The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  He was a terrible driver with little judgment, and he needed a valet-chauffeur and personal manager, which was his wife. He loved to complain about “TV jolly boys,” hated all commercials, yet he would sit mesmerized before one and then complain loudly when it was over to his wife: “Jean, don’t buy that.” A political cynic, he thought that all politicians were corrupt in one way or another. He was impatient with theories and intellectual “preciousness,” but he was awed by academic honors and pursuits (an Oxford don was the most fascinating creature he could think of), and he was hurt and disappointed when his very intelligent daughter, Belden, when elected to Phi Beta Kappa, failed to buy the key.

  Randolph could not name five good contemporary novelists or dramatists, but he was entranced by Shakespeare, Cervantes, Gibbon, and Twain. His own column in The Times had among its readers many literary figures, one being the novelist Vance Bourjaily, who wrote in one of his books that it was through reading Randolph in The Times “that I first realized that it is possible to write of hunting with wit and gentleness, in a spirit of equal love for the creatures hunted and for the follies of those of us who hunt them.” Randolph neither knew nor cared what was happening in contemporary music, but he loved opera, Verdi in particular; he always said that he wanted the “Triumphal March” from Aïda played at his funeral. It wasn’t.

  He died of lung cancer in 1961 at a hospital in Massachusetts. He had written the column in The Times for five years, and soon another Timesman filled Randolph’s space on the sports page. Randolph spent the last several weeks of his life sitting in a hospital bed, being kept alive on oxygen and miracle drugs until there remained only the husk of the man. He drifted through dope vaguely from consciousness to semiconsciousness. Speaking left him exhausted; listening, only less so. And so he said little and waited with his family and friends in the hospital, but at one point before he died he looked toward the corner and said to his daughter: “Belden, get me my fishing rod.”

  She had to say that it was not there. He looked a little confused and closed his eyes, seemingly exhausted. Then his hands moved for maybe thirty seconds, not in the random way that the deeply drugged move their hands, but with some direction which at first his daughter did not understand. Then the pattern of his motions made it obvious. He was fly casting.

  10

  For several thousand Americans, their first and only interior glimpse of the Times building was provided on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1954 when a CBS camera crew from Omnibus was admitted to the newsroom to do a live telecast of Timesmen working on the next day’s edition. It was, like most Omnibus shows, a dignified and erudite presentation, enhanced as always by the soft British voice of Alistair Cooke. While the cameras moved around the newsroom focusing on the bent heads of copy-readers and the furrowed brows of reporters tapping typewriters, Alistair Cooke described the scene in hushed, almost reverential tones that Adolph Ochs would have approved of and appreciated. Cooke’s commentary revealed something of the size of the staff, the enormous effort and expense that is required to publish the paper each day, and then he moved across the newsroom to speak with a handsome, gray-haired man who stood leaning, arms folded, against a desk near the bullpen—Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who had come into the office on this Sunday to participate in the show.

  Sulzberger spoke warmly of the staff, conveying great pride in them and modesty about himself, and he also gave his views on the role of a free and responsible press in a democracy. Then the cameras moved upstairs to observe a large, broad-shouldered, serious man seated behind his desk—Charles Merz, reading from an editorial that he had just written for tomorrow’s Times. The cameras later caught the mood and clatter of the composing room on the fourth floor—the ink-stained printers wearing aprons and picking, pecking, pounding with rubber mallets upon iron tables of type; the silent men who sat straight-spined behind large linotype machines, lightly gliding their fingers over the keyboards amid a tinkling tune of words on paper turning to metal. The cameras also moved into the managing editor’s office during a conference, where, at the head of the table, relaxed and avuncular, sat Catledge. On his right was Theodore Bernstein; on his left, Robert Garst. Across from him, at the opposite end of the table, was the city editor, Frank S. Adams, flanked by the foreign-news editor, Emanuel Freedman, and the national-news editor, Raymond O’Neill. Along the sides of the table sat other editors, including the picture editor, John Radosta, who had replaced John Randolph after the DiMaggio-Monroe incident.

  Although a few editors were made mildly self-conscious by the presence of cameras and microphones, they generally conducted themselves with remarkable poise, and they apparently proved to be of great interest to the television audience. Seconds after the show had ended, the telephone switchboard at The Times began to light up with hundreds of congratulatory calls from readers around the nation, some of them old retired Timesmen who said that the show had made them very nostalgic. There were also several telegrams of praise from Times correspondents who had watched the show from their bureaus in major American cities—Richard Johnston wired in from Chicago, Seth King from Des Moines, Gladwin Hill from Los Angeles, Lawrence Davies from San Francisco, as did several others, including Reston from Washington, whose telegram to Catledge read: “You all did fine. Guy just called up and said he wanted to subscribe to The Times. Sounded as if he’d never heard about it till today.”

  It was an altogether satisfying day at The Times, one of handshaking and fraternal harmony that confirmed, if only briefly, the picture of unity that had been presented on the television screen. And this picture no doubt reflected positively on the Timesmen themselves, reminding them of the grandeur of the institution and of their meaningful contributions to its purpose, which was something that they had not given much thought to during the past year—a most unhappy year at The Times. Three months before the Omnibus show, there had been a photoengravers’ strike that had been supported by most of The Times’ news staff, and as a result The New York Times failed to publish for the first time in its history. The strike, though it lasted less than two weeks, disrupted not only the publication of the newspaper, but it also inspired deep personal dissension among certain members of the staff: those reporters and copyreaders who crossed the picket line outside the Times building had incurred the animosity of the vast majority that had not. And even after the strike had been settled, the strikebreakers within the newsroom were quietly ostracized by Timesmen who now looked to the labor leaders for guidance, not to the spirit of Ochs.

  The paper had grown beyond the pale of paternalism, or so it seemed to many on the staff who were aware of top management’s desire for a more efficiently run operation—and if this were the case, then the staff members would become more self-protective and practical, more committed to unionism and less romantic about The Times. This new attitude was soon apparent in the casual way that certain reporters began to submit overtime slips to the city editor whenever they had worked a half-hour or so beyond their normal quitting time. In the old days, Timesmen would have been too embarrassed to do this, thinking it an honor and pleasure to occasionally work overtime for a newspaper that usually demanded so little of them and had a traditional policy of early good-nights. But the old thinking was fading fast in the newsroom, and while Omnibus briefly reminded Timesmen of what the paper represented to the nation, and while this had its salubrious playback in the newsroom for a while, it did not last for very long. Three months after the show, Meyer Berger, the most honored and admired reporter on the New York staff, told a few editors that he was thinking of quitting The Times.

  They could not believe it. Berger had been a Timesman since 1928, and except for one year at The New Yorker between 1937 and 1938, he had been the star of the staff, a tall, thin, shy, gentle man with a long nose and soft inquiring dark eyes who sat in the front row and talked to the copyboys, clerks, and reporters who usually stood around his desk; he would regale them with humorous stories, would advise them on the Magazine pieces
or “Topics of The Times” they were trying to write, and he would listen patiently while they spoke of personal problems. And then, as his deadline approached, he would turn to his typewriter and, within a half-hour, he would produce a dramatic 1,000-word article about a gangland murder that he had covered earlier in the day, or a poignant side-walk scene that he had observed while coming to work; or he might produce a prose poem to New York:

  New York’s voice speaks mystery.… It has a soft, weird music, a symphony of wind at high altitudes, of muted traffic in endless serpentine twisting over city hills and grades, of jet hiss and propeller thrum, of the hoarse call of tugs on many waters, of great liners standing in from the broad sea.…

  There had practically been a work stoppage in the newsroom in 1932 when Berger’s stories on the Al Capone tax trial in Chicago began to arrive, page by page, on the telegraph machines: copyboys would grab the pages, reading them as they slowly walked to the copydesk; then the copyreaders would read and reread every word of the courtroom drama and the dialogue of Al Capone; finally the editors would take their turn, being as absorbed as the others before sending the story up to the printers on the floor above.

  When Berger wrote similar pieces about the tax trial of Dutch Schultz, even Schultz read them with grudging admiration, although he was offended that Berger had quoted one source as saying that Schultz was a “pushover for a blonde.” When the gangster next saw Berger, he called him over and complained about that line.

  “But it’s the truth, isn’t it?” Berger asked.

  “Yes,” Schultz said, “but what kind of language is that to use in The New York Times?”

  In 1947, when the first American war dead, in 6,248 coffins, were transported by ship from Europe into New York harbor, Berger produced a journalistic classic—as he did in 1949 when a war veteran named Howard Unruh went berserk in the streets of Camden, New Jersey, and with a pistol shot thirteen people before surrendering to the police. Berger had spent six hours retracing Unruh’s footsteps, had interviewed fifty people who had seen parts of the rampage, and then he sat down and reconstructed the whole scene in a 4,000-word article in two and one-half hours:

  … Men and women dodged into open shops, the women shrill with panic, men hoarse with fear. No one could quite understand for a time what had been loosed in the block.

  Unruh first walked into John Pilarchik’s shoe repair shop near the north end of his own side of the street. The cobbler, a 27-year-old man who lives in Pennsauken Township, looked up open-mouthed as Unruh came to within a yard of him. The cobbler started up from his bench but went down with a bullet in his stomach. A little boy who was in the shop ran behind the counter and crouched there in terror. Unruh walked out into the sunlit street …

  Meyer Berger won the Pulitzer Prize for that story, and he sent the $1,000 prize money to Unruh’s mother. Berger then spent most of the next two years researching and writing the official history of The Times, which in 1951 was marking its hundredth anniversary. This was perhaps the most difficult assignment of his life, not because the task was so formidable for his great reporting talent, but because as the “official” book on The Times it had to be approved by various members of the Ochs, Sulzberger, and Adler families, as well as by some senior executives, and it seemed virtually impossible to please them all. There were many deletions and revisions on the book, and when it was published in 1951, and in spite of its critical and commercial success, Berger confessed to a few friends that he sometimes wished his name were not on the book’s cover.

  And now, in the summer of 1954, after having written his “About New York” column in The Times for more than a year, he was again depressed by a few negative reactions to it that he had received from the publisher’s office and from an editor in the newsroom. Finally the editor himself felt compelled to record Berger’s statements about quitting and to send copies of the memo to other editors and also to the publisher’s office:

  July 8, 1954—

  This is a memorandum on a conversation I had with Mike Berger this afternoon at his instance. He apparently was disturbed at recent evidences of some dissatisfaction with his column which were capped by the criticism I made of the piece he had written for last Monday.… He is, of course, very sensitive to criticism and seems to have a feeling that although the column is well liked by readers, it is not well thought of inside the office. I told Mike that he should pay less attention—as I do—to comments within the building than to the reactions that the promotion department reports, which have been uniformly favorable.…

  Turning to specific comments that have been made about the columns, he referred to a suggestion, which he attributed to the Publisher, that the column should be more topical. He said he did not think that the Publisher realized the difficulty involved in trying to write on top of the news and still keep ahead of the game on future columns. I replied that I thought only some of the columns need be topical, perhaps one out of four, and again offered him the use of a leg-man to help him if he thought it advisable. He again did not seem to like this idea. He mentioned also “tear-jerker” columns, which he thought the Publisher was interested in. He said that while those were all right the mail he receives indicates that what people are most interested in is material about old New York. Again, I told him I thought it was a question of changing pace from time to time.…

  July 9, 1954—

  Today I understand that he is still in a rather depressed frame of mind and is still talking about the idea of quitting.…

  Berger did not quit. He continued with his column through July and August, then he took a month’s vacation. He returned, somewhat refreshed, but later he again began to complain about the number of changes that he had been ordered to make in his column, and of instances where his column had been killed entirely, requiring that he insert another in its place. He continued to write the column, but said that he did not really like it. He would have preferred to be what he had always been—a reporter.

  In the fall of 1954, with the death of Anne O’Hare McCormick, Cyrus Sulzberger took over her three-times-a-week column on the editorial page. This was a full-time job and it meant that Sulzberger could no longer devote time to influencing the foreign staff, for which Catledge was thankful, and Catledge was also pleased to announce within the office that the title “chief foreign correspondent,’ which Sulzberger had held for ten years, would forthwith be terminated. It was also Catledge’s present hope that his foreign-news editor in New York, Emanuel R. Freedman, would become established as the one and only channel through which foreign correspondents should deal with the paper. But some of the correspondents continued either through habit or design to write to Cyrus Sulzberger, or to the managing editor’s office, or to the publisher himself. A principal offender was a correspondent in the Far East named Greg MacGregor, who one day received a cable: “CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY YOU CONTINUALLY BYPASSING THIS DESK STOP PLEASE EXPLAIN STOP FREEDMAN.”

  MacGregor was confused by the cable, and when he met up with a friend, Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News, who had recently visited New York, MacGregor asked if he had ever heard of anyone named Freedman on The Times.

  “He’s your boss, you goddamned fool,” Beech said. “He’s the foreign editor.”

  After a bit of research, MacGregor discovered that Freedman had been the foreign editor since 1948. MacGregor tried to reply to Freedman’s cable as diplomatically as he could but he suspected that this misunderstanding would not easily be rectified, and, in retrospect, he was sure that he had been right.

  Although MacGregor had for years sent photographs to Markel’s Sunday department from the Far East—such photographs as battle scenes in Korea, or activities in Formosa, or pictures from other places where he was working as a reporter—MacGregor received a letter from Freedman one day that said, in effect, “Do not forget that your paycheck comes from the third floor.” The Sunday department is on the eighth floor. So MacGregor stopped sending pictures to the Sunday department. But wh
ile in New York on home leave in 1955, MacGregor was seen by Markel in the Times building and was asked why he had ceased to submit pictures. MacGregor said that there was a reason, but that he would rather not discuss it. Markel quickly assured him that anything said would remain confidential, and he pressed for the explanation. After MacGregor had given it, Markel remained silent for a moment, then looking at MacGregor, he asked, “Do you think you’re working for Manny Freedman or for The New York Times?”

  MacGregor replied that he felt exactly the same way, but he asked that Markel look at the situation realistically—he had already had a few misunderstandings with Freedman, and he did not want to risk having another one. Markel reassured MacGregor that there would be no problem, adding that he would be having lunch with Freedman in a day or two, that he would broach the matter very discreetly, and that he was confident that MacGregor’s expert photography would again be available to the Sunday Magazine and the “Review” section.

  When MacGregor next saw Freedman a few days later, he looked very dour. Freedman waved him over, saying, “Ah, about that letter you got—I think that you have misunderstood. Or maybe I did not put it just right. I just meant that you should never sacrifice time from your regular news coverage to go out and shoot pictures for the Magazine. But of course, we’re all working for the same paper.”

  As Freedman, his eyes looking down at his desk, continued to mumble and shuffle papers, MacGregor interrupted to express the hope that there were no hard feelings. Absolutely not, Freedman said, no hard feelings—but MacGregor did not really think that Freedman sounded as if he meant it. (MacGregor later learned from a friend in the newsroom that Markel had taken the issue up with Sulzberger before mentioning it to Freedman.)