The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  Wicker himself had been deeply upset during this period not only by his own inner frustration but by the effect that it was having on his staff. The bureau, until Broder’s resignation had seemed to lend veracity to its complaints with New York, had considered itself voiceless, unrepresented, or misrepresented in the Times hierarchy. Reston had seemed to be building a stronger relationship with Sulzberger, as the publisher himself was becoming more independent, but Reston did not wish to intercede too often or too quickly for Wicker. Wicker was the bureau chief, the hope for the future, and Reston preferred biding his time in the background while Wicker attempted to deal with the bureau’s problems, to build his own relationship with the Sulzberger family, and to build up confidence in himself. Hearing from Reston, as Wicker had in July of 1966, that New York had decided to retain him as the bureau chief, had been encouraging news for a while, but the pressure from New York had not subsided. Two weeks after Broder had quit, it seemed that another Timesman, a man admired and respected, was destined to resign. This reporter, who had been covering the Senate ethics committee’s investigation of Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, had become so repulsed by the bullpen’s frumpishness and haggling that he demanded that Wicker take him off the assignment. In a memo to Wicker the following day, the reporter wrote:

  I am sorry about having exploded yesterday, because you have enough troubles without my adding to them. I am staying out to-day to try to straighten out in my mind what I think I should do.

  Let me begin with the treatment of the Dodd story, and then move on to what—it seems to me—it illustrates.

  As you know, I resisted the pressure from New York, after the first Pearson-Anderson stories appeared, to duplicate their stuff. My position was that when the case reached the courts, or when the committee set to work on the documents, then we should go into it. I did not wish to repeat the allegations without having any evidence of our own, or supplied by hearings.

  The first trouble we ran into was that mandatory kill of the Dodd-Klein relationship, on the ground that it was “potentially libelous.” This, after the allegations had been repeated in the plaintiff’s complaint. It took three weeks to get New York straightened out on this.

  Now the bullpen holds up the story on Sunday night on the ground that we seemed to be “persecuting” Dodd.

  First, I do not believe that the bullpen would have taken that attitude if the Washington Post had the story fronted. It would have had a message down demanding that we duplicate it.…

  In any event I should like to drop the story and have no responsibility for it for the reason set forth below:

  This Dodd story illustrates, in a small way but vividly, what seems to me the basic problem in our relations with the editors in New York, but particularly with those in the bullpen. This is that they do not have confidence in those employed to report the news, nor respect for the reporters’ judgment.

  Let me give some instances that leap to mind on what were extremely important developments:

  1. On the Cuban white paper in 1961, the insistence of the bullpen that the lead be based on an insignificant point, with the result that a totally wrong impression of the paper was given and that we were a laughing stock at the White House and the State Department.

  2. On the Vietnam white paper, the mandatory kill on Finney’s first story, which accurately reflected the substance of the paper, and the substitution of a lead based on what Dean Rusk told Catledge.

  3. On the Mansfield report last January, the refusal to devote a separate story to the report when the release was broken by the Paris Herald Tribune and the insistence that the report be inserted in a rather pro forma story on Dirksen. (We never did run that report, unlike the Post and the Star.)

  4. On Bobby Kennedy’s first long statement on Vietnam, the resistence of Sitton to the importance of the story, overcome only after long argument about whether the clips would not show that Kennedy had said the same thing before.

  We can make mistakes down here, and when we do, we should be hauled up short. But what takes the sap out of a reporter who is doing his level best to make the Washington report worthy of his idea of The Times is that all-too-apparent lack of confidence.…

  18

  The anticipation of Harrison Salisbury’s departure from the newsroom was based strictly on rumor, to be sure, but even rumors have a kind of special validity within The New York Times. One reason is that seated around the newsroom much of the day are some of the most inquisitive men in the world, reporters and deskmen who can observe a series of seemingly insignificant details—an overheard word here, a gesture there, a minor change in pattern—and piece them together into a revealing conclusion. They also have ample time to devote to this since the staff is large, and there are always some people sitting around minding other people’s business. Another factor is that nearly everything of interest either occurs, or is contemplated, in this one big open newsroom or in the adjoining smaller room, Daniel’s office, meaning that anyone making an inordinate number of entrances or exits through Daniel’s door—including Daniel, en route to Catledge’s back office—will not escape attention.

  During the winter of 1966, as the rumors of Salisbury’s being “kicked upstairs” became even more persistent, Harrison Salisbury sat calmly at his desk against the south wall of the newsroom composing a letter to a Communist friend who might be able to help him obtain a visa for North Vietnam. This story intrigued Salisbury—the scene in North Vietnam, a big story unreported so far by any American journalist because none could get visas. The story from South Vietnam, on the other hand, was somewhat stale with repetition, Saigon having become the capital of journalistic overkill, a stage for many American actresses and politicians wishing to blend their sincere concern with maximum personal publicity, and the television reporting from there was becoming surrealistic: a young commentator, microphone in hand, stands in the jungle describing the war drama while a helicopter hovers overhead, rifles crackle, and a platoon of Marines march past the television screen but do not look into the camera. But North Vietnam had yet to be invaded by the circus of American communications, and in his long career Salisbury had proved to be a master at slipping into places that had been forbidden.

  He did this by keeping up unceasing barrages of cables, calls, and letters to hundreds of influential people around the nation and the world—diplomats, dictators, bankers, propagandists—appealing to their vanity, urging their help, timing his own moves occasionally to coincide with moments when these people might also think it beneficial to have stories published in The Times. In 1957 Salisbury managed to get into Romania and Bulgaria, two countries which had barred Times correspondents since 1950, and he also was admitted to Albania, where no American correspondent had been since the end of World War II. (Salisbury later sent a Christmas card to one Albanian who had been very helpful during his visit, and that man has been neither seen nor heard from since.) In 1959 Salisbury was permitted into Mongolia, where only one other American newsman had been since before World War II, and in that year he also got back into Russia, which had barred him during the previous five years because of a series he had written on Russia for The Times in 1954, winning a Pulitzer Prize. He regained his admission to Russia when, as Anastas Mikoyan toured the United States in 1959, Salisbury followed him and wrote stories that so pleased Mikoyan that he produced a new visa, being unaware of the controversy caused by Salisbury’s previous articles. Later, after Salisbury had got to Russia and was at a reception one night talking to Mikoyan, a voice from across the room suddenly called out, “Mr. Mikoyan, beware! You don’t know to whom you are talking. That man has written slanderous things about the Soviet Union.” Salisbury turned in surprise, as did Mikoyan. It was one of the Soviet foreign office men who deal with the press. The man came closer and repeated the remark. There was an awkward silence. Then Mikoyan said quietly that he knew who Salisbury was, adding that Salisbury’s reporting during his trip to America had been very objective.


  Salisbury had been trying to get into North Vietnam for nearly two years. In the summer of 1966 he had even traveled around the periphery of China in a personal appeal, hoping to get down into Hanoi or up into Peking, but at every point he had been rejected. In August he had returned to New York, resuming his duties as an assistant managing editor, but continuing his private campaign with cablegrams and letters to anyone he thought might have influence in North Vietnam. When he learned that the North Vietnamese people had made a martyr of an American, Norman Morrison, who in 1965 had burned himself to death in front of the Pentagon while protesting American policy in Vietnam, Salisbury quickly got in touch with Morrison’s widow and asked that she write a letter to the North Vietnamese authorities in his behalf. She did. Months passed. Salisbury heard nothing.

  In November of 1966 Salisbury became fifty-eight years old. He had been aware of the talk about him in the newsroom, and he had known of Catledge’s feelings that Abe Rosenthal should be moved up to gain experience as an assistant managing editor and Daniel’s possible successor in the future. But what was not yet known around the newsroom was that Salisbury had no intention of yielding his position without gaining another one that would justify his considerable talents. He was not going to be kicked upstairs. If higher management considered him an ideal choice to head The Times’ expanded Book Division, then Salisbury had grandiose plans for that department. He had privately discussed the project on occasion with Catledge, Sulzberger, and Ivan Veit. Salisbury saw worthwhile opportunities for The Times in the book business, and if he became affiliated with it he expected virtual autonomy, being answerable to the publisher, of course, but not necessarily to Sulzberger’s high-echelon advisers. When there was reluctance on the part of Sulzberger, Catledge, and Veit to Salisbury’s approach, Salisbury decided that he would remain where he was. He was a tenacious man. He had spent much of his career writing about Russian purges and plots, power politics and executive intrigue, the ups and downs of commissars, and he was a master at bureaucratic gamesmanship. He was also supremely confident in himself. He had prevailed during long years of loneliness, had struggled as a writer, had successfully written fiction and nonfiction, was a respected journalist, lecturer, and linguist—he would never starve. He was a loyal Times executive but not a supplicant, not the sort who could be quietly eased out and made to accept a high position in limbo, being pacified by the faith and conviction that it would all be handled gracefully in the press release: “making full use of his broad experience” and “wider vistas” and so forth. If Catledge thought that Salisbury was so easily disposed of, Catledge had something to learn, although the executive editor was not unlike many Timesmen in his lack of insight into Salisbury. Even when Salisbury was being warm, friendly, and open, which he was capable of being, he seemed to be functioning on more than one level; no matter where he was, part of Salisbury remained remote and unreachable.

  Harrison Salisbury came by his independence naturally: he was born within a tight, close family that lived in a large, well-kept Victorian house that stood rather conspicuously in the middle of a slum in Minneapolis. The impoverished people who surrounded the Salisbury home in the early 1900’s were Orthodox Jews who had escaped military conscription in Russia; they had migrated first into Canada, later moving in large masses down into northeastern Minneapolis, causing the usual panic and quick property sales in the neighborhood, and soon only the Salisburys were left with these strange striving people who denounced an authority thousands of miles away.

  Salisbury’s father, an insular man, was not disturbed by the change in the neighborhood’s character since he generally avoided all neighbors regardless of their origin. His interest centered only on his family and the house itself, which had been owned by his father, a physician, a distinguished member of this old American family of freethinkers. The first Salisburys had come from England in 1640 as craftsmen and farmers, and many had fought against the Indians in King Philip’s wars in New England. By the early 1800’s, Salisburys had moved into Buffalo, and one of them kept a detailed journal of the War of 1812, observing in person some of the sea battles on Lake Erie. A brother of this man had begun a print shop and bookstore in Buffalo, and founded a newspaper, the Buffalo Gazette, and had a son, Guy Salisbury, who was a fine editor but a heavy drinker, and one day in 1869 he fell into Buffalo Creek and drowned.

  Around this time, one Amasa Salisbury traveled along the Great Lakes and moved into Wisconsin, and had one son whom he named after President Harrison—Augustus Harrison Salisbury. This son fought in the Civil War, later became a doctor and distinguished citizen in Minneapolis, and it was in honor of him that his grandson, the journalist on The Times, was named.

  As a boy, Harrison Salisbury was extremely shy. Surrounded in his neighborhood by Orthodox Jews and their children, he was an outsider from the start. And yet in having such friends, in overhearing their references to life in Russia and sensing their conflict with remote rulers and issues, he became prematurely curious about geography and politics. At this time, too, there was living in the Salisbury home an old white-bearded man, a great-uncle who had fought in the Civil War and been imprisoned at Andersonville; he had been released in such poor health that he never recovered nor married, and so he lived in this big house with Salisbury’s mother and father, an aunt and uncle, and young Salisbury and his sister, and each evening before dinner the old man would take the children, a youngster on each arm of his chair, and read aloud the Minneapolis Journal’s latest dispatches from the battlefronts of World War I.

  Salisbury devoured them. He placed large maps on the floor and pointed to the places. At the age of ten he had written his own history of the Great War, beginning “All Europe was astire …” In class he was a precocious student, graduating from grade school at twelve, from high school at sixteen. Being two years younger than his classmates kept him outside the contemporary circle, and nearly all of the Jewish friends he had grown up with had been forced to drop out of school and take jobs. So Salisbury spent more time reading, his home being lined with books, and writing poetry and essays, one of the latter on Alexander Hamilton, winning Salisbury a prize from a local historical society. He joined the Boy Scouts and earned enough merit badges to become an Eagle, and he particularly liked the long hikes and camping out all night; at first he could not sleep without a pillow, but he trained himself and then he could not sleep with a pillow, it being one of many little comforts he learned to avoid.

  Though his father was an atheist, his grandfather, Dr. Salisbury, had been a leader in the Minneapolis Universalist Church, now merged with the Unitarians, and this church, which Harrison Salisbury attended, partly influenced his political philosophy. The Universalists were opposed to strict dogma, advocating instead a broad and liberal attitude, urging that its members not fail to look at things also from the other man’s point of view. This was healthy, harmless advice for a young man growing up, but when that man continued to reflect some of it twenty-five years later as a newspaper correspondent in Russia during the Cold War and the McCarthy era, he inevitably became controversial.

  It seemed unlikely from the start that Salisbury could have become anything but a journalist. He had those qualities that so many journalists have. He was very shy, very curious, and journalism was the perfect vehicle for overcoming the first and satisfying the second. At the University of Minnesota, Salisbury became editor of the campus newspaper and, coming out of his shell a bit, became the center of what was then called the Great Nicotine War. After the university’s president had issued an ultimatum banning the smoking of cigarettes in the vestibule of the library, Salisbury dispatched his reporters to test the law, to smoke and see what would happen. He then sent other reporters to record the dialogue that would invariably ensue between the janitor of the library and the smoking students being evicted; and Salisbury himself later personally appeared on the scene. These confrontations, of course, provided lively stories for Salisbury’s newspaper; but, to his surprise, caused
his sudden suspension from the university in 1930. This event, which even made page one of The New York Times, inspired student demonstrations around the campus, though the suspension of Salisbury was not lifted for several months. But the United Press bureau in St. Paul, Minnesota, which had covered the story, offered him a job during the interim—his first step in professional journalism.

  Salisbury worked for the United Press for nearly twenty years, moving from St. Paul to Chicago, from Washington to New York to London to Cairo to Moscow, a hundred cities in between, moving so quickly to the clamor of new disasters and datelines and deadlines that his own life sometimes ceased to exist—he became an action addict, blurring the reality of his own personal problems while blending into the restless, competitive world of the agency man. There simply was no time to think about anything but the news, to get it and write it, and write it fast, and this was particularly true at the United Press during Salisbury’s earlier days. The United Press had neither the manpower nor money to compete on equal terms with the larger, richer Associated Press, and so to offset the odds the UP men had to travel more and type faster, and there appeared within the United Press, and the still smaller International News Service, an almost special breed of journalists: aggressive young men willing to be underpaid and overworked for the experience and adventure; they were the low-budget boys who came tearing into town, who shot from the hip and caught the next plane out, and among this group Harrison Salisbury was a star.