The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  Ochs immediately sought an injunction in court and he eliminated from The Times all of the Shuberts’ advertising. The controversy became the talk of Broadway, was publicized around the nation, and was not settled in court for months. Although Ochs’s injunction was ultimately overruled—an appellate division contended that while a theater owner could not bar a patron because of color, creed, or class distinction, he could do so for certain private reasons—the Shuberts, wishing to resume advertising in The Times, finally conceded The Times’ right to select its own reviewers, and the bitterness ended with the Shuberts sending Woollcott a box of cigars at Christmas.

  Ochs had made his point—outsiders were not going to tell The Times how to run its business—but this did not mean that Ochs was not personally offended on occasions when reading a snide or excessively negative review in his newspaper. Ochs’s philosophy was that of a booster, particularly insofar as business or community affairs were concerned; and since the Broadway theater was one of the major attractions of New York, he hoped that his critics would not fail to appreciate and applaud fine efforts whenever possible. In his final will, completed three months before his death, Ochs urged that his editorial page continue to be “more than fair and courteous to those who may sincerely differ with its views,” and he expected the same from his critics. At the same time, he expected them to uphold standards, and he rarely interfered with the publication of a review once it had been written. In Brooks Atkinson’s long career as the drama critic, which had begun in 1925, he could remember only one occasion when Ochs had personally approached him and asked, after reading an advance copy of a review, that a word be changed. This occurred after Ochs had attended the opening of one of S. L. (Roxy) Rothafel’s theaters in Rockefeller Center, an extravagant spectacle that Atkinson criticized for its gaudiness. Ochs, dressed in formal clothes, had walked back to Atkinson’s desk later that evening and asked to read the review, and when he did Atkinson could see a look of pain beginning to crease Ochs’s face. Ochs was a friend and admirer of Roxy, a remarkable show-business entrepreneur and the son of an immigrant German shoemaker—Ochs admired any successful man who had come up the hard way, and he could anticipate how distraught Roxy would be upon reading this review. Ochs said nothing for a few moments. Then very softly and timidly, the white-haired publisher pointed to a line in the review and he asked, “Mr. Atkinson, would you mind changing this one word?” Atkinson looked at the word and thought that its removal did not alter the meaning of the sentence in any way; it was such a minor change that Atkinson soon forgot what the word was: but he changed it, and then Adolph Ochs thanked him, said good-night, and left.

  Ochs’s successors, while equally reluctant to interfere with their critics, nevertheless have shared Ochs’s booster philosophy toward the community, and when in 1966 the paper’s critics panned the opening of the new $45.7 million Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center, Punch Sulzberger was appalled. The opening featured Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, which The Times’ music critic, Harold Schonberg, found “vulgar” and “exhibitionistic”; the ballet within the opera was not satisfactory to Clive Barnes; the art on the walls was unexciting to John Canaday; the architecture was “sterile” to Ada Louise Huxtable; and the 3,800 first-nighters, which included Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, John D. Rockefeller 3d, and Mayor John Lindsay, were characterized by Charlotte Curtis variously as “overachievers,” “nabobs,” “moguls,” and a “mob.” When Punch Sulzberger had finished reading the views of these five Times writers in the paper, he exclaimed, “My God, couldn’t they find anything good to write about?” He expressed his feelings to a few executives, but there was no hint of restraining the critics. If he wished to temper a critic’s tone, or was otherwise dissatisfied, he would not lecture the critic—he would remove him. And that is what Sulzberger had done during the previous month, in August of 1966, in the case of Stanley Kauffmann. Clifton Daniel had learned of Punch Sulzberger’s plan gradually: first Daniel had heard from Catledge that the critic Walter Kerr, whose Herald Tribune had just merged with the Journal-American and the World-Telegram after a long strike, and who had not joined the new World Journal Tribune, was being considered for employment by The Times. Daniel was told to tell Kauffmann, who was on vacation in Connecticut, of the discussions that The Times had been having with Kerr. (Kerr was then in Austria participating in the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies.) But before Daniel could arrange to meet with Kauffmann, in fact on the very day that Kauffmann was scheduled to appear in Daniel’s office, Catledge told Daniel that Walter Kerr had just accepted The Times’ offer.

  When Kauffmann walked into Daniel’s office, the managing editor was obviously shaken, blushing from embarrassment—Kauffmann had never before seen a man more acutely embarrassed, and Kauffmann began to feel sorry for him. Daniel said what he had to say as briefly as he could—Walter Kerr, having been offered the critic’s job, had just accepted it; and now, Daniel continued quickly, the next step was to find something else that Kauffmann might do on The Times. Daniel said that he would give thought to this over the weekend, hoping that Kauffmann would do the same. Kauffmann, seated across the desk, a soft-spoken man with gray, wavy hair, very dignified and controlled, had not reacted angrily; he was upset, but on this occasion he was Daniel’s superior at keeping up appearances. He was not even privately disappointed in Daniel, realizing that Daniel had had nothing to do with this decision, a fact that was perhaps almost as disconcerting to Daniel as the decision itself. Kauffmann was also not entirely surprised by the news. He had imagined that something was wrong when Daniel had requested Kauffmann’s appearance during his vacation.

  Daniel proposed that they meet again on the following Monday outside the office, perhaps in the evening, to continue their discussions about Kauffmann’s future on The Times. Later Kauffmann received a telephone call from Daniel’s office saying that the managing editor could not get away for the Monday night meeting, and asked that Kauffmann come into the office. When Kauffmann arrived, wishing to relieve both Daniel and himself of continued embarrassment, Kauffmann said that he had been unable to think of anything that he could do—or would wish to do—on The Times; instead he proposed that The Times fulfill its contractual obligations to him, and that he leave the paper. Daniel nodded in agreement, and on his desk he had Kauffmann’s file from the auditing department ready and waiting.

  Stanley Kauffmann returned to his desk, planning to spend the rest of the day getting his private affairs and correspondence in order, and then he received word that Catledge wished to speak with him. In the executive editor’s office, Kauffmann heard Catledge explain that the decision to replace him had been part of a “consensus,” and with a certain awkwardness Catledge added: “I was part of that consensus.” Whether the consensus had also included the publisher’s advisers who operate outside the News department—Harding Bancroft, the executive vice-president; Ivan Veit and Andrew Fisher, the two vice-presidents from promotion and production—Kauffmann did not know, nor did he care. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Kauffmann had felt no vindictiveness toward anyone as he left Catledge’s office. He did not now think of the paper in human terms, but rather as an impersonal institution. As an institution it had behaved badly, he thought; it had promised that his tenure would last for a minimum of a year and a half, and it had ended after eight months. He was quite certain that he would never again enter the Times building.

  After leaving the paper, he regained his position as the drama critic for Channel 13 and returned to the New Republic as a literary critic and cultural commentator. He soon lost touch with most of his acquaintances on The Times, although after his pieces had begun to appear in the New Republic he received a complimentary note from Clifton Daniel. He also received one day at home a rather odd letter from Daniel Yankelovich, Inc., the research organization that The Times had hired to conduct its scientific survey on employee morale. The Yankelovich correspondence, which included forms to be filled out, informed Kauffmann
that he had been among the 150 Timesmen chosen to give confidential opinions on The Times and its executives. Kauffmann was amused by this obviously unintended final note of irony. He was seriously tempted to fill out the forms and tell what he really thought. But this impulse soon passed, and Kauffmann never replied.

  Tom Wicker’s position had also been threatened in the summer of 1966, and his survival as the Washington bureau chief was a strange reversal on New York’s part that Wicker was content to accept without further explanation. To dare to inquire into the causes of his good fortune might jinx its continuance, although he had heard that Punch Sulzberger himself had altered the New York editors’ plan that would have removed Wicker as the bureau chief while giving him a Washington column after Krock’s retirement. Now Wicker had a column and the bureau, and he often wondered if the controversial Broder memorandum might have helped his cause in some way.

  David Broder’s lengthy criticism, written shortly before Broder had resigned from The Times in August of 1966 to join the Washington Post, had not only attacked Claude Sitton and the bullpen, indeed the whole New York bureaucracy, but it had cited the low morale in Wicker’s bureau that was the result of New York pressure, a condition that Sulzberger was perhaps not fully aware of. He had quickly become more aware of it, however, after Wicker had personally placed the Broder memo in Sulzberger’s hands while the two men were riding a train together between Washington and New York. Wicker had brought up the subject rather casually, “What did you think of that Broder memo, Punch?” Sulzberger had looked at Wicker quizzically. He had obviously never heard of it. Apparently Daniel or Catledge had not relayed it to the publisher. Wicker, smiling, told Sulzberger, “I just happen to have a copy with me”—and he pulled it out and handed it to Sulzberger.

  The publisher’s interest seemed stirred as he scanned it, and he undoubtedly might have wondered why Daniel or Catledge had never mentioned it to him, although it certainly was not in their own interest to do so. It appeared that Sulzberger might personally look into the matter of Washington’s morale more deeply, but Wicker was not counting on it. Wicker’s optimism had reached a low point between 1965 and 1966, a period during which he had constantly been criticized by the New York editors for his handling of the bureau. Their habitual complaint was that he was not producing enough front-page exclusives out of Washington—Rosenthal was in New York—and Wicker’s executive career seemed to hang in the balance. It sometimes also seemed, however, that Tom Wicker’s competence or incompetence in Washington was really a side issue to something deeper, more complex—it was as if he had become the symbolic figure in a psychodrama that other men yelled at, a focal point upon which Times editors could concentrate their personal grievances and professional differences. Wicker himself was incidental to the cause, he was a tall, ruddy, hefty, ambitious, shrewd, almost folksy Southerner whose presence in Washington had provoked so much emotion and reaction among the other editors that they had inadvertently revealed more about themselves than they had about him. Wicker was a product of events, an individual whose career had been advanced by the reporting of the John Kennedy assassination and by the death of Dryfoos, the latter shifting as it did the balance of power within the newsroom away from Reston to Catledge, prompting Reston to vacate his bureau to his hand-picked successor, Wicker, and to withdraw mainly into his column on the editorial page, over which Catledge had no jurisdiction. Wicker’s appointment had been very acceptable in 1964 to the new publisher, Punch Sulzberger, who was eager to keep Reston on The Times; although the elevation of Wicker had hardly been pleasing to Clifton Daniel when Daniel had learned of it. It meant that Daniel—whose promotion to managing editor had been procured by Catledge while Reston was advancing Wicker—had been deprived of any role in the selection of his chief subordinate in Washington. In the two years that followed, Daniel had tried to limit his criticism of Wicker to the coverage of news, but Wicker could nonetheless sense an undercurrent of personal coolness, and Wicker could understand it. Wicker was Reston’s boy, a reminder of Reston’s lingering influence; and there was perhaps another factor that was of no small annoyance to the class-conscious Clifton Daniel: Wicker, like Daniel, was from North Carolina, and Wicker knew where Zebulon was.

  Salisbury’s quarrel with Wicker was much more political than personal. Salisbury had become increasingly suspicious in 1966 of the Johnson administration’s self-righteous and optimistic attitude toward the war in Vietnam and American issues at home—the government machinery in Washington had seemingly become a manufacturer of illusion, and Salisbury believed that Wicker’s bureau had been derelict in its duty to probe and expose. It was not that Wicker himself was naive; since taking over Krock’s column, Wicker’s writing had reflected a growing concern in the capital over the way things were going, but Salisbury was less interested in Wicker’s perceptions as a columnist than he was in Wicker’s ability to push his staff toward a more aggressive brand of investigative reporting. Salisbury felt that Wicker could not do justice to both jobs, could not write a column and direct the bureau, and A. M. Rosenthal had agreed with Salisbury in this instance, it being one of the few things that Rosenthal and Salisbury could agree upon.

  But Rosenthal had not been very vocal in his criticism of Wicker during the summer and winter of 1966, even though Wicker, a contemporary of Rosenthal’s, was the only man in sight who seemed to pose a threat to Rosenthal’s dream of one day becoming the top executive in the newsroom. This was all the more reason for Rosenthal to restrain himself, not to behave ungraciously or impulsively when it appeared that he was soon to be promoted to an assistant managing-editorship. Rosenthal’s image as a driving editor of the New York staff had done him no harm with higher management when he had taken over the staff in 1963, for it was then generally conceded that drastic action was necessary; but now, more than three years later, when Rosenthal seemed destined for a higher office, he was wise to refrain from any display of partisanship or derogation. If the older editors wished to indulge in it, that was their prerogative; but Rosenthal had more at stake. He had given up his writing career to become an editor, had forsaken the by-line and public acclaim—which neither Reston, Salisbury, nor Wicker had done—and Rosenthal’s goal was to eventually run the entire department. At forty-four he could look forward to fulfilling his ambition, if he did not foolishly incur the displeasure of his superiors in the years ahead. Within a decade or much less, nearly all the senior editors currently running the paper would be gone. Catledge was sixty-five, and within a few years he would probably retire in the South with his pretty wife and write his memoirs, as Krock was now doing. Reston was fifty-seven, and he had often indicated that he preferred living in Washington to living in New York. Clifton Daniel was fifty-four, and, without Catledge, his position on the paper would undoubtedly be weakened, unless he could establish a better rapport with Punch Sulzberger. Failing to achieve that, and if the Democratic party remained in power, Daniel might pursue—with a bit of help from his father-in-law—an ambassadorship. The four assistant managing editors—Bernstein and Garst, Freedman and Salisbury—were all pushing sixty, or were beyond it. Of the younger editors coming up, there was Claude Sitton, the national-news editor, who had had his troubles; and Sydney Gruson, the foreign-news editor, an epicurean who was about to accept a more prepossessing assignment in Paris, where he would take over The Times’ International edition, which Sulzberger hoped would catch up with the stronger Paris Herald Tribune, now jointly owned by John Hay Whitney and the Washington Post. Drew Middleton had been interested in replacing Gruson as the foreign-news editor, but Daniel had not helped him to get the job, endorsing instead a forty-four-year-old correspondent named Seymour Topping, a very efficient, very loyal organizational type who, like Daniel, had come up from the AP, had headed The Times’ bureaus in Moscow and Bonn, and had married well—the daughter of the Canadian diplomat Chester Ronning.

  And so of the whole caravan of characters passing through the great timeless tundra of The Time
s in the second half of the twentieth century, none at this point seemed in a more advantageous spot than A. M. Rosenthal, and nothing would be less providential of him than to display signs of impatience or impiety, or to join in the chorus of dissent against Tom Wicker. Wicker was being criticized enough by other New York editors, and such criticism might have already been carried too far, having achieved for Wicker perhaps increased sympathy from Punch Sulzberger, and having perhaps given Sulzberger the idea that Salisbury, the troubleshooter, might more valuably serve The Times in another department—namely the Book Division, where the newsroom rumors had divined him, with Rosenthal moving up into Salisbury’s spot. Or it could have been that Catledge and Sulzberger, after deciding that Wicker should devote himself entirely to the column, could not find a suitable substitute who could take over the bureau without further demoralizing the Washington staff. Harrison Salisbury, who might have performed remarkably well in Washington, would perhaps also inspire mutiny. Max Frankel, a popular member of the bureau, was unacceptable in New York. Frankel had been described as “too emotional,” the executives having not forgotten his long letter of resignation in 1964. James Reston mean-while continued to defend Wicker, believing that New York, while charging Wicker with a lack of administrative initiative, usually failed to explain what specific big stories Wicker was missing; the criticism seemed too often vague and unconstructive to Reston, and he was not appeased when he was reminded that during his younger days in Washington, he had come up with numerous exclusives. Washington was a very different city in those days, Reston replied—World War II had recently ended, it was a world of emerging nations, news was more easily gotten. But now Washington was pretty much a one-man town, Johnsonville, and if Wicker were the sort who was merely interested in protecting his own flank from New York’s attack, Reston continued, Wicker could have focused each day on President Johnson’s movements and moods, the ruffles and flurries, and remained unconcerned with a more balanced, objective coverage of the capital.