The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  He loved the long hours, possessing phenomenal energy, and he loved the excitement and tactics. He was in Chicago during the days of gangland killings, wrote stories about Al Capone, and covered his tax trial. One day at the United Press bureau one of Salisbury’s reporter friends, a man who had a pipeline into the mob, received a tip that the mayor of Chicago, Tony Cermak, would be shot. Appreciative of the help, the UP bureau quickly planned the coverage, arranging for telephone lines to be kept open and selecting a code word to flash the news. It never occurred to any of them to notify the mayor or the police. When the event did not materialize, however, the reporter who had been tipped off became confused; and his confusion turned to anger when Mayor Cermak, traveling with President Roosevelt, was shot in Miami. “Those bastards double-crossed me,” the reporter said, insisting that Cermak and not Roosevelt had been the target.

  Salisbury got married in 1933 to a girl he had met in Chicago a year or so before, and he would regard it as one of the unfortunate decisions of his life. But he was part of the busy Washington bureau a year later, working most of the night, and by 1942 he was off to cover the war from London, leaving his wife and son in New York. The departure from his son, who was three years old, was difficult for Salisbury, but he had been anxious to get overseas for years, to be part of a historic event that would be the high point of so many reporters’ lives, and so he went. And he can remember very vividly, even now, the sharp small details of England then—the decor of his room in the Park Lane Hotel, the clatter of rooftop shingles as the planes roared low, the rustle of people moving very close to him in the night on the dark streets of London’s blackout—London would never seem more beautiful to him than during those dangerous, glamorous nights of the blackout. Some friends he made then would remain friends for years, among them Daniel of the AP and Walter Cronkite of the UP; and Salisbury also met a marvelous young woman, a Red Cross worker, who would reappear in the United States after the war to complicate his already complicated personal life.

  In 1944, following a short tour in North Africa, Salisbury was sent to the UP bureau in Moscow, and he began reporting the Russian army’s destruction of the retreating Germans, the recapturing of Russian villages and towns, and in May of 1944 he reported the bloody scene on the Black Sea off Sevastopol in which 25,000 Germans were trapped, waiting in vain for evacuation ships:

  You couldn’t walk more than a yard or two in any direction without stepping on a body … along the shore were remnants of small rafts the Germans had attempted to use for escape. Thousands of papers swirled in the dust—passports, military documents, letters, playing cards … Russian salvage crews swarmed over the battlefield like ants, sorting usable parts from wrecked ME-109 and FW-190 planes, trucks and tanks. The city of Sevastopol itself is rubble. In a ninety-minute drive through the streets I saw only five buildings which appeared habitable. Mayor Vassely Yetrimov estimated that 10,000 civilians remain from the pre-war population of 100,000. I saw only thirty …

  After the war Harrison Salisbury returned to New York, to his wife, and to a new job as foreign-news editor of the United Press. The war had been his escape, he admitted that, and now he hoped to adjust to life at home. The birth of his second son in 1947 brought a new closeness between his wife and him, but it did so only temporarily. He was tense much of the time, and the woman he had known in London appeared in New York. He wanted to quit the United Press and work for The New York Times, but there were no openings, and he would not accept the editorships available to him at The Reporter magazine or Time. The indecisiveness of his private life, the frustrations of his professional life; the end of the war, the end of the marriage, the general wretchedness of his daily existence drove him to a point where he could not work at all. He was a victim of what he believed was anxiety neurosis. One day he entered the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.

  Many years later some of his friends would point to this period as the nadir of his life, expressing admiration at his ability to rebound and to continue to rebound when things seemed to be going against him still later in his life. But Salisbury always dismissed such interpretations as melodramatic. Exaggerations. The logic of people wishing to arrive at too-easy conclusions. He saw his life not as one of ups and downs, but as a slow, steady progression. His time of tension was not a breakdown, he asserted, but a wonderful opportunity for reevaluation and reexamination, the kind of thing that every man can use periodically in his lifetime. It would surprise him, during those later years after he had risen within The Times, to be told that some people feared him or disliked him or considered him conspiratorial. Such opinions would not greatly concern him, merely surprise him, for he was confident that they were unfounded. If he was disliked by others because he was so sure of himself—well, he was sure of himself. Some Timesmen were a little pleased in 1960 when his racial reporting from Alabama became part of a big libel suit, thinking this might teach him a lesson. But The Times won the case on appeal. A young Times reporter was shocked when Salisbury suspected CIA men in very respectable circles, but the young man thought differently after the CIA’s activities were exposed, being featured most tellingly in Ramparts magazine. Salisbury was not surprised in 1964 when Clifton Daniel made him an assistant managing editor (“I’d have been surprised if he hadn’t”). Few things caught Salisbury admittedly unaware; he conceded few weaknesses and dismissed as melodramatic the little insights other people claimed to have into his character. It seemed impossible to hurt his feelings, or to catch him in a revealing moment of self-doubt. He seemed always busy, always preoccupied with his work at The Times, yet occasionally he suggested his skill at quiet observation: “I like the way you walk, and the way your eyes move around the room,” he once told a young reporter he knew only slightly. But nobody at The Times claimed to know him well, and so they were left with their unverified versions. Or with what little they could learn about him from his work, but this was difficult. As Salisbury himself wrote in 1961 in The Northern Palmyra Affair, his novel in a Russian setting that now could be anywhere:

  So seldom was anyone what he appeared on the surface. Nor for that matter even what he seemed to be at the first level below the surface. No, indeed. Everyone these days played a triple role or a quadruple role. If a man said something the possibilities were almost infinite. What he said might be true. This was the rarest possibility.…

  Harrison Salisbury was hired by The Times in January of 1949, after persistent visits to the office of the managing editor, Edwin James. Salisbury was assigned immediately to Moscow. Had Salisbury not succeeded, after equal perseverance, in getting a visa from the Russians, he would not have gotten onto The Times, for the Moscow bureau, unstaffed for eighteen months, was the only job open. The Times’ last regular correspondent there, Drew Middleton, who had written with relative unrestraint, had been denied reentry in 1947, and the newspaper frequently had difficulty in covering Russia. Its coverage of the Russian Revolution at first overlooked, then underestimated, the impact of Lenin. Its correspondent in the Twenties and Thirties, Walter Duranty, had become, in the opinion of Times editors, an apologist for Stalin. The Timesman in Russia from 1941 to 1943 turned up later writing for the London and New York editions of the Communist Daily Worker. Before Salisbury had been sent to Moscow, The Times had conducted an investigation of his past activities, political and personal, and the bullpen had been alerted by the publisher to keep a “sharp eye” on his reporting. Even so, Salisbury soon became controversial; his dispatches reflected what many readers considered excessive sympathy for the Soviet Union, and there was the hint within journalistic circles, particularly from the right wing, that the only reason the Russians had granted Salisbury a visa was because he was politically naive. This was not true; but these were years of passionate opinion, not of measured restraint: it was McCarthyism in America, the worst days of the Cold War, and Moscow had become a city of suspicion and dark plots. There was conflict between Mao and Stalin; Tito had broken away; a new state secrets act ha
d been imposed which was so strict that it could be interpreted as preventing a Russian telephone operator from giving the correct time to a foreigner. For Salisbury in Russia these were days of denial and loneliness, a time when he came to suspect that his every move was watched, his every story censored, when nearly every young Russian woman who caught his eye was later questioned by the secret police. One day word was received in the newsroom that Salisbury’s life was in danger—the Soviet secret police, believing him to be a CIA agent, were about to torture him, bring him up for a spy trial, and dispose of him. When Salisbury had not been heard from for several days, a reporter on the New York staff, Will Lissner, wrote the advance obituary of Harrison Salisbury.

  Salisbury’s reputation with American readers might not have been so controversial if The Times’ editors had made it clear that the articles that they were printing under Salisbury’s by-line had previously been censored by the Russians. On several occasions, Salisbury had written the editors requesting that the notation Passed by Censor be inserted over his dispatches, but this was never done, and so he was regularly attacked in the letters-to-the-editor columns and in American magazines as being soft on Communism. Salisbury was not quite sure why there was reluctance on the part of The Times’ management to the use of Passed by Censor, but he wondered if it was because Jewish censorship in Israel then was equally harsh, and that some Times editors or the owners did not wish to antagonize the powerful Zionist groups in America by putting a censorship tag on their stories. But this might have been called preposterous reasoning by his superiors on The Times, and Salisbury decided that it was better left unsaid. And besides, censorship existed then in one form or another from Egypt to the Dominican Republic, and how could The Times accurately label all those varying degrees of censorship on its dispatches? The Times did occasionally express regret in its editorials for the “distorted or incomplete report from Russia, through no fault of our correspondent.” This helped Salisbury to a degree, but not to the degree of offsetting the sting that came on those days when The Times would run, next to one of Salisbury’s censored-soft pieces, a highly critical piece on Russia by The Times’ resident Soviet expert, Harry Schwartz.

  A former Soviet-affairs analyst for the OSS and State Department, later a professor at Syracuse University, Harry Schwartz had been denounced by the Russians as a “capitalist intelligence agent.” He had started writing for The Times about Russia from Syracuse in 1947, the year that the Russians had denied Drew Middleton’s reentry; by 1951 Schwartz had moved down to New York as a full-time staff writer for The Times, producing his stories in an office on the tenth floor that was stacked with Communist newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. The way that Schwartz wrote about Russia 4,600 miles from Moscow, and the way that Salisbury could write about Russia from Red Square, resulted, of course, in Salisbury’s seeming to be a Red propagandist, and resulted eventually in a private little Cold War between these two Timesmen.

  Salisbury became furious when he had heard that Harry Schwartz, attending the New Republic’s forum on the Soviet Union, indicated that Salisbury was being “taken in” by the Russians or was “trying to get in good with them.” The charge was investigated in New York. After an examination of the transcript of Schwartz’s remarks, the editors could find no such statements, and Salisbury was advised to pay no attention to such rumors, merely to continue his fine work under the obvious handicaps. Still, the Salisbury-Schwartz relations remained cool, as many of Salisbury’s dispatches were discarded in New York in favor of the uncensored pieces that Schwartz produced after analyzing the latest Communist journals and consulting his Soviet sources in Washington and elsewhere. (Years later, after Salisbury had returned to New York, he reviewed in The Times a book by Harry Schwartz. Schwartz was not pleased.)

  In 1954, after more than five years in Moscow, and after Clifton Daniel had volunteered to replace him there, Harrison Salisbury returned home. He was forty-five, he had gotten a divorce after years of separation, and he hoped that he could adjust to a quiet and productive life in New York City. It is never easy for a foreign correspondent of The Times to return to the home office, no matter how severe his life might have seemed abroad. There are compensations with those hardships. One is not surrounded by so many editors, so much interoffice pettiness when one is thousands of miles away. While the foreign correspondent is occasionally aroused from his sleep at 4 a.m. by anxious editors from New York requesting an insert in a story to match information published in another newspaper, he nevertheless enjoys long stretches of freedom, writing and moving about as he wishes. All this stops when the correspondent returns, as Salisbury did in 1954, to the home office. The correspondent is first assigned to a desk within one of the many rows; he no longer has a secretary, as he probably did overseas; and now instead of a chauffeur he will travel by subway. Seated around him in the newsroom are many ambitious young men and also some tired old correspondents who have been everywhere and will never go again. Their only sign of having been abroad is the suits they wear, somewhat threadbare now, but obviously made by foreign tailors. These old correspondents sometimes also continue to wear their hair long, in the style of their last European city, but they no longer write many stories for The Times that appear on page one. These go to the young spry men shooting for the big overseas assignments.

  When Salisbury returned, at forty-five, he was considered neither old nor young. His reputation was too formidable for him to be seated in the middle or rear of the room, surrounded by the carnivore or the older men, and so he was put on the aisle in the first row, next to The Times’ top frontline reporters, Peter Kihss and Russell Porter and, later, Homer Bigart. But Salisbury was operating under an added disadvantage. His final assignment for the foreign desk, a series of articles on Russia that he had written shortly after arriving back in New York (and that would win for him the Pulitzer in 1955), made Salisbury suddenly quite famous as a correspondent. His photograph appeared in The Times’ promotional ads, circulation soared, and people around town were talking about him. Yet some editors on the New York desk, for whom Salisbury had never worked, were skeptical of his talent, and so they indulged in a procedure that no longer persists at The Times but was then quite common: they would level Salisbury a bit, bring him down to earth. The first assignment they handed Salisbury upon starting as a member of the New York staff was about trash and garbage. This was a recurring assignment, Salisbury discovered, being revived almost every time that Iphigene Sulzberger had returned from Europe—a trip during which she usually observed that the streets of London, or Paris, or wherever she had been, seemed cleaner than those in New York. Her gently phrased, delicate memos containing her observations might then come bouncing out of the managing editor’s office to an assistant managing editor, then to the city editor, and finally to an assistant editor who would look around the room for a reporter. None of the editors were offended by this chore: the Sulzberger family, after all, owned the paper and were far less intrusive than the publishers of other newspapers; and only in infinitesimal ways might the Sulzberger taste be felt, such as The Times’ radio station, WQXR, not playing Mozart too often because Arthur Hays Sulzberger did not like him—and then, of course, there was Mrs. Sulzberger’s interest in such things as parks and in a cleaner New York. The reporters assigned such stories usually dispensed with them in less than an hour: a quick phone call to the New York City Sanitation Department would get either a shocked denial from the commissioner, or perhaps his sudden announcement of an antilitter drive in New York. This story could be done in six paragraphs, and would land near the bottom of page 41 of tomorrow’s Times, and that would be it until Mrs. Sulzberger’s next trip.

  When Salisbury, in 1954, got this assignment he did not know what to think at first. But he suspected that this was a subtle little plot to cool him off, and his reaction was sudden: he would turn this into the biggest trash-and-garbage story in the history of The Times. And he did.

  He spent weeks digging up facts a
bout trash and garbage, discovering that on certain days 16,402 tons of trash were collected in New York, that this collection is handled by 9,675 city cleaners, that the amount is almost four and one-half pounds of rubbish for each person in New York, or almost one-and-a-third tons for each sanitation worker, there being one trash collector for every 835 New York inhabitants. Salisbury wrote thousands of words on this subject, it became a three-part series that started on page one, and it began:

  No city in the world comes within ten million dollars of spending what it costs New York each year to keep clean. And no great city of the world, with the possible exception of a few in Asia, has a greater reputation for dirt, disorder, filth and litter. Why?

  When Clifton Daniel returned from Moscow to the newsroom in 1955, and began his gradual rise as an executive, life became more pleasant for Salisbury as a reporter, and, beginning in 1962, as an editor. Salisbury’s personal life also began to improve around this time with a courtship that would lead, in April of 1964, to his second marriage. His new wife was a lovely divorcée who had been reared in Boston, and had worked as a Powers model. He had met her through friends in Salisbury, Connecticut, and she had accompanied him during the summer of 1966 on his trip to Asia, that he hoped would lead into Peking or Hanoi. In anticipation of succeeding, Salisbury and his wife, Charlotte, had had their passports cleared beforehand in Washington for travel into China, or North Vietnam, or North Korea, a fact that some people in Washington would in time regret, but not at this juncture, for the Salisburys had been unable to visit any of those places. In August of 1966, Salisbury returned to New York thinking there was little hope, but he continued to send messages to Hanoi advising the authorities of his continued interest in reporting events from within North Vietnam. He got no response. In November, Salisbury cabled Hanoi suggesting that if there were a truce at Christmastime this might make an appropriate moment for a trip into North Vietnam. No response.