by Gay Talese
So it was arranged—a month’s trip to Europe in November of 1964, just Punch and Carol Sulzberger, Tom and Neva Wicker. And, as Reston had imagined, Punch Sulzberger got along well with Wicker—and their wives got along very well.
15
Seated behind his big desk in the middle of the newsroom, Rosenthal momentarily looked up from the stories that he was reading and gazed around the room at the distant rows of desks, the reporters typing, talking among themselves, sometimes looking at him in a way he suspected was hostile—they must despise me, he thought, being both irritated and saddened by the possibility, they must really hate my guts.
It was the winter of 1965. A. M. Rosenthal, who had given up his career as a foreign correspondent during the summer of 1963 to take over the local staff, had incorporated many of the changes that Catledge and Bernstein had hoped for, improving the paper no doubt; but he had also hurt in the process many older Timesmen whom he had liked personally and who had been kindly toward him when he was a cub reporter in this same room twenty years before. The changes in the Sixties were necessary, Rosenthal believed. The seniority system was outmoded, younger reporters who wrote concisely and well had to be favored over older men who could not. The Times could no longer afford to print long dull columns of news about municipal officialdom merely because The Times was the “paper of record.” The emphasis was shifting to sharper writing, faster reading, saying more in less space, saving time for readers, saving money for management—covering all the important news, but not in the stolid way that had long been tolerated. It would be a painful adjustment for some older Timesmen who had been trained under the more leisurely pace of the past, when there had been twice as much room in the paper for local coverage, but now the economics of the business demanded tighter control over men and space. Both Catledge and Bernstein had agreed years ago that the New York staff had become tradition-bound—it was a barnacle-encrusted example of Parkinson’s Law, Bernstein had thought; an old elephant, Catledge had thought, a great big package of habit.
So Rosenthal had come to New York, and within a remarkably short time he had begun to make a name for himself as an editor. The city hospitals, whose inadequate care he had experienced firsthand as a charity patient during his boyhood, were now scrutinized by The Times as never before. Rosenthal directed a young investigative reporter named Martin Tolchin to explore hospital life and to write about the decrepit conditions, the substandard care given to poor patients, the general medical mismanagement—and these articles inspired legislative investigations and some reforms, and also brought journalistic honors to Tolchin and The Times. Rosenthal assigned other reporters to write in depth about the New York public school system—how the whites were abandoning it to the blacks; the new euphemisms of Park Avenue liberals and Queens racists; and he also sent Timesmen into the ethnic neighborhoods, including his own old neighborhood in the Bronx, to describe the atmosphere, to listen to the complaints and hopes, and to write “talk” pieces, or series of articles, about the city that had changed so radically during the years that he had been abroad. Rosenthal was now seeing New York as a foreign city, his fresh eye stimulated by sights and sounds that other New Yorkers might not notice. It seeemed to Rosenthal that homosexuals were more obvious on city streets than when he had last worked in New York, and this led to a superb article that was, by old Times standards, quite revolutionary. Rosenthal also assigned reporters to write about the increasing number of interracial marriages in New York, the increasing opulence of bookmakers and loan sharks, and finally to write about the remarkable case of a young woman who, screaming for help, was murdered one night in a quiet neighborhood while thirty-eight people heard her calls, and did nothing. This story, reprinted and commented upon around the nation, led Rosenthal to explore more thoroughly the subject of apathy in the city, the attitude of New Yorkers who, either through fear of becoming physically or legally involved in a crime that they had witnessed, elected to pretend that they had not seen it. Rosenthal wrote a magazine piece in the Sunday Times on this subject, later expanding it into a short book, and for more than a year he featured stories that re-echoed the incident—an overwhelming public apathy interspersed occasionally by a courageous citizen who became “involved”—and this became almost a private Rosenthal campaign. The news stories that he published were not editorial in tone, but their frequent appearance in The Times conveyed his “message,” the need to become involved, and it emphasized more than ever that the New York coverage was changing under Rosenthal.
Rosenthal wanted to touch the nerve of New York. He wanted his staff to scratch beneath the surface and reveal something of the complexity and conflict of the city. He wanted the stories to be accurate and complete, but also interesting, and some older Timesmen, losing out to younger men who were more enthusiastic and imaginative, became resentful and helped to spread the word that the new policy was to “fake” stories and overdramatize events. When Rosenthal would assign “project” stories that would perhaps require three or four days’ research and would make greater demands on a reporter’s ability to organize the facts and weave them with transition, there was the sullen reaction from some older men that the paper was becoming a “magazine.”
Rosenthal was aware of the disenchantment in the newsroom, and he was deeply upset by it. He was, like the city he was examining, filled with conflict and complexity: he was aggressive and sentimental, driving and tender; he had been eager to shake up the staff, to break the eggs necessary for the omelet, but he had not wanted to lose the sense of popularity and affectionate welcome that he had felt years before whenever he had entered the newsroom during home leave, becoming encircled by smiling familiar faces and handshakes and calls of “Hello, Abe!” Rosenthal had then been the skinny hometown hero who had done so well overseas, an inspiration to copyboys and other young men starting up from the bottom, a source of pride to older men who recalled his early reporting days under the rigid editorship of Robert Garst.
Now things were different. The sensitivity that had contributed to Rosenthal’s greatness as a reporter was contributing to his misery as an editor. It had not deterred him from his ambitions—he had exercised full authority, had made quick tough decisions; but inwardly he had known the effect that it was having, not only on others but on himself. One of the difficult aspects of the New York job was that he had to see the faces of those that he was demoralizing. If a once-privileged senior reporter had to be downgraded in some way, had to be removed from his regular assignment, or had to have his stories regularly rewritten or reduced in length, it was Rosenthal who had to become personally involved, sooner or later, in a face-to-face confrontation with that Timesman. Rosenthal could not, like the foreign-news editor or the national-news editor, communicate with his reporters via cable or telephone. Not surprisingly, a few veteran Timesmen resigned during Rosenthal’s early years as an editor, and Rosenthal was partly pleased and relieved—they could not write well enough, they had lacked enthusiasm—and yet he felt remorseful, guilty, for they had served The Times loyally and adequately for many years.
When one younger reporter, Robert Daley, who did write well, announced his plans to quit The Times in 1965 and devote himself to fiction and magazine pieces, Rosenthal had been greatly disappointed. Daley was the sort who could thrive under the new system in the newsroom, Rosenthal believed, and he had liked several of the pieces that Daley had produced since returning to the local staff after years in Europe as a sports correspondent. It had often been said around the office, though never ruefully, that Robert Daley was a better sportswriter than his father, Arthur Daley, who had been on the paper since 1926 and had won a Pulitzer as The Times’ sports columnist. But Robert Daley possessed none of his father’s attachment to The Times, and he was determined to quit, believing that he could go further as a writer, and make more money, by leaving The Times. So he became Rosenthal’s first unwelcome defector. Rosenthal said good-bye to Daley in the newsroom, wishing him luck. Then after Daley had
left, Rosenthal turned and walked into the men’s room with tears in his eyes.
An individual who was discussed and debated almost as much as Rosenthal during these years was Rosenthal’s hand-picked assistant, a lanky creative tower of tension named Arthur Gelb. Gelb and Rosenthal were about the same age, and they had known one another intimately for years. They had corresponded regularly while Rosenthal had worked abroad and Gelb had risen from local reporting to an editorship in the Cultural-News department. On the occasion of Rosenthal’s winning the Pulitzer in 1960, Gelb wrote a humorous article in Times Talk about Rosenthal that the latter had not immediately appreciated. It had portrayed Rosenthal as a master of one-upmanship, a sharp-witted egotist who, upon receiving the Pulitzer, had written Gelb: “A little small, but the thought was there.” The article went on to quote another Rosenthal letter: “About Poland. I don’t know. I don’t know. The natives here are rather insolent and don’t speak English. The curry stinks but the herring is excellent. We have a nice house. Small men in small cars follow me around. We have a lovely collie named Jack or Jock or something like that. He adores me. Our cook quit. I saw Stevenson. He knew my middle initial, the test for all candidates for the presidency.”
In some ways the article had told as much about Gelb as it did about Rosenthal; as when Gelb concluded:
I have tangled with Abe quite a few times, as I rather enjoy being One-Up myself, but I can recall only two instances when I came out ahead. In one, I had to resort to physical violence (always an unanswerable argument, since I’m bigger than he is; I only use that technique on him when he truly infuriates me—for example, by disagreeing with me about something) and, in the other, I admit I had to have my wife’s help to win.
The time I had to knock him down was because he didn’t understand the ending of a J. D. Salinger story in The New Yorker, and he kept giving me his cockeyed version and insisting he was right; I sat on his chest until he admitted I was right. He knows better than to contradict me on literary matters, now.
The other time was when I had to show him, once and for all, that it’s just silly to be stubborn about some things. My wife and I dropped up to see Abe and his wife, Ann—a doll, if ever there was one—rather late one evening, and we picked up a little poundcake and brought it with us to have with coffee, but we decided to drink Scotch instead of coffee, and Abe said we had to take the poundcake home with us. We refused. As we were getting into the elevator to leave, Abe thrust the box with the poundcake at us, but, quick as a wink, and just as the door was closing, I hurled the package back at him. The Rosenthals lived on the second floor, and the elevator was pretty slow. When we reached the lobby, the doorman handed us the package, which Abe had run down the stairs with. Did you ever hear of anyone so stubborn? We had to take it, of course, but as soon as we got home, we called for a Western Union messenger and had it sent right back to the Rosenthals. (The 40-cent poundcake now had about three dollars invested in it, but it was the moral issue that was at stake.) We didn’t hear anything for the next day or two, but then slices of it began arriving in the mail, and within the next few weeks, whenever a mutual friend of Abe’s and mine, like Bernie Kalb or Hal Faber, came over to our house, he brought us a slice, too, with Abe’s greetings.
Well, it kept going back and forth like that for a while, and then one day, when the Rosenthals were at our house for dinner, my wife sneakily slit open his overcoat lining and sewed in the cake—reduced, by now, to a handful of crumbs. I called him up when he got home, and told him he had the cake. He admitted that we had outdone him in ingenuity, and he gave up.…
Rosenthal and Gelb worked closely and well together, and they drove the New York staff as never before. The reporters sometimes referred to the new team as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. While they were both serious and creative editors, they provided an electric, almost show-biz snap and tension to the newsroom, much of it the result of the restless Gelb’s unending flow of ideas. It seemed that every five minutes he would propose a new idea for a story to Rosenthal, who would respond with delight—or a look of nausea. Each morning just off the train from Westchester, Gelb’s tall, thin, dark bespectacled figure would come breezing into the newsroom with pockets packed with ideas—twenty ideas, thirty ideas: people to interview, tips to check, angles to investigate, grand “projects” that might take weeks to complete. Some of these ideas were brilliant, most had merit, a few were wild, all meant work, lots of work. So the less-ambitious Timesmen, whenever they saw Gelb getting up from his desk and about to look around, would pick up their telephones, or would walk to the dictionaries located behind posts.
Inevitably, most of Gelb’s ideas went to the eager younger men, and he employed an almost hypnotic manner in communicating his ideas to them. He would whisper. First he would put an arm around a young man, would walk him down the aisle, and then would whisper, very confidentially, hand over mouth, into the young man’s ear—the inference being that this particular idea was so great that Gelb did not want to risk its being overheard by other reporters who would surely become envious. Finally, before the reporter would leave the room to embark on the assignment, Gelb would whisper again, “And remember, there’s a great deal of interest in this story.” There was the barest hint that this idea might be Rosenthal’s, or maybe even Daniel’s or Catledge’s, and the young reporter had better do his best. Then, after the reporter had gone, Gelb would have his arm around another reporter, and again there would be the parting whisper, “And remember, there’s a great deal of interest in this story.”
Rosenthal and Gelb would later read the stories as they came in, page by page, and would check to see that the touches and angles that they had requested were there. Then they would try to assure that the story was not overedited by a copyreader; on occasion, in order to prevent the cutting of a certain paragraph or phrase, Rosenthal would carry the appeal to Bernstein himself. When Rosenthal was particularly pleased with the way a story had been done, the reporter would receive a congratulatory memo, and Rosenthal also pressured Daniel and Catledge into quickly producing big raises for certain of his favorites. One of his young stars was R. W. Apple, Jr., whose popularity with older Timesmen was hardly enhanced by the rumor that, after a few months on Rosenthal’s staff, he was making $350 a week.
If so, he was earning it. An indefatigable young man with a round smiling face and a crew cut, the look of a slightly overweight West Point cadet, Apple was very gung-ho; he never stopped running, the perspiration showing through his shirt by 2 p.m., and he never dismissed one of Gelb’s ideas without giving it a try. The result was that Apple got more good stories into the paper than anybody on Rosenthal’s staff. This is not what bothered his older colleagues so much, for they soon recognized his ability to get a story and write it; what really unsettled them was Apple’s incredible enthusiasm for everything he had been assigned to cover—a Board of Estimate hearing, a talk by the tax commissioner, a repetition of political speeches—and Apple’s insistence, once he had returned, on telling everybody in the newsroom about what he had seen or heard, or what had happened to him while on the story. Once, returning from the Democratic National Convention in 1964, Apple burst into the newsroom to report that Ethel Kennedy had sneaked up and pinched his behind on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Later, sent to Vietnam to work with two other Timesmen, Charles Mohr and Neil Sheehan, Apple reported back that while pinned down under enemy fire, a bullet had slit open the back of his trousers. When he returned to New York briefly on home leave he revealed that he had actually killed a few Vietcong, to which one of his skeptical colleagues replied, “Women and children, I presume.”
Perhaps Rosenthal’s most dramatic story as editor of the New York staff occurred during the winter of 1965. It began with a letter from a friend who worked in a Jewish agency. The letter from Rosenthal’s friend claimed that a New Yorker named Daniel Burros, who had two days before been identified in The Times as the New York head of the Ku Klux Klan and also a member of the American Naz
i Party, was Jewish. The Times article had not mentioned this last fact, having no knowledge of Daniel Burros’ religious background, a secret well kept by Burros as he had traveled around the country with his fellow Nazi “troopers” advocating hatred and death to Jews everywhere.
Rosenthal stood up at his desk as he read the letter. He was fascinated, excited. He considered his friend to be a very reliable man, and yet Rosenthal’s excitement was mixed with disbelief, a skepticism that always grips an ambitious journalist whenever he is handed a story that seems too good to be true, too shockingly odd and marvelous; he desperately wants the facts to finally fit the fantastic story that is already forming in his mind, building within him, expanding, he can almost start writing it, but he must suddenly stop and wonder with cool detachment whether the facts are accurate: Rosenthal looked around the newsroom for the right reporter to handle this story. He wanted a reporter of unquestionable reliability—a patient researcher and subtle writer. Two things had to be answered: first, was Daniel Burros indeed Jewish, and if so, how and why did a Jewish boy become a Nazi? This assignment might take days to complete, and would require following many small leads that might be unproductive; the ringing of strangers’ doorbells, the waiting on street corners in the hope of locating Burros’ friends or parents, who would most likely be uncooperative. There should also be attempts made at contacting Burros’ former teachers, his friends from his days in the United States Army, his rabbi. (According to the letter, Burros had been bar mitzvahed.)