The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  And yet despite the United States’ incredible wealth and growth in the Nineteen-sixties, both the government and The New York Times were beset by internal conflicts, factionalism, executive scurrying—part of which had undoubtedly resulted from the sudden changes at the top following the premature death of a chief executive. Orvil Dryfoos, whose death occurred in 1963 some months before Kennedy’s, had been The Times’ publisher for only two years. His sudden departure, shaking as it did the executive order and alliances within the institution, added momentum to forces already in motion, and it led some older Timesmen to believe, with regret, that the paper had now completely severed its spiritual ties with the permissive patriarchy of Adolph Ochs. In Ochs’s earlier days, when the United States government was an isolationist power with more lofty and independent ambassadors, The Times was characterized by bureau chiefs and correspondents who enjoyed a kind of ambassadorial status in the major cities of the world. But now in the mid-Sixties, the home office of The Times, like the White House, seemed bent on ruling by direct control. Through the marvels of instant communications, jet airplanes, and various computerized gadgets available to a modern oligarchy, the New York office was indeed capable of directing the movements and minds of its men around the globe with speed and without having to work through bureau chiefs. There was no longer a need for strong bureau chiefs. Now the job could be done by superclerks. An electronic edict from New York could flash almost instantly thousands of miles away on the desk of the superclerk, who could convey it to his Times colleagues, who, ideally, would quickly comply with New York’s wishes.

  And it was such an assumption as this, if not by such methods, that led some New York editors to believe, in the summer of 1966, that the Washington bureau would accept New York’s conclusion that Tom Wicker should be replaced—perhaps by a Timesman from the New York office. Wicker had held the job for two years. This was long enough, it was believed in New York, to prove the point that Wicker had not adequately inspired the staff to the kind of aggressive reporting that was desired in Washington. Not only was Harrison Salisbury of this opinion, but so were Clifton Daniel and A. M. Rosenthal, among others, and the same might be said of Turner Catledge; although Catledge seemed to be stalling for time, as if hoping to let the forces play out their aggressions before making his move.

  If there was particular hesitancy on Catledge’s part to push for Wicker’s removal, it was perhaps understandable. Catledge had been part of the Washington bureau; he was the only New York editor who had ever worked in the bureau on a regular basis. He had been able to observe firsthand the power-building process of Arthur Krock during the Nineteen-thirties, knew the strengths and weaknesses of the Krock system, and had also benefited from it, had gotten the front-page by-lines that helped to establish his own reputation in the capital with the Congress and the President. Krock had regarded Catledge as the finest reporter on the staff, and in 1936 Krock had given Catledge the title of Chief Washington News Correspondent. But by 1941, it was obvious to Catledge that he could go no further. The bureau was really a one-man show. Catledge felt that his progress had stalled—he was hitting his head “against the bottom of Arthur Krock’s chair,” he described it to a friend—and so in the winter of 1941 Catledge quit The New York Times. He accepted what appeared to be a dream job, that of roving chief correspondent for the Chicago Sun, founded by Marshall Field III to compete with the Chicago Tribune. But Field’s ambition was never fulfilled, and Catledge was never happy in Chicago. His “roving” job consisted mainly of covering the Rio Conference in 1942, and there was considerable discord among the management members of the paper. Even his later promotion to the position of editor-in-chief of the Chicago Sun did not elate him. He had never caught the mood of Chicago, never felt a part of it. He became acutely aware of this one day as he sat in a courtroom, representing the Sun in a lawsuit; as the lawyers mentioned various sections of Chicago, the names of particular streets, Catledge realized that he had never heard of them. After seventeen months in Chicago, he was still very much a stranger.

  He also missed working for The New York Times. There is a very agreeable sense of privilege about employment on The Times that can forever spoil an individual who identifies personally with corporate greatness and tradition. Catledge had grown accustomed to The Times’ size and sway, the way it facilitated the opening of doors on almost every level of life. He let it be known that he wanted to come back, and in the spring of 1943 he was rehired by The Times. He was given the title of national correspondent, meaning that he could travel around the country reporting on politics and related subjects; his salary of $12,000 was not to be compared with the $26,500 he had been making in Chicago just before he left, but he did not quibble.

  Returning to The Times, even after a relatively brief absence, Catledge was able to see the newspaper with more perspective. The Times had made many changes since Ochs’s death—obvious changes such as the printing of fashion and food pages, which Ochs would never have allowed, as well as the increased use of photographs, the greatly improved Sunday Magazine, and the brighter daily reporting, particularly by such men as Meyer Berger of the New York staff, and James Reston, who in 1944 became the diplomatic correspondent of Krock’s bureau, after having worked in London and as an assistant to Sulzberger. But The New York Times was also coasting a bit on its success, Catledge thought. It had now grown so enormously in the New York newsroom, mainly because of the hiring of many new editors and deskmen to handle the war news, that there was a vast depersonalization and coolness about the place. The paper lost a fine reporter, Robert Bird, to the New York Herald Tribune, and it would later take from the Tribune such men as Peter Kihss and Homer Bigart, but the New York editors seemed generally unconcerned over who came or went: The Times was unquestionably the best newspaper in sight, even though the Tribune in those days was a serious and interesting newspaper, and was no doubt a more congenial place for reporters wanting literary freedom. For straight reporting, however, and depth of coverage, The Times was incomparable. It was especially clear during World War II, when The Times’ staff so outnumbered and outdistanced the Tribune’s, despite the remarkable efforts of some Tribune reporters who were as good as The Times’ best, that the Tribune could never again gain on The Times in circulation or advertising.

  The decision to increase The Times’ staff and spare no expense in covering the war was Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s, and within that decision he revealed a business acumen that may rank as the wisest move he ever made as publisher. Since the raw materials for producing a newspaper—paper, ink, metal—were rationed during the war, the newspaper publishers around the nation had to decide whether they would try to become rich by filling their newspapers with more advertising, which was then available in great abundance, or whether they would resist the easy revenue and print more news. Sulzberger chose the latter alternative with a resoluteness that the Tribune’s owners did not try to match, and as a result The Times conceded millions during the war years, but produced a superior newspaper. Sulzberger also maintained the good will of his advertisers, large and small, by permitting them to publish minimum-sized ads in The Times: a national advertiser who formerly might have purchased a full-page ad in The Times was restricted to a quarter-page, and a merchant seeking employees through the help-wanted columns could not exceed two lines for each appeal. But the additional space that The Times was able to devote to war coverage instead of advertising was, in the long run, a very profitable decision: The Times lured many readers from the Tribune, and these readers stayed with The Times after the war into the Nineteen-fifties and Sixties, while the Tribune, which featured columnists and sprightly makeup at the expense of solid reporting, began to lose its circulation, and its advertisers began to withdraw.

  Sulzberger himself made trips to the European and Pacific fronts during the war, and a few Times staff members not normally associated with international reporting went overseas to bolster the war coverage. Brooks Atkinson temporarily left his job a
s drama critic to report from Burma, India, and China; he flew with Chennault’s Flying Tigers on a bombing mission over Japanese targets, and he was the first journalist to report that General Joseph W. (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell, who was having arguments over policy with Chiang Kai-shek, was being called home.

  Meyer Berger left his sidewalks-of-New York beat to report briefly from London, and as the war was ending he toured North Africa and Europe. Turner Catledge, too, visited the European battle-fronts in 1943, writing articles about the activities of the American Red Cross. In the fall of 1944, while Catledge was scouting the political campaign in Fargo, North Dakota, he received a telegram from Sulzberger asking him if he would be interested in taking a trip with the publisher to inspect the Pacific front. Catledge wired back his acceptance, and in November they began their 27,000-mile flight with a stop at San Francisco. They checked into the Mark Hopkins Hotel, went almost immediately to the Top of the Mark for a few drinks before dinner. They were seated at a comfortable divan, and through the big windows that surrounded them they could see the panorama of the north side of the city, the neck of San Francisco Bay with the ships coming and going, and to the left, the Golden Gate Bridge.

  They ordered a Scotch, then a second round. On the third round Sulzberger proposed that they be “doubles.” Then they ordered two more “doubles” and continued to talk about everything—The Times, the San Francisco landscape, The Times, women, The Times, the strange workings of the Oriental mind. They ordered still another round of “doubles.” When the waiter brought them, Sulzberger asked, “Are you sure these are doubles?” The waiter said, “Am I sure? You’ve drunk practically a bottle already.”

  They had a few more rounds and then they stood up to go to dinner. But before they left, Arthur Hays Sulzberger looked at Catledge, then extended his hand, saying, “Well, you pass.”

  Catledge asked what he meant, but Sulzberger changed the subject. Then later, during dinner, Sulzberger recalled a trip that he had made to Russia the year before with Reston, mentioning how Reston’s engaging companionship during the day was not so satisfactory at night. Reston was not one for night life and drinking, and it was Reston himself who had suggested that the publisher’s traveling companion during this Pacific tour should be someone who could keep up with Sulzberger at night. And so, in San Francisco, Sulzberger had decided to put Catledge to the test, and Catledge had passed.

  The nocturnal drinking and many discussions throughout their long trip gave Sulzberger the opportunity of knowing a great deal about Catledge; though the publisher did not reveal it at this time, he was considering Catledge for an executive position in the New York office, perhaps as the heir apparent to Edwin James as managing editor. Reston was also under consideration, but Reston was not anxious to leave Washington or to give up his reporting career. Sulzberger now also had a nephew on the staff, Cyrus L. Sulzberger—the son of Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s brother, Leo—but C. L. Sulzberger was enamored of life as a foreign correspondent, and the publisher was content to let him remain overseas. Catledge also was uncertain about the choice of moving permanently to New York. He had a home, a wife, and two daughters in Washington, and there was always the possibility of his replacing Krock. But this might take years, and Catledge, now in his early forties, saw in the New York job a more immediate opportunity. There seemed to be no other Timesman of his generation with a better chance of succeeding James. Catledge had had many years’ experience as a reporter on several newspapers, and he had worked as an editor in Chicago. He was ambitious, and he knew that Sulzberger liked him. Catledge would have to work under Edwin James, who could be a difficult man, but James was at least a Southerner and Catledge was sure that he could get along with him.

  And so Catledge accepted Sulzberger’s proposal to move to New York, and in January of 1945 Sulzberger named him an assistant managing editor. There were other assistant managing editors, of course, but all were older men, contemporaries of James, and when Catledge’s desk was placed in the spot nearest to James’s office, the newsroom observers were sufficiently convinced that Catledge would be the next managing editor. A few days after his arrival in New York, Catledge received a note from Krock that read: “Now that you’re my boss, won’t you please call me Arthur?”

  9

  During the six years that Catledge worked under Edwin James he was exceedingly careful, provoking James’s anger only once, and that was over James’s son, Michel.

  Michel James was a very thin, sinewy young man with sallow complexion and a lean, almost haunted look relieved now and then by an impish smile or grin. He dressed himself in narrow, rather bizarre clothes, lived near Gramercy Park in lower Manhattan, with a dog named Bidet, and frequented what were then considered the more far-out places in Greenwich Village. Had he been a young man in the Nineteen-sixties instead of the Forties, he would probably have become attracted to the hippies. But during the postwar years, the avant-garde was not so formalized nor magnetic, having no great unifying cause in dissent, and so what passed for Bohemia in New York consisted mainly of a few overly publicized old Village “characters,” a dozen deliberately dingy bars patronized by young writers and painters, by homosexual choreographers and designers, by not-very-radical student radicals from N.Y.U. and postdebutantes having their first and only affairs with Negroes—and there was also in this milieu a large segment of nondescript individualists who worked uptown, dressed with a casual flair, and lived as impulsively as their imagination and income would allow. Among this latter group was Michel James.

  He had been born in Paris during his father’s days there as a correspondent, and he was completely bilingual, speaking English perhaps better than his brusque and colloquial father, and speaking French as well as his Parisian mother. When Edwin James brought his family, which included two daughters, to live in New York City, Michel was sent to Princeton, from which he graduated in 1941. During the war, Michel joined the American Air Force, becoming a bombardier on a B-17, and Edwin James was never more proud of his son than he was then. He kept a framed photograph of Michel in uniform in his office at The Times, and he instructed a Times war correspondent to keep him informed on Michel’s activities in Europe. The correspondent’s reports were generally favorable and uneventful until one day when James heard that Michel, due to an illness, had missed a bombing mission—and it was during that mission that his B-17 had been shot down and the entire crew was lost.

  After the war, Michel worked briefly for the Associated Press and for Time magazine. Then in 1947 he was up for employment on The New York Times. He had been proposed by the paper’s chief foreign correspondent, C. L. Sulzberger, who from his office in Paris, and from his position as the publisher’s nephew, had attained virtual control over The Times’ foreign staff—it had become his overseas annex, and now he wished to add to it the son of The Times’ managing editor. And when Edwin James seemed amenable, Turner Catledge decided that he had better step in quickly and raise an objection. When he did, Edwin James became infuriated.

  Catledge’s reasoning was based on several factors. He felt that the hiring of a relatively inexperienced reporter who was the managing editor’s son would put a burden not only on the son but also on The Times’ other editors and on the paper as a whole. While Catledge recognized that nepotism knew no limits within The New York Times, and that Cyrus Sulzberger would be among the last to condemn the practice, Catledge believed that it should be curtailed whenever possible. Of course Catledge was privately suspicious of Sulzberger. If Sulzberger had Michel James under his wing in Europe as a kind of hostage, Sulzberger might carry even more weight with Edwin James, and there was no telling where that could lead. At the very least it might establish pro-Sulzberger policies that Catledge would inherit should he succeed James as the managing editor. Sulzberger, who was in his middle thirties, would be part of the organization for many years to come, and Catledge knew that if he were to achieve his ambition in unifying the paper, in breaking down the principalities and leveling
the dukes and reestablishing the power in the managing editor’s office, he had better act before the principalities became empires, as they had become in the cases of Markel’s Sunday department and Krock’s bureau in Washington.

  Cyrus Sulzberger had already established himself as a man of great boldness and drive. He was a tall, stern-looking man with almost opaque grayish eyes behind glasses, and he invariably wore a frayed trench coat in all weather—he rather typified the trench-coat type of journalist, the sort who not only liked to cover wars and to hobnob with the mighty, but also liked to influence world policy and the men who dictated it. There were few dictators, kings, or sultans in postwar Europe and Asia that Sulzberger had not met and interviewed—and from whom he had not received, at his request, autographed photographs which he later had framed and hung in his Paris office.