The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  The New York staff, the largest of all the departmental news staffs of The Times, was undoubtedly the most tradition-bound and also the most uncoordinated. Each morning hundreds of people would file into the newsroom and would either seat themselves behind vast rows of desks like parishioners at church, or they would disappear in the distance behind some pillar or interior wall, some dark nook or glass-enclosed maze on the doors of which was printed “Science” or “Real Estate” or “Drama” or “Sports” or “Society”—and even when Catledge stood outside his own office gazing around the newsroom through his binoculars he could never see at a single sweep everybody on his staff nor did he precisely know what they were all doing there. For this information, he would have to consult his various and sundry subeditors, and sometimes he wondered what they were all doing there. Sometimes it seemed that the brigades of Times employees posted throughout the third floor were not really all working for The Times but were rather occupying positions from which to run a mail-order business, or to write magazine articles or novels, or to use the telephones to supervise a trucking business (indeed, one man did exactly this from his desk in The Times’ morgue), or to use the phones to place bets with a bookmaker—although Edwin James’s bookmaker, who was employed as a news clerk near the bullpen, was still very much in operation.

  The newsroom was in many ways like New York City itself—vast, varied, overpopulated, confusing, and characterized by a heterogeneous assortment of skilled workers, geniuses, oddballs, and drones. When a great disaster occurred in New York City—such as when an airplane hit the Empire State Building, or when New York’s electrical power failed, or when, a few hours away, two ocean liners, the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm, collided at sea, killing several passengers, including Times correspondent Camille Cianfarra—The Times’ city editor had merely to pick up his loudspeaker to summon dozens of men and dispatch them to the scene. In the course of such coverage, Timesmen often met other Timesmen for the first time. While these individual Timesmen were perhaps not as dynamic or hard-working as some reporters from other newspapers, The Times always overwhelmed the opposition by sheer numbers—it had more men to dredge up more facts, and then these facts were funneled into the newsroom, were sorted by clerks, were scrutinized by echelons of editors, then were passed down into the hands of a few superb rewrite men with fast fingers and well-organized minds. The newsroom remained generally quiet during the coverage of cataclysms, and when there was no momentous news event to preoccupy the staff, the men in the newsroom seemed to totter between total inertia and vague distant distractions. It would take years for Catledge to fathom the mysteries of the place, and to know all the people who worked there—the baseball writers who rarely appeared in the office, the ballet critic who fluttered through at night, the old white-haired scrivener of chess tournaments who wore a heavy overcoat in summer, the music critic who never wore an overcoat even in snowstorms, the chief copyreader on the obituary desk who never removed his hat in the office, the happy clerk in the telegraph room who during his off hours was an undertaker, the quiet clerk in the telegraph room who, unknown to The Times, was employed by the CIA.

  The newsroom was many things to many people; and seemed at times to be operated, as one visiting correspondent observed, somewhat along the lines of a Paris café. In the late afternoon, he noted, the reporters at their desks would lean back in their chairs, sip coffee, read the newspapers, and watch other people walking back and forth in front of them. There was often a card game at one of the desks, always a conventional gathering at another desk, and there was also a late-afternoon tranquillity about the place that induced sleep. Some of the men and women who were having love affairs would, after the senior editors had disappeared into the 4 p.m. news conference, slip away to one of the hotels in the Times Square area, having only to remember to place an occasional precautionary call to a friend in the newsroom and to return before six-twenty, for that was when the city editor would stroll along the aisles giving his traditional “good-night” to individuals on the early shift. There was one reporter named Albert J. Gordon who had once left for home at the end of the day without a “good-night”; later reached by phone he was told that the editor wished to discuss with him a most important matter—now, and in person. Gordon lived at an inconvenient distance from the office, and it was also then raining heavily, but he reappeared in the newsroom as soon as he could. There, wet and sullen, he stood for a few seconds in front of the city editor’s desk until the editor looked up and said, almost with a smile, “Good-night, Mr. Gordon.”

  The city editor and his assistant editors also followed tradition when they assigned stories to the staff each morning; the best local stories were given to the front-row veterans, and the younger reporters near the back usually ended up with such stories as a watermain break in Yorkville or a small fire in Flushing, or were sent to Watertown, New York, to cover the training activities of the Seventy-seventh Division, General Julius Ochs Adler’s old outfit, a traditional “must” on the assignment sheet. Younger reporters who wrote with style were never completely trusted by the city editor and his associates, the assumption being that “writers” would compromise the facts in the interest of better literature. Such writers therefore were usually assigned to cover the weather or parades or the Bronx Zoo and the circus—where, if the quotes were brightened a bit, there was a reasonably good chance that the clowns and animals would not complain in letters to the publisher.

  There was a traditional manner, too, in the way the New York editors planned the coverage of those news events that occurred on an annual basis, such things as the opening of the opera season, the Easter parade, the governor’s budget message, the horse show, the debutante parties at the Plaza, the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center—any particular occasion that had been successfully and uncontroversially covered and printed in The Times last year and the year before, and the year before that, could be (and usually would be) covered in the same way this year. The layout would be identical, with the same size photographs and poses and an almost identical headline and lead as had appeared in The Times a year ago; and often the same reporter was assigned every year to the same story. Except for the alteration in the date and certain names, the reporter’s story written last year could have sufficed for this year and next.

  While Turner Catledge did not wish to tamper with tradition at The Times, he did think that some New York editors went to the extreme, although it was understandable that the newsroom would be the hub of habit within The Times: it had been so long under the personal scrutiny of senior editors who were Ochs fundamentalists, who had been indoctrinated by Van Anda’s Swiss Guard, that the subordinate editors who worked in the newsroom found it easier to follow a safe formula than to try anything new. Even Arthur Hays Sulzberger, with all his modernism and willingness to make concessions to a changing world, was nevertheless drawn back occasionally to the methods of the past. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, Sulzberger sent for the old Times files to see how Lincoln’s death had been handled in 1865 by The Times’ original publisher, Henry J. Raymond, and Sulzberger noted the black mourning borders that separated each column of type of the front page. Then Sulzberger sent for a copy of The Times on the day of Adolph Ochs’s death announcement in 1935, observing the black borders that framed the picture of Ochs at the top of page one; and Sulzberger finally decided to make the Ochs page a model for The Times’ front page in 1945 that announced President Roosevelt’s death. Like Ochs, Roosevelt was displayed with a black-bordered four-column picture in the center of page one, near the top.

  While such direct supervision of The Times’ makeup was uncharacteristic of the way that Sulzberger normally functioned as publisher, he did pay particular attention to typography and photographs, and this may explain in part his sudden indignation—and the rather drastic results to his picture editor—on the day that The Times published a photograph of Marilyn Monroe kissing Joe DiMaggio.

  The pictu
re editor was a tall, casual, easy-going Southerner named John Randolph. Randolph was a personal friend of Turner Catledge, having worked under Catledge on the Chicago Sun as picture editor, and he had also worked with Catledge on the Baltimore Sun. In 1949, when Catledge began to have influence under James, he helped to get Randolph onto The Times as a copyreader. And in 1952, a year after Catledge became the managing editor, he made Randolph the picture editor, thinking that it would be a very pleasant job for a very pleasant man, and thinking, too, that John Randolph—who had demonstrated a lively style as a caption writer in Chicago and had also shown talent as a free-lance writer for Collier’s and Esquire and for magazines devoted to hunting and fishing, which were Randolph’s passionate hobbies—would enliven the captions and headlines that accompanied photographs in The Times.

  While Randolph had no talent or ambition as an administrator, he did enjoy working with the deskmen and photographers on The Times’ picture desk, he did supply some spark to caption writing, and he certainly did enjoy the extra money that his job as picture editor had brought him. During Randolph’s long career as an itinerant newsman, he had never saved money, nor could he ever drive himself to earning more until he was absolutely broke. Hunting, fishing, and gambling at cards were always more enticing than writing articles for magazines, and the only reason he wrote his first article for Esquire in 1937, on the training of bird dogs, was to pay for the birth of his daughter.

  Randolph was then married to a former schoolteacher whom he had met one night at a house party in Vermont. She was the daughter of a moderately prosperous New England farmer and sheep breeder, and when she was introduced to Randolph he was unshaven and hungover and claiming to be a newspaperman from Washington, D.C., who had come up to Vermont looking for Dillinger. When her parents finally met Randolph, they were very skeptical. He had no land or money, and his credentials were unimpressive. Born in Louisiana to a roving country newsman, Randolph had spent one year at the University of Alabama, another at George Washington University, and had played a little semiprofessional football, which accounted for his broken nose. He had shifted from newspaper to newspaper in and around Washington, D.C., where he occasionally also drove a taxicab. In Washington he was known as the only cab driver who read Shakespeare on the job, sometimes turning down a fare if he was particularly engrossed.

  But when the courtship between Randolph and the schoolteacher continued through the mail after he had returned to Washington, her parents finally began to accept him, and her father was particularly impressed with the graceful letter that Randolph had written requesting consent to the marriage.

  With the coming of World War II, after Randolph had worked on various copydesks and had done public-relations work for the Roney-Plaza Hotel in Miami, he applied to the Office of War Information, was trained as a linguist, and was sent to China. His job there was to furnish propaganda that would be published in pamphlets and be distributed in the hope of encouraging wider Chinese participation in the fight against Japan. But the program was largely a fiasco because, as Randolph later explained to his wife, the Chinese generals, in addition to being very corrupt, were reluctant to engage their troops in battle because to do so would result in a loss of men and hence of status, power, and—most important—supplies that could be sold on the black market for large sums of money.

  After the war, and through his fortunate friendship with Turner Catledge, Randolph came to The New York Times, but he never really liked living in New York City nor in its suburbs. The suburbs, while not the city, were not the country either—and so, soon Randolph had moved his wife and children to Colrain, Massachusetts, and he took the train up there on weekends: he preferred two days in the country and five alone in New York City to seven in the suburbs. He spent his evenings in New York playing cards in the newsroom, a nightly game that The Times’ executives tolerated because it kept many extra men in the office long after their “goodnight”—and thus they were readily available should a big story break.

  The marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio in January of 1954 was not momentous news to The Times, but it was news, and a brief account of the ceremony was scheduled for page 21, and it was also decided to use a photograph of the couple. Randolph had several pictures to choose from, but they all seemed essentially the same: the couple, just married, standing in a posed embrace for the San Francisco photographers along the sidewalk outside of City Hall.

  So, Randolph routinely picked one picture from out of the pile, marked it for a two-column cut, and put it aside to be submitted later to the bullpen, which passes on all photographs before they are sent up to the Engraving department. The picture showed Marilyn Monroe with her head back and her mouth slightly open, and DiMaggio with his lips puckered and his eyes closed. There seemed nothing particularly vulgar or exceptional about the picture—at least Randolph did not think so, nor did Theodore Bernstein and the other bullpen editors who later passed on it.

  The next morning, John Randolph was no less surprised than dozens of other Timesmen to hear that the picture in The Times had caused a “great flap” in the publisher’s office, and that Randolph was no longer The Times’ picture editor. Randolph at first could not believe it. He could not believe, nor could the other Timesmen, that Miss Monroe’s open-mouthed French kiss would so offend the sensitivities of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, or Iphigene Sulzberger, or whoever may have registered an objection in the publisher’s office. Of course, it was true that there was an incredible double standard where sex was concerned at The Times; that is, while sex has been the traditional excess of so many of the paper’s most prominent reporters, editors, executives, and shrine keepers—“Drink is the bane of the Herald Tribune,” one old saying went, “sex is the curse of The Times”—it was equally true that the personal habits of Times-men rarely if ever tainted the purity of the paper itself, which remains comparatively Victorian. Young Times reporters writing about sex education or birth control or deviates are forewarned about being “too clinical,” and Times editors have been known to have the genitals of dogs airbrushed out of photographs before printing them, and to have cloaked the cleavage of some buxom opera sopranos. But on the other hand, the Monroe photograph was not “cheesecake”—she was wearing an unrevealing black dress—and she and DiMaggio were married and it did not seem inappropriate to publish a mildly passionate wedding-day kiss in Mr. Ochs’s newspaper. Or so Randolph thought.

  In any event, he was out as the picture editor. He was not embittered nor angered by Sulzberger’s decision, which was relayed to him by Catledge—just surprised. Catledge seemed deeply embarrassed by the whole incident. He asked Randolph more than once if he had sent to the bullpen other pictures of the DiMaggio-Monroe wedding; if Randolph had, then the choice would have been the bullpen’s, and Catledge might have been able to spread the blame around and permit his friend to remain as the picture editor. But Randolph answered that he had submitted only the one picture that had appeared in the paper. He was willing to quietly accept the entire blame, and he did.

  Catledge assured Randolph that his salary would not be cut—he would merely be transferred as a copyreader to the national-news desk on the other side of the newsroom, and there was in Catledge’s manner the hint that Randolph, who had played the game well, would somehow be taken care of after things had cooled off.

  Two years later Catledge heard that there was to be an opening in the Sports department—the writer of the “Wood, Field, and Stream” column, who had held the job for nineteen years, had resigned to accept an important management job at a big resort in the Bahamas, and Catledge thought that Randolph might like to take over the column—which carried with it a large expense account and the freedom to travel around the country to hunt and fish and to write about it for The Times. Randolph was delighted by the offer, and if there was ever a Timesman who was ideally suited for a particular assignment, Randolph was suited for this one—and his column became immediately one of the most readable features in the paper. It wa
s not so much his knowledge of the outdoors or his expertise as a fisherman or hunter that brought distinction to his writing; it was almost the opposite. Randolph was neither a lucky fisherman nor a great one. While he was a good shot, he was not superb. He was like a million other men who hunt and fish merely because they enjoy the act of doing so, and particularly enjoy escaping from a clamorous city and wandering through the woods or relaxing on a boat; and a typical Randolph column began:

  The only trouble with this story is that it is not a lie. That is too bad, because it could raise perceptibly the sorry level of fishing lies, which, taking them by and large, are paltry things.

  It is the only department in which fishing has not progressed. Research carried out by seven doctors of philosophy for four years and endorsed by three bishops has proved that no really good fishing lie has been written since Moby Dick.…

  It was generally conceded within The Times’ newsroom that John Randolph had the softest job on the paper. He was the only Timesman who got paid for playing. His columns appeared from warm sunny places during winter, from cool lakes during summer. On the longer, more interesting trips he usually took his wife, not only because he liked her company, but also because without her he was nearly helpless. The simplest gadget, whether it was a can opener or a lighter, baffled him and sometimes infuriated him. He was endlessly absentminded, leaving almost every hat he ever owned, and a few overcoats, on trains. He burned cigarette holes in most of his suits, never filled in check stubs, and once sat fishing while his tackle box floated out past his feet and sank.