by Gay Talese
Reston remained until the early hours of the morning. During this time he and Rosenthal came to know one another better than they had before, which was not to say that the experience was one of harmony or satisfaction. Each man argued from his own position, believing it to be in the best interest of The Times, and Reston resented Rosenthal’s treatment of Wicker, and he also thought that Rosenthal had been impetuous during the whole Greenfield episode. Rosenthal felt now that he was on trial with Reston, and he resented being put in so defensive a position, and the situation was far from resolved as Reston stood up to leave in the middle of the night. After he did leave, Rosenthal paced through the apartment in a state of anguished monologue; and, at daybreak, unable to resist, he telephoned Reston’s hotel, woke him up, and continued the tense discussion. It was an outrageous thing to do, and Rosenthal regretted doing it, but it was somehow consistent with the bizarre events that had gripped the upper echelon of The Times during the last several hours—it had been a total nightmare for Rosenthal, an executive theater of the absurd.
When he arrived at The Times later in the morning, exhausted yet invigorated by the turmoil of the past twenty-four hours, Rosenthal went directly up to the fourteenth floor to keep an appointment he had with Sulzberger. The publisher was expecting him, and when Rosenthal had emerged from the elevator he saw Sulzberger coming toward him down the corridor with his arms outstretched; and then, in the spirit of men who had shared a sadness, they embraced and walked together into Sulzberger’s office.
If Rosenthal had had any serious doubts about his place on the paper, Sulzberger quickly dispelled them. Sulzberger was personally relying on him, he said, to help repair the damage done and to restore to The Times the harmony that had once prevailed. They had learned a good deal about The Times and about themselves during this experience, and Sulzberger thought that perhaps some good would come of it. The discord had at least been played out to the hilt, it had hit deep and low, and now there was nowhere to go but up. Sulzberger asked Rosenthal to spend the weekend at his country home for further discussions, and Rosenthal felt better. Returning to the newsroom, Rosenthal informed Daniel and Catledge of his weekend plans; he hoped that they also would attempt to reach an understanding with the publisher.
The next day, on page three of the Washington Post, under a headline that read: “A New York Times Coup That Was Almost Fit To Print,” was the story. It reported the details of James Greenfield’s departure and mentioned that there had been cheering in the Washington bureau after the announcement, with one bureauman having exclaimed: “We’ve won.”
Rosenthal resented the story, as did most Times editors, including Reston and Wicker. There is a tacit understanding among most responsible newspapers that they not expose one another’s internal difficulties—The Times, after all, had not focused on the Post’s executive machinations in past years—but the Post on this occasion had obviously not played by the rules, even though Reston had spoken on the telephone during the previous afternoon with his friend Katharine Graham, the president of the Post, and with her editor Benjamin Bradlee. But it had not suppressed the story, and now on the morning of February 9 it was in print, and The Times’ editors suddenly had a fuller understanding of the meaning of the freedom of the press, and they knew, possibly for the first time, what it is like to be on the receiving end of reporting when the news is not favorable.
Despite the peace that Rosenthal had made with the publisher, the older editors still felt betrayed, and they ignored Sulzberger for several days. Catledge finally agreed to Sulzberger’s earnest request that their years of friendship not be destroyed by this single incident, but Daniel continued to snub Sulzberger for almost two weeks; and when he finally did speak freely with him, late one day after the news conference, in the small room adjacent to his office, Daniel lost his composure and, in a shrill voice, lectured the publisher like a schoolboy. After that, it seemed unlikely that things could ever be entirely reconciled between Clifton Daniel and Punch Sulzberger.
The Times continued to publish as usual during the weeks ahead, although there were days when Catledge and Daniel seemed listless and utterly dejected. The embarrassing aspects of the Greenfield affair had received national exposure through such publications as Time and Newsweek, and there were rumors in the newsroom that Daniel was looking for another job and that Catledge was merely marking time until his retirement. But as disjointed as the executive situation was within the paper, the events of the outside world were worse, and this tended initially to have an almost positive effect on the editors—they were forced to submerge their own differences somewhat to concentrate on the sudden chaos in the nation. There was such flagrant disunity within the United States that Lyndon B. Johnson was driven to admit, on March 31, that he could not unify the country, and thus would not seek renomination for the Presidency.
The Vietnamese war continued to be a hopeless struggle, draining both the economy and the patience of citizens young and old, creating factions shile common trait seemed only to be hate and violence. In April, Martin Luther King was fatally shot by a sniper in Memphis, setting off riots in Chicago and Washington. In June, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, where his bid for the Democratic nomination, begun three months before, had just peaked with his victory in the California primary. Between the two deaths, there had been clashes across the land between peace marchers and the police, with white racists calling for “law and order” and Negro racists calling for “black power”; and on the Columbia University campus in New York, in the most dramatic student protest of the year, five buildings were seized, classes were suspended, 720 demonstrators were arraigned, and the president of the university would resign during the summer. The Columbia protest had begun in April as students attempted to force the university to sever its ties with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a twelve-university consortium that performed military research for the government, and also to halt the construction of a nine-story gymnasium in Morningside Park that would form a kind of buffer between Harlem and the Columbia community—“gym crow” was the protest term for it.
But these issues were linked to larger breaches between students and administrators, were part of what was popularly being referred to as a worldwide “generation gap.” Now there were student boycotts in Poland, organized protests in Czechoslovakia, surges of youthful idealism throughout Europe and Asia—while old men rushed to buy gold, seeking security and solidity against the unsteady standards of the Sixties. In America the large corporations, computerized, profit-minded, were producing new cars that were grated with flaws and worthless luxuries for a nation that had the best and worst of everything. As the corporations continued to make millions, young men died in Vietnam, and older young men like Punch Sulzberger seemed caught between the prismatic vision of the generation above and the one below. At forty-two, Sulzberger felt what other heads of institutions were now feeling: it was as if they had all been tuned into the same channel and were now all being jammed by the same static. On every level, authority was being challenged by the pressures for change, the prod of publicized protest; young people, though powerless themselves, had gained a fleeting influence through some mysterious combination of electronics and histrionics in a synthetic age—Mark Rudd, Danny the Red, Rap Brown; discothèque radicals and guitar-strumming nuns were the creations of a climate that had turned the heat on Johnson and de Gaulle, on the international banker, the neighborhood schoolteacher, the cop on the beat. Even such a fundamentalist institution as the Roman Catholic Church was being forced into making concessions, being questioned about what had once been unquestioned.
Shortly after the riots had paralyzed Columbia, the demonstrators turned their attention toward what they considered another bastion of the enemy—The New York Times. The Sulzberger family, products of Columbia education, had long been influential in the university’s activities—like his father before him, Punch Sulzberger was a trustee of Columbia, and he had supported the Columbia polic
ies (including its military research ties with the government) that the students now found morally reprehensible. On May 2, eighty-two young people assembled outside Punch Sulzberger’s home at 1010 Fifth Avenue, demonstrated for forty-five minutes, and chanted: “New York Times—print the truth!” They charged that The Times’ reporting of the Columbia protest had sided with the administration and had shown little understanding of the students’ position, and they also questioned the ethics of a Times publisher who served as a trustee of a university that was regularly in his newspaper’s headlines. They saw this as a conflict of interest, but Sulzberger denied the charge in a statement printed in the next morning’s Times, adding: “We do not believe that executives of a newspaper need divorce themselves from some service to the community.” While he admitted that the editorials—which had condemned the campus disorder under such titles as “Hoodlumism at Columbia”—had reflected his opinion, he insisted that the reporting had been objective. The Times, he said, “had used its resources to provide full, accurate and dispassionate coverage.” But the students and their supporters disagreed. The reporting, they believed, had been neither fair nor dispassionate, and they were particularly incensed by one story that had appeared on page one of The Times on May 1. It was a compassionate article that featured the president of Columbia University, Grayson Kirk. It described him as he stood in his large office that had been invaded by demonstrators—furniture was broken; the floor was littered with tin cans, half-eaten sandwiches, and dirty blankets—and Dr. Kirk, passing a hand over his face, was quoted as saying, “My God, how could human beings do a thing like this?” The story had been written by A. M. Rosenthal.
Rosenthal had given himself the assignment, appearing on the Columbia campus one evening, in response to an inner urge to experience again the fulfillment that he had felt as a reporter. He saw the Columbia story as a very tragic but significant event: a proud old institution of learning was being ravaged by young men that it was endowed to assist, and he wanted to know what had gone wrong, and why. But when he had informed Clifton Daniel of his plan to write about Columbia, the managing editor had objected. It had been understood that Rosenthal, on being made an editor, would retire from reporting, adhering to the policy and practice of both Catledge and Daniel. And until this time Rosenthal had complied. But now the power of authority had temporarily been weakened within the newsroom as elsewhere, and Rosenthal’s more independent attitude was also possibly influenced by the recent triumph of Reston, who had never taken the vow of obscurity when he had become an editor and who had proven to be the most formidable man on the staff. When Rosenthal insisted that he wanted to write about Columbia, Daniel withdrew his objection. Daniel’s eighty-three-year-old father had just died after a long illness, and he went immediately to Zebulon to be with his mother. Rosenthal was left in charge of the newsroom, free to do as he saw fit, and it was then that he wrote the story that described Columbia’s tormented president, Grayson Kirk, walking in his disheveled office after having listened for hours to the sounds of police sirens, the smashing of glass, the students’ chants of “Kirk must go”:
He wandered about the room. It was almost empty of furniture.… He was still neat and dapper but his face was gray and he seemed to move and walk in a trance. So did almost everybody in the room. A policeman picked up a book on the floor and said: “The whole world is in these books; how could they do this to these books?” …
Dr. David Truman, vice president of the university, was there, too, exhaustion on his face. He wandered through the suite, back and forth from wrecked room to wrecked room and at one point he said, almost to himself, “Do you think they will know why we had to do this, to call in the police? Will they know what we went through before we decided?”
A police inspector strolled over to Dr. Kirk and silently showed him something he had just picked up from the floor that a student had left behind—a piece of iron pipe tied to a bit of rope.…
The publication of Rosenthal’s story enraged dozens of readers who saw Dr. Kirk as a villain of the uprising, a reactionary administrator whose ineptitude had fomented the discord, and whose tolerance of the university’s involvement with government military research projects was an affront to the integrity of Columbia. Several angry letters were sent to The Times, and in the Village Voice there were articles by Nat Hentoff and Jack Newfield that criticized both Rosenthal’s article and the paper’s broader coverage. The Times was portrayed as a monstrous organ of the Establishment that, in attempting to whitewash its sister institution on Morningside Heights, had arranged the facts and conveyed a tone in much of its reporting that vilified the student demonstrators and had not given equal prominence to the causes of their dissatisfaction or to the brutality of the police. (Almost one hundred young people were reportedly injured in scuffles with the police, including a Times reporter whose head wound—from handcuffs being used as brass knuckles—required twelve stitches.)
Rosenthal was upset by the negative reaction to his article, and while he attributed much of it to critics from the New Left who would go to any length to fault The Times, he nevertheless wondered what had suddenly gone wrong within his life. After a prolonged period of success, recognition, and reward, it now seemed that everything he touched was ill-fated: the book that he had coauthored with Gelb had been condemned by the critics; the afternoon edition that he had edited had been discarded by Sulzberger; the attempt to place Greenfield in Washington had boomeranged; and now the first news article that he had written in years had become a cause célèbre. He did not know what he had done, or had not done, to deserve such reversals, but he was fairly certain of one thing—1968 was the worst year of his life.
It was also an unpleasant time for Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger. She was soon to be seventy-six, and she had lately become deeply concerned with the future of The Times. In recent years there had been an extraordinary amount of criticism of The Times published in various periodicals and magazines—Commentary and Encounter, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, The Public Interest, among others—much of it concentrated on the paper’s news coverage, some of it centered on the personalities of the men who help to run The Times. Following the publication of these critical articles, Clifton Daniel and his associate editors had carefully reread them to see if they could find any errors of fact or omission so that, should Catledge or a member of the Sulzberger family make inquiry, Daniel would be prepared to reply with a memo that might invalidate the criticism, and might also serve as a basis for a letter of correction to be sent to the offending magazine. Until 1968 Mrs. Sulzberger was convinced, as were nearly all the editors, that there had been little merit in the published criticism. The articles either made factual errors while accusing The Times of the same, or they gave the impression that The Times’ editors were having grave personality differences and were engaged in an internal struggle. Mrs. Sulzberger believed this to be exaggerated, and she said so in one lettter that she wrote to the author of one such magazine piece.
But now in 1968, following the Greenfield incident, she could no longer be so sure. She had also been disturbed recently by some stories that she had read in her own newspaper, stories that emphasized sex and suggested the younger generation’s complete abandonment of the moral strictures of the past. One article that was particularly offensive to her appeared on the women’s page: it described how young college women at New York City universities were living with young men in an atmosphere of sexual emancipation, and one coed who was cited but was not named was a sophomore at Barnard College, Mrs. Sulzberger’s alma mater. The Barnard girl was reported to be living with a Columbia College junior in a $100-a-month apartment within walking distance of classes. The couple had lived together for two years, the article continued, and had once flown to Puerto Rico for an abortion. But now, having abandoned birth control pills, the couple was attempting to have children but was not necessarily ready for marriage, believing it “too serious a step.”
Shortly after the Times art
icle was printed, the Barnard authorities located the girl and sought to expel her because she had disregarded the dormitory regulations and had also lied in the process. But the coed asked for an open hearing, and this prompted student support within the adjoining campuses of Barnard and Columbia: they brandished signs and petitions in front of the Barnard College library, demanding a change in the student housing regulations, and these demonstrations and the debates that followed kept the story alive for months. The Times covered it fully, to Mrs. Sulzberger’s increasing chagrin. It was as if the editors had just discovered sex, she thought, and one day she chided her son: “Why not put sex in perspective?” reminding him, “It went on in my day too.”
But what most bothered her now was the seeming lack of direction that had gripped The Times; it was getting larger, fatter, richer, and yet it appeared to have lost some of its sense of mission. When she pondered this, her mood was not lighthearted and the question that she posed one day to her son was not meant to be answered easily or quickly. “Where,” she asked, “are we going?”
Punch Sulzberger spent the rest of the year trying to reply. His answers were in the form of documents that he composed, regarding them as part of his self-education, and he shared them with no outsiders. He sent the first document to his mother in the winter of 1968, and he continued to work on others throughout the year and into 1969. But within a few months of the Greenfield resignation, Sulzberger decided that an immediate and painful decision had to be made. The executive leadership in the News department had been shattered by the recent Washington-New York confrontation, and Sulzberger felt compelled to replace his old friend and adviser, Turner Catledge. Catledge had been one of the great figures of The Times, had taken over a sprawling mismanaged operation in 1951 and had coordinated it; but now, at the age of sixty-seven, Catledge’s energies were not what they had been, and the scars from the February feud had not healed, and if the situation remained as it was, the morale of the entire staff might continue to deteriorate. Nobody in the newsroom seemed to know who the boss was; even the senior editors did not know which way to turn for a decision. Ochs had had similar problems a half-century ago, Iphigene informed her son, and Ochs had never permitted his personal concerns to impede the progress of the paper. The Times came first, and now Catledge had to be replaced by a man who could reunite the paper, perhaps restoring some of the Ochsian spirit of the past, and there was only one Timesman who could do this. James Reston.