The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  “Saturday morning,” Woodin replied unhesitatingly, and Krock’s story dominated the next day’s Times.

  After Woodin had resigned because of ill health in 1934, Roosevelt appointed in his place an old friend, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., a man much disliked by Krock, and during the next decade Morgenthau would complain often to Sulzberger and others about the “intrigues” of Arthur Krock, being particularly offended by Krock’s often-expressed opinion that Joseph P. Kennedy, Jesse Jones, or John W. Hanes would make ideal replacements for Morgenthau, and being embarrassed near the end of his career by Krock’s premature exposure of the so-called Morgenthau Plan. Krock first learned of it after an important source had invited him for a drink of bourbon and then asked, “Do you know where Henry Morgenthau is?” Krock, admitting that he did not, was promptly told that it might be wise for him to find out. It developed that Morgenthau was at the Quebec Conference pressing his plan to transform postwar Germany into a wholly agricultural nation; also that this mission had received Presidential sanction and that Morgenthau had left for Quebec without notice to either the Secretary of State or the Secretary of War. It was such reporting as this, the recognition of Krock’s great contacts, that made Sulzberger reluctant to intrude. As much as any Timesman was irreplaceable anywhere, Krock was irreplaceable in Washington. He had gone there in January of 1932 for The Times as a favor to Ochs, having previously covered the capital for other newspapers and grown tired of the town, preferring to live in New York. But Richard V. Oulahan’s unexpected death from pneumonia in December of 1931 left Ochs with no Timesman’ very willing or able to take over the bureau, and so Krock accepted the job on his own terms, which amounted to almost complete autonomy. There are very few moments in a reporter’s life when he has his publisher at a disadvantage, but this was one of them, and so Krock pressed his luck while he could, finding the experience strange and wonderful.

  His previous relationships with publishers had invariably ended in his disappointment. At the World where he had been assistant to the publisher, Ralph Pulitzer—who had once written: “Krock has a tongue as sharp as emery and a heart as soft as hominy”—Krock had imagined himself to be in a very favored position, but he was suddenly soured when Walter Lippmann was appointed editor of the World and not long afterwards Krock joined The New York Times. A decade before, when Krock had been an editor on the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times, working for a while under the walrus moustache and sardonic nature of Colonel Henry Watter-son (for whom Adolph Ochs had worked as a printer in Louisville in 1875), Krock’s position was undercut after Robert W. Bingham, the future Ambassador to England, acquired the papers. When Bingham installed another editor over Krock, Krock quit and headed for New York. (Many years later, while Ambassador Bingham lay dying in a hospital, Krock reported exclusively in The New York Times that Joseph Kennedy would be the next Ambassador to England, infuriating President Roosevelt, who complained that Krock did not even have the courtesy to wait until Bingham was in the grave before announcing his successor.)

  Nothing had come easily to Krock in his professional or private life, and men of privilege, impressed by Krock’s humor and his soft and stately manner, were often surprised by his depth of rancor. A plain-looking bespectacled man of five-feet-nine, with hazel-brown eyes and clear, almost pink complexion, Krock possessed no physical distinction until his full head of dark fine hair had turned a fluffy white during his senior years; then, honored three times by the Pulitzer Prize committee, Krock was known within press circles as a “pundit” and “dean.” He did not consider the latter title especially flattering, it reminding him of the elders who dominated Washington journalism when he arrived in the capital in 1910—a “small group of pompous frauds,” he wrote of them, “identifiable not only by their disinclination to do legwork, which was great, but in most cases by their attire. They habitually wore frock coats and silk hats, dropped big names in profusion, carried canes and largely made contacts with their single news source in the noble saloons of the period.”

  Arthur Krock might be accused of many things, but never of a “disinclination to do legwork.” He had hustled throughout his working life, being equally diligent as a Times pundit as when he was a young reporter on horseback galloping to an assignment in his native Kentucky. He had been born in the southern part of the state, in the city of Glasgow, near the Tennessee border, on November 16, 1886. His father, an intelligent man who was frustrated in his work as a bookkeeper and wrote verse in his spare time, was Jewish; his mother, the daughter of a local dry-goods merchant, was part Jewish. When his father left home for Chicago, pursuing a dream that Krock could never envision, his mother moved in with her parents, and it was in their home that Arthur Krock was reared.

  In 1904 he was sent to Princeton, but he had to drop out after one year, because of a lack of money, which deeply distressed him. He did receive a junior-college degree from the Lewis Institute in Chicago, and then he returned to Kentucky hoping to get a newspaper job in Louisville. As with many journals in those days, the Louisville papers had a “cub system” in which young men of no experience began without a salary for the honor of learning the craft, an honor that Krock could not afford; so he presented himself convincingly as a reporter of vast experience, and thus he was hired by the Louisville Herald at $15 a week.

  Krock learned fast. Within a few years he was one of the busiest reporters in the state, covering all sorts of assignments—including a few back-country elections in Kentucky that were conducted with Hatfield-McCoy shotgun etiquette. One evening while assigned to the Breathitt County election, Krock was sitting with a few people in the home of the county attorney, who was on the wrong side politically, and a shotgun blast shattered the window and blew up a lamp. Everybody crouched down, and then Krock gallantly volunteered to escort the two women in the room across the Kentucky River bridge to the other side. Soon he was leading them across a trestle two hundred feet above the water, carrying in front of him a lantern that within seconds was shot to pieces by one of the sharpshooters standing under the bridge. Krock and the women crawled the rest of the way, and when they arrived he had an acute attack of appendicitis.

  On another day, also in Breathitt County, Krock met a pretty girl along the road who smiled at him and, after a brief conversation, suggested that he walk her home. As he was doing so, he noticed a surly-looking man observing them from the other side of the road, and Krock asked the girl, “Who’s that?”

  “He’s my beau,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He don’t like your walkin’ with me.”

  Without hesitation, Krock abandoned the girl and approached her beau and said, “Listen, this is nothing. I have no intentions of any sort and I’m going back to town right now.” And he did.

  In 1911, when Krock was twenty-four, he married the daughter of a railroad official, and they had a son who later went into public relations. Krock’s marriage was a happy one that lasted for twenty-seven years, ending with the death of his wife after a long illness in 1938. Krock then was introduced at a Washington party to a fashionable Chicago divorcée named Martha Granger Blair, a society columnist for the Washington Times-Herald. She had seen him before and had listed him in her column as one of Washington’s “glamour boys.” She had described him as a man who tries very hard to be charming to women and “thinks he has a deceptive charm, but hasn’t.” Although “he looks so fierce and takes everything so seriously,” she wrote, he has “enticement.”

  They were married in 1939. They lived with her two children (one of whom later became a Times reporter) at a country home in Virginia surrounded by 296 acres and in a large apartment in Washington. Krock was earning more than $30,000 a year from The Times, had been honored by foreign governments for his reporting, had received an honorary degree from Princeton, and had fulfilled most of his professional and social ambitions. At home with his wife and stepchildren, he was relaxed, warm, and informal. On returning from the bureau in the e
vening, if he and his wife were not going out to dinner, he would make a bourbon old-fashioned, puff his fine cigar, and read to the family the column he had just written, an effort that was rarely appreciated although they pretended to follow every word.

  In the office with his men, Krock was a paragon of formality. He was Mister Krock even to reporters who had known him for years.

  “How long does a man have to work around here before this ‘Mister’ business stops?” a Timesman once asked him.

  “As long as you care to stay here,” Krock replied. “I’m sorry, that’s the way I am.”

  Arthur Krock had much more in common with Ochs than Sulzberger. Though Sulzberger was only five years younger than Krock, Krock seemed part of the Ochs era. Krock and Ochs were regally remote, politically conservative; they were self-made men, confident and vain and hardened by experiences that Sulzberger had never had.

  Finally Sulzberger came to accept Krock as part of the Ochs legacy—not a painless inheritance, to be sure, but Sulzberger had little choice. Krock knew every important figure in Washington, was possibly more influential in the nation than the Secretary of State. If Krock was made unhappy, he might quit and accept one of the many offers of other publishers. Krock was not so attached to Washington that he would not leave: as Krock himself said, “I like Washington the way a chemist likes his laboratory—in spite of its smell—because it has the materials with which he must work.” Sulzberger did not want Krock to leave, not having as yet a replacement of sufficient stature who could get the news and run the bureau as Krock was running it. There was no doubt in Sulzberger’s mind that Krock had greatly improved the daily performance of the Washington bureau over what it had been under the previous bureau chief.

  And so Sulzberger turned his attentions elsewhere, allowing Krock and the bureau more self-rule than The Times had ever permitted before and ever would again. When The Times endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt for President in 1944, Krock wrote a column opposing Roosevelt, and the editors in New York did not change a word; this was part of Krock’s understanding with Ochs. Conversely, when The Times had supported Wendell Willkie for the Presidency four years before, and the editor-in-chief of the Chattanooga Times had insisted on endorsing Roosevelt, Sulzberger had objected, insisting that the Chattanooga Times’ editor and his associates either endorse Willkie or take six months’ leave of absence with pay. They chose the latter, and thus the Chattanooga Times backed The New York Times in supporting Willkie in 1940. Sulzberger’s reasoning was that since he and the other Times policy makers in New York were responsible for the editorial viewpoint of both papers, it was somehow improper to support a Republican in the North and a Democrat in the South, a stringency that Sulzberger did not apply in his dealings with Arthur Krock in Washington.

  Turner Catledge worked under Krock for almost ten years. He actually joined the bureau two years before Krock took it over—Catledge had arrived in Washington in January of 1930, five months after he had been hired in New York, while the Washington bureau chief was Richard V. Oulahan—and Catledge could later see and feel, not always happily, the stylistic differences between these two men: Oulahan, a dignified gentleman who had run the bureau since 1912, had permitted his staff to cover Washington with a kind of roving detachment; Krock, after Oulahan’s death, informed the staff that it would now function as a team, which meant taking orders.

  Krock installed under himself a vice-chief, an administrative assistant who was loyal and efficient and not excessively ambitious or egotistical; his job, among other things, was to coordinate the coverage of the capital. Krock also did not want his reporters to vary their assignments from day to day, or week to week; instead he wanted each of them to concentrate on a particular area of the government and to develop sources and stories within that area-one reporter might focus on the Pentagon, a second on the White House, a third on the State Department, a fourth on the Department of Labor, and so on until every agency in the government had a Timesman watching over it.

  In theory this system had obvious advantages. Reporters would become more knowledgeable and would presumably write with more depth, would be less likely to make mistakes, or to misinterpret, or to be duped by government spokesmen. But there were also inherent disadvantages in this system—reporters could become too familiar with their subject, eventually assuming, unconsciously, a familiarity on the reader’s part that did not exist; and reporters might also become victims of what Walter Lippmann considered the bane of the newspaper business, “cronyism,” a camaraderie among the press and government sources, resulting from their close daily relationships, their personal trust in one another and mutual reliance on professional cooperation, that eventually could—and often did—mean that the reporter became spiritually a part of the government. Or if not a spiritual part, the reporter had at least a proprietary interest in his section of the government, his daily by-line depending on his ability to get information from sources in that section, and their cooperation was unlikely if he had written an unfavorable story on the previous day. So it was in the best interest of most reporters to have a positive approach to government news, and only the very best reporters, the most independent and ambitious ones, would be unsusceptible to cronyism.

  While this did not present a problem during Krock’s years as the bureau chief, he being too vigilant and skeptical of the government and too demagogic to permit any personality but his own to flavor the news, the regulation of the Washington bureau was less rigid after James Reston, a more patriotic and flexible man, took over in 1953. But even under Reston, cronyism was never too noticeable; and even if it had been, the editors in New York would have been reluctant to condemn it strongly. Reston, like Krock, was a man of rank and reliability who condoned little interference from New York. As Krock had built his empire under Ochs, so did Reston have a strong alliance with Sulzberger, and an even stronger one with Sulzberger’s successor, Orvil Dryfoos. It was also true that when Reston assumed command of the bureau, the possible existence of cronyism would not have caused great concern or notice in the New York office because the United States government was still a popular and trusted institution, the “credibility gap” was years away—the triumphant spirit of World War II, the complaisance during the postwar prosperity, the faith in the nation’s wisdom and righteousness was deeply infused in American thought, and this philosophy was not shattered by the Korean War or by the scandals in the Truman administration. It was not until Eisenhower’s final years that many illusions about America began to fade.

  The disillusionment was hastened by such factors as the shock of Soviet achievements in space, and by the United States’ being caught in a lie during the U-2 incident, an opening round in the “credibility gap”; and by the Nineteen-sixties the national doubt had intensified into nationwide dissent, inspired primarily by a new generation of Americans untouched by old illusions. This generation was unwilling to support on moral grounds the United States military acts in Vietnam or its Civil Rights posture at home, and it was also motivated by hundreds of private reasons and human fears that found release in the larger voice against the government—flags and draft cards were burned, patriotism became the property of the nut fringe, and the old attitudes and terminology were twisted—“law and order” could really mean racism; “mother” and “peace” could be controversial words; the media manufactured dramatic events and colossal characters out of many small incidents and minor men. The government’s word was to be accepted with suspicion, and The Times’ editors in New York, influenced as much as anybody else by the new disenchantment and skepticism, began to prod the Washington bureau as never before to keep a watchful eye on the government, to expose its sins; and if the Washington bureau failed to do so, a few editors in New York, among them Harrison Salisbury, began to quietly suspect that the bureau was overly protective of its sources, was a victim of cronyism.

  The bureau chief at this time, beginning in 1964, was Tom Wicker. Wicker had been on The Times only four years when
Reston, wishing to devote more time to his writing and also a bit weary of office politics, vacated the bureau job after almost twelve years and installed in his place the thirty-eight-year-old Wicker, in whom Reston saw qualities that reminded him of himself. But what Wicker did not yet have in common with Reston—and Krock—was singular strength with the publisher’s office, a personal bond that is built slowly during years of outstanding service on The Times. And so without a solid relationship with the owners of The Times, and not having had sufficient time to establish a national reputation as a journalist, Tom Wicker, from his very beginning as the bureau chief, was vulnerable in ways that Reston and Krock had never been.

  Wicker’s added disadvantage, that of inheriting the bureau when the government’s honesty was widely doubted, required of his bureau an escalation of its right to question and challenge—and this at a time when Wicker lacked the power to direct his staff with anything approaching autonomy, and when The Times itself was undergoing vast internal changes and second-guessing, in part because of its sudden growth as a newspaper (a growth accelerated by the disappearance of the New York Herald Tribune), and also because of the expanding ambitions and philosophical differences of some important executives within The Times.

  No matter what Tom Wicker’s personal limitations might have been in the mid-Sixties, he seemed to be plagued also by several forces beyond his control—his dilemma seemed to be linked, in fact, with the larger problems of the government of the United States. As the Johnson administration had lost much of its stature and believability with the American people, so had Wicker’s bureau lost much of its prestige and persuasiveness within the Times organization—the afflictions of the administration had infected the bureau, or so some New York editors thought, or preferred to think. For now they were trying to downgrade the bureau and to eliminate the last vestiges of its self-rule so that The Times could become one corporate body with all the power centered in the main office in New York. In this sense, it was the New York office that was moving on a parallel course with the government of the United States, a government of increasing federalization, of unprecedented power in the Presidency, of deteriorating States’ Rights. And it was neither coincidental nor surprising that The New York Times as a whole would reflect, in miniature, the collective style of the government because the two institutions at the top are shaped by the same forces historically, socially, and economically—what happens to the government inevitably happens to The Times. Should the United States continue as a preeminent power, The Times’ words will continue to carry weight in the world. Should the United States decline as an international influence, so will The New York Times—following in the wake of The Times of London, which today does not thunder across the sea as it did during the glorious days of the British Empire.