The Kingdom and the Power (35 page)

Sulzberger himself made trips to the European and Pacific fronts during the war, and a few
Times
staff members not normally associated with international reporting went overseas to bolster the war coverage. Brooks Atkinson temporarily left his job as drama critic to report from Burma, India, and China; he flew with Chennault’s Flying Tigers on a bombing mission over Japanese targets, and he was the first journalist to report that General Joseph W. (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell, who was having arguments over policy with Chiang Kai-shek, was being called home.

Meyer Berger left his sidewalks-of-New York beat to report briefly from London, and as the war was ending he toured North Africa and Europe. Turner Catledge, too, visited the European battle-fronts in 1943, writing articles about the activities of the American Red Cross. In the fall of 1944, while Catledge was scouting the political campaign in Fargo, North Dakota, he received a telegram from Sulzberger asking him if he would be interested in taking a trip with the publisher to inspect the Pacific front. Catledge wired back his acceptance, and in November they began their 27,000-mile flight with a stop at San Francisco. They checked into the Mark Hopkins Hotel, went almost immediately to the Top of the Mark for a few drinks before dinner. They were seated at a comfortable divan, and through the big windows that surrounded them they could see the panorama of the north side of the city, the neck of
San Francisco Bay with the ships coming and going, and to the left, the Golden Gate Bridge.

They ordered a Scotch, then a second round. On the third round Sulzberger proposed that they be “doubles.” Then they ordered two more “doubles” and continued to talk about everything—
The Times
, the San Francisco landscape,
The Times
, women,
The Times
, the strange workings of the Oriental mind. They ordered still another round of “doubles.” When the waiter brought them, Sulzberger asked, “Are you sure these are doubles?” The waiter said, “Am I sure? You’ve drunk practically a bottle already.”

They had a few more rounds and then they stood up to go to dinner. But before they left, Arthur Hays Sulzberger looked at Catledge, then extended his hand, saying, “Well, you pass.”

Catledge asked what he meant, but Sulzberger changed the subject. Then later, during dinner, Sulzberger recalled a trip that he had made to Russia the year before with Reston, mentioning how Reston’s engaging companionship during the day was not so satisfactory at night. Reston was not one for night life and drinking, and it was Reston himself who had suggested that the publisher’s traveling companion during this Pacific tour should be someone who could keep up with Sulzberger at night. And so, in San Francisco, Sulzberger had decided to put Catledge to the test, and Catledge had passed.

The nocturnal drinking and many discussions throughout their long trip gave Sulzberger the opportunity of knowing a great deal about Catledge; though the publisher did not reveal it at this time, he was considering Catledge for an executive position in the New York office, perhaps as the heir apparent to Edwin James as managing editor. Reston was also under consideration, but Reston was not anxious to leave Washington or to give up his reporting career. Sulzberger now also had a nephew on the staff, Cyrus L. Sulzberger—the son of Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s brother, Leo—but C. L. Sulzberger was enamored of life as a foreign correspondent, and the publisher was content to let him remain overseas. Catledge also was uncertain about the choice of moving permanently to New York. He had a home, a wife, and two daughters in Washington, and there was always the possibility of his replacing Krock. But this might take years, and Catledge, now in his early forties, saw in the New York job a more immediate opportunity. There seemed to be no other
Times
man of his generation with a better chance of
succeeding James. Catledge had had many years’ experience as a reporter on several newspapers, and he had worked as an editor in Chicago. He was ambitious, and he knew that Sulzberger liked him. Catledge would have to work under Edwin James, who could be a difficult man, but James was at least a Southerner and Catledge was sure that he could get along with him.

And so Catledge accepted Sulzberger’s proposal to move to New York, and in January of 1945 Sulzberger named him an assistant managing editor. There were other assistant managing editors, of course, but all were older men, contemporaries of James, and when Catledge’s desk was placed in the spot nearest to James’s office, the newsroom observers were sufficiently convinced that Catledge would be the next managing editor. A few days after his arrival in New York, Catledge received a note from Krock that read: “Now that you’re my boss, won’t you please call me Arthur?”

D
uring the six years that Catledge worked under Edwin James he was exceedingly careful, provoking James’s anger only once, and that was over James’s son, Michel.

Michel James was a very thin, sinewy young man with sallow complexion and a lean, almost haunted look relieved now and then by an impish smile or grin. He dressed himself in narrow, rather bizarre clothes, lived near Gramercy Park in lower Manhattan, with a dog named Bidet, and frequented what were then considered the more far-out places in Greenwich Village. Had he been a young man in the Nineteen-sixties instead of the Forties, he would probably have become attracted to the hippies. But during the postwar years, the avant-garde was not so formalized nor magnetic, having no great unifying cause in dissent, and so what passed for Bohemia in New York consisted mainly of a few overly publicized old Village “characters,” a dozen deliberately dingy bars patronized by young writers and painters, by homosexual choreographers and designers, by not-very-radical student radicals from N.Y.U. and postdebutantes having their first and only affairs with Negroes—and there was also in this milieu a large segment of nondescript individualists who worked uptown, dressed with a casual flair, and lived as impulsively as their imagination and income would allow. Among this latter group was Michel James.

He had been born in Paris during his father’s days there as a
correspondent, and he was completely bilingual, speaking English perhaps better than his brusque and colloquial father, and speaking French as well as his Parisian mother. When Edwin James brought his family, which included two daughters, to live in New York City, Michel was sent to Princeton, from which he graduated in 1941. During the war, Michel joined the American Air Force, becoming a bombardier on a B-17, and Edwin James was never more proud of his son than he was then. He kept a framed photograph of Michel in uniform in his office at
The Times
, and he instructed a
Times
war correspondent to keep him informed on Michel’s activities in Europe. The correspondent’s reports were generally favorable and uneventful until one day when James heard that Michel, due to an illness, had missed a bombing mission—and it was during that mission that his B-17 had been shot down and the entire crew was lost.

After the war, Michel worked briefly for the Associated Press and for
Time
magazine. Then in 1947 he was up for employment on
The New York Times
. He had been proposed by the paper’s chief foreign correspondent, C. L. Sulzberger, who from his office in Paris, and from his position as the publisher’s nephew, had attained virtual control over
The Times’
foreign staff—it had become his overseas annex, and now he wished to add to it the son of
The Times’
managing editor. And when Edwin James seemed amenable, Turner Catledge decided that he had better step in quickly and raise an objection. When he did, Edwin James became infuriated.

Catledge’s reasoning was based on several factors. He felt that the hiring of a relatively inexperienced reporter who was the managing editor’s son would put a burden not only on the son but also on
The Times’
other editors and on the paper as a whole. While Catledge recognized that nepotism knew no limits within
The New York Times
, and that Cyrus Sulzberger would be among the last to condemn the practice, Catledge believed that it should be curtailed whenever possible. Of course Catledge was privately suspicious of Sulzberger. If Sulzberger had Michel James under his wing in Europe as a kind of hostage, Sulzberger might carry even more weight with Edwin James, and there was no telling where that could lead. At the very least it might establish pro-Sulzberger policies that Catledge would inherit should he succeed James as the managing editor. Sulzberger, who was in his middle thirties, would be part of the organization for many years to come, and Catledge knew that if he were to achieve his ambition in unifying
the paper, in breaking down the principalities and leveling the dukes and reestablishing the power in the managing editor’s office, he had better act before the principalities became empires, as they had become in the cases of Markel’s Sunday department and Krock’s bureau in Washington.

Cyrus Sulzberger had already established himself as a man of great boldness and drive. He was a tall, stern-looking man with almost opaque grayish eyes behind glasses, and he invariably wore a frayed trench coat in all weather—he rather typified the trench-coat type of journalist, the sort who not only liked to cover wars and to hobnob with the mighty, but also liked to influence world policy and the men who dictated it. There were few dictators, kings, or sultans in postwar Europe and Asia that Sulzberger had not met and interviewed—and from whom he had not received, at his request, autographed photographs which he later had framed and hung in his Paris office.

Sulzberger had joined
The Times
in 1939, after graduating from Harvard, and after working for five years as a free-lance journalist in Europe and as a reporter for the United Press in Washington and for the
Pittsburgh Press
. During his first three years at
The Times
he traveled more than 100,000 miles through thirty countries, reporting turmoil and intrigue in the Balkans and North Africa, Italy and Russia, the Near and Middle East. He was once arrested by the Gestapo in Yugoslavia on charges of espionage, and on another occasion he was denounced by one of Mussolini’s aides as a “creeping tarantula, going from country to country, spreading poison.”

But in the course of his travels, which would eventually lead him to a Pulitzer Prize, Sulzberger did manage to pause here and there to enjoy the pleasanter side of Europe and to indulge his fine taste in women and wine. His eye for women was obvious in his choice of secretaries, who were invariably pretty, and there was probably not a capital in Europe or Asia in which he was not acquainted with at least one woman who was either elegant, royal, or rich. Early in his career, while visiting Athens, he was introduced to a fascinating Greek woman who had connections to the royal family of Greece. He later kept in touch with her from Turkey via shortwave code, and a year later, in Lebanon, they were married.

While Turner Catledge could not fault Sulzberger’s choice in women nor his industriousness as a reporter, he did question his judgment in wanting the managing editor’s son to join the foreign
staff. But Catledge was powerless to prevent it because the idea appealed to Edwin James. So in 1947 Michel James became a
Times
man, and, to nearly everyone’s surprise, he had talent.

It was a writer’s talent, to be sure, a feeling for words and a fluidity that was uncommon in a
Times
reporter. Michel James also had a sense of humor, seeing the world in his peculiar way—it was not the serious and solid planet recognizable to most
Times
men but it was rather an uncertain, shaky place overrun with idiots. This attitude occasionally was evident in his reporting, and because of this and because of his exploits overseas, Michel was soon to be regarded as a questionable asset to
The Times
. He ran up enormous and exotic expense accounts, once hiring a yak to transport him and his equipment to an assignment in northern Pakistan. He would sometimes be incommunicado for days, weeks, and then he might suddenly appear in Bonn or Paris with a pet monkey on his back. Michel James reported dramatically in
The Times
a full-fledged offensive by Algerian rebels that nobody else saw in quite that way, and when he returned to New York for a tour in the newsroom he could usually be counted upon to enliven the place by some word or deed. An excellent photographer of voluptuous nudes, his desk was regularly encircled by other reporters lusting over his pictures. Once he managed to have printed in
The Times
’ annual “Neediest Cases” charity drive a one-dollar donation in the memory of a cranky old
Times
man who was still alive and working on the staff.

Such imagination as this was not destined to make Michel James an indispensable part of
The Times
, and years later he quietly resigned and left New York to settle in some small Western town, and he was not heard from again. As to whether his presence on the foreign staff was to increase C. L. Sulzberger’s influence in the managing editor’s office, it was never possible to tell. For in December of 1951, Edwin James died. And Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s memo on the bulletin board of the newsroom read: