by Gay Talese
“King Faisal visited the UN today, and we have Mickey Carroll following him,” Gelb said. “Faisal indicated that he was not really upset by what’s happened.”
“How did he indicate this?” Daniel asked.
“He actually said it,” Gelb quickly replied. “He also posed for photographers, smiling.”
“He’s up for election,” Catledge chimed in, grinning.
“What?” asked Daniel, turning around.
Daniel is unable to hear well from his left, an impairment he has borne since he was twelve, and he wished that if Catledge insisted on interrupting, that he would do so from one of the chairs closer to the window, on Daniel’s right, and not from the rear, almost directly behind Daniel’s left ear. When Daniel looked back, Catledge, large, ruddy, comfortable, casually shrugged, suggesting that the remark was not worth repeating. So Daniel turned toward the front again and continued to listen as Gelb ticked off dozens of assignments that reporters were working on at this moment—a contract dispute between the city and the Doctors’ Association, a murder in the Bronx, a move by Senator Robert Kennedy to promote the career of a Buffalo Democrat named Peter Crotty.…
Cigarette smoke climbed higher in Daniel’s office. The circle of editors listened politely, if not intently. There was nothing very special about today. It was like yesterday, the day before. The summer had begun, and a Friday-afternoon laziness had set in. The highways and bridges around New York City were now beginning to rumble and vibrate with the early waves of weekend traffic, and except for Catledge and two lesser executives, there were no senior Timesmen seated along the outer edge of the room. The publisher was absent. So was the executive vice-president, Harding F. Bancroft, a tall, blond, tweedy pipe smoker who in 1963 had replaced Amory H. Bradford, a tall, blond, tweedy pipe smoker who had resigned. Lester Markel, who had attended yesterday’s session, was not here today. John Oakes never attends these meetings, maintaining the clear line of separation that exists between the News and Editorial departments.
Daniel looked around the table. It was 4:31 and, since Gelb, he had heard from four editors—Cultural, Foreign, Finance, Sports—and had learned, among other things, that a Van Gogh painting had sold for $441,000 to Walter Chrysler, Jr.; that the Chinese were streamlining the doctrine of Mao Tse-tung so that it would be more palatable for school students; that Wall Street was unalarmed; that the Yankees were in seventh place, fifteen games behind Baltimore. Daniel nodded toward the national-news editor, Claude Sitton, seated in the far corner of the table to the left of Gelb.
“Claude,” Daniel said.
A lean, slightly balding gray-haired man edged forward. Claude Sitton, a native of Atlanta, had joined The Times as a reporter ten years before, at the age of thirty. He then had dark hair, a limber gait, a benign expression—he seemed almost too bland for the assignment that would be his specialty: the Civil Rights movement in the South. But between 1957 and 1964, traveling thousands of miles a year, getting to know by heart the schedule of every airline operating in the South, getting to know the black preachers and redneck sheriffs, the young militants and dreamy blonde coeds who temporarily took leave of their segregated suburbs in the North to denounce the South—Sitton superbly covered the story. He moved with it from town to town, little places that made headlines for a week and were not heard from again—Poplarville, McComb, Sasser—and he infused his reporting with the angry dialogue and grim detail that made it all seem so meaningful, if only for a day. When Medgar Evers, the Negro leader in Mississippi, was shot to death three years ago on a June night in Jackson, Sitton wrote:
… the sniper’s bullet struck him just below the right shoulder blade. The slug crashed through a front window of the home, penetrated an interior wall, ricocheted off a refrigerator and struck a coffee pot. The battered bullet was found beneath a watermelon on a kitchen cabinet. Evers staggered to the doorway, his keys in his hand, and collapsed near the steps. His wife, Myrlie, and their three children rushed to the door …
Now, at the conference table, Claude Sitton, aged forty, showed the wear of all those years on the road. He had been pleased by his promotion to editor and the salary increase, was happy that he could now spend more time with his family in a new home in suburban New York and could avoid the endless air terminals and the grueling routine. But there were also times when the executive pressure and office politics had made him nostalgic for the reporter’s life, particularly when the stories were good, as they were today.
Today, Sitton told Daniel, there were dramatic new developments in Mississippi—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leading 2,500 Civil Rights marches through the state, was having problems with some of his followers, especially such younger ones as Stokely Carmichael. It had begun last night in Canton, Mississippi, Sitton said, remembering the place from his own reporting two years ago, remembering the old white-columned courthouse, the Confederate flag sticker on the glass window of the voter registrar’s office inside the building, the long line of Negroes waiting outside and being watched by a sheriff’s deputy who wore a black leather jacket, black slacks, black Western boots, and who paced up and down the line with an automatic carbine swinging in his left hand, a wooden club dangling from his belt … it had begun last night in Canton as King’s marchers, pitching their tents on the grounds of an elementary school for Negroes, were suddenly interrupted by sixty gun-wielding state troopers ordering them to move. Two minutes later, the order ignored, the troopers had donned gas masks and begun to approach the crowd, with King urging his followers, black and white, to remain nonviolent—“There’s no point in fighting,” he had cried, “don’t do it.”
Canister after canister of gas was then tossed into the crowd, and within seconds dozens of men, women, and children retreated, running and crying confusedly through the haze, tents tumbling. Other demonstrators persisted, burying their faces deep into the damp grass, but they were soon dragged up by the feet and hands by the troopers and pushed into the street beyond the school grounds. One trooper had grabbed a Catholic priest from Chicago and hit him with the butt of a shotgun. A photographer from Florida had been tackled and knocked into a ditch. Twelve demonstrators had passed out from the gas fumes, including the three-year-old son of a white couple from Toronto.
Today, Sitton continued, many marchers were in no mood for more nonviolence, and Carmichael and other militants were on the verge of mutiny. Sitton did not really know the full extent of it, Carmichael’s call for “Black Power” having not yet been shouted through the media of the land, but Claude Sitton seemed to sense the change as he said softly, at the conference table, “It could be very bad for King now.”
“What was the great objection to their spending the night on the school grounds?” Daniel asked.
“The troopers said that they were acting on orders from the city and county school officials, who said that the marchers had no permission to put up tents there. It was also in a transitional neighborhood.”
“What’s a transitional neighborhood?”
Sitton seemed surprised by Daniel’s question, the answer seeming obvious, but perhaps this was Daniel’s way of hinting that he wanted this to be defined in tomorrow’s story.
“That’s where Negroes are moving into a white neighborhood,” Sitton said.
Sitton went on to say that Homer Bigart, perhaps the best reporter in the newsroom, had arrived in Canton to reinforce the coverage. The news from Mississippi might easily become worse. James Meredith, who had recovered from the gunshot wounds he had suffered in Mississippi three weeks ago when ambushed at the beginning of the march, was now on his way back to join the others. Also, fifteen Mississippi whites identified as Klansmen were indicted yesterday in Biloxi by a Federal grand jury in connection with the firebomb slaying last January of a Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Negro leader; and so the racial climate was now primed for further violence, and the newspaper and television reporting today emphasized this, quoting embittered whites shouting “nigger,” and quoting angry blacks
damning Mississippi as a “police state,” and comparing it with “Hitler’s Germany.”
Turner Catledge, the Mississippi-born grandson of slave owners, listened. His fingernails drummed against the armrest of his chair a few times but he said nothing, and it was not possible to know whether he was tapping from tension or boredom. His home state had been denigrated regularly in the press for a decade, although some of the little Southern towns that had made the hottest headlines were placid places in Catledge’s memory, places where Negroes and whites had once lived in more harmony than Northern liberals could ever imagine, these liberals not having lived so close to Negroes as had Catledge’s countrymen, nor ever having understood or shared with the Negro such poverty and deprivation.
Faulkner once said that the rest of the nation knows next to nothing about the South, and Catledge might agree, but quietly, for this was not the time for Southerners to be making excuses. It was a time for atonement in the Deep South. In the wake of such Southern atrocities as took place in Selma, Alabama, a year before, the aroused nation demanded, if only briefly, that the Negro be reimbursed for past abuses, and the guilt of white men all over America was now borne by the South, for it was in the South that the white man’s sins were more easily seen. Even Faulkner, had he lived, would have experienced difficulty in trying to defend the South after the scene in Selma had been filmed on television and had been played again and again on the home screen in millions of living rooms: the sight of a charging wedge of troopers with billy clubs and gas grenades crashing into a procession of Negroes, the odd sound of plastic helmets and wood beating against flesh, clop, cluck, clap, the cries of Negroes falling to the highway, the cheers of white locals watching on the other side of the road, the hoof clicks of nervous horses mounted by a sheriff’s posse anxious to get into the act, the ticking of television cameras. Soon, from all over America, thousands of sympathizers, black and white, were bound for Selma—nuns, newsmen, debutantes, psychiatrists, banjo players, Senators’ wives, stock clerks, sculptors, social workers—and for most of a month they lived in Selma’s Negro quarter, shared the Negro’s food and misery, sang his songs, and scorned his oppressors; helped inspire a new guilt, a new social conscience, a new voting bill in America; helped instill in many illiterate and uninspired Negroes throughout the land a strange new hope that after Martin Luther King’s marchers had crossed the little bridge and had completed the fifty-mile journey down the road to the state capital, everything would somehow get better, a kind of miracle would occur; it would be like Lourdes and the faithful might toss away their crutches.
Months later, a Times reporter revisited Selma. The town was quiet. The sympathizers from the North had come and gone—as they had come and gone in Selma one hundred years before—and now Selma’s blacks and whites were left with the pieces, life was no better, and the marchers and journalists were making news elsewhere in the South—and eventually in the North, where some Northern whites who had so eagerly come to Selma were not so willing to openly oppose inequities closer to home.
Turner Catledge liked the story that reported this, and he sent the Times reporter a congratulatory note, but it would have been imprudent of Catledge to be less private about his feelings; he might appear too defensive about the South, too unobjective as an editor, perhaps also foolish—as Faulkner had appeared during his final years, when, in his public statements and letters to various newspapers, he tried to defend the South when national opinion was not very receptive to unrepentant white Southerners. The editors published Faulkner’s letters, usually without comment, although the editorial writers around the country did not castigate Faulkner as a racist, as they might have. Faulkner was still a much-admired man, and when such men reach a certain age they are free to make fools of themselves in public and to expect, and receive, from the press the utmost in courtesy. Faulkner was a recipient of this respect. So was former President Truman, who was much bolder than Faulkner on the question of race, and as a result was possibly of concern to his son-in-law at The New York Times, or at least some Times reporters thought that he was. While Times reporters had once looked forward to joining Harry Truman on his traditional morning walks and talkathons during his frequent visits to New York, this assignment began to lose its charm during Truman’s later years, as the issue of integration became more intense, and as he began to reveal signs of bigotry that Timesmen had to report, although they imagined the dismay that Truman’s revelations in print might cause Clifton Daniel. The Timesmen should not have worried so. Daniel was a hardened newspaperman, after all, and his father in Zebulon had used “nigger” most of his life, and when there had been a student movement at the University of North Carolina in the Thirties to admit Negroes, Clifton Daniel, though a campus leader, did not become involved.
Still, racial remarks by a former President of the United States in the Nineteen-sixties were never treated casually at The Times. The New York Times wishes to protect all of the Grand Old Men of the Republic whenever it can, and there was a bit of fussing on the copydesk over stories that contained controversial Trumanisms—such as when he said, while a Negro sit-in was making headlines, that if anyone tried to do that in his store he’d kick them out; or when he called the Selma protest “silly” and called Martin Luther King a “troublemaker,” earning a telegram of thanks from Selma’s Sheriff James G. Clark; or when Truman declared that racial intermarriage ran counter to teachings of the Bible. This latter remark, which inspired no editorial retort from The Times, was made during a stroll along Park Avenue, when a reporter, not a Timesman, asked the former President if he thought that racial intermarriages would become widespread in the United States.
“I hope not,” Truman said. “I don’t believe in it. What’s that word about four feet long? Miscegenation?” Truman, still walking, swinging his cane, then turned to the reporter and asked, “Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?” When the reporter responded that he would want his daughter to marry the man she loved, Truman said, “You haven’t answered my question,” adding, “Well, she won’t love someone who isn’t her color. You’ll edit the man she goes out with. I did. And mine married the right man.”
All of this was published the next morning in The Times, on an inside page under a small headline, the story not failing to mention in the second paragraph that Truman had long been “an advocate of integration in other respects,” and also mentioning that the “right man” that Margaret Truman had married was Clifton Daniel of The New York Times.
When Catledge is asked his views on miscegenation, as he sometimes is during his travels out of town, he replies that this subject is not really his main concern at the moment: his concern, he says in a mockingly confidential manner, is that his daughter wants to marry a certain white man that he does not like. (She did marry the man, and now is divorced.) But Turner Catledge, who is quick at anticipating a question before it is asked, usually sidesteps such flippancy, regarding all aspects of the Civil Rights movement as too important to be discussed seriously with those who badger him most about it. Even at The Times, Catledge manages to keep his private thoughts largely to himself, sometimes parrying a sharp question with humor, at other times remaining aloof—as he was this afternoon, sitting in the conference room listening to the cultivated voices of two younger Southerners, Daniel and Sitton, newbreed city slickers, discussing the latest malefaction in Mississippi; listening until the day’s conference had ended and Daniel had said to the departing editors: “Thank you, gentlemen.”
Catledge has not lived in Mississippi in almost forty years. Now he is a New Yorker, indulging in the sweet urban life that the most successful of Southerners adapt to so quickly, patronizing the better restaurants, knowing all the head waiters by name, living in a large luxury apartment on the East Side where it is the New York landlords who uphold segregation, having honed it down to a fine and polished art. Catledge’s second marriage, to a wealthy and attractive New Orleans widow whom he met nine years ago at an editors’ conventio
n in San Francisco, is a happy one. He is now earning about $100,000 a year, has a wide and interesting circle of friends. He is not a big celebrity, nor did he ever wish to become one, preferring to function within the corporate code, but his name is nevertheless known in nearly every newsroom in America, and he is regarded with respect and a certain awe by the most powerful politicians in New York and Washington. He has fulfilled, at sixty-five, and long before attaining that age, the most fanciful dreams of his youth, and he has felt at home in a very tough town that a young transplanted Mississippi friend of his, Willie Morris, calls the Big Cave.
But emotionally, Catledge remains a Southerner. He still speaks with a Southern accent that gets thicker with each drink. He can become sentimental to the point of mawkishness, even dewy-eyed, when reminiscing late at night about his days in the South, memories of the farm, the friends he had, black and white, down in the red-clay hill country of central Mississippi in Neshoba County, named after an Indian tribe, but now better known as the place where, on a lonely country road in 1964, three young Civil Rights workers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney—were slain one by one in a Ku Klux Klan conspiracy that, according to the FBI, involved Neshoba County’s chief deputy sheriff.
There is little resemblance between the South that Catledge knew as a boy and the South that he now reads about in his newspaper—but this is, as he would not care to admit, partly the fault of journalism. Journalists concentrate on isolated incidents, current confrontations, printable news that fits—they leave historical perspective to others, and they leave the pleasanter side of any place to the memory of those who predate disorder and press coverage, people like Catledge whose South no longer exists except when resurrected by an old familiar word that jumps up at him from his newspaper, Neshoba, or when there is printed a fact or a name that is otherwise linked to the Mississippi of his mind.