by Gay Talese
Clyde Haberman was in bed when Rosenthal called his home in the Bronx. Haberman had been awakened fifteen minutes before by a call from the City College publicity department saying that it had been receiving inquiries about the “Brett Award.” It was then, and only then, that Haberman remembered that he had forgotten to remove the humorous award, as he had intended, or as he had perhaps intended, from the long list before turning it into the desk the afternoon before. He remembered how bored and drowsy he had then been in the newsroom, having spent hours behind the typewriter copying the interminable list of names and awards that were to be presented at the college’s commencement ceremony two nights hence—hundreds of names and awards whose publication in The Times was a waste of space, he thought, was an annoyance to his eyesight, was giving him a headache—he could understand that The Times, a paper of record, would devote space to a Congressional roll call, or would print long texts of speeches … but to fill three columns with City College student awards seemed absolutely preposterous to Haberman: and the more he typed, the more frustrated he became …
the RICHARD MOBY AWARD for excellence in community relations—Eugene Scharmann;
the THEODORE LESKES MEMORIAL AWARD to the student who has demonstrated unusual promise in the field of civil liberties and civil rights—Phyllis Cooper;
the BENJAMIN LUBETSKY MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP to the deserving student of engineering—Arnon Rieger;
the NEHEMIAH GITELSON MEDAL to the student who best exemplifies in his undergraduate career the spirit of the search for truth—Gregory Chaitin;
the …
BRETT AWARD to the student who has worked hardest under a great handicap—Jake Barnes.
It had just popped into Haberman’s head, his fingers reproduced it quickly on paper, he had laughed, he had thought it very funny, he had decided to take it out, not to take it out, he continued to type … and later he had become busy with something else, forgetting about Barnes and Lady Brett as he had turned the story, and the long list, into the desk. And it had taken the morning phone calls to remind him, first from the City College press agent, and then from Rosenthal.
“Clyde,” Rosenthal began softly, “did you see the City College prize list this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see a Brett Award?”
“Yes.”
“How did that get there?”
“I, uh, guess I put it in,” Clyde Haberman said timidly, “in a moment of silliness.”
“You did,” Rosenthal said slowly, his voice getting hard. “Well, that moment finished you in newspapers.”
Haberman could not believe the words. He was stunned. Finished with newspapers, Haberman thought, he must be kidding! It isn’t possible over an inane thing like this!
Haberman got dressed, having been told by Rosenthal to appear in the newsroom immediately, but even as he rode the subway to Times Square, Haberman could not believe that he was finished at The Times. Haberman had sensed that Rosenthal was an extremely sensitive man, a feeling that Haberman had first gotten from reading Rosenthal’s classic on the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. It was so revealingly sentimental, Haberman had thought, reading the piece a second time, that he wondered how Rosenthal could have exposed such tender emotion. Now in the subway Haberman thought that Rosenthal was merely upset by the joke in The Times; Haberman knew him well enough to sense that Rosenthal regarded a joke on The Times to be a joke on him. Yet he was confident, once the lack of malicious intent had been explained, that the mistake would pass and be forgotten.
It was noon when Haberman entered the newsroom. Nearly everybody was out to lunch. He walked up to the big desk where Rosenthal sits, and he addressed a broad-shouldered gray-haired clerk named Charles Bevilacqua, who had been there for years.
“Is Mr. Rosenthal in?” Haberman asked.
“Out to lunch,” Bevilacqua said.
Haberman walked away, but Bevilacqua called after him harshly, “You’d better stick around. He wants to talk to you.”
Haberman wanted to whirl around and say. No kidding, you idiot, why didn’t somebody tell me? but being in no position to act offensively, he retreated meekly into the newsroom’s rows and rows of empty desks, occupied only by the obituary writer, Alden Whitman, a reporter, Bernard Weinraub, and a young man on tryout, Steve Conn, a friend of Haberman’s.
“Hey, Clyde,” Conn said, laughing, “did you see that Brett Award in the paper today?”
Haberman said he had. Then he admitted writing it, and Conn smacked a hand gently against his forehead and groaned, “Oh, God.”
Haberman took a seat in the middle of the newsroom to await Rosenthal’s return. He focused on the silver microphone up ahead—a most intimidating gadget, he always thought, for most young men on the paper: they feared, after having turned in their story, the sight of an editor picking up the microphone and booming out their names, paging them to the New York editor’s desk to explain their ambiguities or errors. Just from the sound from the microphone, Haberman knew, a young reporter could usually tell the mood of the editor: if the editor paged the reporter in a snappy, peremptory tone—Mr. Haberman! very quick—it meant that there was only a small question, one that the editor wished to discuss hastily so he could get on to other matters elsewhere. But if the editor languished on the sound of a young man’s name—M r H a b e r m a n—then the editor’s patience was thin, and the matter was very serious indeed.
Twenty-five minutes later Haberman saw Rosenthal walk into the room, then stride toward his desk. Haberman lowered his head as he heard the microphone being picked up. It was the voice of Charles Bevilacqua, a low sad note of finality, M r H a b e r m a n.
Haberman got up and began the long walk up the aisle, passing the rows of empty desks, thinking suddenly of a course he had taken under Paddy Chayefsky in screenplay-writing, and wishing he had a camera panning the room to capture permanently the starkness of the scene.
He saw Rosenthal standing before him. “Sit down,” Rosenthal said. Then, as he sat, Haberman heard Rosenthal begin, “You will never be able to write for this newspaper again.”
Haberman now accepted the reality of it, and yet made one final attempt at reminding Rosenthal of the work he had done from City College, the many exclusives and features, and Rosenthal cut him off: “ ’Yes, and that’s why you acted like a fool—I had backed you, and written memos about you, and you could have been on staff in a year or two.… You made me look like a jackass. You made The Times look like a jackass …”
There was silence. Then, his voice softening and becoming sad, Rosenthal explained that the most inviolate thing The Times had was its news columns: people should be able to believe every word, and there would never be tolerance for tampering. Further, Rosenthal said, if Haberman were pardoned, the discipline of the entire staff, the younger men and the established reporters, would suffer—any one of them could err and then say, “Well, Haberman got away with it.”
There was a pause, and in this time Rosenthal’s voice shifted to yet another mood—optimism for Haberman, not on The Times but somewhere else. Haberman had talent, Rosenthal said, and now it was a question of accepting the fact that it was all over with the Gray Lady and moving on determinedly to make the grade somewhere else.
Rosenthal talked with him for another five minutes, warmly and enthusiastically; then the two men stood up, and shook hands. Haberman walked back, shaken, to a desk to type out his resignation. Rosenthal had given him the option of doing this so that he would not have officially been fired. Rosenthal had discussed this point an hour before with Clifton Daniel, and also with Emanuel Freedman, an assistant managing editor, and Richard D. Burritt, the personnel specialist, and they all agreed to accept the resignation as soon as Haberman could type it out.
Having done so, and after handing it in, Haberman was aware that other people in the newsroom were now watching him; he felt a strange sensation of being in a warm spotlight. He did not linger. He quickly collected some papers
in a manila folder, tucked it under his arm, and walked out of the newsroom and through the lobby toward the elevators. He stood there momentarily, then heard his name being called by Arthur Gelb, who had come running, saying, “Clyde, wait.”
Haberman had never particularly liked Gelb, having been influenced by the Old Guard’s view; but now Gelb was deeply concerned about Haberman, and he reassured the young man that the world was not over, that there were brighter days ahead. Haberman thanked him and was very moved by Gelb’s concern.
Then Haberman rode the elevator down to the first floor, not pausing as he passed the stern statue of Adolph Ochs in the lobby, nor stopping to talk with the few friends he met coming through the revolving door. He would return to City College for his final session in the fall, and then after graduation worry about what would happen next. He might work briefly for another newspaper, and then he would probably have to serve for two years in the Army.
The next day there was a “correction” in The Times, only a single paragraph. Yet it reaffirmed that there were a few things that had not changed in the slightest at The Times. The paragraph, written by Clifton Daniel, read:
In Wednesday’s issue, The New York Times published a list of prizes and awards presented at the City College commencement. Included was a “Brett Award.” There is no such award. It was put in as a reporter’s prank. The Times regrets the publication of this fictitious item.
Despite the occasional tension and shifting, the revitalization that Catledge had wanted in the newsroom was being supplied by Rosenthal and Gelb, and one result of all the chasing, writing, and rewriting was the disappearance of the late-afternoon card game. Another was the traditional “good-night,” inasmuch as Rosenthal did not care when his reporters came and went, so long as they got the story. A third result was that the national and foreign staffs, once so superior to New York’s, were now beginning to feel intensified pressure and competition for space on page one. On some mornings, The Times’ front page would carry five or six stories that had been produced by the New York staff, while the national and foreign staffs would each have three or four. During the early evenings, after the stories had been turned in and were being edited or set in type, Rosenthal and Gelb would wait for the layout sheets that would show which stories had been selected by the bullpen for page one, and if there were five or more by the New York staff, Rosenthal and Gelb would leave the office in a triumphant mood. Once when Rosenthal had left the office before seeing the layouts, he telephoned a subordinate editor and was told that five stories had made it. But moments after Rosenthal had hung up, the subordinate editor received a revised layout showing that two New York stories had been replaced by late-breaking stories from out of town. The editor, upset, walked over to the bullpen carrying the revised layout and said, “Look, I already told Abe we had five stories on page one.”
“Well,” one bullpen editor replied casually, “you now have three.”
“Yes,” the New York man said quickly, “and what’s Abe going to say about that?”
“You mean Abe is going to get mad at you?”
“Well,” the New York man said tentatively, “you know Abe.”
Perhaps no editor in the newsroom felt the pressure of the New York desk more than Claude Sitton, the forty-year-old national-news editor. It was unlike anything he had known during his grueling years as a reporter, a period during which he had been away from home about twenty days a month, working sometimes twenty hours a day while traveling through his native South covering the Civil Rights movement. He had then aroused the contempt of the Klan and other racists with his reporting, had braved the dogs and harassment of Chief “Bull” Connor in Birmingham, had once been thrown out of a store in Mississippi by one of Catledge’s kin. As a reward for his work, and with Catledge’s blessing. Sitton had been brought back to New York in 1964 and made the national-news editor, succeeding Harrison Salisbury, who had been promoted to assistant managing editor.
But the emergence of Rosenthal and Gelb, and the shadow of Salisbury, had introduced Sitton to challenges that were occasionally more aggravating than any open animosity he had felt in the rural South. He had known that it would not be easy as Salisbury’s successor. Salisbury had been enormously energetic—an individual of great prestige and persuasion. But Sitton had not fully anticipated the interoffice competitiveness that went with the job, the barely perceptible but nonetheless real and constant crosscurrent of tension that seemed to exist between the desk that Salisbury had just vacated to Sitton, and the one occupied by Rosenthal across the room. It was as if Salisbury, despite his elevation, was still anxious that his old bailiwick, the national staff, not fall behind the fast pace being set by Rosenthal, and Sitton was immediately caught in the middle. There seemed little doubt that Salisbury was not Rosenthal’s favorite person, and the driving personalities that they both possessed often enabled them to see things only one way, their own way; and the divergent backgrounds from which they came, the totality of their experiences at home and abroad, their egos and ambitions, the way they saw the world, seemed destined to keep them apart both socially and philosophically—Rosenthal, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia, the correspondent who had been banished from Communist Poland, was more nationalistically American and reverential toward its American institutions than was the more sophisticated Salisbury, an almost stoical Midwesterner who had lived through the worst years in Stalin’s Russia, and had descended from a family of individualists who had settled in America more than three hundred years ago and had lived under a variety of political saviors and scoundrels that were often indistinguishable. When Harrison Salisbury, cool, overtly direct, seemingly unselfconscious, would approach the New York desk with an idea or an opinion, Rosenthal seemed almost to bristle. Salisbury appeared to be unaware of the effect that he was having on the sensitive Rosenthal, and he would be surprised, or would claim to be surprised, when hearing that Rosenthal had gone to Clifton Daniel to settle issues that Salisbury had not even known were issues.
When Claude Sitton became the national-news editor in 1964, he began to experience incidents similar to those that had arisen between Salisbury and Rosenthal during Salisbury’s last year on the national desk—differences that were not always due to personalities but were the result of honest disagreements over whether certain stories should be handled by the New York desk or the national desk. While stories from overseas uncontestably fell under the jurisdiction of the foreign desk, the jurisdictional boundaries between the national desk, which included the Washington bureau, and the New York desk often overlapped. The Kennedys, for example, were considered the property of the national desk, but when the Kennedys, after the Presidential assassination, divided their time between New York and Washington, and established residences in New York, the question of which desk was responsible for which Kennedy story was often debatable.
In 1965 the New York desk blocked an attempt by The Times’ national political correspondent, David S. Broder, stationed in Washington, to cover President Johnson’s speech in Princeton, New Jersey, because Princeton was part of the New York desk’s territory. In possible retaliation, the national desk refused to let the New York reporter who had covered Johnson’s speech make a trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to report on the National Young Republican board’s action on the New Jersey Rat Fink case. Instead, David Broder was ordered to Arkansas by Sitton. Broder wrote his story from there and filed it with the New York desk, and it was killed after one edition. Broder felt the rivalry of the desks in a number of his assignments and he also felt restricted by The Times’ bureaucracy; and in August of 1966 he resigned from The Times to join the Washington Post. At Clifton Daniel’s request, he wrote a memo listing his grievances against and impressions of The Times, and his view of its political coverage and the situation in the Washington bureau. Broder’s typed memo, single-spaced, ran nearly eight pages. In it he described elaborately, sometimes scathingly, the frustration of dealing with the New York office. The morale in
Washington, he wrote, was very low, and he chafed repeatedly at the editorship of Claude Sitton and at the general tendency in New York to overplay news stories with big names and to underplay trend stories or stories of a more analytical character:
For example, The Times front-paged my story about the Eisenhower-Reagan meeting, though nothing of significance happened there, but it gave routine, inside-page treatment to my carefully-documented, ground-breaking report that Nixon, far from lacking a political base, had already lined up almost solid support from the South for his 1968 candidacy.…
In general, it was my impression that Times editors had a certain few stimuli to which they reacted in a political story: Instances of extremism, either of the New Left or the Radical Right; political action by Southern (but not northern) Negroes; Kennedy stories of any variety. These may be the grist of political talk at New York cocktail parties, but, as you know, they do not begin to embrace the variety of concerns that really animate national politics.
… Bureaucratic frustrations. I hesitate to bore you with these, but they are so much a part of the difficulty of covering a beat for The Times that they cannot be ignored. Every reporter has his own set of horror tales; the only thing distinctive about this particular beat is that frequently you’re out somewhere alone on a story, and when you get raped in New York, your cries of anguish can never be heard. Examples: You file a “dope story” from Washington, telling how Romney is under heavy pressure from Congressional Republicans not to blackball Bob Griffin for the Senate nomination for a second successive time, and you tell how Romney’s impending decision on the matter bears on his presidential prospects. The national editor [Sitton] reads it and says it’s “too speculative, let’s wait until he decides.” When he decides, you’re off on another story, and all that appears in The Times is a two-paragraph stringer item, devoid of any of the necessary background.…