The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  And so what worked in Mississippi worked as well in Manhattan, although the reverse was not so true. The impersonal pushing of the North was out of step with the South; Southerners could not easily accept it: the South was deep-rooted and fixed in its ways, as Federal lawmakers would later learn. The South set its own pace and style and stamped its people for a lifetime, and when Northerners went South to live, it stamped them, too. Northerners who settled in the South adopted the regional accent; Southerners who settled in the North did not.

  So in Tunica, Catledge got along; and the country people that he met, and the small papers for which he worked in Mississippi as well as the larger papers that he later joined in Memphis, provided him with a repertoire of regional stories and oddities that would delight his companions and guests in future decades around Sardi’s bar or “21” or in the backroom of some Southern Senator’s office in Washington. The politicians to whom Catledge was most naturally drawn in Washington were those who shared his familiarity with the country South, who exemplified its style and had learned, as he had, how it could also work wonders far from home. In Washington, Catledge was friendly with, among others, Senators Pat Harrison of Mississippi, Carter Glass of Virginia, Thomas Heflin of Alabama, John Nance Garner of Texas, and James F. Byrnes of South Carolina. They confided in him, tipped him off to stories, drank with him—particularly Garner, who became Vice-President; and when Byrnes became Secretary of State, he offered Catledge an assistant secretaryship. Catledge turned it down, preferring the newspaperman’s existence to the politician’s, although in Catledge’s case the two worlds were almost indistinguishable—Catledge behaved like a politician, talked like one, and no doubt would have made a great one had he ventured into a full-time political career. He remembered names, remembered old obligations, remembered old friends even as he made newer ones in more powerful places. By the time he had joined the Washington bureau of The New York Times in 1930, Catledge seemed to know people in every hamlet south of the capital—bootleggers, Baptist preachers, bellhops, usedcar salesmen; country editors and judges; a Mississippi whore about whom Catledge had once written a flattering article for his paper’s society page; a Memphis shoeshine boy named Willie Turner who had descended from slaves on James Turner’s farm. In fact, Willie Turner had been named in honor of Catledge’s mother, and when Catledge moved to Memphis he and Willie Turner would get together two or three times a week, and when Catledge’s by-lines began to appear in the local newspapers—and later in the Baltimore Sun and The New York Times—his friend would clip them out of the various journals left behind each day by customers and he would paste them into a scrapbook that he kept under the shoe stand.

  Catledge had ridden the rails into Memphis from Tupelo in 1923 and, luckily, he walked into the Memphis Press offices almost directly behind a newly appointed managing editor from Oklahoma City who was anxious to demonstrate his powers as a decision-maker. He hired Catledge on the spot. Later, when the newspaper had an economic setback, Catledge was laid off, giving him an opportunity to visit the Memphis Commercial Appeal and to walk directly into the office of its editor, a red-faced volatile Irishman named C. P. J. Mooney. As Catledge entered the room, Mooney was seated behind his desk rubbing his eyes with a hand that lacked a few fingers. Mooney listened to Catledge’s spiel for a while, expressing particular pleasure at Catledge’s being born in Mississippi, a state in which Mooney hoped to increase circulation. Then Mooney, rubbing his eyes again with the nub of his hand, interrupted Catledge and waved him out of the office, saying in a snappy tone that Catledge can hear even now: “Okay, okay, just walk down the hall, take a left, then take another left, and you’ll see a red-headed Jew and tell him to put you to work.”

  Catledge followed the directions, and soon he was facing a ruddy, bushy-haired man named Sam Kahn, the city editor, and announcing with proper timidity that he had just been told by Mooney that he could join the reportorial staff.

  “Mr. Mooney told you what?” Kahn responded incredulously, having previously been told that no new reporters would be hired.

  “Mr. Mooney said you would give me a job,” Catledge repeated.

  “He told you that?”

  “Yessuh.”

  “What were his exact words?” Kahn asked, still doubtful.

  “He told me to walk down the hall, take a left, then take another left, and I’d see a red-headed Jew and to tell him to put me to work.”

  Kahn pondered for a moment, then said, “All right, you start at twenty-five dollars a week.”

  This was five dollars more than Catledge had been making at the Memphis Press, and, gratified, Catledge vowed that he would prove his worth to Mr. Kahn. Catledge’s opportunity to do so arose a few days later when Mooney, who was writing an editorial about the boll weevil, suddenly appeared in the newsroom and asked in a loud voice to no one in particular: “Say, what do you call those fellows who study insects?” Nobody could answer, and Mooney glared contemptuously across the room, shaking his head. Then, to dramatize his disgust, he pointed to a particular staff member and repeated the question; and as one staff member failed to answer, Mooney quickly pointed to another, then another, then another, becoming angrier as he moved from person to person around the room, and getting dangerously close to where Sam Kahn was sitting. Catledge, watching from the other side, suspected that Kahn was no more brilliant than the others. So just as Mooney was about to point to Kahn, Catledge yelled out from the distance, “Entomologist?” Mooney swung around. He nodded, then left the room. Sam Kahn sighed in relief. The next week, Catledge received from Kahn a ten-dollar raise.

  Catledge remained in Memphis until 1927, when his reporting was noticed by the then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who recommended the young reporter to Adolph Ochs. After Hoover was elected President, and after Catledge had joined the Baltimore Sun, Hoover again asked Ochs about Catledge; and in the summer of 1929, at the age of twenty-eight, Turner Catledge became a Timesman.

  7

  When Catledge arrived at The Times, Adolph Ochs was seventy-one years old. He was now slightly deaf and distant, so rarely seen in the newsroom that each of his visits was an event, a time of quiet stirring and excitement, a turning of heads in unison following his every step along the aisle. He was a white-haired little man with somber blue eyes, a figure very erect but frail. Young Timesmen who had never seen him before were awed by the sight of him. There was something very visionary, almost spiritualistic about him, the way he looked and seemed to float through the building, saying nothing, and the way he appeared, disappeared, reappeared months later, giving just enough of a glimpse to reaffirm his existence. One day he was seen standing off to one side of The Times’ cafeteria with a few elderly women, one of whom asked, “And these are all your people?” Ochs slowly gazed around the crowded dining room, a vast flock extending into the distance, and then he said softly and dramatically, and mostly to himself, “Yes, these are my people.”

  Ochs was not well during these final years. The left side of his face was falling, he looked like a man who had had a stroke, but his problem was more mental than physical—he was disconsolate, so deeply depressed at times that he did not read the newspaper for days. He spoke of turning The Times over to trustees, and thought regularly of death. He had two grand mausoleums built, one in Chattanooga, the other outside New York—to the very end, Ochs balanced his commitment.

  His illness was referred to within the family as melancholia, but they could not understand the cause, it seeming so illogical and sad that he should be mournful now, in 1929, when his success was at its peak of recognition. He was being honored by university presidents, by statesmen, by the cities in which he had once worked as a printer’s apprentice. Chattanooga had recently spent three days in celebrating him as its Citizen Emeritus, and Commander Byrd, whose explorations of Antarctica had been serialized in The Times, had just named glaciers and lakes after Ochs and his family. The Times now led the world’s newspapers in advertising, and Ochs could
afford to buy in White Plains, New York, a 57-acre estate with a white-columned mansion that had seventeen bathrooms. Ochs personified success, challenges faced and conquered, but now it all seemed lost on him; it would take his obituary to bring his story to life.

  When he had bought The Times in 1896, it was losing $1,000 a day, had $300,000 in unpaid bills, and was given no hope of recovery. After Henry Jarvis Raymond’s death in 1869, following a heart attack while in the apartment of a stage beauty named Rose Eytinge, The Times was taken over by Raymond’s partner, George Jones. Jones brought credit to The Times by exposing the scandals of William Marcy Tweed’s Tammany machine, but in 1881 when Jones deserted the Republican party, unwilling to support James G. Blaine for President, there was angry retaliation from many Republican advertisers and subscribers. The Times’ annual profit dropped from the $188,000 it had earned prior to the paper’s endorsement of Grover Cleveland, to $56,000; and by 1890 it was down to $15,000. But the political decision was not alone responsible for the decline. The Times was also poorly managed during these years, and things became worse after Jones’s death in 1891. A syndicate headed by The Times’ editor-in-chief, Charles R. Miller, took over the paper and eventually led it into bankruptcy. It was at this point that Adolph Ochs, thirty-eight years old, was able to acquire The New York Times for $75,000.

  He had borrowed this sum from various bankers and others who had been impressed by his accomplishments in Chattanooga and his plans for New York, and also by the many letters of recommendation that Ochs had solicited from influential congressmen, railroad owners, ministers, editors, and also President Grover Cleveland, whom Ochs had once entertained in Chattanooga and with whom he had kept in touch. In a letter to the President, Ochs had explained:

  I am negotiating for a controlling interest in The New York Times, and have fair prospects of success. I write to respectfully ask that you address by return mail a letter to Mr. Spencer Trask, chairman of the New York Times Publishing Company, giving your opinion of my qualifications as a newspaper publisher, general personal character, and my views on public questions, judged by the course of The Chattanooga Times.

  In other words, say what you can of me as an honest, industrious, and capable newspaper publisher. I wish to assure you that the enterprise I contemplate is not too large for me. I am able to handle it financially and otherwise.

  Within thirty-six hours, President Cleveland had replied to Ochs:

  In your management of The Chattanooga Times you have demonstrated such a faithful adherence to Democratic principles, and have so bravely supported the ideas and policies which tend to the safety of our country as well as our party, that I should be glad to see you in a larger sphere of usefulness. If your plans are carried out, and if through them you are transferred to metropolitan journalism, I wish you the greatest measure of success possible.

  Ochs’s $75,000 investment in The New York Times not only brought him that amount in bonds—it also immediately netted him 1,125 shares of stock, each worth $100 because of the new company’s inducement plan that allowed fifteen shares of stock with the purchase of each $1,000 bond. Also, Ochs’s arrangement with the stockholders stipulated that if he could run The Times without going into debt for three consecutive years, he would receive an additional 3,876 shares of stock, giving him a total of 5,001—or a majority of the company’s 10,000 shares. The 3,876 shares were held for him in escrow, and it was then thought inconceivable that he would be in possession of them within four years. But Ochs had very definite ideas on how to resuscitate the paper and he wasted no time in implementing them. Because of his experience in both the editorial and mechanical sides of journalism, he knew the newspaper business as few publishers ever do, and he knew how to cut costs without cutting quality.

  Before he had invested in The Times he had made a study of New York, sometimes touring the city on a bicycle he had rented in Central Park, and he felt certain that there was a market for the type of newspaper he had in mind. The most successful papers in New York, selling for a penny, were Pulitzer’s World, whose morning and evening editions had a total circulation of 600,000, and Hearst’s Journal, whose two editions totaled 430,000. These two men featured a lively brand of reporting, muckraking, and pathos that Ochs deplored. His paper, selling for three cents, would be competing with the Sun, which Ochs thought well written but weak in reporting, the Herald, more interested in higher society than anything else, and the Tribune, decidedly Republican and reactionary. Ochs wanted his paper to be impartial and complete, a journal that would appeal to the businessman and, as he put it, “not soil the breakfast linen.” He wanted a paper that would “give the news, all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is parliamentary in good society, and give it as early, if not earlier, than it can be learned through any other reliable medium; to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect, or interest involved.”

  He began by making The Times legible, purchasing new type and utilizing his typographical talent and judgment. He quickly eliminated the installments of romantic fiction that Charles R. Miller had been buying and running in The Times in a desperate last attempt to lure readers; instead, Ochs demanded coverage of financial news, market reports, real-estate transactions, court proceedings, the official if dreary activities of government that other newspapers had long ignored. Ochs wanted a paper of record, and it was still Times policy in the Nineteen-sixties to note each day in the back of the paper, in tiny type, a record of every fire in New York, and it still is possible to read daily in The Times what the weather is like around the world, the names of visible satellites, the arrival time of mail ships, the air-pollution index, the texts of major speeches, the names of official visitors to the White House, the precise moment that the sun sets, the moon rises.

  There were only two telephones in the Times building on Park Row when Ochs took charge, and he immediately made provisions for more; he also arranged for the purchase of more typewriters, over the protests of some Timesmen wishing to persist with pens. (Brooks Atkinson, however, whose exquisite penmanship was more legible than the typing of most other Timesmen, managed to write his theater reviews in longhand until his retirement in the early Nineteen-sixties.) Ochs’s wife, Iphigene, a well-read woman who had written book reviews in Chattanooga, persuaded him to include a review section in The New York Times. But Ochs, who was not a literary man, urged that his review editors treat books as news and be courteous, if not restrained, in comment—Ochs was ever wary of offending. Except for his editorial page, which he could as easily have done without, he wanted few opinions in his paper. He adjusted to his book and theater critics, to be sure, and he did not tamper with their work, but it always pained him when a show was panned or a writer was condemned in The Times. And Ochs took an almost masochistic pleasure in printing the letters of readers who disagreed with The Times. The “Letters to the Editor” was not his innovation, but he gave it a lavish display, being shrewd enough to recognize its value in promoting good will for The Times, further proof of Times impartiality. His most flagrant act of promotion, however, was his sponsorship of a contest offering $100 to anyone who could write a ten-word motto to replace “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” his own slogan that had been scoffed at, laughed at, doubted, yet widely discussed by rival editors and various readers around New York. Twenty thousand suggestions were submitted, 150 of which were published in The Times. The winner, selected by a single judge, the editor of Century magazine, was “All the World’s News, But Not a School for Scandal.” But Ochs, after paying the $100 and being pleased by the publicity, decided that he liked his own slogan better, and so he retained it.