The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  A week later, MacGregor visited the Washington bureau, it being the practice then, as now, for foreign correspondents on home leave to spend time working or observing others at work in the major news departments within the Times building, and also to visit the bureau in Washington briefly. The Washington bureau chief was now James Reston, and in the course of a pleasant conversation Reston suggested that MacGregor spend about a month in the capital to get the feel of America again after being away so long in the Orient. MacGregor thought that this was a fine idea, and when Freedman called a few days later to ask when MacGregor would be leaving for Singapore, MacGregor informed him of Reston’s plan, to which Freedman asked, “Who is running the foreign desk, Scotty or me?” MacGregor relayed this to Reston, who later called Arthur Hays Sulzberger and also Freedman. Reston then told MacGregor, “Everything’s okay, just carry on.”

  MacGregor remained in Washington for the next three weeks, during which time Reston had lined up a number of appointments for him with government officials, and MacGregor felt that his time in Washington had been both enjoyable and profitable. After arriving in Singapore, MacGregor made out his expense account to cover his home leave, including the per diem charges for his stay in Washington, and mailed it to Freedman. Weeks later, MacGregor received a letter informing him that his Washington expenses had not been allowed. This item represented between $400 and $500. MacGregor wisely decided not to press the issue at this time, but rather to wait until he was again in New York to discuss it personally with Catledge. This he did in 1960, and he was finally reimbursed, although his relations with the foreign desk had now deteriorated beyond repair. After a few years in the newsroom as a general-assignment reporter and a rewrite man on the late-night shift, MacGregor resigned from The Times to become editor of an English-language publication that specializes in the coverage of South American affairs.

  As soon as Catledge was free to do so, he began making trips abroad and spending time with foreign correspondents, and he frequently was amazed at how well they lived, the number of servants they had, the size of their homes.

  In Mexico he visited the young bureau chief, Sydney Gruson, who explained at the outset, “Okay, Turner, while you’re here we can go off each morning and see people, and I’ll make phone calls, and I’ll pretend that this is the way I really work here. Or,” Gruson said, eyes lighting up, “we can do what I really do here. I own five race horses, I see them run two or three times a week, and I play golf three or four times a week. And, well, how do you want to do it, Turner?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Catledge said, “we’ll do it the way you always do it.”

  During the next week they had a magnificent time. They went to several parties, they bet on Gruson’s horses, losing every time, and went to the bullfights, where Gruson had arranged for a bull to be dedicated in honor of Catledge.

  Ten days later, after Catledge had returned to New York, Gruson received word that his Mexican assignment was over. He was to report back to the New York office, and some months later he was reassigned to Prague—with Catledge maintaining that his Mexico trip had nothing to do with it.

  Sydney Gruson did extremely well during his assignment in Eastern Europe, and his coverage of the anti-Stalinist revolt in Poland was so outstanding that he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He did not get it, but he did receive from Clifton Daniel, who by then was an assistant to Catledge, a short note in May of 1957:

  Dear Syd:

  This is a letter of non-congratulation. The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today. You should have had one. I’m sorry you didn’t get it.

  Sincerely,

  ECD

  Sydney Gruson folded this note and tucked it into his wallet, and he carried it with him for the next nine years.

  A year after his trip to Mexico, Catledge visited London and was told by the London bureau chief, Drew Middleton, about a bright young man named Sander Vanocur that Middleton wanted to hire for his bureau. Vanocur was then working for the Manchester Guardian, and, though still in his mid-twenties, he had already demonstrated talent not only as a reporter but also as a gracious and likable individual who moved easily through the British social and diplomatic scene, and Middleton was convinced that Vanocur would be an asset to The Times in London. Catledge, who was now insisting that all hiring be done in New York, said that he would be happy to consider Vanocur’s application when the young man was next in the United States. A few months later, during the winter of 1955, Sander Vanocur appeared in Catledge’s office.

  He was tall, husky, dark-haired, and rather handsome, and he wore a finely tailored suit and brown suede British shoes. Catledge was impressed. Vanocur had, on his own initiative, already gone to Washington to see Reston, having had the appointment arranged by Eric Sevareid, who had known Vanocur when the latter was a stringer for CBS. Reston had liked Vanocur, and so did Catledge; and so did Catledge’s special assistant on personnel selection, a former news editor named Richard D. Burritt—who was regarded by irreverent staff members as the office psychiatrist.

  Richard Burritt was not really a psychiatrist—this position being held by a licensed practitioner who spent one day a week in the Times’ Medical department on the thirteenth floor—but Burritt’s technique while interviewing an applicant, his tendency to ask personal questions and then to lean back and quietly listen, observing reactions, nodding, analyzing tendencies, nodding, noting the way in which the applicant had knotted his necktie, the width of his lapels-all this, and more, had earned for Richard D. Burritt the title of Times “shrink,” which he carried with an aura of either notoriety or esteem, depending largely on who was describing him. If Burritt was being described by an individual who had failed Burritt’s imaginary psycho-trial, who had been turned away for not being “Times material,” or who had been hired by Burritt as a copyboy but had never been promoted beyond that, then Richard D. Burritt was seen as a crazed contemptible corporate clod. But if described by an individual whom Burritt had favored and who had subsequently risen from copyboy to clerk, from clerk to reporter, then Burritt was characterized as a sensitive sage, a perceptive appraiser of men, an executive of rare flexibility. Burritt was more flexible than his critics would ever concede, a fact that was demonstrated when Burritt—who preferred hiring as copyboys tweedy graduates of Ivy League colleges who swore by The Times, who would eagerly accept employment in the Times building even as window washers—was approached one day by a skinny, six-foot five-inch pimply young army sergeant in uniform. Yet there was something about the applicant that intrigued Burritt, and, together with another Times personnel expert, Burritt proceeded to interrogate him. Everything was fine until Burritt asked the applicant to name the college from which he had graduated.

  “I did not attend college, sir,” he said.

  Burritt shook his head sadly, explaining that all copyboys on The Times had to be college graduates, adding that there were copyboys employed at that very moment who had Master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s.

  Suddenly and dramatically, the tall sergeant rose to his feet and announced, “Gentlemen, I regard the essence of education to be the enlightenment of the mind by the introduction of ideas!” As the two Times personnel experts looked at him in startled silence, he continued, “It is true that I am not a college graduate, but I am literate and articulate and I dwell in the realm of ideas.”

  “Yes,” Burritt interrupted, “we can see that you do, but you could not live in New York on a copyboy’s salary of $27 a week.”

  “Leave that to me,” he said, and he displayed such self-assurance that Burritt decided to hire him. Within a few years he had risen from copyboy to clerk, then to reporter, and soon he was one of the best reporters on the paper—McCandlish Phillips.

  In the case of Sander Vanocur, the situation was different. He was hired not as a copyboy but as a reporter, which in many ways was a great advantage over the way that McCandlish Phillips began on The Times. The copyboy’s life consisted of filling paste pots, fetchi
ng galley proofs, walking across the street to obtain coffee for the copyreaders and rewrite men, and also a quart of ale for the superintendent of copyboys, a white-haired stout ruddy man named Steve Moran, whose nightly consumption of ale is one of the unheralded legends of The New York Times. After Steve Moran had gone off duty, the copyboys came under the supervision of a tiny tyrannical man named Sam Solovitz who, at four feet eleven inches, resembled an aging jockey, which is what he claimed to be to any woman he met in a Times Square bar. Working under Steve Moran during the late afternoons, or under Sam Solovitz during the evenings, was no bargain in either case, and as a result many copyboys became so obsessed with a determination to escape their plight that they wrote; they wrote more than Proust; they stayed all night in the newsroom and borrowed a reporter’s typewriter and wrote a “Topics of The Times,” or a piece for The Times’ travel section, or an article for the Sunday Magazine, or anything that they could get into print and send to Richard Burritt as an example of the “initiative” that he always said was the hallmark of great Times reporters. And this is how dozens of copyboys got onto the reportorial staff.

  But for a young reporter already on the staff, like Sander Vanocur, the display of “initiative” could be a handicap. Or at least it was during the Nineteen-fifties when the city editor and his subordinate editors, traditionalists all, often misinterpreted initiative in young men as a sign of insubordination or gall or a desire to take stories away from older, more deserving Times reporters—particularly on those many days when there were not enough stories to go around. The young reporter was supposed to sit at his desk near the back of the newsroom and await his turn. Sometimes an assistant city editor would wander back and ask him to rewrite a three-paragraph publicity release, or sometimes the reporter would hear his name bellowed over the newsroom microphone, meaning that he was either to report to the city desk for some minor assignment outside the office (“Mr. Vanocur—city desk, please”), or that he should remain at his desk to answer an in-coming call from a funeral home (“Mr. Vanocur—obit, please”). Unlike the copyboys, who at least were kept busy during their working hours, the young reporters would sit and wait.

  Occasionally, they would be assigned to substitute for, or to work under, a veteran district reporter in the “East Side shack” or the “West Side shack”—which were two apartments within two buildings near the two major police precincts in mid-Manhattan, the first on East Fifty-first Street, the other on West Fifty-fourth Street; or they might be assigned to the shack in Brooklyn or the one in downtown Manhattan across the street from the headquarters of the New York City Police Department. This assignment consisted mainly of looking out the window at the police precinct to see if there was any “activity,” or listening to the Fire Department’s bell-code apparatus that was installed within the reporter’s shack and periodically clanged out bongs in a special rhythm and frequency that revealed the precise location of the fire that had just been reported somewhere in New York City. All veteran district reporters knew the firemen’s bell-code by heart, and they could tell within a second of hearing the bongs how large the fire was, where the fire was located, and whether or not it was worth covering—a decision that was influenced both by the size of the fire and by the progress of the card game that was going on among the reporters from all the newspapers that assigned men full time to shack duty. The shacks were actually like men’s clubs, and the reporters who were full-time district men (i.e., reporters who spent their entire working day in a particular shack until a four-alarm fire, or a gangland killing, or a riot demanded that they temporarily leave it and gather the necessary information and telephone it into a rewrite man in the newsroom before returning to the shack and the card game: the district men themselves did not write stories)—these reporters liked the life in the shack: it was like a cozy retreat from the wife and the city editor; it was an ideal spot for an older newspaperman who liked to play cards and did not mind the incessant bonging of bells.

  But for a younger reporter, life in a shack could be sheer misery. He could neither sleep nor read novels nor concentrate on his own free-lance writing because of the bells. And it was also very boring to spend hours looking out the window watching the front door of the police precinct—The Times did not publish that much crime news anyway. And so the young reporter soon joined the older men from the Journal-American, or the World-Telegram or the Herald Tribune, in a card game, leaving most of the work to be done by the tabloid men from the Daily News and the Mirror, which featured crime and which usually had reporters who had relatives either on the police force or in the Mafia. Vanocur had neither.

  Following his tour of the shacks and after a session as a Times correspondent in Queens, Sander Vanocur returned to the news-room and took his turn on night rewrite. The rewrite bank was a rather caste-conscious place at The Times during the Nineteen-fifties. The city editor, Frank S. Adams, who had been a first-rate rewrite man himself during his earlier reporting days, took great interest in the nocturnal performance of the rewrite bank, which consisted of about seven men clustered within three tight rows of desks near the front of the newsroom facing the city editor’s desk. The very best late-breaking stories went to the man who sat in the first row on the aisle—he was known as the “dean” of rewrite, and he was unquestionably the most trustworthy and imperturbable under deadline pressure. His name was George Barrett. The other rewrite men in the front row got good stories if they occurred when Mr. Barrett was out to dinner, which he had each night at nine o’clock after two J&B’s-with-water in Gough’s Chop House across the street from the Times building, or at Downey’s on Eighth Avenue—where he could always be reached should something really big occur.

  The reporters in the second row were a mixture of old reliables, men who were capable of writing but tired of running, and a few maturing reporters in their final polishing stage prior to becoming foreign correspondents. In the Fifties, this latter group included Tad Szulc, Bernard Kalb, and Wayne Phillips (no relation to McCandlish Phillips)—and these three were very fast and lively and they reflected the spirit that the city editor wanted to see on his rewrite bank, and he did not complain when they hung a sign on one of the pillars overlooking their desks that read: “Greatest Bank in the World—Human Interest Compounded Nightly.” These three men also played jokes regularly on the copyboys, and sometimes—using one of the telephones in the back of the newsroom—they would phone in a fake story to one of the older unsuspecting rewrite men, imitating the voice of one of the district reporters from the shacks, or perhaps the breathless correspondent that The Times had in Riverhead, Long Island—J. Harry Brown. J. Harry Brown had a very distinctive telephone style—rapid-fire, repeating every phrase: “Hello, Hello. This is J. Harry Brown, J. Harry Brown, in Riverhead, Riverhead, Long Island.

  Early one morning in Damascus, Syria, where Wayne Phillips was then assigned following his triumphant tour on rewrite, he was suddenly startled from his slumber by a telephone call in his hotel room that began: “Hello. Hello. This is J. Harry Brown, J. Harry Brown, in Riverhead, Riverhead, Long Island.” Wayne Phillips had been drinking arrack in an Oriental cabaret until dawn, and the familiar staccato of J. Harry Brown brought him bolt upright in bed—until the caller finally identified himself as Bernard Kalb, Phillips’ former colleague on rewrite, who was being dispatched by The Times to Djakarta, and whose plane had briefly stopped at the Damascus airport. Phillips, overjoyed to hear Kalb, quickly dressed, rushed down through the hotel lobby, jumped into a taxicab, and roared off to the airport, where he found Kalb in the terminal. They had coffee and reminisced until Kalb’s plane was ready for takeoff. On Phillips’ way back to the hotel he encountered along the road a convoy of troops in trucks and tanks, security guards, road checks, dust, and confusion. “What’s going on,” Phillips yelled to his driver, “an invasion?” The driver stopped to inquire, and then he said to Phillips, “That’s what they want to know. From the way you took off for the airport they thought an attack had s
tarted.”

  Sander Vanocur worked on rewrite, but a great story never occurred while Mr. Barrett was out to dinner, or while most of the other rewrite men were busy or away from their desks or gone for the night—which had been Wayne Phillips’ good fortune while on rewrite a year before when the poet Maxwell Bodenheim was discovered murdered in a dingy furnished room on the fringes of the Bowery; and which had happened to another young rewrite man, Max Frankel, a year later, in 1956, when after midnight there was the radio flash on the Andrea Doria-Stockholm collision at sea. Frankel, who was twenty-six, did a superb job of organizing the facts and writing the story clearly and swiftly, and at 2:34 a.m. the press machines began to roll with Frankel’s front-page story and by-line under an across-the-page headline: “Andrea Doria and Stockholm Collide; 1,134 Passengers Abandon Italian Ship in Fog at Sea.” The next day, The Times’ top reporters, Meyer Berger, Milton Bracker, Peter Kihss, and others took over the story—but Frankel had been the newsroom hero of the night, and later that year, shortly after the outbreak of the Hungarian revolution, he was sent to Vienna to help in The Times’ coverage of the revolution and the refugees streaming out of the country. Frankel’s foreign assignment was listed as “temporary,” but he never returned to the New York newsroom. After Vienna he served as a vacation replacement in Belgrade for one month, and then he was assigned to The Times’ Moscow bureau, where his major assignments included Khrushchev’s rise, Zhukov’s fall, and the discovery of a young American pianist—Van Cliburn.