The Kingdom and the Power (19 page)

Buckley was incorrect in his assertion that
The Times
was silent over the Mrs. Roosevelt incident; in two editorials in 1949 it supported Mrs. Roosevelt’s position, although its rebuff of the Cardinal was most delicate.

John Oakes remained calm through the clamor following Spellman’s death. Oakes had been through this sort of thing many times before, and he would again, and he rather liked the excitement that such editorials can provoke. He had wanted to run a stimulating editorial page on
The Times
and that is what he was now doing, expressing opinions that are not always popular but are at least his own, and the publisher’s, and are not influenced by powerful people outside
The Times
nor by the advertisers who buy space in
The Times
from Monroe Green.

Monroe Green sat in his office waiting for the telephone call from Alan Tishman about the new luxury skyscraper apartments that
The Times
’ editorial page that day described as a desecration of the natural beauty of the New Jersey cliffs along the Hudson River.
When Green’s secretary announced that Mr. Tishman was on the line, Green was not surprised by Tishman’s immediate tone of anger and confusion. It was terrible, Tishman said—terrible, cruel, stupid, unfair. The apartment buildings did not violate the skyline, as the editorial claimed; instead they brought elegance to that dreary plot of land, Tishman said. Why had
The Times
permitted such a diatribe to be published? What was gained by it? Who had done such a thing?

Monroe Green, who had been listening sympathetically, told Tishman that he was sorry, and that, while he agreed with Tishman, he had no control over the editorials. As to what recourse to take, Green said that Tishman had two alternatives. He could write a letter of protest to the editorial page, and it would be printed and might do some good—or it might do more harm. It might merely call attention to the editorial itself. Green strongly advised against sending the letter. The best thing to do, Green continued, his salesman’s voice becoming more reassuring, was to do nothing. Forget about it. Pretend it did not happen. The advertising supplement—and future advertising—would offset whatever damage the editorial had done, and personally, Green said, he did not think that the editorial had done any damage at all. Nobody reads the editorials, Green said.

Tishman gave it some thought, and he finally decided to follow Green’s advice. And later, after the luxury apartment houses had opened and were filled with tenants, Tishman decided that Green had probably been right. Nobody reads the editorials.

C
lifton daniel sat at his desk enjoying the final few seconds of silence that remained before his office would be crowded with editors discussing the news. It was perhaps the most pleasant moment of the day. The late-afternoon sunlight streamed down between tall buildings in Times Square and filtered through the Venetian blinds and white draperies of Daniel’s office, heightening the many colors in the room and illuminating the faded photographs of Van Anda, Birchall, and James that hung on the wall. The big polished conference table, surrounded by chairs modeled after Adolph Ochs’s own chair, stood in the front of the office; beyond it was an open door revealing part of the newsroom. Daniel leaned back, way back, twirling his horn-rimmed glasses in his right hand, and looked out across his long office, through the door, and watched the people moving about within the newsroom. He could see a tall blond copyboy, a tweedy young man who probably felt as equal to his superiors as most copyboys do on
The New York Times
, walking toward the bullpen while reading a set of galley proofs—hoping, no doubt, to find an error. Daniel could see the bent-over heads of copyreaders on the foreign desk, supplicants at the altar of the wire god, pondering and scratching, and he could also see two photo clerks squinting up at the pictures that they had just torn from the telephoto machine. Though Daniel did not have a view of the dozens of reporters who were now assembled behind rows of desks, he
could hear the muted tapping of their typewriters, the distant ring of telephones. He knew that the tension of the deadline was building, but he also knew that some reporters, unassigned on this day, were now sitting idly behind their keyboards reading a newspaper or a book, waiting for another
Titanic
to sink, or waiting for the coffee wagon, or waiting for the news conference to begin so that they could dial one of the secretaries and perhaps make a date later for a drink.

It had been a relatively easy day so far, and Daniel looked forward to getting home on time tonight and spending all of tomorrow and Sunday at his summer place in Bedford with Margaret and the children. There was no great international crisis today to keep him late at the office, and the inter-
Times
problems, the personality differences between certain senior editors, the painful personnel changes that were soon to be made, were such that they could not be dealt with this weekend. One of the individuals involved was Daniel’s friend Harrison Salisbury. During Salisbury’s long and distinguished career as a reporter, and during his more recent role as one of Daniel’s four assistant managing editors, he had made invaluable contributions to
The Times
and to Daniel’s position on
The Times
. Throughout the executive reorganization of the last few years, Harrison Salisbury, as Daniel’s troubleshooter, had performed many of the necessary, if ungracious, functions that were bound to make him unpopular and
did
. But Salisbury did not seem to mind. He saw himself as carrying out his duties and was unaware of the resentment he was causing, the enemies he was making not only in the Washington bureau, which was his primary target, but also in New York among a few of Daniel’s other editors. And now, in the summer of 1966, the rumors around the newsroom were that Salisbury was on his way out as an assistant managing editor; he was being kicked upstairs to head
The Times
’ Book Division, which was being expanded.

Clifton Daniel did not want to see Salisbury go, but the question was whether Daniel had enough singular power, or even the will, to do anything about it. Salisbury had rendered fine service during the struggle, but now the publisher and his executive editor, Turner Catledge, apparently wanted to see harmony restored at almost any price. Perhaps Salisbury’s mere presence in the newsroom would be a grim reminder of things best forgotten—Daniel would have to wait and see. Nothing could be done at this time. Anything done should appear to have Salisbury’s blessing and Salisbury was not
even in the country now. He was on a special assignment traveling around the periphery of China hoping to get down into Hanoi or up into Peking. So far, he had been unable to get a visa into either place, and it looked as if he would return to the office later in the summer without the big story that he wanted and with only an outside chance of surviving as the devil’s advocate in the newsroom. Already, a younger man, A. M. Rosenthal, who was forty-four years old—Salisbury was fifty-seven—was assuming many of Salisbury’s duties, and Rosenthal had been assigned a desk against the south wall of the newsroom where the assistant managing editors sit. Rosenthal was ostensibly filling in during Salisbury’s absence. But nobody in the newsroom underestimated the significance of where Rosenthal was sitting. Where one sits in
The Times
’ newsroom is never a casual matter. It is a formal affair on the highest or lowest level. Young reporters of no special status are generally assigned to sit near the back of the room, close to the Sports department; and as the years go by and people die and the young reporter becomes more seasoned and not so young, he is moved up closer to the front. But he must never move on his own initiative. There was one bright reporter who, after being told that he would help cover the labor beat, cleaned out his desk near the back of the room and moved up five rows into an empty desk vacated by one of the labor reporters who had quit. The recognition of the new occupant a few days later by an assistant city editor resulted in a reappraisal of the younger reporter’s assets, and within a day he was back at his old desk, and within a year or so he was out of the newspaper business altogether. Editors, too, must respect the system, and the story is told that one day twenty years ago an assistant managing editor, Bruce Rae, made the mistake of sitting in Edwin James’s chair when the managing editor was out ill. When James heard about it, he was furious. Bruce Rae, regarded as a possible successor to James, got no further.

But Rosenthal was a very aware young man. Since his appointment as editor of the New York staff in 1963, following a brilliant career as a correspondent in India, Poland, and Japan, Rosenthal had inspired a very large and somewhat lethargic assemblage to compete favorably with Reston’s men in Washington and with the traditionally superior foreign staff. Now Rosenthal was obviously being considered for one of the four assistant-managing-editor positions. These jobs, except in Salisbury’s case, were held by men who had been on
The Times
for thirty or forty years and had
risen from the ranks of copyreaders. The men were still physically sound and mentally alert, and they would no doubt be displeased by any lessening of their responsibilities—but if Rosenthal was to gain experience as a top executive, one of the older men would have to be moved elsewhere. It was the inevitable process by which the institution perpetuated itself—
the old order changeth
. If Harrison Salisbury did not go, then it would have to be one of the other three editors. One of these was a man who had been giving Clifton Daniel much trouble of late—the editor of the bullpen, Theodore Bernstein.

Bernstein, a native New Yorker in his early sixties, was a quick, sharp, didactic editor. He was a chain smoker who had suffered a mild heart attack recently, although outwardly he seemed very calm and contained. Of average height and slight build, with fair complexion and thinning dark hair, he had an alert, thin, friendly face with soft brown eyes, and he was as approachable as any man on
The Times
. But with a pencil in his hand, Theodore Bernstein could become suddenly cold and dogmatic. He had been an outstanding professor of journalism at Columbia University, from which he had graduated in 1925, the year he joined
The Times
as a copyreader; since then he had written several successful books on journalism and the proper use of the English language, and in 1939, though he was only thirty-five, he was put in charge of war copy at
The Times
. He wrote many of the big headlines of World War II and he personally scrutinized the metal matrix of
The Times
’ front page at night before it was rolled away to the press machines. Bernstein later edited the Churchill memoirs for the paper, as well as those of Cordell Hull and General Walter Bedell Smith, and when Turner Catledge in the Nineteen-fifties called for a better-written, better-edited
New York Times
, Bernstein was established as the enforcer of standards—he became
The Times
’ grammarian or, as
Encounter
magazine later described him, its “governess.”

From his tiny enclosed office in the southeast corner of the newsroom, fortified outside his door by subordinate editors who shared most of his opinions on news and grammar, Bernstein also published a little bulletin called
Winners & Sinners
that was distributed to
Times
men in New York and throughout the world; it listed examples of their work, good and bad, that had appeared recently in
The New York Times
, and it also included a recitation of Bernstein’s grammatical rules and comments. These were memorized by deskmen throughout the newsroom, who were held accountable by
Bernstein for the maintenance of his principles; thus the deskmen, in the interest of a more readable and grammatical newspaper, gained new and rather heady power during the Nineteen-fifties with Bernstein as their mentor, chief of the super-desk. Such a position, of course, made Bernstein a villain with those reporters who had their own ideas about writing. They charged that the deskmen, overreacting to Bernstein’s rules, were merely hatchet men who deleted from stories the choicest phrases and gems of originality. Turner Catledge did not become involved in the feud at that time. If Bernstein’s men went too far they could always be checked, and the quicker pace of postwar life, the coming of television, the increased cost of news production, among other factors, required that
The Times
become a more tightly edited paper for faster reading. Catledge realized that
somebody
had to worry about the proper uses of
that
or
which
,
whom
or
who
, and so Catledge left this to Bernstein, who knew best, and Catledge concerned himself with interoffice politics, which
he
knew best.

Bernstein’s power as an assistant managing editor began to diminish after Catledge brought Daniel back to New York from Moscow in 1955 and began to groom him as the next managing editor. While Bernstein knew that he had never been a candidate for Catledge’s job, being of Catledge’s generation, to say nothing of his being a Jew, he nonetheless quietly resented Catledge’s elevating his younger Southern protégé to a point where Daniel, even while Catledge was still the managing editor, outranked Bernstein in the executive pecking order. Bernstein and Daniel saw things in a quite different way, their styles did not blend; Bernstein, a reverse snob, was as conspicuously informal as Daniel was formal. When Daniel was named to succeed Catledge in 1964 and when he redecorated Catledge’s old office, ordering a brand-new blue-black tweed rug, Bernstein requested and received for
his
floor a chunk of the old tattered Catledge rug that had been pulled up, possibly to be junked. While Daniel sat in his traditional English office in his wrinkleproof chair, Bernstein occupied his office across the newsroom with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, sitting on an old wooden chair behind a scratchy desk, upon which he wrote with flawless grammar on the cheapest memo paper he could find. During Daniel’s first two years as managing editor he admitted to having raised his voice in anger only once, presumably at Tom Wicker; but others in the newsroom claimed to have heard Daniel locked in quarrels with Bernstein on at least a half-dozen occasions,
usually the result of Bernstein’s having passed off an irreverent remark about one of Daniel’s pet projects, most likely the women’s page.