The Kingdom and the Power (50 page)

T
he scene from an Allen Drury novel about the press in Washington,
Capable of Honor
, describes a skit at the annual Gridiron Club show in which a chorus line of journalists, jovially and
satirically, remind themselves of their duty to
stand tall in Georgetown
—i.e., to play ball with the Administration, to not rock the boat, to report the news in a way that will maintain their own social acceptance within the fashionable section of the capital … “Got to stand tall in Georgetown!” announces a reporter, explaining why he praises Robert Kennedy, vilifies Nixon, sanctifies Stevenson, denounces Goldwater … “Better watch out,” another reporter warns a colleague whose recent writings did not advance the proliberal line, “or you won’t stand tall in Georgetown!”

Drury’s portrait of Washington as a city of compromise and cronyism, a portrait that began in 1959 with the publication of his best-selling
Advise and Consent
, bears little resemblance to the Washington that is presented each day in newspapers. But as
Time
wrote of
Advise and Consent
: “It covers enough truth to make some Washington newsmen squirm.” The book characterizes members of the Washington press corps, largely composed of liberal Democrats—Drury is more conservative—as slanting the news in favor of liberal politicians and viewpoints. Drury elaborates on the theme of partiality in
Capable of Honor
, his third novel, recounting how a generation of young reporters from all over the nation arrive in Washington “fired with an idealistic vision, supported and held high by the determination to tell America the truth honestly and fearlessly regardless of whom it might help or hinder”—but then: “Almost without their knowing it they soon began to write, not for the country, but for each other. They began to report and interpret events, not according to the rigid standards of honesty upon which the great majority of them had been reared in their pre-Washington days, but according to what might or might not be acceptable in the acidly easygoing wisecracks of the Press Club bar and the parties at which they entertained one another.” As surely as Washington’s seductive glamour corrupts some politicians, Drury concluded, so does it corrupt some members of the press even though the process is hardly conscious and seldom sinister.

Drury was a member of
The Times
’ Washington bureau when he wrote
Advise and Consent
, and while the politically conservative Arthur Krock liked it, the moderately liberal James Reston did not. Reston thought that Drury’s picture of the press was unfair. Reston did not tell this to Drury personally, but he did relate it to a news magazine, which piqued Drury. For Allen
Drury, like the newsmen in his novels, desired the approval of his colleagues, particularly such illustrious ones as Reston, and his failure to get it from Reston was disappointing and frustrating. Each morning Reston would walk into the office with a smile and good-morning for everyone, but with no reference to Drury about the novel that was the talk of Washington, a big best seller in the making. Drury was a tall, dark-haired bachelor, a bit shy and remote; he had been a political reporter on the Washington
Evening Star
before joining
The Times
; he had in fact been the first reporter that Reston had hired after the latter had become the bureau chief in 1953. Drury was assigned by Reston to cover Capitol Hill, principally the Senate, but within a few years Drury felt the restrictions and limitations of such reporting. Coverage of the Senate offered no outlet for his creative talent, and the injection of any style in his reportage was invariably eliminated by the deskmen in New York.

While Catledge and other senior editors in New York trumpeted the call for brighter writing, they often did not really seem to want it when they got it; or they did not know how to get it into the paper when they got it. The decisive power lay with the deskmen, the copyreaders—finally it was
they
who decided what was bright, what was not, what was fit to print. Since most copyreaders were not known for their sense of humor—nor was their thankless job likely to produce one, nor to sustain one if they ever possessed one—the reporter attempting to inject brightness into his reporting of a Senate session was combating great odds, even if what had happened in the Senate might have justified a lighter treatment.
The Times
traditionally covered the Senate with drab restraint. It was as if
The Times
, despite Catledge’s pronouncements, really wanted to be boring about the Senate and other official government bodies.
The Times
was awed by what was official. It was easier, safer, to report accurate boring accounts of government activity than accurate interesting accounts. And so in
The Times
the Senate was a body of stone, a stagnant stream of statistics and measures—not a vibrant congregation of human mannerisms and conceits, drives and ambitions, that somehow responded to the vibrations of the nation. The Senators themselves, and the
cognoscenti
in Washington, were not displeased with
The Times
’ reporting, for they were among the few who could read between the lines and fill in the blanks; but average readers hardly ever got a full and penetrating picture, and
therefore had little idea of what the Senate was really like until they themselves had visited it, and then they were often amazed at how vital it seemed. But in
The Times
, if there was a descriptive paragraph or two about the interior of the Senate, the mood, the atmosphere, it was usually buried near the bottom of the story, and was carried over into an inside page. A reader had to scan a thousand words to reach the few revealing lines. This was not true of
Times
reporting on the
un
official phases of American life—business, industry, fashion, sports, the arts—about these
The Times
could be expressive, clear, and critical—it seemed so much easier for a
Times
man to write honestly and frankly about Arthur Miller than about Senator Wayne Morse.

Of course, reporters like Allen Drury could always fight harder with the copydesk, if the deskmen were the actual repressors of readability—indeed, some
Times
reporters fought constantly with the desk, challenging each change, but this was not as easily done in Washington as in New York. A New York reporter working in the newsroom at night might see an early galley proof of his story, might learn the name of the offending copyreader and argue with him in a corner of the newsroom after the first edition had gone to press, possibly persuading the copyreader to restore a choice phrase for the second edition. But the Washington reporter did not see
The Times
until the following morning. Any complaint that he made was after the fact, and it was also quite formal—it had to be channeled through Reston, who might relay it to Dryfoos or Catledge, and then it would filter down through Daniel or Bernstein to the national-news editor, to the assistant national-news editor, to the head of the national copydesk, finally to the copyreader. It was unwise to berate copyreaders for tampering with a reporter’s prose style unless the editing had distorted the facts or the meaning of the story.
The New York Times
was not a writers’ colony, after all, and confrontations with copyreaders might disrupt their morale and diligence, might eventually lead to a permissiveness on their part, or a fear of making changes, that could eventually allow careless or tasteless writing to appear in
The Times
. The copyreaders were the enforcers of discipline, Ochsian disciples who upheld traditional standards, and they should not be undermined. Since “bright” writing was subjected to the copyreaders’ definition of what was bright, the reporter could only do his best and
not
read his story after it had appeared in
The Times
, as some reporters did; or
he could fight constantly with the desk, as other reporters did; or he could do what Allen Drury did—give
The Times
what it seemed to want, and preserve his energy and talent for his outside writing.

Each day Drury would cover the Senate, would write accurately if uninspiredly, would file his story through the bureau to New York, and then promptly leave the office and work on a novel that portrayed the Senate, the Presidency, the Washington press and society with an insight that had never appeared under his by-line in
The Times
. Shortly after
Advise and Consent
had been completed for Doubleday & Company, it became a
Reader’s Digest
condensed book, then a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Arthur Krock, Russell Baker, and Mary McGrory of the Washington
Evening Star
wrote approving blurbs for the book, and Drury was being congratulated and discussed all over town—but still no word from Reston. Drury knew that Reston had little interest in novels, reading mostly nonfiction books that were useful to him as a journalist—“The Nineteenth Century was the era of the novelist, the Twentieth Century is the era of the journalist,” was Reston’s convenient assessment—and yet Reston was an individual of awareness, and Drury could not believe that Reston had not heard of
Advise and Consent
. Finally, unable to resist, Drury virtually demanded recognition. He approached Reston’s secretary one day and remarked that everyone seemed to know about the book except Scotty Reston.

The next evening, Reston passed by Drury’s desk, and in a couple of terse but amiable sentences he congratulated Drury. He said that he had not realized that Drury had been working on such a project. When Drury reminded him that he had mentioned it two years before, when he had begun to write seriously, Reston replied, “I hadn’t realized that was what you meant,” adding that he thought the whole thing was great—and then, smiling, Reston was on his way, walking in that inimitable glittering manner.

Drury watched him and thought about him, and his impression of Reston then, and years later, remained essentially the same: Reston, the supreme reporter and excellent writer, was also a major ego, a very self-centered, not deliberately cruel but fiercely competitive individual, even when he was indisputably on top. He did many kindnesses for people, Drury conceded, but generally as the grand seigneur. Reston’s ego and competitive spirit were
such that he simply could not take such competition from an underling, particularly when the underling not only dared the gods but succeeded and was going into orbit.

Drury resigned from
The Times
in 1959, not long after
Advise and Consent
, which would win a Pulitzer, became the number one best seller. One of the last articles that he wrote for the paper, and one of his best, was an article for the house organ,
Times Talk
, in which he revealed that in spite of his success, the copy-desk and top management still seemed unimpressed by him. “It keeps you humble,” he wrote, adding, “My friends on the copydesk are the same old lovable, ham-handed, insufferable hatchetmen they always were.” The most gratifying result of his book, he said, was the invitation that he received from his fellow reporters to address them at the National Press Club, and the standing ovation that he received afterwards.

Later, at the annual Women’s Press Club Congressional Night at the Statler Hotel, while Drury was standing and talking to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and Mrs. Udall, Reston and his wife, Sally, came along, and Udall called out, “Here’s one of your boys.”

Reston grinned at Drury and said, “I’m one of his.”

So we do not dislike one another, Drury thought, and he was very pleased.

Drury’s Washington was not Reston’s Washington, nor Lippmann’s nor Buchwald’s nor Gore Vidal’s Washington—but the vulnerability of the politicians in Drury’s world of fiction, and the partiality and self-protectiveness and self-aggrandizement of the Washington press, formed a tableau of the capital that a few
Times
men in New York believed to be quite realistic. It was not that the New York editors wished to portray an unflattering picture of Washington in
The Times
, but they were interested in a sharper, deeper sense of the city than they were getting. And, as usual, they suspected that one reason they were not getting it was that the Washington bureau was overly protective of its sources. This complaint, which was nearly as old as the
Times
building, was first presented formally in 1916 when one New York editor, representing the opinion of others, wrote a lengthy
memo to Ochs charging that Richard Oulahan, Krock’s predecessor, was being “used” by the Woodrow Wilson administration, and was regularly writing propaganda. It was then suggested that Oulahan make weekly trips to New York so that he might dine with the editors and receive the benefit of their wisdom. But Ochs, who did not then regard a pro-Wilson policy as a vice, particularly since
The Times
had recently been accused of being pro-German, refused to interfere with Oulahan, and this attitude prevailed until Oulahan’s death. Then Krock was sent from New York to Washington, and as one problem was solved another took its place—the problem of Krock himself. Now, in 1962, Krock’s successor, Reston, after nearly a decade as the bureau chief, was beginning to sense a revival of old pressure from New York, much of it coming from an editor who had just been named to run the national-news desk—Harrison Salisbury.