipment and with other vague administrative details. Once, after a high executive from the publisher’s office had complained about the untidy appearance of the newsroom, singling out the reporters’ habit of piling their coats atop certain desks and littering the floor with cigarette butts, Garst issued a staff memorandum requesting that all coats be hung in the locker room, and he had ash trays placed along the rows of desks. Within a month or so, nearly every ash tray had disappeared and the floors were as littered as ever—a principal offender being the chain-smoking television critic. Jack Gould.

  And yet during the winter of 1956, an uncertain period during which several Times reporters and copyreaders were subpoenaed by a Senate subcommittee investigating Communists or former Communists in the newspaper business, Robert Garst’s integrity and personal kindness toward some subpoenaed Timesmen was such that they shall never forget it. At a time when other executives seemed under intense pressure, Garst remained cool. He assured the subpoenaed staff members that, while he had no sympathy for communism, he respected their position of not revealing the names of other past associates in the party, and that their jobs were secure if they had left the Communist party and had been completely honest in the statements that they had signed to this effect and had sent to Sulzberger through Catledge’s office. Garst did not seem so righteous and pessimistic as some other editors did toward those being investigated. Garst, they were surprised to discover, had sympathy and compassion for people in trouble. Now, ten years later, Garst was still the quiet man seated against the south wall of the newsroom. Whatever his specific duties were, he must have performed them adequately, for he had retained his position through twelve years of Catledge’s managing-editorship and, so far, had survived the first two years of Daniel’s tenure.

  The other assistant managing editor, Emanuel Freedman, was the youngest of the four. He was a very serious, solidly built man in his middle fifties who never seemed to smile. His broad shoulders and strong facial features, a rather large head and ears with wide-set eyes and heavy brows and precisely combed graying brown hair, made him seem when seated to be much taller than he was, which was about five-feet-eight. He wore a gray homburg and conservatively cut suits that were more expensive than they appeared to be. The workmanship of his clothing was on the inside, meticulously done by modest tailors, and this style was in concert with Freedman’s personality. He was a meticulous man of no frivolity, and while he was always courteous he was never informal. He never took his jacket off at the office, and reporters liked to say that Freedman did not even take off his jacket when making love. Generally he was well liked by the staff, not only by those who worked under him as foreign correspondents during his many years as the foreign editor—a group that included Daniel, Salisbury, and Rosenthal—but also by those in New York office who had never gone overseas and who knew him only by reputation. He was said to be a very fair man with his subordinates, modest about himself, and, except when in the company of old friends, extremely shy.

  Born in York, Pennsylvania, he had, like Garst and Bernstein, graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism. In those days, much more than now, Columbia was the school for Timesmen, having established with The New York Times a kind of institutional alliance. Sulzberger was a trustee of Columbia University, many family members had gone there, and news releases from the Columbia campus got special care within The Times’ newsroom. The Columbia School of Journalism, while endowed by Pulitzer, seemed to function as a factory for aspiring Timesmen. Its faculty was festooned with Times editors advancing Ochsian fundamentalism, and the brightest students were regularly recruited by The Times, were moved up through the system, and many of them would later return to teach journalism at Columbia and perpetuate the process. Out of this process, in the early Nineteen-thirties, came Emanuel Freedman.

  He had been an outstanding student at Columbia and had studied under Theodore Bernstein, and in 1934 when a copyreader’s job opened up on The Times’ foreign desk, Bernstein, who was then an assistant foreign editor, telephoned Freedman and got him hired. Freedman’s entire career on The Times would be spent behind a desk. He ran the desk at The Times’ London bureau from 1945 to 1948, and it was during this period that he got to know Clifton Daniel, who had returned to London after a tour of reporting in the Middle East. The two men, then both bachelors, got along very well in a quiet, undemanding way. Daniel liked Freedman’s taste in clothes, his reserve, and the precision of his schedule—one could set a watch by Freedman’s comings and goings. At precisely the same time every evening, the office car was waiting to take Freedman to dinner; exactly one hour later, it brought him back. Once a week Freedman played poker, his expression being no different from what it was when he was not playing poker. He drank on rare occasions, and when he did he never seemed to enjoy it. Reliable, solid, no bad habits—it was not surprising that such a man would become The Times’ foreign-news editor, the ringmaster of fifty far-flung correspondents that had to be directed through various time zones, cable routes, political shifts, and upheavals. Nor was it surprising, despite the difficulties of his job, that he made few enemies among his correspondents. His dealings with them were formal, impersonal. He was an arm of The Times, an instrument of the institution, a rock in its foundation. But he was also privately pleased when, in 1956, he received an invitation to Clïfton Daniel’s wedding.

  Very few Timesmen had been asked down to Independence, Missouri, to witness the Daniel-Truman marriage. Among them were Turner Catledge; Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Daniell (The Times’ bureau chief in London during the war years); and Mr. and Mrs. Emanuel Freedman. Clifton Daniel’s title at the time of his marriage to Margaret Truman was “assistant to the foreign-news editor.” This title was used so many times in hundreds of pre-wedding news stories that there suddenly was curiosity as to who the foreign-news editor was. The New Yorker magazine decided to find out, and a “Talk of the Town” piece was the result. In it Freedman was discovered to be “sedate, intelligent, soft-spoken.” And in 1964, thirty years after he had begun on The Times’ copydesk, and two months after Daniel had been made The Times’ managing editor, Emanuel Freedman became an assistant managing editor.

  Now A. M. Rosenthal was being pushed in the same direction. It seemed a bit premature to some of the other assistant managing editors, although they would never admit this openly. Rosenthal, bright as he was at forty-four, had only been editor of the New York staff for three years, and they could not understand the urgency of bringing Rosenthal into the upper ranks at this time. Neither Salisbury nor Bernstein, Garst nor Freedman, was approaching the mandatory retirement age, although
this was a rather vague thing at The Times, subject to all sorts of adjustments, depending on who was being retired. Arthur Krock, still writing his column from Washington, was seventy-eight. Lester Markel was seventy-two. Throughout the fourteen-story Times building—in the corners of crowded rooms, in musty little offices along hidden halls, behind the towering shelves of libraries—could be found individuals who, because of some connection with someone, or because they had escaped notice for years, were growing older and older but were kept on by The Times. Advanced age seemed to be something to be used if the manipulators wished to use it. And who were the manipulators? Turner Catledge was undoubtedly among them. A harsh description of Catledge’s position, perhaps, but perhaps not: Manipulate—to handle, manage, or use, esp. with skill. Catledge had unquestionably manipulated, esp. with skill, the lives and destinies of dozens of Timesmen during the last two decades. All those years as a political reporter in Washington, his ringside seat in the Senate, observing the great indoor strategists of his time, had given to Catledge an education in the subtle use of power and timing, the art of illusion. And he had made the most of this later during his years as The Times’ managing editor, and he was probably still doing so today, although an accurate judgment of Catledge’s influence was difficult to assess. Power has almost always been a rather nebulous thing at The Times, losing much of its bold line and shape as it achieved height. A sharp, clear display of power by a top Times executive was not good form, was in conflict with the Ochsian maxim on modesty, was considered unwise: and so through the years the behavior of Timesmen at the top was not noticeably different from that of those nearer the bottom.

  Those Timesmen directly below the top, the scramblers, did on occasion assert themselves, some of them pushing too hard and failing, others of them climbing to the top but then, absorbed into the hierarchy, they lost much of the individuality and drive that had once distinguished them. In any event, the Timesmen below, the reporters and copyreaders, rarely knew who was pulling which string from above. They could only guess, and sometimes they wondered if getting ahead at The Times was really worth the effort. Each step up, it seemed, cost the individual a part of himself. With greater power went greater responsibility, more caution, more modesty, less freedom. Those who finally attained great power did not seem to use it, perhaps could not use it. If they could not use it, what was the point in having it? And, more important, how could its existence be confirmed? A politician must win elections, a star actor must make money at the box office, a network-television commentator must maintain ratings, but a titled Timesman may go on for decades on the momentum of the institution, facing no singular test, gaining no confidence from individual accomplishment; and yet he is personally catered to by statesmen, dictators, bankers, presidents of the United States, people who believe that he possesses persuasive powers within the institution—but they cannot be sure; he cannot be sure.

  High power at The Times is a vaporous element—energy is harnessed, pressure is built, decisions emanate from a corporate collective, but it is difficult to see which man did what, and it often seems that nobody really did anything. Decisions appear to ooze out of a large clutch of executive bodies all jammed together, leaning against one another, shifting, sidling, shrugging, bending backwards, sideways, and finally tending toward some tentative direction; but whose muscles were flexed? whose weight was decisively felt? The reporters in the newsroom do not know. They know a great deal about the clandestine affairs of city government, Wall Street, the United Nations, but they do not know what goes on at the top of The Times. They may find out if they probe, but Times employees are not expected to probe deeply into the affairs of their superiors. Since the average Timesman does not regularly sit in on the daily news conference in Daniel’s office, he cannot gain clues from observing the editors’ mannerisms, their reactions to one another, the little asides often made around the table. Thus the reporters must rely on rumors or be aware of small changes—such as the fact that Rosenthal was sitting at a desk against the south wall on this summer afternoon, that Salisbury and Bernstein were both missing, that Garst and Freedman looked no different than they usually did.

  Robert Garst, detached and a bit bored, sat behind his desk reading. Emanuel Freedman, poker-faced, was talking on the telephone. At another desk, barely suppressing his buoyance, sat Rosenthal. In the big office, cool and relaxed, was Clifton Daniel. Daniel had had lunch today with the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. McNamara probably knew more about The Times’ hierarchy than any reporter in the newsroom, for the highest levels of the United States government and The New York Times are constantly in touch. These men often dine together, see one another at receptions, converse regularly on the telephone. They are curious about one another’s bureaucracies, the policy shifts and personnel changes, realizing that what transpires in one place might affect the other—a mini-domino theory. And so despite their occasional differences on the slightly lower level, a hard alliance prevails at the top—and in any large showdown, the two forces would undoubtedly close ranks and stand together.

  This does not mean that The Times, in the winter of 1966, had complied with the government’s desire to suppress a series of articles on the Central Intelligence Agency; it did mean, however, that The Times felt obliged to have a former head of the CIA, John McCone, visit the Times building and read the articles before publication and suggest changes where the facts might imperil national security. Some of McCone’s suggestions were accepted, others were not. There was a little give and take on both sides, the entente cordiale surviving as it had to survive. The two forces were both committed to essentially the same goals, the preservation of the democratic system and the established order, and this kindred spirit at the top often filters down through the ranks toward the bottom: a minor government official immediately accepts all telephone calls from Times reporters; the mounted policeman on Forty-third Street looks after the illegally parked cars of his newspaper friends, and The Times looks after his horse; and the clerk in the courthouse can fix what a recalcitrant New York policeman will not. Mayor Lindsay will dance at a Times jamboree, and when Governor Nelson Rockefeller spots Clifton Daniel at a large cocktail gathering there is an instant smile, and within seconds they both edge their way to the patio and a very private conversation.

  Times reporters wishing to know what goes on within the hierarchy of The Times must subtly search for clues in their talks with government officials, ambassadors, Senators, those who move in the same circles as the Sulzbergers and other heirs of Ochsian power. It is remarkable how much the government knows and cares about the inner workings of The Times. When Turner Catledge was a reporter in Washington in the late Nineteen-thirties, he had been tipped off by both President Roosevelt and the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, that he would be Arthur Krock’s successor, and Catledge undoubtedly would have been, had he chosen to remain in Washington.

  For nearly a century, the presidents of the United States have tried to maintain warm personal relationships with members of the Ochs family, and while this has not always guaranteed flattering news coverage of the White House, it has at least enabled the President to know a good deal about the paper and about those executives whom he might one day wish to influence or charm or to whom he might wish to address a letter of complaint.

  Lyndon Johnson, three months after he became President, visited the Times building and had lunch with eleven senior executives in the publisher’s dining room. (Dozens of kings, queens, and national leaders had been there previously, including Winston Churchill, who once paused during the meal to ask Sulzberger: “Do the resources of the great New York Times extend to a bit of mustard?”) President Johnson was an engaging guest. He ate everything on his plate, was complimentary of the shrimp and the roast beef. He told a few jokes and did not permit the luncheon to be interrupted by his calls even though, less than an hour before he arrived, he had received news of Cuba’s decision to cut off the water supply to Guantánamo. He sat between Art
hur Hays Sulzberger and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, father and son, on a special upholstered folding chair that a Secret Service agent had placed there before lunch: the chair was lower than a normal dining chair, and wider. The table was set with gold-rimmed dishes and silverware embossed with The New York Times’ emblem, the eagle that adorns the masthead each day on the editorial page. The floral arrangements sprouted the national colors—red carnations, white roses, blue delphiniums—and they were set in transparent glass bowls so that the Secret Service men could be certain that they were bomb-free. After lunch, one of Johnson’s aides came in with a handful of telephone messages. Johnson excused himself and went out to the foyer and took one telephone call. Then he returned and told the others, some of whom he knew quite well from previous meetings—Catledge, Daniel, Oakes—the latest news about Cuba. Then he shook hands all around and headed for the elevator.