The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  The magazine rights to Svetlana Alliluyeva’s book went to Life, whose board chairman, Andrew Heiskell, was married to Punch Sulzberger’s sister, Marian, the widow of Orvil Dryfoos. The inside story of Mrs. Alliluyeva’s escape was written for The Times by Harrison Salisbury, who had gotten most of his information from his friend, former Ambassador Kennan; but Salisbury had kept his by-line off the story because he did not wish to offend his sources in the Soviet Union at a time when he was traveling regularly through Russia, which was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its revolution. The translator of Mrs. Alliluyeva’s book was Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a quietly wealthy, well-connected woman who had worked in the Senate office of John F. Kennedy, had met Punch Sulzberger and Clifton Daniel overseas, had known both Svetlana and Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia during her days there as a correspondent, and after the assassination was helping the assassin’s widow, Marina Oswald, write a book for Harper & Row.

  A magazine piece by Svetlana Alliluyeva that appeared a few months before her book, and had been inspired by her reading of Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, was printed in the Atlantic Monthly, whose publisher had published former Ambassador Kennan, and whose editor-in-chief, Robert Manning, had most recently worked in the State Department and knew all the right people in politics and journalism. In an issue of Book Week in April of 1967, Manning had written a very favorable review of James Reston’s book The Artillery of the Press, and a month later Reston wrote a very favorable review in The Times on page one about Mrs. Alliluyeva’s article in the Atlantic Monthly.

  When Mrs. Alliluyeva’s book, entitled Twenty Letters to a Friend, was distributed by Harper & Row in the fall of 1967, The Times’ Sunday “Book Review” editor, Francis Brown, searching for an appropriate reviewer, selected Olga Carlisle, an American of distinguished Russian ancestry—she was the granddaughter of the playwright and short-story writer Leonid Andreyev, and her parents had been friends of Pasternak. Mrs. Carlisle’s review was very favorable, and it was positioned on page one. The Times’ daily book critic, Eliot Fremont-Smith, a keen student of office affairs—he had praised Reston’s Artillery of the Press as “one of the important documents of our time”—was profoundly moved by the Svetlana book, calling it “the rarest of events.”

  And so it had all worked out very well—Punch Sulzberger dwelled in the center of a rather tidy world. He had paid an estimated $250,000 for the serialization rights to the memoirs, had helped to launch Mrs. Alliluyeva’s best seller, had pleased his many clients in The Times’ News Service, and had somewhat restored The Times into the good graces of those patriots in the nation who had been offended by Salisbury’s reporting from Hanoi, and by Oakes’s aggressive dovishness on the editorial page. It was one of the remarkable qualities of The Times that it could be, almost simultaneously, so many things to so many people—it was a deep-rooted flexible tree that moved from left to right, right to left, making its quiet adjustments as it dropped its tired old leaves and rebloomed through a century of seasons.

  In the winter of 1967, Herbert L. Matthews sat rather forlornly in Room 1048 along a corridor of editorial writers on the tenth floor. Nothing would please him less than to be described as forlorn, a man doing penance in an ivory tower because he had embarrassed The Times years ago in Cuba. Matthews was vain and valorous; at sixty-seven he was thin, tall, only slightly less energetic, and no less alert, than when he had first joined the paper in 1922, beginning a career that would find him in Peking in 1929 observing a triumphant Chiang Kai-shek; in Addis Ababa in 1936 riding with an invading Italian army; in Perpignan in 1939 writing his last dispatch from the Spanish Civil War; in Italy and India and North Africa during World War II, in London after the war, and in the Cuban hills in 1957 interviewing a bearded revolutionary that most people thought was dead.

  Because of these articles about Castro and subsequent ones about Cuba, The Times would eventually be charged with Communizing that island, and many editors in the newsroom would become chary of Matthews. In 1963, as a member of John Oakes’s Editorial department, Matthews revisited Cuba and Castro, and upon his return to New York he offered to write articles for the News department, but his offer was refused. In 1966, again representing the Editorial Board, Matthews reacquainted himself with Castro and Cuba. No other Timesman could get into Cuba in 1966, and Matthews had amassed twenty-five thousand words of notes, but the News department again declined his offer to write for it; consequently, The Times went through the year with no information from Cuba from a member of the staff.

  When readers wrote letters to The Times inquiring about Matthews’ status, they received replies from Clifton Daniel’s office explaining that Matthews was no longer writing for the News department because he was no longer, strictly speaking, a newsman, but rather a member of the Editorial Board, implying that editorial writers did not write for the News department. This was not true. Harry Schwartz, Murray Rossant, and numbers of other editorialists wrote frequently for the News department, and so had Matthews in years past. Now, however, he was a sensitive issue. While his by-line appeared from time to time over an essay or article on the editorial page, or perhaps in the Sunday edition, it rarely appeared more than once every few months. During 1966 it appeared a total of six times. But as an anonymous editorial-writer he was extremely productive. He wrote about Latin American affairs (being sometimes critical of Castro), about the Middle East and Vietnam, and other subjects that John Oakes thought worthy of comment. Oakes was very respectful of Matthews’ talent and was fond of him personally, and he had never forgotten his first sight of Matthews in Paris forty years ago: Oakes, a schoolboy visiting the Paris bureau, saw Matthews walk in wearing a gray fedora, beige gloves and matching spats, and carrying a malacca walking stick.

  The next time Oakes saw him was two decades later, in 1949, when both were writing editorials on the tenth floor under Charles Merz. Matthews was then a favorite son of the institution, enjoying a warm relationship with the owners of The Times; Iphigene Sulzberger was the godmother to Matthews’ only son. But now, in 1967, after forty-five years, he was preparing to leave The Times, planning to devote himself to his books and to his belief that history will finally absolve him. Even now he believed that Castro was not a Communist when the revolution began, and in Matthews’ final article on the editorial page—the last of four by-line reminiscences on the four continents that had been his beat—he wrote:

  For the United States, Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution brought Latin America to life after a long period of indifference and neglect. When Cuba’s Jefe Máximo and his Government turned Communist and later almost brought on a nuclear war, somebody had to be blamed. I was.

  The influence of journalism on history is a fascinating and controversial subject which has engendered much nonsense. I would not deny that as I sat with Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, Ché Guevara and others up in the Sierra Maestra on the chilly morning of Feb. 17, 1957, Clio, the muse of history, touched me with her wand—or whatever she uses. The resulting publicity in The Times gave Castro and his guerrilla band a nationwide and even a worldwide fame that, chronologically, was the start of the most fantastic career of any leader in the whole course of Latin America’s independent history.

  However, Cuba was “ripe for revolution,” as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote for a State Department white paper. Fidel Castro was the man of destiny and nothing was going to stop him in the long run.…

  Looking back over the kaleidoscopic changes in the world during these 45 years and passing in review the men and women who made the history of our times is a process that leaves some pride, some humility—and a sense of helplessness. There is, at least, a residue of satisfaction in thinking that one did not always go the way of the crowd.

  A newspaperman walks with the great of many lands, but he must go his own way—right to the end of the road.

  Herbert Matthews’ kind of man, an individualist inspired by a touch of idealism and self-absorption, was out of style on The Times
in 1967. The new foreign-news editor, Seymour Topping, did not want superegos on his staff, nor did Clifton Daniel. Both Topping and Daniel preferred correspondents such as they themselves had been—dispassionate men, reliable, cool. Topping now had Daniel’s permission to call home immediately any correspondent who was not functioning in accordance with New York’s directives. With swift modern communications and jet airplanes at his disposal, Topping could move his men around the globe like pawns; he did not need nor would he tolerate the old system that had produced such figures as Drew Middleton in London, Harold Callender in Paris, A. C. Sedgwick in Athens, Arnaldo Cortesi in Rome, and Thomas J. Hamilton at the United Nations; and had permitted wide latitude to such roving correspondents as Herbert Matthews.

  Under the new system, Topping functioned as a one-man control tower, and it was significant that in 1967 the only dominant correspondents were, like Topping, former correspondents who had become editors—Daniel, Salisbury, Rosenthal. Not surprisingly, the overseas expertise was emanating from Forty-third Street. The overseas bureau chiefs had lost their traditional stature, and it was also more difficult in 1967 for a correspondent to get a story into The Times. Except for the staff in Vietnam, whose stories had top priority, the rest of the staff around the world had been instructed by Topping not to file dispatches each day unless absolutely necessary and to concentrate on “wrap-up” stories that condensed the events of several days. Space was limited, and there was no longer sufficient room for a daily spread of relatively minor government news from fifteen or twenty capitals. Even the Moscow bureau, whose stories had been so prominently played in The Times when the bureau chief had been Topping or Daniel or Salisbury, was now of secondary importance to Saigon’s and to the fact that Washington had emerged as the supreme capital of the Western world insofar as The Times was concerned. What Harold Wilson or de Gaulle or Aleksei Kosygin was thinking was not at this juncture so important as what Lyndon Johnson was doing or not doing. The big story was not in the major foreign capitals but at home—the American crisis over Vietnam and the Negro; the challenge to authority on the campus and in the street. And so unless a correspondent was in Vietnam—or in the Middle East during a periodic assault; or was, like Henry Tanner, in Paris during a student uprising, or, like Lloyd Garrison, in Biafra during a siege of starvation—unless the correspondent was encircled by death, destruction, or revolution of some sort, he might as well return to the United States, where there was enough tension and violence for everyone.

  Perhaps the first Timesman to rebel against the tighter controls abroad and to recognize the more dramatic opportunities at home was thirty-three-year-old David Halberstam, a tall, dark, low-pressured but very aware journalist who had graduated from Harvard, had worked for a small country paper in Mississippi, and had then moved up to the Nashville Tennessean, also writing pieces for The Reporter. A few of these magazine pieces were read by Reston, who in 1960 hired him for The Times’ Washington bureau. Halberstam was moderately happy in Washington, but his true reportorial talent was not fulfilled until he had gone to the Congo in 1961 to cover the fighting there. He worked best when free to follow his own instincts, to pursue his own ideas without the guidance or resistance of an editor. More than any other Timesman of his generation, Halberstam was in the best tradition of Matthews and Salisbury—to borrow one of Salisbury’s self-descriptive phrases, Halberstam had “rats in the stomach.” He was a driven, totally involved reporter who was unencumbered by conventionalism or the official version of events, and, like Matthews and Salisbury, he was destined to become controversial, particularly after arriving in Vietnam in 1962.

  Halberstam’s coverage of the war conveyed little of the optimism that the South Vietnamese leaders and their American “advisers” insistently proclaimed. As Halberstam saw it, the allied contingent was neither making friends, influencing people, nor winning the war in Vietnam. He was not the only reporter who felt this way—there were, among others, Neil Sheehan of the UPI and Malcolm Browne of the AP, both of whom would later join The Times—but Halberstam, whose reporting appeared consistently on page one of The Times, became the most conspicuous běte noire of the American State Department and the White House. Those skeptical of Halberstam’s reports began accusing him of exaggerations, and even some Times editors were privately worried during 1963 that the paper once again might be charged with abetting communism. The foreign desk questioned him with sharply worded cables, to which Halberstam responded even more sharply. After the overthrow of the Diem regime, and following the murder of her husband and her brother-in-law, Madame Nhu announced, “Halberstam should be barbecued, and I would be glad to supply the fluid and the match.”

  While Halberstam’s winning a Pulitzer in 1964 quieted much of the professional rankling, he continued to have his personality differences with members of the foreign desk. He had gone too far, too fast; and they missed few opportunities to question his judgment. Halberstam resented many of their cabled queries, and he also became angered when a promised raise was inexplicably held up.

  During his next assignment, in Warsaw, he met and married a Polish actress, Elzbieta Tchizevska, further complicating his relationship with the foreign desk: it was now feared that he would write softly about the Communist regime to avoid expulsion from Poland and separation from his wife. Halberstam did the opposite, writing several critical articles about the economic life of the people and of anti-Semitism in Poland, and in December of 1965 he was expelled on charges of “slander.” When there seemed only mild concern in New York over his personal welfare, in fact when he had heard that a few editors thought that he had caused his own expulsion by his abrasiveness, Halberstam became even more embittered.

  His next assignment was in Paris, where his wife later joined him, but the stories in Paris bored him, and there seemed no other foreign assignment with the reportorial challenge that existed in the United States. The glamorous era of the foreign correspondent seemed over, at least for him, and he spent much of his time in the Paris bureau writing a novel and occasionally composing a letter to friends in New York that revealed his frustrations under the present system:

  I am working more for myself than for Punch Sulzberger, but if its okay with him its okay with me. My attitude right now is pleasantly cavalier: the more faced with the prospect of leaving The Times, the more convinced I am that in the long run it is better for me, that I don’t need their security, and that I can swim and swim well.…

  I have written Abe Rosenthal that I want to return to New York, and I hope he can do something about it (the correspondence with Daniel has all been very pleasant and non-explosive). About Daniel: he is I think the epitome of another generation and particularly of the other generation on The Times, the generation that calls you Mister. He believes that this is the best of all possible worlds in the best of all possible professions—that therefore it is an honor for you to work for The Times, really your privilege, and that it is your honor to talk with him, since he is its working embodiment.…

  We had a week with Charlotte Curtis, who is now one of the most powerful men on the paper, since Daniel values her opinions on everything and reads mostly her section (Jesus, in the middle of the collections we got a cable from him wanting to know why purple was the color this year, or some crap like that). Charlotte and I talked rather endlessly about the future: she kept telling me that newspaper writing was the only way to write and I kept insisting that if you stay with it you hit a point of no return, your talent levels out and eventually diminishes, and that you retire without even knowing it. I kept telling her that The Times simply is not in a position to let me write what I want to write and that as for magazine writing, if it comes to that, I will work for a magazine I like and not one I don’t even read, The Times’s own weakly. She suggested I go to Bangkok and I said fuck Bangkok. Bright, tough little broad.…

  Halberstam later returned to New York, but even under Rosenthal he could not gain the freedom to write and travel around the country as he
wished, and as a result he resigned in 1967 to join the staff of Harper’s. The resignation of a young Pulitzer Prize winner was unsettling to some editors, and Halberstam’s departure may have made conditions more flexible for other correspondents returning to New York. One of them, J. Anthony Lukas, who had gone to Harvard with Halberstam and had followed him into the Congo, was rather gingerly treated upon his return, receiving top assignments commensurate with his talent. In October of 1967, Lukas was assigned to delve into the background of an eighteen-year-old girl from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had been found murdered in New York City with a hippie boyfriend in a boiler room in the East Village. The idea for the assignment had come from Rosenthal, who had a friend who knew the slain girl’s father, but the writing and approach to the story were uniquely constructed by Anthony Lukas.

  After interviewing the girl’s parents in their thirty-room house in Greenwich, and after hearing her described as a wholesome, well-adjusted product of a privileged suburban upbringing, Lukas shifted his attention to Greenwich Village, where he spoke with her hippie friends. They described her life in a dingy hotel, said that she lived with a number of young men, supported them on marijuana and LSD, and had herself been “freaked out on Methedrine.” Lukas’ portrait presented the two conflicting views of the girl, a story that The Times featured on page one and to which it devoted a full page inside. Even more unusual was the trouble that was taken in the layout of the story: the part dealing with the girl’s parents in Connecticut, their opinions and insight into her character, was set in regular type; the version of her as presented by her companions in Greenwich Village was set in italics. The Times had rarely in the past made such an artful presentation of a story within its regular news columns, and there was perhaps no feature all year that was more talked about by Times readers, particularly those with young daughters living in fashionable suburbs. The article, entitled “The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick,” would win a Pulitzer.