The Kingdom and the Power (18 page)

George never did become involved with
The Times
’ News department—nor has his son John. And John Oakes prefers it that way, liking the clear line that separates his editorial-page staff from the rest of the newspaper, protecting it from the commercial ambitions of Monroe Green on the second floor and the sprawling bureaucracy of Clifton Daniel on the third floor. Oakes enjoys an independence within the institution that is rare—his opinions, and those of the editorial writers under him, are subject only to the scrutiny of the publisher. Oakes is regularly in touch with the publisher and receives what amounts to total freedom, and as a result the editorial page in recent years has been converted from vapidity to vibrance, attacking issues with an aggressiveness that Adolph Ochs would never have tolerated, and sniping at important people once regarded within
The Times
as “sacred cows,” such people as Chiang Kai-shek, Robert Moses, and Francis Cardinal Spellman. When Oakes began writing editorials for
The Times
in 1949, after three years of writing for Lester Markel’s “Week in Review” section in the Sunday department, the editorial policy was strongly in support of Chiang Kai-shek. The editorial specialist who produced most of these pieces was an old China hand who had become an admirer of Chiang and expressed few opinions that might offend the Generalissimo, who read
The Times
through translation. After the writer’s retirement, and with the increasingly important role played by John Oakes in the Fifties, highlighted by his scathing editorials on McCarthyism,
The Times
’ policy on China, among other major issues, noticeably began to change. Oakes weighed the wisdom of having Communist China admitted to the United Nations, and when this thinking started to penetrate
The Times
’ editorial page, Chiang Kai-shek was furious. One such editorial appeared a day before a
Times
correspondent on Taiwan was scheduled to have an interview with Chiang, an exclusive story that the correspondent had dutifully arranged weeks in advance. When the correspondent appeared, the Generalissimo, arms flailing, angrily refused to cooperate, being unappeased by the correspondent’s explanation that the news staff and the editorial page are run as entirely separate departments within
The New York Times
.

The privileged treatment accorded Robert Moses by
The New York Times
until relatively recent years was remarkable, and it was achieved mainly through Moses’ audacity, his skill at using his personal connections, or the presumption of these connections with top people at
The Times
, including the Sulzbergers, to browbeat
some
Times
reporters who were assigned to cover aspects of his vast and varied career. As New York’s most powerful public servant—during the Nineteen-fifties he was, among other things, the Commissioner of Parks, head of the Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee, chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, chairman of the State Power Authority, a member of the Planning Commission—Moses was undeniably a great and valuable source of news. It was also true that he had definite ideas on how news should be covered, and if he was displeased by a story in the newspaper he would unhesitatingly fire off a telegram to
The Times
denouncing the reporter as incompetent, or he would sometimes call a press conference to castigate the reporter publicly, or sometimes he would write a gentle letter of complaint to Arthur or Iphigene Sulzberger, a note that would be bucked down through channels to the third floor, ending up in the hands of perhaps a second-assistant city editor who might quietly wonder if Robert Moses’ low opinion of the reporter was not in some way justified. While Moses never did succeed in getting a
Times
reporter dismissed or even chastised, he was never discouraged from trying, and what he did accomplish was to alert reporters to his possible reaction, making many reporters—the less secure ones, to be sure, but
The Times
always had its quota of these—extraordinarily cautious with every story they wrote about him; they became sensitive to his sensitivity. These reporters knew, or thought they knew, or preferred to believe, that Moses had to be more delicately handled than other important newsmakers in New York. They had heard it rumored about the newsroom that Moses was a friend of the family, that Iphigene Sulzberger particularly liked his manner in responding to her suggestions about city parks; and to what extent this was true was unimportant, truth or rumor being equally persuasive in this context—there
seemed
to be sufficient evidence within the
Times
building to support the theory that Robert Moses required special handling, and so he got it.

For example in 1959 when Moses became angered by a series of articles in
The Times
dealing with the city’s Title I slum-clearance program, which he headed, his letters of objection did not appear in the “Letters to the Editor” space, where they belonged; instead they were published on various days within the news columns as
news
, being prefaced by an explanatory paragraph, appearing under a news headline, and being given immediate and serious play. This not only raised readers’ doubts about the credibility of the series,
but it also took some of the edge off the series, which the reporter had carefully researched for months—and which was accurate and objective, if not totally satisfactory to Moses in all of its detail and interpretation. When Moses wrote magazine articles in
The Times
for his friend Lester Markel, an editor known for the severity of his stylistic standards, there was rarely any tampering with Moses’ florid prose, cushioned as it was with barbs and pretension, and these articles were featured in the Sunday
Times Magazine
almost as prominently as those written by Markel himself. During these years, too, there was employed on
The Times
’ news staff a veteran reporter who was known among his colleagues as a “Moses man,” meaning that Moses had him as a confidant and friend, entrusting to him his private telephone numbers and his whereabouts on weekends so that should
The Times
wish to reach Moses to confirm or deny or comment on some news development,
The Times
’ editors could do so by contacting Moses’ man, who would contact Moses. This particular reporter’s status on the staff, his inner confidence and manner, and no doubt his courage in seeking merit raises, was fortified in part by his relationship with Robert Moses; and when Moses went into decline as an important newsmaker in the Nineteen-sixties, so did Moses’ man decline in
The New York Times
’ newsroom.

Robert Moses’ deterioration as a sacred cow on
The Times
was largely attributable to the newspaper’s great organizational shift during the Sixties, events prompted by the illness and incapacity of Sulzberger and then the unexpected death of his fifty-year-old successor, Orvil Dryfoos, in 1963. The quick exit of two publishers in three years, together with the reshuffling of the old guard under them, had a disruptive effect on many traditional habits and values at
The Times
. Suddenly there were new editors with new ideas making decisions on the third floor, and there was John Oakes running the editorial page on the tenth floor, and most of these men had little reverence for the sacred cows. Among the first to feel this change was Robert Moses; another was Francis Cardinal Spellman.

Moses began to feel it during the winter of 1963 when, as president of the forthcoming New York World’s Fair, he encountered a chilly press reception to so many of his plans and deeds—the mood of the media seemed against him, tired of him, not only
The Times
but the other newspapers as well, plus radio and television. It was not that they reported the news incompletely or
inaccurately. If anything they were
too
complete,
too
accurate, they overlooked nothing. They quoted that one extra word or phrase that was too much, inserted that extra little detail that can sub-liminally convey skepticism to a reader. They had fun with Moses, this cranky old man trying to ballyhoo the Fair, and they picked it apart before its flimsy construction was complete, and then they continued to downgrade it through the next two summers.

The Times
’ editorials criticized Moses’ financial handling of the Fair, his “penchant for invective,” and the reporters seemed to delight in recording his every frustration—his futile attempt to get the A & P to remove its big neon bread sign that peeked over the Fair grounds, his inability to get the Russians to participate in the Fair, his unfulfilled optimism about the number of people who would be visiting the Fair each day. The press, including
The Times
, overdramatized the Fair’s opening-day threat of racial disturbances, including an automobile “stall-in” by Negro militants along the highways—a threat that, while it never materialized, did not help attendance. No one seemed particularly interested in helping Moses at this point, and the press would display little of the blithe spirit, the indifference to minor flaws that had characterized its coverage of the previous Fair in Brussels, or would spark the reporting of the later Fair in Canada. Moses, the symbol of the New York Fair, had made too many enemies during his long career. He had written too many letters, pushed too many people. And he got what he deserved, even though, as is often the case, he did not get it when he deserved it. For the New York World’s Fair of 1964-65 was not really the ugly, dull, uninspired extravaganza that much of the press coverage indicated. Each day thousands of visitors greatly enjoyed the Fair, found the sights and sounds both marvelous and memorable, but they had no way of expressing this, no voice that could compete with a press that focused on the demonstrators at the gates, the problems of parking, the labor disputes, the flaws that can always be found if one looks for them—as one
Times
man did when he reported in his column, “At the Fair,” that there were no paper towels in the men’s room of the Scott Towel Pavilion.

Francis Cardinal Spellman was one of those men who for decades in
The New York Times
was written about constantly, but never deeply.
The Times
from Adolph Ochs’s day was hypersensitive in its coverage of religion, ever fearful of offending one group or another, and in Cardinal Spellman’s case the editors’ job was even
more precarious because he was not only an immensely powerful clergyman but he also sometimes said or did things that were controversial, putting the onus on the editors to somehow print the news and yet not offend the Cardinal or his many thousands of followers. The editors managed to do this for many years with great skill, blunting the reportorial edge, softening the headlines, emphasizing whenever possible his personal kindnesses, his charities, his simple manner, and the warm applause he received at parochial school graduations and police communion breakfasts, without ever stressing and sometimes totally ignoring Cardinal Spellman’s less glorious moments—his blessing of bombers, his affection for Senator Joseph McCarthy, his involvement in New York politics. And this polite press policy toward him would have undoubtedly continued indefinitely had he not so persistently paraded his patriotism during the Vietnamese war, a time of loosening restraint in America, of growing discord within his own Church—Spellman in the Sixties had, like Robert Moses, gone on too long, and the liberals were now becoming increasingly less liberal, including some on
The New York Times
John Oakes. One year before Spellman’s death an editorial in
The Times
attacked the Cardinal for saying, during his Christmas visit to American troops in Vietnam, that anything “less than victory is inconceivable,” a remark not only repulsive to many Catholic liberals in America but also to Pope Paul, who had been carrying on a campaign for a negotiated peace. Even in
The Times
’ news columns, in an analysis article by the recently hired religious-news editor, John Cogley, a liberal Catholic formerly of the Catholic magazine
Commonweal
, the Cardinal was chided for his words; Cogley also pointed out that the number of Catholics who traditionally express serious moral reservations about war is proportionately smaller than the number of Protestant and Jewish objectors—a statement that no
Times
journalist would probably have gotten into print a few years before, and a
Times
man with a Jewish by-line might not have gotten into print even on this occasion.

Even more remarkable was the editorial on Cardinal Spellman that appeared in
The Times
on the day after his death, an appraisal that not only shocked many Catholics but surprised many other
Times
readers who had mistakenly assumed that
The Times
’ editorial page would now temper its views on the Cardinal and publish a kind of eulogy to him. Instead, describing him as a man of fixed convictions, strongly expressed, the editorial dredged up
what it deemed to be his sins: “He backed the late Senator Joseph McCarthy in his demagogic excesses, and he made a dismaying attack on Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt when she upheld separation of church and state in education. In political affairs and in public debate he often tended to speak in a commanding tone and to don a mask of authoritarianism which, however appropriate in some other time and some other place, was ill-suited to a pluralist democracy. Whether he was trying to ban the motion picture ‘Baby Doll’ or block the reform of New York’s divorce law, Cardinal Spellman sometimes squandered his own and his church’s prestige on trivial issues and lost causes.”

Dozens of letters and calls of protest immediately followed, overwhelmingly opposing the editorial. Of the first seventy letters received, sixty-two condemned it, and a few of these were later published in the “Letters to the Editor” space on the editorial page. In the
National Review
, its editor, William F. Buckley, wrote an editorial about the editorial, rebuking
The Times
for not criticizing Spellman’s delinquencies at the time he committed them, charging that it had been editorially silent about Spellman when his friendship with McCarthy and his differences with Mrs. Roosevelt were newsworthy. The Cardinal had then terrorized
The Times
into restraint, Buckley wrote, and because of this, Buckley concluded, “We mourn the Cardinal’s passing even more.”