by Gay Talese
While Catledge and other senior editors in New York trumpeted the call for brighter writing, they often did not really seem to want it when they got it; or they did not know how to get it into the paper when they got it. The decisive power lay with the deskmen, the copyreaders—finally it was they who decided what was bright, what was not, what was fit to print. Since most copyreaders were not known for their sense of humor—nor was their thankless job likely to produce one, nor to sustain one if they ever possessed one—the reporter attempting to inject brightness into his reporting of a Senate session was combating great odds, even if what had happened in the Senate might have justified a lighter treatment. The Times traditionally covered the Senate with drab restraint. It was as if The Times, despite Catledge’s pronouncements, really wanted to be boring about the Senate and other official government bodies. The Times was awed by what was official. It was easier, safer, to report accurate boring accounts of government activity than accurate interesting accounts. And so in The Times the Senate was a body of stone, a stagnant stream of statistics and measures—not a vibrant congregation of human mannerisms and conceits, drives and ambitions, that somehow responded to the vibrations of the nation. The Senators themselves, and the cognoscenti in Washington, were not displeased with The Times’ reporting, for they were among the few who could read between the lines and fill in the blanks; but average readers hardly ever got a full and penetrating picture, and therefore had little idea of what the Senate was really like until they themselves had visited it, and then they were often amazed at how vital it seemed. But in The Times, if there was a descriptive paragraph or two about the interior of the Senate, the mood, the atmosphere, it was usually buried near the bottom of the story, and was carried over into an inside page. A reader had to scan a thousand words to reach the few revealing lines. This was not true of Times reporting on the unofficial phases of American life—business, industry, fashion, sports, the arts—about these The Times could be expressive, clear, and critical—it seemed so much easier for a Timesman to write honestly and frankly about Arthur Miller than about Senator Wayne Morse.
Of course, reporters like Allen Drury could always fight harder with the copydesk, if the deskmen were the actual repressors of readability—indeed, some Times reporters fought constantly with the desk, challenging each change, but this was not as easily done in Washington as in New York. A New York reporter working in the newsroom at night might see an early galley proof of his story, might learn the name of the offending copyreader and argue with him in a corner of the newsroom after the first edition had gone to press, possibly persuading the copyreader to restore a choice phrase for the second edition. But the Washington reporter did not see The Times until the following morning. Any complaint that he made was after the fact, and it was also quite formal—it had to be channeled through Reston, who might relay it to Dryfoos or Catledge, and then it would filter down through Daniel or Bernstein to the national-news editor, to the assistant national-news editor, to the head of the national copydesk, finally to the copyreader. It was unwise to berate copyreaders for tampering with a reporter’s prose style unless the editing had distorted the facts or the meaning of the story. The New York Times was not a writers’ colony, after all, and confrontations with copyreaders might disrupt their morale and diligence, might eventually lead to a permissiveness on their part, or a fear of making changes, that could eventually allow careless or tasteless writing to appear in The Times. The copyreaders were the enforcers of discipline, Ochsian disciples who upheld traditional standards, and they should not be undermined. Since “bright” writing was subjected to the copyreaders’ definition of what was bright, the reporter could only do his best and not read his story after it had appeared in The Times, as some reporters did; or he could fight constantly with the desk, as other reporters did; or he could do what Allen Drury did—give The Times what it seemed to want, and preserve his energy and talent for his outside writing.
Each day Drury would cover the Senate, would write accurately if uninspiredly, would file his story through the bureau to New York, and then promptly leave the office and work on a novel that portrayed the Senate, the Presidency, the Washington press and society with an insight that had never appeared under his by-line in The Times. Shortly after Advise and Consent had been completed for Doubleday & Company, it became a Reader’s Digest condensed book, then a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Arthur Krock, Russell Baker, and Mary McGrory of the Washington Evening Star wrote approving blurbs for the book, and Drury was being congratulated and discussed all over town—but still no word from Reston. Drury knew that Reston had little interest in novels, reading mostly nonfiction books that were useful to him as a journalist—“The Nineteenth Century was the era of the novelist, the Twentieth Century is the era of the journalist,” was Reston’s convenient assessment—and yet Reston was an individual of awareness, and Drury could not believe that Reston had not heard of Advise and Consent. Finally, unable to resist, Drury virtually demanded recognition. He approached Reston’s secretary one day and remarked that everyone seemed to know about the book except Scotty Reston.
The next evening, Reston passed by Drury’s desk, and in a couple of terse but amiable sentences he congratulated Drury. He said that he had not realized that Drury had been working on such a project. When Drury reminded him that he had mentioned it two years before, when he had begun to write seriously, Reston replied, “I hadn’t realized that was what you meant,” adding that he thought the whole thing was great—and then, smiling, Reston was on his way, walking in that inimitable glittering manner.
Drury watched him and thought about him, and his impression of Reston then, and years later, remained essentially the same: Reston, the supreme reporter and excellent writer, was also a major ego, a very self-centered, not deliberately cruel but fiercely competitive individual, even when he was indisputably on top. He did many kindnesses for people, Drury conceded, but generally as the grand seigneur. Reston’s ego and competitive spirit were such that he simply could not take such competition from an underling, particularly when the underling not only dared the gods but succeeded and was going into orbit.
Drury resigned from The Times in 1959, not long after Advise and Consent, which would win a Pulitzer, became the number one best seller. One of the last articles that he wrote for the paper, and one of his best, was an article for the house organ, Times Talk, in which he revealed that in spite of his success, the copy-desk and top management still seemed unimpressed by him. “It keeps you humble,” he wrote, adding, “My friends on the copydesk are the same old lovable, ham-handed, insufferable hatchetmen they always were.” The most gratifying result of his book, he said, was the invitation that he received from his fellow reporters to address them at the National Press Club, and the standing ovation that he received afterwards.
Later, at the annual Women’s Press Club Congressional Night at the Statler Hotel, while Drury was standing and talking to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and Mrs. Udall, Reston and his wife, Sally, came along, and Udall called out, “Here’s one of your boys.”
Reston grinned at Drury and said, “I’m one of his.”
So we do not dislike one another, Drury thought, and he was very pleased.
Drury’s Washington was not Reston’s Washington, nor Lippmann’s nor Buchwald’s nor Gore Vidal’s Washington—but the vulnerability of the politicians in Drury’s world of fiction, and the partiality and self-protectiveness and self-aggrandizement of the Washington press, formed a tableau of the capital that a few Timesmen in New York believed to be quite realistic. It was not that the New York editors wished to portray an unflattering picture of Washington in The Times, but they were interested in a sharper, deeper sense of the city than they were getting. And, as usual, they suspected that one reason they were not getting it was that the Washington bureau was overly protective of its sources. This complaint, which was nearly as old as the Times building, was first presented formally in 1916 when one New Y
ork editor, representing the opinion of others, wrote a lengthy memo to Ochs charging that Richard Oulahan, Krock’s predecessor, was being “used” by the Woodrow Wilson administration, and was regularly writing propaganda. It was then suggested that Oulahan make weekly trips to New York so that he might dine with the editors and receive the benefit of their wisdom. But Ochs, who did not then regard a pro-Wilson policy as a vice, particularly since The Times had recently been accused of being pro-German, refused to interfere with Oulahan, and this attitude prevailed until Oulahan’s death. Then Krock was sent from New York to Washington, and as one problem was solved another took its place—the problem of Krock himself. Now, in 1962, Krock’s successor, Reston, after nearly a decade as the bureau chief, was beginning to sense a revival of old pressure from New York, much of it coming from an editor who had just been named to run the national-news desk—Harrison Salisbury.
The national-news editor handles not only the stories that are sent in from Washington, but also those from Timesmen in other bureaus around the nation—Philadelphia and Boston, Chicago and Detroit, Kansas City and Houston; the men in the Deep South covering the Civil Rights movement; the men on the West Coast—Gladwin Hill in Los Angeles, Lawrence Davies in San Francisco. Salisbury had been appointed by Catledge, with strong support from Clifton Daniel, to bolster the national coverage; Salisbury had very definite ideas on how to achieve this, and he did not care if he became very unpopular in the process. Salisbury was not an office politician. He was sharp and direct, a tall man with a long stride, a lean catlike face with quick eyes and a little moustache that seemed somehow to be working for him. He had a sense of humor, but it was subtle, so subtle that few perceived it. This did not bother him. His primary concern was to improve the national reporting. He wanted more imagination, more mobility and drive from his correspondents, more jet journalism and less waiting for events to occur in their own backyards; and if his regional correspondents did not respond to his wishes, he would invade their territory with eager young journalists borrowed from the New York staff. Salisbury had made dozens of recent trips around the country as a lecturer and reporter, and he knew what news was there, what new trends and reactions were changing America, and he wanted his correspondents to report these fully and to write them well. To guarantee that the writing would not be disjointed by the copyreaders, Salisbury hovered over them, overruled them when necessary, and was unconcerned about the sensitivities of the deskmen’s demagogue, Theodore Bernstein.
Salisbury also had definite feelings about Washington; he had worked there for the United Press, and he had also worked in The Times’ bureau during the summers of 1955 and 1956, covering the State Department. Reston had suggested that he might remain in Washington, but Salisbury, very much his own man, was not interested. Reston and he would soon be at loggerheads, he thought, and after completing his summer tour in Washington he returned to New York and worked on special assignments. When Catledge offered him the job of education editor, Salisbury saw it as too limiting; but when he was offered the nationalnews editorship in 1962, he accepted it.
Soon Reston’s men began to feel Salisbury’s presence and to resent it. They were unaccustomed to such scrutiny and they complained to Reston, who interceded. But Salisbury was not easily discouraged. Every few days, it seemed, he would pepper the bureau with more memos, calls, tips on some new government plan or conspiracy, and if the bureau did not produce the story that he believed was there, he was dissatisfied. It was implied somehow that they had not checked with enough people; or they were buying all that was told them; or there “had to be more to it” than that. Some members of the bureau were astounded by Salisbury’s suspicious nature, and they attributed it to his years in Russia during the dark days of Stalin. Other bureau men resented Salisbury’s comparing them unfavorably with certain Washinton reporters on the Herald Tribune, or the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. The lively reporting that he seemed to like in the Herald Tribune, they said, merely represented a desperate last attempt by a dying newspaper to call attention to itself, and they were surprised by his decision to publish President Kennedy’s s.o.b. remark in The Times during the Administration’s confrontation with the steel industry in April of 1962. Wallace Carroll, Reston’s deputy, had written in his story that President Kennedy had been enraged at the steelmen’s decision to raise prices across the board and had spoken unflatteringly of them, but Carroll did not attribute to Kennedy the direct quotation that would later appear in his story (“My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches but I never believed it till now!”); it was Salisbury who identified these words as the President’s, getting the information from sources whom he trusted. Salisbury then called Carroll and asked him to write an insertion that would include this quotation. Carroll objected, saying that he had not heard the President use such language. When Salisbury persisted, Carroll snapped back, “The hell with it—you write it in yourself!”
If Reston had not been so busy at this time writing his column and running his bureau, fortifying its future with such younger men as Wicker and Baker, Max Frankel and Anthony Lewis; and if Reston’s time and interests were not also involved with keeping up with the nation, the world, and his own family, which included three sons whom he rarely saw enough of, Reston could have devoted his entire career to fighting the editors in New York. Reston had more worthy ambitions than that. Salisbury’s intrusions could be annoying, but Reston recognized Salisbury as a good newsman whose instincts were often right if his personal approach was often wrong; and if things became intolerable Reston could always go to the publisher. Dryfoos, in fact, had recently discussed the possibility of Reston’s coming to New York at some future date to serve as “Editor” of The Times, which was a title that did not now exist, but from Dryfoos’ vague description it would seem to give Reston more power than the managing editor. Reston, however, made it clear that he preferred living in Washington, and under no circumstances would Reston want to relinquish his column. For the column was both Reston’s joy and his special base of power within the organization. Because of the column, and what he had done with it, Reston had become a national figure, a confidant of presidents, an individual that other publishers would quickly hire away from The Times if they could. If he gave up the column, he would not carry the weight that he did with world leaders, and soon his position within the paper would be less than it had been—he would be more identified with his Times title, less with his own name, and there was no advantage to that.
And so as long as he had his column and had such valuable subordinates as Wallace Carroll to relieve him of many administrative burdens, Reston was resigned to an attitude of give-and-take with New York (with the ageless Arthur Krock muttering in the background that when he was bureau chief he took nothing from New York). Reston was now approaching his middle fifties; he had books to write, sons to think about, little time for bickering with fellow editors. He had achieved his goals and, more important, he was a happy man.
The Sulzberger family was proud to call him their own—and never more proud than in December of 1962, when during a New York newspaper strike, Reston read his Sunday column on television, communicating to millions his affection for The Times and his sadness that it was now being struck by the labor unions.
Reading The Times is a life career, like raising a family—and almost as difficult. But I’ve become accustomed to its peculiar ways and can’t break the habit. It is a community service, like plumbing.
This is the season of peace, and somehow—I don’t know why—peace seems to have a better chance in The Times. Everybody else seems to be shouting at us and giving the human race six weeks to get out. But The Times is always saying that there was trouble in the Sixteenth Century too.…
Without newspapers, the procedures of life change. Tired men, sick of the human race after a long, gabby day at the office, cannot escape into the life story of Y. A. Tittle or the political perils of Harold Macmillan, but must go on talking
to strangers all the way to Westport.
It’s bad enough on the public, but think of a reporter. I’ve been fielding The Times on my front stoop every morning for 25 years and it’s cold and lonely out there now. Besides, how do I know what I think if I can’t read what I write?
The strike, which began on December 8 in 1962, lasted for 114 days. It affected not only The Times but also the Daily News, the Journal-American, the World-Telegram and Sun; and also three other New York dailies and two on Long Island that had not been struck by the printers’ union but whose owners, as a sign of ownership solidarity, had either suspended or curtailed the publication of their papers. The strike, coming in the middle of the big pre-Christmas advertising campaigns, deprived the publishers of millions of dollars, thus weakening some publications to a point of no return—indeed, the Mirror would fold not long after the strike had ended; and within a few years, the merged edition of the Herald Tribune, the World-Telegram and Sun, and the Journal-American would also disappear after another strike. During the 1962–63 strike it had been predicted by Bertram A. Powers, president of the printers’ union, that the number of New York dailies would eventually dwindle to three, and he was right. Only The Times and two tabloids, the morning News and the evening Post, would remain in a city that in 1900 had sixteen dailies, and that in 1930 had a dozen.