by Gay Talese
And so Markel’s energies would continue to propel, although the fragility of his ego would be shown by the fact that he rarely set foot in the Sunday department after Sulzberger had removed him. If Markel had spent time browsing through his old domain on the eighth floor, he would have passed, across the hall from his former office, a rather formally furnished Spanish-style room with a refectory table, wooden chairs, and an iron chandelier. On the wall was a portrait of Lester Markel, unsmiling. The room, which has no important function in the department, is most often empty and very quiet. It is sometimes referred to as Markel’s “chapel.”
When the preliminary word of Sulzberger’s reorganization plan first reached the Washington bureau, the reporters and other staffmen were shocked, but not surprised. They conveyed the impression that nothing from New York, no matter how preposterous, would surprise them. For two years now, or ever since Salisbury’s promotion to national editor in 1962, and since Clifton Daniel’s ascendancy as the assistant managing editor under Catledge, the Washington bureau had felt the bombardment of second-guessing from the New York office. If it was not Daniel claiming that the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal had published something that The Times had not, then it was Harrison Salisbury on the telephone relaying his story ideas, his suspicions, and questions: Was there any Murchison money behind that Lyndon Johnson deal? What was Abe Fortas really up to? Was it true, as rumored, that the State Department would finally recognize Mongolia? Getting recognition for Mongolia seemed to be one of Salisbury’s pet campaigns, perhaps because he thought that Mongolia would make an ideal “listening post” for China-watchers—or perhaps Salisbury was just fond of Mongolians. In any case, Salisbury had promoted Mongolian recognition in one of his books, and he was regularly hearing “rumors” of Mongolian recognition in Washington. Washington bureaumen claimed that they had queried the State Department so often about this that soon, out of boredom or harassment, the State Department would recognize Mongolia.
With the death of Orvil Dryfoos, the balance had shifted from Washington to New York, and one of the first results of this shift was the resignation of Reston’s number two man, Wallace Carroll. Carroll claimed to have “seen the writing on the wall” in the summer of 1963, shortly after Sulzberger’s appointment as publisher, and so Carroll decided to leave The Times and become the editor-publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel. Carroll had been on The Times since 1955, had run the bureau under Reston with efficiency and composure, and when Dryfoos had been alive he had thought of Carroll as a possible successor to Markel. But Carroll quickly saw that he had nothing to look forward to but increased pressure from New York, and he could not be dissuaded from quitting. Catledge, who had liked Carroll, offered him the Rome bureau, or any other bureau that was open, if he would change his mind. Reston had volunteered to turn over the Washington bureau to Carroll, devoting himself entirely to the column. Carroll was appreciative, but his decision was irrevocable; he sensed what life would be like under Daniel as the managing editor, and Salisbury as Daniel’s deputy, and so he accepted the position in Winston-Salem, where he had once worked, and he was happy to be going back.
Unknown to nearly everyone during this period, Reston was contemplating his own resignation. He had been deeply disappointed that no member of the Sulzberger family had consulted him during those weeks after Dryfoos’ death and before Punch Sulzberger’s appointment as the publisher. This was odd, considering how close Reston had always been to the family. But in retrospect, it was also revealing. Reston, at least for the present, was out of the inner circle. Reston had delivered the Orvil Dryfoos eulogy at the funeral, and then had returned to Washington as the Sulzbergers and the directors had gathered in secret session to select the successor. There had been rumors of Reston’s playing a key role in New York, but nobody had approached him, and this had disturbed and confused him. If he had been offered the executive editor’s job, he might have turned it down; and yet he would have appreciated the opportunity of considering the job. Now he did not know exactly where he stood. He was outranked by Catledge, that was clear. When Dryfoos was alive, Reston had been officially under Catledge, but in actuality he was not. Reston had immense pride, and he could not accept the situation as it now stood, and he seriously considered accepting the impressive offer extended him by his close friend Katharine Graham, president of The Washington Post Company. In a position at the Post, Reston would not only continue as a syndicated ccolumnist but he would also have a hand at guiding her newspaper as well as the company’s other publication, Newsweek. Reston would receive enough money and stock benefits to guarantee that he and his family would be quite rich, and he no doubt could lure to the Washington Post a few of the very best young Timesmen. So during the summer he gave serious thought to quitting, and discussed it with such friends as Walter Lippmann. In the end, however, Reston decided to remain at The Times.
There was no newspaper like The Times, no other medium that each day reached the people that Reston wanted to reach with his words and thoughts. Reston could get along without The Times, and vice versa, but that was of minor importance. By staying with The Times, and concentrating on his column, he was more influential with American policy makers, with the power brokers of the nation and the leaders abroad, than he would be if he quit at triple the money. Reston believed that The Times alone had the audience that moved America. The President of the United States read it every morning, and so did the Congress, and so did seventy embassies in Washington, including the Russians. More than half the college presidents in the United States read The Times, and more than 2,000 copies were sold each day at Harvard, more than 1,000 at Yale, 700 at Chicago, 350 at Berkeley. These were the people that Reston wished to influence—the Establishment of today, the Establishment of tomorrow: he was the Establishment columnist, and he could be that only on The Times.
Reston also loved the paper. He had once told Carroll that he would sooner divorce his wife than quit The Times. This was, of course, not even close to the truth—Reston had debated quitting The Times in 1953, until Krock had stepped down as bureau chief; but there was no doubt that Reston was a Timesman in the old sense, a man emotionally committed to the institution as a way of life, a religion, a cult, and it would not be possible for him to quit as easily as Wallace Carroll had done. Reston had joined The Times in 1939, had grown with it, had used it, had been used by it—they had been a wonderful combination, and Reston, at fifty-four, still had a considerable way to go. And so he decided to remain on The Times and see what was ahead for himself and for it. Young Sulzberger was now feeling his oats. The paper was in a strange state of transition. Arthur Hays Sulzberger was too ill to influence it, being confined to a wheel chair, and being so stricken with heart attacks that he was now a thin, drawn figure, very different from his handsome photographs and his large portrait in the Times building. Iphigene Sulzberger had the financial power but she also had a son, only one son, and he was now the publisher, the hope of the future. She could not, would not interfere at this point. Punch Sulzberger had spent much of his lifetime being second-guessed by people who knew better or thought they knew better, but these days were gone, as were most of these people. All that Reston could do was to try to understand the Sulzberger that he had never known, to perhaps build a working relationship that would deepen with time into a warm friendship. And so Reston flew to New York and spent amiable hours with Sulzberger during the summer of 1964, shortly before the announcement about Catledge was to become final. Reston made one last attempt to get Sulzberger to reconsider, talking to Sulzberger in the concerned, public-spirited way that Reston spoke with presidents and senators, suggesting that the youthful publisher might be wise to surround himself not with older men but rather with the bright young men of his own generation—such men as Tom Wicker, Max Frankel, or Anthony Lewis. Sulzberger listened, but he was not now responsive to the idea of altering his plan. Catledge was to be the boss of the News department, indisputably responsible for t
he whole news section—everything except the editorial page, which would remain under Sulzberger’s cousin, John Oakes. Reston could not, under these conditions, continue to serve as the bureau chief. And so at his own request, Reston asked to be relieved of his title and to select his successor. Reston would become, like Markel, an “associate editor,” and would continue to occupy an office in the Washington bureau from which he would write his column. Sulzberger did not want to lose Reston, and he was relieved and delighted that Reston would remain, and he was agreeable to Reston’s selecting his own successor. Reston chose Tom Wicker. Sulzberger did not know Wicker well, but he admired his reporting. Reston knew Wicker very well, not only as a reporter but as an individual. Wicker was the sort of man, Reston believed, who could be driving down a country road during a political campaign, could jump over a fence and learn what a farmer was really thinking, and could then go back to town, change into a tuxedo, and be equally at home at an embassy party. Such an individual, of course, was not unlike Reston himself.
Also in the summer of 1964, Sulzberger endorsed Wicker as the next Washington bureau chief, not fully anticipating the effect that it would have on the New York editors, who now would be unable to select a man of their own choosing to solve what they considered the problems of Washington coverage, the cronyism, the lack of imagination and drive. And there would also be two Timesmen in Washington who would not be elated by the selection of Wicker, one of these being Max Frankel.
Frankel had nothing personal against Wicker, but Frankel, who had been almost a child prodigy on The Times, now felt that the quick pace of his earlier development had stalled; and his failure to become the bureau chief, at the age of thirty-four, did little to relieve his anxiety. He had become a Times reporter at twenty-one, in the summer of 1951, between his junior and senior years at Columbia. He had begun writing for The Times as a Columbia campus correspondent in 1949. Those were the Eisenhower years at Columbia, and it had been a very important assignment for a young correspondent; and Frankel had made the most of the opportunity. He was an alert young man, politically oriented and curious, rather stocky, bespectacled, round-faced, fast-stepping—one to whom the drama of World War II had not been learned out of a history text, but had rather been felt personally by himself and his family.
Max Frankel had been born in Gera, Germany, now in the East Zone, and had lived near Leipzig for eight years until his family was expelled in a mass roundup of Jews of remotely Polish ancestry. Driven to the German-Polish border by the Gestapo, the Frankels were finally admitted to temporary residence in Cracow, Poland. In 1939 he returned with his mother to Germany to try to arrange for emigration to the United States. His father, remaining in Poland, soon was fleeing the Nazi armies and was later taken into custody by Soviet authorities, who tried him as a German spy and gave him a choice between Soviet citizenship and a fifteen-year sentence of hard labor in Siberia. Jacob Frankel chose the latter, vaguely hoping to someday rejoin his wife and son, who had meanwhile obtained from the Gestapo an exit permit and had sailed from Holland for the United States, arriving in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the winter of 1940.
They settled in the Washington Heights section of New York, not far from the George Washington Bridge, in an area of refugees sometimes called the “Fourth Reich.” There Frankel attended public schools, studying hard, and after the war his father, released from prison, left the Soviet Union and rejoined the family, later opening a small dry-goods store in West Harlem. Frankel graduated in 1948 from the High School of Music and Art in New York, where he had edited the school newspaper; then he worked six months for the United World Federalists as an Addressograph machine operator, and then, winning a New York State scholarship, he enrolled at Columbia. His rise from campus correspondent and editor-in-chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator to The New York Times’ staff was rapid, as was his elevation to a prominent place on the staff. After an impressive tour as a rewriteman in the newsroom, following two years’ service in the United States Army, Frankel became a Times correspondent in Vienna, then Belgrade, then Moscow. In 1961, after ten years of extensive and varied experience, Frankel joined Reston’s bureau. In the next two years he covered the State Department, the White House, occasionally the Pentagon, the CIA, the Congressional committees and foreign embassies. When Reston decided to relinquish his bureau job, Frankel was ready for something other than just straight reporting.
Two days after Wicker’s appointment as bureau chief, Max Frankel resigned. In a long and emotional letter to Punch Sulzberger, Frankel announced that he was joining The Reporter, where he hoped to have the freedom to write on national as well as international subjects, official as well as human affairs; to travel freely, to deliver lectures, to teach occasionally, to appear on television, to see if he could make the grade as a writer, not merely a reporter; to write with a subjectivity that in The Times’ news columns is forbidden. Frankel wanted to become more his own man, he suggested to Sulzberger. But then, after he had sent the letter, Frankel had a rather sudden change of mind. The Times loomed larger, the outside world seemed less enticing, he could not break the knot. Finally, and with considerable embarrassment, Frankel sent a telegram to The Reporter’s editor, Max Ascoli, stating that he had withdrawn his resignation from The Times—he simply could not leave.
The second Times reporter in Washington who had hoped to succeed Reston was a cool, lean, well-scrubbed-looking, intense, and brilliant young man named Anthony Lewis. At thirty-seven, Lewis was three years older than Frankel, and he was Frankel’s opposite in many ways. Whereas Frankel could be emotional, Lewis seemed tightly contained at all times, incredibly controlled, his orderly mind concentrating only on those things that were relevant now, at this second, and he was careful not to overstate his case or overstep his boundaries. His handwriting was an exquisite example of perfect letter formation, neatness, clarity of communication. His eyes were brightly alert, and his hairline, receding beyond an already high forehead, made him appear almost tonsured. His voice was soft, sometimes warm and friendly, and with just an edge of tension when things displeased him. He had been born in New York, had attended Horace Mann School, a private school, and then had gone to Harvard, graduating in 1948. Even now, sixteen years later, he somewhat symbolized in appearance, if not in fact, the Ivy League style of that postwar period—conservative, Brooksbred, conditioned to blending, accentuating the symbols of similarity, toning down any natural eccentricities or temptations. Only those who knew him well, or with whom he was sufficiently impressed and thus responsive, sensed the interesting man beneath—the connoisseur of opera, the serious man married to a tall, blithe student of modern dance, the superb mimic of W. C. Fields, the charming dinner guest. Few reporters in The Times’ bureau knew this side of him. They knew mainly the perfectionist, the purposeful, hard-working reporter who had won a Pulitzer in 1955 for a series of articles on the Federal loyalty-security program, while working for the Washington Daily News. Lewis had won a second Pulitzer in 1963 for his reporting on the Supreme Court. It had been Reston’s idea, encouraged by Justice Felix Frankfurter, to have a Timesman specialize in the coverage of law. Lewis drew the assignment, returning to Harvard for a year on a Nieman Fellowship to study law. And Justice Frankfurter later said of Lewis’s Supreme Court coverage: “There are not two members of the Court itself who could get the gist of each decision so accurately in so few words.” In 1964 Lewis published an important book concerning a landmark decision of the Supreme Court—Gideon’s Trumpet, which was excerpted in The New Yorker.
And yet if Reston had selected Lewis as his replacement, there were Timesmen in Washington who said they would resign. He was too coolly ambitious and driven, they believed, lacking the easy congeniality of a Reston or a Wicker. In New York, some editors felt that Lewis, who had also specialized in covering the Justice Department, had become overly enamored of the Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, developing a friendship that was possibly a flaw in Lewis’s objectivity. Reston was aware of all thi
s, and while he was proud of Lewis and liked him personally, he thought that Wicker would be more suitable as the head of the bureau than either Frankel or Lewis.
Anthony Lewis was deeply disappointed by Reston’s decision. And when Lewis had the opportunity to become the London bureau chief, he took it. He replaced Sydney Gruson, who was returning to New York as the foreign editor, replacing in turn Emanuel R. Freedman, who was becoming an assistant managing editor, joining Theodore Bernstein and Robert Garst. Harrison Salisbury, who had vacated his national-news editor’s job to an energetic Atlanta-born reporter named Claude Sitton, was also moving up to become an assistant managing editor under the newly appointed managing editor, Clifton Daniel.
During all this shifting, and before turning the Washington bureau over to Tom Wicker, James Reston had arranged one other detail with Punch Sulzberger that seemed very inconsequential at the time, but as events would transpire in the years ahead, it would perhaps rank as a marvelously astute move, one that would reveal something of the Restonian mind—its awareness of corporate whimsy, its knowledge of how executive wives can sometimes build the bridges that can more tightly bind their husbands. Reston, knowing that Sulzberger and his wife, Carol, would be going on a trip to Europe after the November election, planted the idea with Sulzberger of inviting Wicker and Wicker’s wife, Neva, to accompany them. This would be an ideal opportunity for Sulzberger to get to know more intimately his new bureau chief, and Sulzberger agreed. These executive trips could be disastrous, Reston knew—the constant companionship could magnify personality differences, or result in hours of boredom in the middle of the Atlantic, or there was always the chance that the wives would not get along. Or such trips could produce harmonious results, bringing a young publisher and a young journalist closer as men, ultimately producing perhaps the kind of friendship that had begun in the Forties when Reston had taken trips with Arthur Hays Sulzberger—and it is possible that Turner Catledge would have never become managing editor in 1951 if he had not proven to be such a compatible drinking companion for Arthur Hays Sulzberger in 1944 during their Pacific junket. So the executive trip was a gamble—a source of envy to those executives who had been left at home, but perhaps a great boon to the executive who accompanied the boss: in any case, Reston thought that it was a chance worth taking, for Wicker would have to emerge as a major figure on the paper if the bureau were not to be completely swallowed up by New York. Reston was also confident that Wicker and Sulzberger would get along. They were both the same age, were both very informal, and they both were married to pretty young brunettes. Neva Wicker was a delicate and appealing North Carolina girl who knew when not to talk. Carol Sulzberger sensed simplicity and sincerity in people and admired it, and she had only briefly met Neva Wicker, and had barely known Tom Wicker.