by Gay Talese
Sometimes Reston thought that the influence of the press was exaggerated; at other times he seemed not so sure. It could not be denied that Herbert Matthews had influenced Castro’s career, that Halberstam had caused ripples in South Vietnam and Salisbury in North Vietnam. Television’s dramatic films of the clubbing of black marchers by Alabama state troopers in Selma had suddenly aroused millions of Americans, sending thousands of sympathizers into Selma in the next few days to support the marchers, to inspire new legislation, and to stir temporarily in America a national guilt and concern that would then fade as Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, and other racists, black and white, would dominate the news. Reston himself had on occasions during his career encouraged or inhibited political decisions by his words in The Times; and in the Time magazine cover story about him it was said that he sometimes planted one of his own ideas with government officials and, after being assured that it would be discussed, he wrote in The Times about the idea that was under consideration without hinting that he was its originator. There is nothing unusual about this in Washington, where some journalists have been known to write speeches for their favorite senators and to serve as unofficial advisers on policy, and where a large portion of the press corps’s identity with the national interest had become so deep-rooted during and just after World War II, when Reston began his rise, that it is now often impossible to see a sharp line of demarcation between the role of the press and that of the government. In a capital where there were more journalists, about 1,400, than Congressmen, and where the columnists may remain in power for decades while the politicians come and go, there is an understandable desire on the part of politicians to cooperate with the press, to flatter and possibly confuse with confidence those journalists who are the most important or critical—but one result of close cooperation between the press and the government is that they often end up protecting the interests of one another, and not of the public that they presume to represent.
Reston saw the situation from various angles: he believed that the President had, perhaps, too much power, and that the press had to help counterbalance him; but Reston also believed that such criticism could also be excessive, as it might have been in the case of President Johnson, encouraging dissent throughout the nation, aiding the enemy. While Lippmann had argued that it was fallacious reasoning to consider that a divided public opinion would have any effect on the enemy, Reston thought that there was something to be said for both sides—for both the danger and the necessity of criticism. Reston, as Murray Kempton had once described him, was not so much a man of the left or right as he was a man of The Times.
Now in 1967 Reston saw himself locked in a debate with his colleagues in New York over the priorities and traditions of news coverage. Reston was urging more reportorial freedom, New York wanted tighter controls. New York’s definition of news was often contrary to that of Reston and Wicker; Reston saw the world as revolving around Washington, while Catledge, Daniel, and the bullpen saw Washington in relationship to New York and the world. The place where the two factions in the debate might agree was that the modern newspaper could not stand still, but the proper course was questionable. Reston believed that the new role of the press was in the field of thoughtful explanation. The Times and other newspapers had already begun to rely more heavily on news analyses, articles that ran adjacent to news stories and interpreted controversial facts and statements, and counterbalanced them with the views of other authoritative spokesmen. Turner Catledge had been an early advocate of the newsanalysis article, recognizing a need for modernizing Ochs’s definition of objectivity, but Catledge later became disturbed, perhaps more so than Reston, by what he believed to be occasional abuses of this innovation. Catledge had not wanted the news analysis to become a reflection of a reporter’s opinion, for opinions were to appear only on the editorial page and in the critics’ columns. And so memos from New York warning reporters about opinions were sent to all the bureaus, which raised some doubts in a few reporters’ minds about the sincerity of Catledge’s previous exhortations about brighter writing.
In the Washington bureau, Tom Wicker pinned to the bulletin board one of Catledge’s statements that included the comment that responsibility for maintaining The Times’ traditional fairness “rests with the desks as well as with the reporters.” This, one Washington reporter said, was a clever maneuver by the cagey Catledge to refuel the old antagonisms between reporters and copyreaders, keeping everybody off balance. But Reston had not felt that Catledge had a personal motive, preferring to believe that The Times’ intramural differences were not really a reflection of personalities but were a genuine disagreement on principles.
Reston continued to think this way with regard to the New York editors through 1967, but in 1968 there would occur an incident that would suddenly disturb this conviction. That was when Reston would learn that New York had found the man to replace Wicker and to take over the Washington bureau.
20
James Lloyd Greenfield, an agile and urbane dark-haired man of forty-three, cared a great deal about how he looked and about the impression he was making on each new person that he met. He remembered names, was always attentive, was often complimentary. His suits were well tailored and of excellent fabric, usually set off by a colorful shirt and a silk handkerchief sprouting from his breast pocket. He revealed a sense of humor through an easy Midwestern accent, and he reminded one somehow of the successful executives shown in the television commercials, the wellgroomed youthful men being served martinis by blond stewardesses in the friendly skies of United; which is to say that there was nothing carelessly arranged about Jim Greenfield, that his taste was contemporary, that he symbolized the sort that large organizations were proud to display in public—men who did not quite get to the very top but who were often more presentable than those who did. Greenfield had worked hard to get to where he was, however, and the emphasis on his manner and appearance is not to demean his character but merely to suggest that he had cultivated what a more uncaring man, a presumptuous or ruthless man, might have been unlikely to cultivate. James Greenfield liked people, wanted to be liked in turn, and he was.
He had been born in Cleveland, the son of a job-printer and a former regular army sergeant, and his home life had been unhappy, particularly with regard to his father. Forced to shift for himself at an early age, working at fourteen in the office of the Cleveland Press, living with friends or relatives, Greenfield prematurely developed an adaptability to new people and places. He obtained a scholarship to Harvard, earning extra money by working in the university’s news bureau. After his graduation in 1949 he joined the Voice of America, serving in New York and in the Far East. During the Korean War he became a correspondent for Time, remaining in the Time organization for ten years, moving from Tokyo to New Delhi, from London to Washington, acquiring a taste for the better life through a liberal expense account, meeting people around the world who would be his friends for years. One person whom he met in India, in 1955, was The Times’ correspondent Abe Rosenthal. They were immediately companionable, and they sometimes traveled together on assignments through India and once into Ceylon.
When they were both transferred to bureaus in Europe—Greenfield to London, Rosenthal to Warsaw—they and their wives continued to remain in touch. In 1962, after Greenfield had spent a year in Washington as the chief diplomatic correspondent of the Time-Life bureau, he resigned to join the State Department as a public-affairs official. When Rosenthal visited Washington, he saw Greenfield; when Greenfield was in New York, he saw Rosenthal, and through Rosenthal he came to know Clifton Daniel, Arthur Gelb, and Punch and Carol Sulzberger.
James Greenfield left the State Department in 1965 to work with Pierre Salinger in Los Angeles as an executive with Continental Airlines, but this, he soon discovered, was not really what he wanted to do. He hoped to return to journalism, and during a business trip to New York, having lunch one day with Rosenthal at Sardi’s, Rosenthal mentioned the possibility of Greenfie
ld’s joining The Times. When Greenfield expressed interest, Rosenthal discussed it with Daniel. In June of 1967, Greenfield came to New York as an assistant metropolitan editor under Arthur Gelb. Gelb had at least a half-dozen assistant editors on the local staff, and it was several days before a desk for Greenfield could be wedged into the tight fleet of gray metal that surrounded Gelb near the front of the room behind the silver microphone; but it was finally managed after the upanchoring and rearranging of a few other desks, and Greenfield’s own graceful manner facilitated his entry. He did not appear to be jockeying for position among his peers, but rather he conversed with them and with the staff in a casual, pleasant way; and when he began to make suggestions, after a few weeks, he did so with delicacy and tact.
Rosenthal did not know specifically where Greenfield might best serve the paper, but he gradually came to regard him as perhaps the most imaginative subordinate editor in the newsroom, an idea man in ways quite different from Gelb. Gelb’s ideas were largely attuned to the cultural or social life of New York City, while Greenfield’s interests encompassed the nation and overseas; and not only those countries in which he had lived, but others to which he had been drawn by his journalist’s curiosity. Greenfield was very well informed about the student protest movement in America, a problem that he had studied during his years in the State Department; after he had left Washington for the airlines job in Los Angeles, he had continued to remain intimately interested in the thinking on campuses and in such hippie centers as Haight-Ashbury, which he had personally visited. He knew about the latest fads, the philosophies, and the language of the young, and he was one of the first Times editors to perceive the hippie movement as national in scope, spreading from San Francisco to Madison Avenue, and he encouraged the wider coverage of teen-age preoccupations.
Greenfield’s personal knowledge of the inner workings of Washington was regarded as a significant asset by some senior editors in New York. He provided them with a check against Wicker’s bureaumen. Greenfield had many contacts within the government and among those departed New Frontiersmen who hoped to regain power someday behind Senator Robert F. Kennedy; from these and other sources, Greenfield often received tips on matters that the Johnson loyalists were not anxious to discuss. If this information was not always substantial enough to produce major stories, it often added to the dimension or understanding of the news that was available. When the American ship Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans, Greenfield obtained information that described some of the drama and the scurrying on deck just before the ship’s radio went silent and the crew was captured—the sort of detail that New York had long claimed it was not getting out of Washington. But at this time there was no plan to move Greenfield from his present position to Washington. Greenfield was to remain in New York for an indefinite period, and his first important assignment was to help in the production of the experimental afternoon newspaper that Punch Sulzberger had been contemplating ever since the disappearance of the World Journal Tribune.
Sulzberger was not the only publisher interested in the afternoon newspaper market in New York; the owners of the New York Daily News were also exploring the possibilities, as was the publisher of New York’s Spanish-language El Diario—La Prensa, although these men, like Sulzberger, were extremely secretive about their projects. The only thing known about The Times’ venture was that it would be six columns wide and would somewhat resemble the Observer in London. Rosenthal was put in charge of a twelveman committee to supervise the first edition; he was assisted by a bullpen editor named Lawrence Hauck, by Arthur Gelb and James Greenfield, by numbers of other deskmen, makeup men, and reporters, all assembled in a temporary newsroom on the eleventh floor behind locked doors and windows that were covered to prevent outside peeping. There the plans were made for columns, features, and the entire news format, while outside the building representatives of the advertising and circulation departments conducted surveys to estimate the income such a newspaper might expect in New York.
After weeks of work and careful planning by Rosenthal, a dummy edition was laid out and was printed in the subbasement of the Times building at 5:30 one morning. Guards protected the stack of freshly printed forty-page papers from the random perusal or theft by outsiders. Then later in the day the papers were delivered to the office of the vice-president, Ivan Veit, where forty-five copies were numbered and distributed to a select list of executives through the building. A few days later all the copies were recalled, but one was missing. Tom Mullaney, editor of the Financial-Business department, had locked his copy in his desk drawer before leaving the building for the weekend; when he returned on Monday he discovered that his drawer had been jimmied; his copy was gone.
The response to the pilot paper, and to a second sample, was mixed—some executives liked it, some did not, some wavered and waited, others who had originally opposed the idea continued to oppose it, asserting that a second newspaper would adversely affect The Times. Sulzberger had initially been excited by the project, but the more he thought about it, the more reluctant he became. A second newspaper would require the creation of a philosophy that was different from The Times’, but was not inconsistent with it. There was also the problem of housing a second staff when The Times was having difficulty in fitting its present staff into the building, and there was the question of whether there was sufficient advertising revenue to support a new paper at a time when production and labor costs were higher than ever. Finally, there was doubt in Sulzberger’s mind that he and the other top executives could divide their energies without jeopardizing The Times; and so he announced that he was suspending the afternoon operation. Since the other New York publishers had come to the same decision, the city was left for the time being with only one afternoon newspaper, the New York Post.
Rosenthal was very disappointed by Sulzberger’s conclusion. Rosenthal had been very enthusiastic and optimistic about the new enterprise, and it had also represented his first major undertaking since he had become an assistant managing editor, and now he interpreted its rejection as a failure on his part. The other executives did not feel this way, at least did not express it; indeed, the afternoon editions had been so closely guarded that relatively few Timesmen were aware of Rosenthal’s involvement and hopes. Nevertheless, he was upset—his smooth, quick climb had been interrupted, and Sulzberger’s decision had hit him almost simultaneously with another aggravating bit of news. A book that he had coauthored with Gelb, a lengthy study of Daniel Burros, the Jewish Nazi who had committed suicide after reading McCandlish Phillips’ article, had been unenthusiastically reviewed in certain periodicals, including The Times’ own Sunday “Book Review.” Almost as disconcerting as the review was The Times’ choice of the reviewer—Nat Hentoff, a novelist and critic who had previously written disparagingly in the Village Voice about Rosenthal’s editorship of the New York staff. The Voice, in fact, had sharpened its sights on The Times with Rosenthal’s rise, or so it seemed to him, carping at such Times exclusives as the Harlem “Blood Brothers” story, and once printing in the Voice an anonymous article by a former Timesman who blamed Rosenthal for the low morale in the newsroom and other changes for the worse.
Why the Times “Book Review” would send the Rosenthal-Gelb book, entitled One More Victim, to anyone on the Voice was both mystifying and infuriating to Rosenthal and Gelb, and they could not help but wonder if it had been done out of spite by some subordinate editor on the eighth floor with a malicious sense of humor. If such were the case, a book editor could rather easily fulfill his intentions: knowing his stable of reviewers, knowing their literary leanings and vanities and pet grievances, their tendencies when dealing with certain authors or subjects or political philosophies, the editor had merely to match a particular book with a particular reviewer to get an almost certain result. This game of literary crossbreeding for invidious ends was not so possible on the lower levels of the Sunday “Book Review” when Markel had been the high potentate: in those days an effort had been m
ade to shepherd the books of important Timesmen, or books by friends of The Times, into the hands of genial reviewers. But now the Times “Book Review,” no doubt tired of its bland old image under Markel and also following the more rapier style of The New York Review of Books, was trying to forge a sharper product. John Simon, known as “Bad John Simon” in New York cultural circles, was back writing for The Times, his dispute with Markel a forgotten issue. The Times had recently published a number of reviews that had drawn protests from readers claiming that the critics’ well-known political positions and prejudices precluded any chance of a fair review (e.g., Sidney Hook’s review of Dr. Meyer Zeligs’ Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss). And The Times was also publishing critiques that seemed more unjustifiedly venomous than any in the past (e.g., Wilfrid Sheed’s assault on William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner).