The Kingdom and the Power (41 page)

Vanocur wrote good stories for
The Times
while on night rewrite and while on general assignments during the day, and he received by-lines; but none of the stories that he wrote in the newsroom between 1955 and 1956 were sufficiently dramatic to be splashed across the front page and gain the attention that might have propelled him toward the overseas assignment that he had hoped for. Catledge seemed to have forgotten all about him, and the only personal attention that he received from an influential editor was brief and meaningless: it occurred late one afternoon when Clifton Daniel, on his way to the men’s room, noticed Vanocur sitting behind his desk wearing one of his British suits, and with his brown suede British shoes propped up on the typewriter. Daniel stopped in the aisle, and from a distance of about twenty feet he focused on the shoes and the cut of the suit, recognizing them immediately as British-made—and, though Daniel said nothing, his mood suddenly seemed to drift and fade, perhaps back to some glorious yesteryear in his favorite city, London, and to fleeting recollections of that most adventurous time of his life.… Then Daniel stiffened a bit, looked away from Vanocur’s shoes, and continued on his way to the men’s room.

Not long after that, Sander Vanocur, impatient with the pace of
The Times
, resigned and became a television reporter for NBC, and within a few years he was recognized as one of the very best in the nation.

The years 1955 and 1956 were hardly ideal times for young reporters to be getting a start in the newsroom. Not only was the New York staff so tradition-bound that it would take Catledge several years to make an appreciable dent in its hardened habits, but
The Times
’ top management—including Catledge—were very distracted and disturbed in 1955 and 1956 by the intrusive tactics
of a Senate subcommittee that was investigating communism in the press and seemed determined to concentrate on the former Communists who were on the payroll of
The New York Times
.

The Senate investigation began in the summer of 1955 with one CBS correspondent’s admission that he had been a Communist spy, and it widened in December of 1955 when, before the start of secret hearings in New York, thirty-five subpoenas were issued—twenty-six of them to past or present employees of
The Times
. In January of 1956, before the start of public hearings in Washington, eighteen subpoenas were delivered—nine of them to
Times
employees, and two to individuals who had recently left
The Times
.

In the history of the paper, there were few months more dismal than December, 1955, and January, 1956. When
The Times
had been scrutinized on other occasions, it could either ignore the issue or easily justify its position, but now it was not so invulnerable. The dynamics of McCarthyism were still pervasive in the land, and
The Times
did have among its reporters and copyreaders, and among its workers in the mechanical departments and other sections within its total employment of 4,000, a number of men who in the past had been members of the Communist party in America. Some had joined the party as students in the Nineteen-thirties, and had quit after a year or two. Some had been party members while working for other newspapers, and had resigned long before joining
The Times
. Others had been party members as recently as a few years ago, although all claimed to be nonmembers at this time. There was supposedly one copyreader, however, who had quit the party before joining
The Times
, then had rejoined the party—and one afternoon, after subpoenas had arrived in Catledge’s office, Catledge walked out into the newsroom to have a word with this copyreader, and discovered him editing a
Times
dispatch from Moscow.

It was a strange, awkward, embarrassing time for the paper, one of suspicion and conflict, anger and compassion. There were
Times
staff members, political conservatives and superpatriots, who now deeply resented those who had been exposed as one-time party members, and as a result some personal friendships and even office courtesies were abruptly ended. There were other staff members who, while they privately abhorred McCarthyism, and while they deeply regretted the exposure of their colleagues, nonetheless were now a bit more cautious and remote in the newsroom when in the company of those who had been named. There were just as
many—or more—
Times
men who did not cease being friends with the eight or ten employees on the third floor, or the various others throughout the building, who had been cited by the committee; if anything, friendships may have strengthened at this time, fortified by a determination to remain unintimidated by the witch-hunting tactics of a few subcommittee investigators, whose true purpose was being questioned by
The Times
’ top management, and whose methods had already revealed signs of carelessness. One day an investigator entered Catledge’s office with a subpoena for one “Willard Shelton.” Catledge shook his head, replying that
The Times
had no one by that name (although, to himself, Catledge remembered a Willard Shelton he had known on the
Chicago Sun
). Then the investigator, momentarily confused, asked, “Well, do you have
anybody
named Shelton on your staff?” Catledge said that there was a Robert Shelton—and then, to Catledge’s utter amazement, he saw the investigator erase
Willard
and write in
Robert
on the subpoena.

The investigation was in some ways a sham, there seemed little doubt of that; and yet
The Times
could not obstruct the investigative process. And while
The Times
’ top executives and editors tried to remain calm and objective, assigning uncontroversial reporters each day to cover the subcommittee’s hearings fully and accurately—which was done—the internal repercussions were also felt whenever one of the exposed
Times
men would enter the newsroom and take his place at a copydesk or behind a typewriter. There would be a slight rustle of unnatural movement around him—a forced conviviality on the part of some colleagues, or a brief halt in conversation, or an expression of sympathy, or a conscious avoidance of any mention of the fact that
The Times
’ most recent edition had carried the testimony and a photograph of the
Times
man who had just walked into the newsroom. In one way or another, the entire staff was touched by the inquiry, and the men who had been singled out felt the pressure from many directions. Two veteran reporters who had been listed, and who had appeared before the subcommittee, now went days without an assignment from the city desk. One reporter who had worked in the Washington bureau since 1947, and had covered many stories from the press table in the Senate chamber, was released by Reston and was sent to New York, where, for the next two years, he sat in the last row of the rewrite bank doing what was essentially a clerical job—assembling the daily news summary and index. Eventually, his
penance paid, he regained his place as a by-line reporter—though never again in Washington—and he was also denied, years later in New York, a chief correspondent’s job for which he was qualified; and he was never completely forgiven by another former Communist in the newsroom for revealing to the FBI the names of party members who had worked on a Long Island newspaper between 1937 and 1939.

On the highest levels of
The Times
—in the offices of Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Orvil Dryfoos, Charles Merz and John Oakes, Turner Catledge and James Reston, and others—there was considerable wrestling with the angels: How could
The Times
remain consistent with Ochs’s traditional patriotism and yet not overreact to the investigators and possibly violate the principles of individual civil liberties and freedoms that
The Times
had so clearly espoused for years on its editorial page? There was little doubt among top management that the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee’s investigation, headed by Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, had singled out
The New York Times
precisely because of the vigor of its opposition to many of the things for which Senator Eastland (and his colleague, Senator William E. Jenner of Indiana, and the subcommittee’s counsel, Julien G. Sourwine of Nevada) stood—that is, because
The Times
had condemned segregation in Southern schools, had challenged the abusive methods employed by various Congressional committees, had denounced McCarthyism, had attacked the restrictions of the McCarran Immigration Act; because it had criticized a security system which concealed the accuser from his victim, and because it had insisted that the true spirit of American democracy demanded a scrupulous respect for the rights of even the lowliest individual.

On the other hand, Sulzberger recognized that the press was not sacrosanct, and was as properly subject to Congressional inquiry as any other institution in American life. Sulzberger himself, in his public speeches and statements within the office, said that he was a prejudiced witness for the capitalist system, and that he did not want a single Communist on his payroll, insisting that all employees who had been called by the subcommittee should cooperate, and that he hoped they would not plead the Fifth Amendment. The first two
Times
reporters who had been subpoenaed admitted that they had been members of the Communist party for a short time but had quit in the Nineteen-thirties when they saw that they had made a mistake. But the next witness, a
copyreader, refused to reveal his past political background, and when he appeared before the subcommittee, he invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment. Sulzberger fired him.

His dismissal shocked some of the more liberal members of the staff, and it also brought a letter of protest from the American Civil Liberties Union on the grounds that invoking the Fifth Amendment is a Constitutional right and should not be in and of itself grounds for dismissal.
The Times
published the letter on its editorial page with Sulzberger’s reply:

This letter was praised in some quarters, denounced in others, and it was very unsatisfactory to a few of the very liberal editorial writers such as John Oakes, who objected to Sulzberger’s position against the Fifth Amendment. But Sulzberger persisted in his thinking, and in late November of 1955, as more
Times
men revealed their intentions to not cooperate fully, Sulzberger and Dryfoos had a draft of a statement written to justify the dismissal of
future
Times
men who invoked the Fifth Amendment: The draft, dated November 22, 1955, was a form press release that began:

When John Oakes received a copy of this statement for his opinion, he scribbled across the top of it a sentence to Orvil Dryfoos—“Orv: I don’t think this is at all adequate. JBO.” Oakes, though a member of the Editorial Board, was years away from replacing Charles Merz as the editor of the editorial page; still, Oakes had written most of the anti-McCarthyism editorials for
The Times
, and he was never hesitant about expressing his views to Merz, or to Dryfoos, who was then a vice-president, or to the publisher himself, Sulzberger. On January 2, 1956, Oakes wrote Sulzberger: