The Kingdom and the Power (5 page)

Raskin remembered one experience with the Washington bureau back in 1949 that was so awful it was comic. During that year, a period of national economic decline marked by substantial unemployment, Raskin learned from a friend in the Federal Security Agency that President Truman was preparing to send to Congress a special message urging that the Federal government appropriate funds to help the states and cities run emergency work-relief programs for the first time since the WPA in the Great Depression. Suspecting that it would be hopeless to get anybody on Krock’s staff to help confirm this tip, Raskin did his own research by
telephone and he finally got enough facts together to write the story from New York. This story made page one of
The Times
, appearing at the top of the page under a two-column headline, and when it reached Washington there was fury in Krock’s bureau. Krock’s deputy, Luther Huston, quickly assigned reporters to prove that Raskin’s story was a hoax. Huston even went to the length of having
The Times
’ White House correspondent, Anthony Leviero, put a press-conference question to President Truman in a negative enough way to invite, and get, a negative response. Then Huston sent an irate letter to New York listing the names of high-ranking officials in Washington who had told the bureau that there was absolutely nothing to Raskin’s story. The letter ended with a strong reiteration of the theme that trying to cover Washington from Times Square was bound to result in disaster and when would New York learn its lesson? (On the same day that Huston’s letter arrived in New York, President Truman sent the work-relief message to Capitol Hill, and everything in it corresponded to Raskin’s forecast.)

But James Reston would never have condoned such pettiness, nor would he have permitted his bureau to function with such haughty arrogance, which was bound to boomerang sooner or later. Reston presented himself and his staff as team players. And his artistry as an administrator could not be measured simply by the fact that he usually got his own way—what was more interesting was that Reston’s way, as he presented it, seemed solely designed for the greater glory of
The New York Times
. Reston, after all, was a cathedral-builder, not a stonecutter, and it would have been highly imprudent of any New York editor to openly challenge Reston’s motives. They might be angry at him, as when he prevented Raskin from writing the steel-strike story in Washington, but they could never catch Reston in an act of arrogance or selfishness or power-building. He might have indulged in such things, but they could never catch him. Everything he did seemed of high purpose and sound principle. In taking the strike story away from A. H. Raskin, Reston did not deprive
The Times
’ readers of knowledgeable coverage; Reston had his
own
labor specialist.

Reston’s whole stance seemed so intertwined with
The Times
, his idealism and character so in keeping with the concepts endorsed by the Sulzberger, that to question James Reston would be to question
The Times
itself. If Reston’s hand seemed to be involved in some tricky office maneuver, as it would from time to time,
particularly during the shake-up of the Nineteen-sixties, his participation would be from such a high moral position that it would be almost treasonable of any New York editor to call it office politics. For all they knew, Reston probably had cleared his moves in advance with the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, or after Sulzberger retired because of ill health in 1961, with Orvil Dryfoos. Reston and Dryfoos had become exceedingly close friends during the Nineteen-fifties, and when Reston came up to New York he often stayed at the Dryfoos home, serving as the new publisher’s confidant and adviser, and serving within the institution as part of its national conscience, its legate to the capital, its poet laureate. He sang the praises of the paper and the family that owned it in his speeches and writings, and, when workers struck
The Times
in 1963, Reston rebuked the labor leaders with an indignant lament: “Striking
The Times
is like striking an old lady.”

And so it was not surprising then, when the Bay of Pigs story demanded a big decision in
The Times
’ newsroom on that night in 1961, that Orvil Dryfoos, newly in command, would turn to Reston for advice—and Reston, so sensitive to the national interest and to
The Times
’ stake in that interest, would advise that the story be toned down; and it was. It would have been toned down, published, and forgotten, too, along with a hundred other big stories and delicate decisions made since 1961, if Clifton Daniel’s speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the spring of 1966, had not dredged up the issue once again, and if the New York editors who had been overruled five years before had not played up the story of Daniel’s speech as they did in
The Times
’ edition of June 2, 1966. They spread the entire four-thousand-word text of the speech across six columns inside the paper and also printed a photograph pertaining to the Cuban invasion and a seven-hundred-word story written by the AP man covering the speech in St. Paul, under a headline: “Kennedy Later Wished Times Had Printed All It Knew.” Such extensive coverage of Daniel’s speech, which surprised even Daniel when he returned from delivering it, was ostensibly justified on the grounds that it contributed an important footnote to history. But there was little doubt that another reason for its prominent display was that the speech made heroes of the New York editors who had been vetoed in 1961 by Dryfoos and Reston—it actually, in a subtle way, pointed a finger at the Dryfoos-Reston alliance, something that might not have occurred five years before; but now, in 1966, things were different. Orvil Dryfoos was dead.

F
ortunately for Clifton Daniel, and
The New York Times
, most of what goes on in or around his office does not usually get beyond the thick walls of the
Times
building. If it did, if there were reporters and columnists from other publications each day watching and questioning the editors of
The Times
, following them around and analyzing their acts and recording their errors, if
The Times
were covered as
The Times
covers the world, then Daniel’s large office would lose much of the dignity and decorum that it now seems to possess. But Daniel is usually very skillful at concealing his thoughts and sustaining poise under pressure, and his suntan in the early summer of 1966 also helped obscure signs of tension, and only once so far had he lost his composure to a point where it was noticeable to the secretaries and subordinate editors who sit around the newsroom that adjoins his office door.

That incident had been unforgettable for Daniel. He had actually become so enraged at one of his younger editors, Tom Wicker, the new bureau chief in Washington, that he pounded his fists on the desk several times, screaming and shouting, his soft chin trembling. Even if it were true, as charged, that Wicker had not kept in close enough touch with the New York office, and had also been remiss in some of his other duties as a journalist and administrator, there was no justification for this reaction, Daniel knew, and he was sorry that it had happened, was astonished that he had
allowed it to happen. This sort of thing is not supposed to happen at
The New York Times
. It happens in bad novels about big business, or it happens within some of the more high-pressure publications around New York perhaps, but not at
The Times
; not so openly anyway. And there was much more to the whole thing than merely the temporary displeasure with Tom Wicker. Wicker was no doubt paying part of the price for all those years of autonomy enjoyed by his predecessors, Reston and Krock. Still, what probably did not help matters was that Wicker, who can be very impulsive, had become angry at Daniel’s behavior, declaring that he was unaccustomed to being talked to in this way, and he added that he was not sure what he was going to do about it. Then he quickly turned and left Daniel’s office and took the next plane back to Washington.

Three or four days later Daniel was in Washington having dinner with Wicker, and the whole thing was officially forgotten, although it will never really be forgotten by either man. If Daniel were to be completely candid with Wicker, which he would never be, he would admit that from the beginning he had not been very fond of Wicker personally nor impressed with him professionally. When Wicker first applied to
The Times
for a job in 1958, Daniel had been one of the New York editors who had turned him down. Wicker was a tall, raw-boned, ruddy-complexioned Southerner with thick fingers and alert narrow eyes and a heavy jaw partially concealed by a reddish beard. He was then in his early thirties and had not been very experienced as a journalist, although he did have interesting credentials. He had already written five novels, three under a pseudonym, that captured some stark scenes of violence and sex and politics in rural settings, and in 1957 he had won a Nieman Fellowship in journalism at Harvard after having worked the previous six years on the staff of the
Winston-Salem Journal
in North Carolina, his native state. Wicker was the son of a railroad man, and had been reared in the poverty of the Depression in a small place called Hamlet. Like Clifton Daniel, he had gotten his degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina, but this did not result in any preferential treatment for Wicker; it might have had a reverse effect, making Daniel more aware and critical, especially when Wicker came into
The Times
’ newsroom with that beard. Nobody on
The Times
’ reportorial staff then wore a beard except a foreign correspondent recently returned from Turkey, and he was quickly transferred to Jersey City.

Shortly after Wicker had completed his fellowship at Harvard, he joined the staff of the
Nashville Tennessean
, and then in 1960, his beard shaved off, he appeared again at
The Times
, this time in Reston’s bureau in Washington, and he was hired. He became one of Reston’s boys and four years later, at the age of thirty-eight, Reston’s successor as bureau chief. It was an incredibly quick rise made possible by
The Times
’ great shift in the Sixties and also by Wicker’s talent as a journalist. Wicker was a driven man, sensitive and tough, one who had become resigned without bitterness to the probability that he would never make it as a novelist, although he could never completely understand the success of some of his contemporaries, Updike and Roth and others, men who wrote well but, it seemed to Wicker, knew very little about the world around them.

But Tom Wicker had little time to ponder contemporary American taste in fiction once he joined
The Times
. Suddenly he became caught up in the current of journalism, the daily opiate of the restless. He traveled cross-country with politicians, wrote his stories on airplanes and in the backs of buses. He wrote easily under deadline pressure and liked this life that, through his position on
The Times
, brought him a recognition that would most likely have eluded him had he continued to take the long, solitary gamble of the novelist. As a journalist Wicker could usefully employ other assets, too, among them a disarming country-boy manner that he did not attempt to modify, it being no handicap in Washington, it being almost an asset, in fact, during the early administration of Lyndon Johnson, a fellow Southerner, the onetime farmboy and rural schoolteacher: Wicker’s coverage of Johnson through 1964 showed a depth of understanding that was not so evident during the Kennedy years.

In addition to Wicker’s great interest in politics and people, he possessed a quick mind and an ability to articulate what was on his mind. Like many Southern journalists, Wicker often talked better than he wrote. And he wrote well. He could probably have become a good television commentator, and he was effective when debating on panel shows, making his points with long Faulknerian sentences mixed with regional metaphors and wit, coated in a Carolina accent. One night, after a small dinner party in New York, Wicker became locked in a debate with James Baldwin, a smoldering scene in which Baldwin occasionally jumped to his feet to shriek insults down at Wicker, the white devil from the South, and the
evening later became so filled with fury that Wicker’s wife left the table angrily in tears. But Wicker remained cool under the barrage of hysteria from Baldwin and another Negro at the table, debating them point for point, and he probably got the better of most exchanges that evening without ever resorting to rage.

But with all his qualities, Tom Wicker’s early success on
The Times
owed a great deal to luck, to the fact that he had been at the right place, at the right time. While this may also be generally true of many journalists who succeeded in a big way when young, it was extraordinarily true in Wicker’s case: he joined
The Times
just before its revolution, he joined Reston’s bureau just in time for the early excitement of the Kennedy era and the drama that followed, and he happened to be the only
Times
man among the Washington press corps who traveled with Kennedy to Dallas. Wicker’s story of the assassination took up more than a page in
The Times
of November 23, 1963, and it was a remarkable achievement in reporting and writing, in collecting facts out of confusion, in reconstructing the most deranged day in his life, the despair and bitterness and disbelief, and then getting on a telephone to New York and dictating the story in a voice that only rarely cracked with emotion.