The Kingdom and the Power (24 page)

But what most offended Daniel this morning was the story, on page eleven, of Charles de Gaulle’s visit to Siberia. It was actually a well-written piece for the first eight paragraphs, and Daniel was particularly engrossed in it because eleven years ago, in the summer of 1955, Daniel himself had traveled through Siberia, his final fling as a correspondent, and it had been an unforgettable assignment for him. Daniel was then the only permanent correspondent of a Western non-Communist newspaper in the Soviet Union, and his articles throughout 1954–55 had conveyed the thrilling time he was having, an elegant bachelor in his early forties wandering around Russia visiting museums, attending the ballet, reporting on Soviet fashion shows, enjoying the sudden improvement in East-West relations now that Stalin was dead and Khrushchev was embarking on a new policy of vodka diplomacy. When Daniel arrived in Siberia, wearing his new fur hat, imagining himself a fashionable frontiersman, and privately expecting to be quite bored by Siberian drabness, he was delightfully surprised by what he found there and his reaction to it. He was almost charmed by the place, the sight of hearty factory workers and farmers living an arduous but normal life, attempting to build a better life, and part of this scene strangely evoked for Daniel memories of some stories his father used to tell with such warmth and humor about North Carolina at the turn of the century, how the early Daniels and other settlers had had to hack down trees to carve out the town of Zebulon, the rugged backwoods existence replete with raw challenges and rickety dreams. And Clifton Daniel’s article in
The Times
had compared part of the Siberia he saw with the Zebulon he had heard his father describe—except now, in 1966, reading of de Gaulle’s visit, reading of how thousands of Siberians had cheered the French leader along the parade route, Daniel suddenly stopped short at a sentence that speculated that it was “curiosity and pleasure that had brought them there—an interruption in an otherwise unexciting existence.”
Unexciting existence
? Daniel became
irritated. How could the
Times
reporter be so sure that the Siberians’ existence was unexciting? The reporter had merely flown into Siberia with the other newsmen covering de Gaulle, Daniel reasoned, and there was absolutely no justification for placing such a value judgment on life in Siberia. Impatiently, Daniel read on.…

Now Daniel looked up as the editors began to file into his office. All were dressed in dark summer suits except the assistant sports editor, who was in his shirtsleeves and was wearing a hideous purple tie. Behind him walked the women’s-news editor, Charlotte Curtis, wearing a flamboyant slim Pucci-style dress that Daniel seemed to like. Her strawberry-blonde hair was teased atop her head and her thin long face was coolly composed until Daniel smiled at her; quickly, she smiled back. Then she sat next to him on his left, tucking one of her legs up under her right buttock and letting a high-heeled shoe dangle from her tiny toes under the table.

Daniel stood at the head of the table nodding as the others, sixteen in all, walked in. When Rosenthal arrived, Daniel smiled again, waving Rosenthal into the chair on Daniel’s right. Rosenthal, dark-haired and boyish, blue-eyed and wearing dark horn-rimmed glasses, blushed ever so slightly. Then, self-consciously, Rosenthal shot a glance toward his close friend Arthur Gelb, seated at the opposite end of the table. Gelb, a tall intense editor who was substituting for Rosenthal as the New York editor while Rosenthal was filling in for the absent Salisbury, had seen it all. Gelb grinned back at Rosenthal.

Among the last to enter the room was Catledge. Large and looselimbed, with a round ruddy face and graying at the temples, Catledge ambled through the door past the other editors, extending greetings as he passed, but not sitting among them at the conference table. Catledge walked to the back of the room and took a seat almost directly behind Daniel, settling himself comfortably before crossing his legs. Daniel looked back at Catledge, nodded, and then turned back toward the others and waited until they had all assembled.

Daniel knew pretty much what to expect even before the first report on the day’s news was delivered to him. He had seen most of the advance summaries earlier in the afternoon, and this assemblage was largely ceremonial, a ritual around a table involving a circle of editors each held accountable by Daniel for a piece of the world,
each witnessed and judged by older editors who sat beyond the circle closer to the wall—Catledge, veterans from other departments, executives from the publisher’s office, the publisher himself on occasion. And overlooking the proceedings were the wall photographs of Ochs and Van Anda and their successors. This gathering in Daniel’s office each day was, among other things, a reaffirmation of
Times
tradition, a blending of past and present. If Adolph Ochs were alive, Daniel felt sure, he would not be displeased by what he might see or read in
The Times
today. Ochs might be surprised by some of the changes, confused perhaps, but on the whole he would not be displeased.
The Times
was still a conservative paper, relatively speaking, and at the top of page one was Ochs’s favorite slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” which has endured since Ochs bought the paper in 1896. True to its patriarch,
The Times
was still trying to be a
news
paper, not a showcase for feature writers, not a gazette of opinion; and the
Times
edition that Daniel had read this morning, a typical edition that reported no earthshaking calamity, no genius dead, supported Daniel’s high opinion of the paper despite the flaws that he found.
The Times
that day carried more news than any other paper in the world, more names, more statistics, more reports from more places—the Senate, the garment center, Wall Street, Yankee Stadium, Quantri province, The Hague. Daniel saw
The Times
as a vast banquet table containing something for everybody: tidbits of trivia, roasts of political pork, morsels of mayhem, Pakistani puffs—if it was news, if it was printable in the editors’ opinion, it appeared in
The New York Times
and made its bid for history.

This morning the lead story on page one, sedately displayed under a single column of gray type, was the Senate hearing of misconduct charges against Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut. The offlead, in the extreme left-hand column of page one, concerned the debate in Washington over escalation of the air war in North Vietnam. There were also other stories about the alleged brutality of the police in New York, an indictment against fifteen suspected Klansmen in Mississippi, a plea by U Thant for peace in Cyprus. The most-discussed story was Mayor Lindsay’s cancellation of an official dinner in New York for King Faisal because the Saudi Arabian monarch had said, in reply to a reporter’s loaded question at a press conference in Washington, following Faisal’s cordial visit with President Johnson, that he considered friends of Israel to be enemies of the Arabs. This was big news? Faisal had said this before,
and most Arab leaders had been saying it for years. And yet today this story was spread across four columns in the middle of page one of
The Times
, and as Daniel read it on the train from Bedford he had privately conceded that it was a lot of clamor about very little.

Daniel had met King Faisal years ago, had known him when he was only a prince, in fact; and Daniel was aware, as most journalists were, that if Faisal were publicly asked to comment on the Arab boycott of American firms that trade with Israel, Faisal could certainly not say kind words about the Israelis or condone trade with them—not if he wished to keep his palace and preserve his leadership among the increasing number of restless Nasserites in the Arab world. And so Faisal said what he had to say: friends of Israel were not friends of the Arabs—“Jews support Israel, and we consider those who provide assistance to our enemies as our own enemies.” Suddenly, his published statement aroused Jewish groups around America, alerting the New York politicians concerned with the large Jewish vote in New York, and Mayor Lindsay canceled the Faisal banquet, Governor Nelson Rockefeller canceled his appointment with the King; the Arabs in the Middle East were insulted, the White House was embarrassed, the press had a hot story, and Margaret Daniel—discussing it at home with her husband earlier, her small-town Midwestern loyalty proclaiming itself amid new evidence of provincialism along the supposedly sophisticated Eastern seaboard—shook her head and said, “Oh, New Yorkers
really
behaved badly this time, didn’t they?” Her husband could only agree.

Still,
The New York Times
could not ignore the news, and it devoted four stories, three photographs, and an inside page to the Faisal incident this morning. John Oakes also published an editorial in which he called the King’s comments “shocking,” although he cited the “rudeness” of Lindsay and Rockefeller in refusing, despite pleas from the White House and State Department, to perform their “public duty to receive a head of state.” (The reporter who had asked the question that sparked the controversy, not a
Times
man, was neither identified nor commented upon.)

Now, seated at the conference table, his editors ready and waiting, Clifton Daniel knew that he had not heard the last of the story. It would undoubtedly be on the front page again tomorrow, maybe also on the following day. Glancing toward the far end of the table, Daniel could see the tall, attentive figure of Arthur Gelb waiting to read from the notes that he held rigidly in his long, thin fingers—presumably more local reaction to the Faisal statement. It appeared
that Daniel would call on Gelb first, relieving Gelb of the sense of urgency that seemed to possess him now that he was sitting in for Rosenthal and had a big story to handle; but then Daniel turned away and looked toward the foreign-news editor, Sydney Gruson.

“Sydney,” said Daniel, softly.

Sydney Gruson was a small, wiry, dapper man of forty-nine who looked about ten years younger. He had a preserved, friendly face of florid complexion, wide-set lively eyes that detracted from the bags beneath, and a full head of shiny dark hair slicked back and precisely parted. Daniel had met Gruson in London during the war, liking him well enough to arrange the interview that got Gruson onto
The Times
. Gruson was a good reporter who, like Daniel, was fascinated by wealth and society. But as Gruson gained acceptance into this world by virtue of his elevation on
The Times
, becoming most recently a personal friend of Jacqueline Kennedy and moving within her East Side circle, he managed not to compromise himself professionally. At one Kennedy gathering at a New York restaurant, after Stephen Smith had charged the Sulzbergers with using
The Times
to downgrade the Kennedys, Gruson angrily interrupted and replied: “It is not enough to like the Kennedys 60 percent or 70 percent—
you
demand we love them 110 percent … you are all myth makers, and, frankly, you are all lousy at it!” Much more was said on both sides, and Gruson was embarrassed the next morning by his outrage, blaming it on the combination of whiskey and wine; but this behavior was not uncharacteristic of Gruson. He was loyal to the Sulzbergers, was on good terms with the right people within the institution, and his casual manner as an editor reflected the comfort and self-assurance that he felt as a
Times
man. When Daniel had called out his name, Gruson had been reading through a few cables he had received just prior to entering Daniel’s office. Now, his head down, still reading, Gruson said, “I’m not ready yet.”

Daniel did not seem perturbed. He nodded toward Miss Curtis.

“Charlotte.”

Charlotte Curtis, who
was
ready, immediately began to read from a single sheet of paper on which she had typed a summary of what would appear on her page tomorrow.

Since tomorrow was a Saturday, the slight decrease in advertising would limit the edition to sixty-four pages, compared with this morning’s seventy-six, and she had only one page to fill. It would not be, as she would readily admit, a very exciting page—certainly not as photogenic as this morning’s layout, which was devoted
largely to a study of female knees and the miniskirt (
The Knee Is Fancy Free—and Fashionable
); but she did have a good feature story about a chic new neighborhood in Washington, and in her slightly nasal Ohio accent she read: “Although Georgetown still has a corner on being the right address in the capital, a new contender for that status is Watergate East where, according to the ads, it overlooks the Potomac River and offers elegance for as little as sixty-thousand dollars per apartment.”

Daniel liked her approach, breezy, informative, a little bite here and there. He was pleased that he had convinced her to take the editor’s job a year ago, the reporting and writing of the women’s news staff having greatly improved under her direction, and Daniel did not care what the men in the bullpen thought of such reporting—
he
liked to read it, and he was confident that thousands of other readers did also.

“Arthur,” said Daniel, after Miss Curtis had finished.

Arthur Gelb, sitting tall, tight, squinting through thick eyeglasses, began to read the latest on the Faisal incident and other local-news items. Gelb had begun his career as a copyboy on
The Times
, had worked his way up to second-string drama critic under Brooks Atkinson, and had co-authored with his wife, Barbara Gelb, an impressive biography of Eugene O’Neill. When Rosenthal returned from Japan to become the New York editor in 1962, he asked that his close friend Gelb be switched from the Cultural-News department, where Gelb was a subordinate editor, to the New York desk. In the last three and a half years, Rosenthal and Gelb, brimming with ebullience and new ideas, had injected much life into
The Times
’ local reporting. Gelb was now aware that if Rosenthal moved up to replace Salisbury, Rosenthal’s present position would likely become Gelb’s—unless he made some horrible blunder during this summer replacement period. Gelb had been very careful earlier in the day with his assignment sheet, and now he was confident that there was not a major story or news angle in New York that his reporters were ignoring.