The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  At fifty-eight, Reston had been a Timesman for nearly thirty years, and his stature was such that no other editor—not Daniel, Salisbury, Rosenthal, or Catledge—could question his right to the top job in the newsroom. Furthermore, by bringing Reston to New York, it would remove from Washington the one individual with the power to challenge the New York leadership; it was an ingenious plan that would centralize all the authority in the home office, would eliminate the last of the old dukedoms, and would also represent a triumph of sorts for Washington—their man had gained control of the newsroom, and the directives from New York would henceforth not seem so unsavory in Washington. Punch Sulzberger, his mother, and the rest of the family all agreed that the plan should be instituted as soon as possible, but the publisher, still sensitive to Catledge’s feelings, was hesitant about revealing it at this time. So much had already happened in so short a time, and he would have preferred to wait awhile, although he knew that he should not. He did not want to risk losing Catledge, for he hoped that Catledge would remain as a director of The New York Times Company and a vice-president, devoting himself to the general problems of corporate policy and serving in his natural capacity as a kind of elder statesman and diplomat during the period of transition.

  Sulzberger was contemplating this in his office one day in April when his friend Sydney Gruson, who had decided to leave The Times to become an associate publisher of Newsday, walked in for a brief chat. Gruson’s new position at Newsday had already been announced, but he was not scheduled to begin until May, and Sulzberger, who felt very comfortable with Gruson, decided to discuss the Reston plan with him, adding that Reston had been consulted and had agreed to accept it. Gruson conceded that the move was a wise one, perhaps the only one that would accomplish Sulzberger’s aims, although Gruson felt badly for Clifton Daniel. Gruson was one of the few men who had enjoyed a long and warm relationship with the managing editor; the latter had been instrumental in getting Gruson onto The Times in 1944 and had also supported Gruson’s appointment to foreign editor in 1965. Daniel, who had been under Catledge for so long, would now be under Reston, and would never know the feeling of being completely in charge.

  Later that day, Gruson was walking through the newsroom and he encountered Daniel, who was leaving his office. Daniel paused for a moment, and then invited Gruson into the office for a drink. After Daniel had fixed the drinks and sat down in the small room, he looked at Gruson and he appeared to be troubled and mildly confused. “Tell me,” Daniel said finally, “what is going on around here?”

  Gruson felt compelled to tell Daniel what he knew he should not. Sulzberger had spoken in confidence, and yet Gruson felt a strong sense of loyalty to Daniel, particularly now when things seemed to be uncertain, and so Gruson told Daniel what he had heard. Daniel turned pale and swallowed his drink. Then he stood and relayed the news to Catledge, who consulted with Sulzberger, and thus the elevation of Reston was confirmed.

  Gruson was extremely embarrassed by what he had done on this Friday afternoon, and he quickly wrote a note of apology to Reston. On the following Monday, he revisited the publisher’s office, and Sulzberger looked at him and swore in a loud voice, exclaiming, “Sydney, I didn’t think you’d have the nerve to show your face in this place again!” But Sulzberger did not really seem upset. If anything, he seemed relieved; the word was out. He had since spoken at length with Catledge, and the latter would remain with the paper to help during the period ahead. It was possible that Sulzberger, subconsciously, had leaked the word through Gruson to the editors on the third floor. Among Gruson’s many assets and charms, there was also an inability to keep secrets, and Sulzberger knew Gruson well enough to know this. So Gruson had really done Sulzberger a favor, and the publisher’s fondness for Gruson was such that he wished he was not leaving to take the Newsday job. Before Gruson left, the publisher informed the owners of Newsday that he would be making attempts to rehire Gruson; and within a year, he would. Gruson would return in 1969 as Sulzberger’s special assistant.

  Reston came to New York as the executive editor in the early summer of 1968, and within a very few months his presence had influenced the daily coverage of the news and had brought a new atmosphere of informality to the newsroom. Reston walked around the room in his shirt sleeves, introducing himself as “Scotty” to those Timesmen that he did not know, and his “office” was a desk in full view of everyone—it was actually Harrison Salisbury’s desk, the latter having moved temporarily into the national-news editor’s chair to replace Claude Sitton, who had resigned in May to become editorial director of the News and Observer Publishing Company in Raleigh, North Carolina. With Reston’s arrival, the seat syndrome and much of the pomp and ritual of the newsroom was passé, and so was the four o’clock conference, which Reston thought was unessential. He did not abolish it, however; in deference to Daniel, who continued to preside at four o’clock, the meetings went on, although Reston himself did not attend, and soon other editors were regularly absent, sending subordinates. Reston held his conference at 11:30 each morning. It was held in Daniel’s office and attended by Daniel and Rosenthal, Salisbury and Topping, Gelb and the new picture editor, John G. Morris, who had worked at Magnum and Time-Life. Daniel occupied his regular chair at the head of the table, but the focus of attention was entirely on Reston no matter where he chose to sit, and Reston’s ease and geniality were pervasive—a stranger would never have guessed that there had recently been animosity and discord among editors at this table.

  Reston had not come to New York as a conqueror but rather as a conciliator, and the editors now seemed to recognize the need for a rapprochement—for the good of The Times and their own good as well. With a minimum of effort, Daniel was soon able to work under Reston as he had under Catledge, and Reston himself often visited Catledge’s back office for advice and reassurance on subjects about which Catledge was better informed. Rosenthal and Salisbury seemed cordial, and it was Salisbury who suggested, at a meeting one morning, that Rosenthal write a column for the editorial page in July while Wicker was away on vacation; Reston endorsed the suggestion and Oakes concurred. Rosenthal had made his peace with Reston after their emotional scene following Greenfield’s resignation; Rosenthal had called Reston in Washington a day later, saying that he did not want twenty years of friendship to be eradicated by the outbursts of a single evening, and Reston said that he felt the same way. Rosenthal did not exactly know what his future was under Reston in New York, but he quickly sensed the excitement and change that Reston’s presence was bringing to The Times.

  The 11:30 meetings, unlike the 4 p.m. recitals, were vibrant with new ideas and discussions about what should be covered and how. While Reston did not think that The Times should abandon its role as “the paper of record,” he did want to reexamine the old definition of news, to eliminate much of the semiofficial pronouncements and announcements that The Times had habitually honored, and to devote that space to a more reflective appraisal of daily events. Reston had once stated in a speech about journalists: “We are not covering the news of the mind as we should; we minimize the conflict of ideas and emphasize the conflict in the streets”—now he was in a position to change this, and hardly a day passed without The Times’ carrying an interview with an important man of ideas: if it was not Justice Fortas commenting on modern youth and the law, it was Ben Shahn discussing his art, or S. J. Perelman lamenting the state of humor, or Jean Monnet reflecting on economic conditions in Europe. The difference in The Times was not so much the attention given to such individuals as these, who had often been in the headlines before; rather it was the elaborate display that the paper was now giving to what Reston had called “the news of the mind.”

  A very long interview with André Malraux, beginning on the first page of the second section, under a prominent headline and photograph, was continued in the back of the paper; in the days when the bullpen had decisive power, Bernstein would doubtless have not allowed such an interview or feature story to jump from tha
t page (known within the office as the second-front) to the back, insisting instead that second-front features be cut to fit entirely on that one page and to end above the index, a policy that discouraged long interviews. And it was no longer uncommon to find interviews with, or speeches by, such distinguished men as C. P. Snow, on page one.

  Reston wanted The Times to report what the young people of the nation were thinking and saying, and one of his first instructions was that The Times print excerpts from the remarks being delivered by valedictorians to various graduating classes around the nation in 1968. If the valedictorians seemed no more in agreement on the national goals or solutions than the politicians or educators, it did not matter; Reston’s point was to have “the conflict of ideas” reported as adequately as “the conflict in the streets,” and he also wished to suggest through his newspaper that there was more to America in the Sixties than mere conflict. As a result of his editorship, numbers of stories were soon to appear that described the more tranquil mood of small-town America, the hamlets of central Pennsylvania, the flatlands of the West, and within the quietude of Ohio not far from where Reston had been reared—to such places The Times sent reporters and photographers to portray the silent majority, to record their frustrations and hopes, to ask them which man they preferred as their next President. Most of them, like Reston, were not very enthusiastic about either Hubert H. Humphrey or Richard M. Nixon, and while they were worried about the war in Vietnam, they seemed equally concerned about the rising prices of food, the inabilities of television repairmen, and the violence of the noisy minorities at home. They did not feel, however, that America was as bad as the press made it out to be, and much of this attitude was reechoed in Reston’s own columns, datelined “Washington,” “Prague,” “Moscow,” during the summer and winter of 1968. While America could not boast of “law and order,” this was perhaps all to the good, he suggested, for the alternatives might be totalitarianism, or the sort of suppression that the Soviet Union had just demonstrated in quelling liberal tendencies in Czechoslovakia. Reston wrote several pieces on this theme during the latter half of 1968, reminding readers that the United States, with all its flaws, was infinitely superior to lands overseas where there was “law and order” and little else.

  The Nineteen-sixties might indeed prove to have been a glorious time in American history, Reston said in a speech at the University of North Carolina; Americans were not avoiding their problems, as the Soviets were, but instead were struggling with them openly—in the streets, on the campuses, in the courts—and he saw signs of great promise and hope for the new generation of Americans. Reston also found life in New York to be somewhat better than he had expected—the city was a fascinating study of daily recovery after daily turmoil, rhythmic in its discord, and he was enchanted by the everyday sights that most New Yorkers took for granted. From the windows of his skyscraper apartment near the United Nations, he and his wife were enthralled by the movement on the East River below—the endless tandem of tankers and tugs, yachts and submarines, seaplanes and freight-car floats, motorboats carrying commuters to Wall Street, Circle Line cruisers teeming with tourists, scows packed with garbage and being pursued by seagulls—it would make an excellent subject for a story, Reston told Gelb, and Gelb quickly agreed and assigned a reporter to it, and within a few days a two-thousand-word article with photographs was lavishly spread across the second-front of The Times, “jumping” to the back.

  As energetic as Reston was, it was soon apparent that he could not both write his thrice-weekly column and have sufficient time left for all the necessary executive chores; and so in November of 1968, in accordance with Punch Sulzberger’s wishes, Reston announced the appointment of Rosenthal to the newly created position of associate managing editor, a title that placed Rosenthal over Bernstein, Salisbury, and Freedman, and invested in him full responsibility and authority for the running of the daily paper. Clifton Daniel, continuing as the managing editor, would be available to Rosenthal for higher consultation, but Daniel would be devoting himself more to relieving Reston of administrative details and to overseeing the non-news side of the daily operation. Daniel would also replace Lester Markel as the moderator of the National Educational Television network’s news show; Markel, who would be seventy-five in January of 1969, was scheduled to retire from The Times and take charge of a project for the Twentieth Century Fund on the relationship between public opinion and public policy. And so, at forty-six, Rosenthal would be serving essentially as an untitled managing editor. He was answerable to Reston, and Daniel would not impose his will over Rosenthal’s news judgment; Rosenthal would also be in a position of authority in the bullpen. When Theodore Bernstein had cited Rosenthal as a potential executive in 1962, and had prompted Catledge to make him the New York editor, Bernstein had no idea that Rosenthal’s rise would be so rapid, would within six years put Rosenthal in a position to overrule the paper’s renowned rule maker, Bernstein himself. But as Reston suggested in his statement while promoting Rosenthal in 1968, the moment had come “to bring along to the executive structure of The Times a new generation.”

  At the same time Reston achieved, as only Reston could achieve, a smooth transferal of Wicker from the Washington bureau leadership to the position of associate editor. Wicker, forty-two, would now have his name printed each day on The Times’ masthead on the editorial page, as would Rosenthal, but he would devote himself primarily to the writing of his column. Wicker would be replaced by Max Frankel, thirty-eight, although Frankel’s bureau would be an adjunct of the New York office—the autonomous grandeur that had been created by Krock was now a thing of the past, if Krock himself was not. Remarkably, the eighty-one-year-old Arthur Krock was still a resilient fixture in the bureau; and he had just published a best-selling book, Memoirs, that contained, characteristically, a few barbs for the New York office. Krock charged The Times with “over-organization,” a lack of patriarchal spirit, and excessive power and wealth, among other things, but the executives at The Times accepted the criticism as graciously as they could. They were reluctant to argue with Krock, having learned from experience that they probably could not win, and they also were now hopeful that the old differences would subside and a new era of understanding would begin. It had been a tumultuous year, 1968, but now it was over, endigng on a final note of sadness that brought them together.

  On the snowy, freezing Sunday afternoon of December 15, they gathered within a very large, ornate temple to mourn the death of Arthur Hays Sulzberger. He had died peacefully in his sleep three days before, at seventy-seven, living as long as Ochs. The memorial service for the chairman of the board, held at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street, was attended by many of the nation’s political and business leaders, and cables of condolences had been received from every part of the world. Among the more than one thousand mourners in the temple were New York’s Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mayor John V. Lindsay, Senator Jacob K. Javits, and also President-Elect Richard M. Nixon. The appearance of Nixon had been something of a surprise to most Timesmen in attendance, for the paper had not supported him for the Presidency and it had also recently become involved in a grudging dispute with him because of his running mate, Spiro T. Agnew. One month before the election, a Times editorial described Agnew as “utterly inadequate,” and three weeks later John Oakes printed another editorial that dredged up old charges of conflict of interest that had been brought against Agnew prior to his election as the governor of Maryland in 1966. These charges, among others, had centered on Agnew’s involvement in certain land-buying ventures and his affiliation with a bank that did business with the state; while they had made headlines, they had failed to establish evidence of illegality on Agnew’s part, or even impropriety, and in 1966 The Times had endorsed Agnew in his gubernatorial race. But two years later, in an editorial urging the support of the Hubert Humphrey-Edmund Muskie Democratic ticket in the Presidential election, The Times reintroduced the old allegations about Agnew, concludin
g that “Mr. Agnew has demonstrated that he is not fit to stand one step away from the Presidency.”

  Nixon was incensed. In a CBS television interview, he cited it as “the lowest kind of gutter politics that a great newspaper could possibly engage in,” adding, “A retraction will be demanded at The Times legally tomorrow.” But John Oakes, instead of retracting it, reprinted the offensive editorial, thus generating a series of charges and countercharges between the newspaper and the Agnew campaign workers and lawyers. Agnew even took out a full-page ad in The Times to proclaim his innocence and to assert that the paper had made errors of fact yet refused to admit them; the headline of Agnew’s ad read: “The truth hurts at Times.”

  But with Nixon’s appearance at the Sulzberger service, it was obvious that the next President of the United States did not wish to continue his dispute with The Times, which had, after Nixon’s election, immediately begun to build its bridges back to the White House. Oakes had published editorials complimenting Nixon on his selection of Professor Henry A. Kissinger of Harvard as a Presidential assistant for national security, and Dr. Lee A. DuBridge as an adviser on science; and the announcement of Nixon’s cabinet–together with the appointment of Daniel Patrick Moynihan to head the Council on Urban Affairs—was also greeted with enthusiasm in The Times—as Nixon himself was greeted when he walked into Temple Emanu-El with his Secret Service men to pay his respects to the Sulzberger family.