The Kingdom and the Power (52 page)

Instead of the Guild being in the position to set the standards by virtue of its earlier expiration date, Powers wanted all union contracts to expire on the same date—hopefully the Guild’s date of October 31, so that the craft unions could confront the publishers before the big pre-Christmas advertising bonanza, a time when publishers would be most anxious to avert a strike. Powers’ union, founded more than a century ago, had not called a strike since 1883—except for a “voluntary vacation” in 1919 in the hope of achieving a forty-four-hour week. But this protest, staged in defiance of the International Typographical Union, had failed. And while the more aggressively led unions had made impressive gains during the century, the printers’ had not kept pace, and it would never catch up by continuing to accept fouror five-dollar-a-year salary increases, and the assorted fringe benefits, that might be acceptable to other unions whose base pay was higher.

What the printers also needed, Powers believed, was a stronger sense of their own identity. A newspaper could be produced without reporters and copyreaders—the executives, the bureaus, and the wire services could fill the word gap—but a newspaper could not be produced without printers; at least not at this time. Of course if the automatic typesetting machines, which responded
like player pianos to perforated strips of paper tape, were allowed to multiply, they could eventually lead to the eradication of printers, and of the union and of Powers himself—a harrowing thought for Powers, if not for all the publishers.

Some publishers, emotional and bitter, came to hate Powers during the strike. They saw Powers as a ruthless threat to their survival in journalism. Of the New York dailies, only
The Times
and the
News
were consistent money makers; the others survived on subsidies from newspaper chains or from individual owners whose wealth was derived from outside sources. While the Publishers Association had assured the union that no regular employees would lose their jobs through automation, the publishers nevertheless wanted to immediately begin using the automated machines to set all the Wall Street listings and related stock charts on their financial pages. The machines would receive the tape containing this information from the Associated Press or United Press International. But the unions balked, insisting that a share of the savings made possible through the use of tape should go into a special fund for printers’ retraining, or for their early retirement or other supplemental unemployment benefits. The publishers objected, aware that publishers in other large cities had received union approval for the increased use of tape without having to set up special funds for printers. And so a stalemate resulted, attitudes hardened on both sides, and in 1962, a few weeks before Christmas, the strike began.

Picket lines of printers paraded back and forth in front of the offices of
The Times
, the
News
, the
Journal-American
, and the
World-Telegram and Sun
. The owners of the city papers not being struck—the
Post
, the
Mirror
, the
Herald Tribune
—stopped their own presses and locked their doors. Suddenly, the reading habits of millions of New Yorkers were changed. Some New Yorkers, their routines interrupted, would learn to live without newspapers and would never return as regular readers. They watched more television, or read news magazines more thoroughly, or books, discovering that New York seemed a more normal and placid place without the daily barrage of blazing headlines from Hearst, the rumored gangland shootings in the
News
, the threatening international strife in
The Times
. Other New Yorkers, hooked on the daily habit, read
The Times
’ Western edition that their friends in California mailed to them; or they bought the out-of-town papers now stacked on newsstands—the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, the
Christian Science Monitor
—or they read the
Wall Street Journal
, or
Women’s Wear Daily
, or one of the slim special strike editions being produced and edited by groups of journalists, including some from
The Times
. For these and other
Times
men, the strike did not inspire the inner conflict and regret that had characterized the strike of 1953; that past strike had been a new and disturbing experience, one that had prevented
The Times
from publishing for the first time in its history, and while most
Times
men felt compelled to respect the picket lines they had also felt a sense of abandonment and betrayal of
The Times
.

Now, however, the personal bond was not so strong.
The Times
had seemed to become a much less personal place in recent years, more coolly corporate as it had grown larger and more important, and veteran
Times
men were at peace with themselves as they watched the picket lines. Some younger
Times
men even felt a sense of adventure and freedom during the 1962–63 strike, particularly during its earlier stages: their daily lives now did not revolve so directly around
The Times
, they had time to think more about themselves, to reevaluate their present circumstances, to contemplate the future. They could see that life went on without
The Times
, the world went on without
The Times
, and as the newspaper strike continued they gained in self-confidence and awareness; they explored new areas of the city at a slower pace, they saw new people, thought new thoughts, dressed more casually, acted more impulsively, sensed what it would be like not to be a
Times
man—no privileged treatment from politicians, no free tickets from press agents, no guarantee that a telephone call would be returned from an important person; no sense of responsibility to these important people, no restrictions when writing a
Times
story, no feeling of personal restraint and caution in public dealings or private involvements—they saw two sides of their life during the strike, the one side more privileged and somehow neutralized, the second less assured but perhaps more fulfilling—they weighed these two worlds, and they waited. They drew unemployment checks and union benefits, or they found temporary jobs on television, or in government, or in public-relations firms, or on magazines, often earning as much as or more than they had on
The Times
. One
Times
reporter, Philip Benjamin, completed his first novel during the strike—
Quick Before It Melts
, featuring Antarctica, where he had been on assignment
for
The Times
—and this humorous novel, published in 1963, was sold to Hollywood for $50,000.

Nearly all the strikers, the craft unions as well as the newsmen, adjusted to the prolonged strike without great financial strain. The average printer, backed by union funds and state unemployment insurance, was earning about twenty dollars less than he would have earned had he been working. If the strike hurt anyone financially it was the newspaper owners—and also those outsiders whose businesses were influenced by newspapers: the proprietors of stores that relied on local advertising, the producers of Broadway shows, the buyers and sellers of real estate, the investors, the speculators, the publicists. The strike was disheartening to an artist making a debut, to a debutante just engaged, to a stenographer seeking a job, to an owner of a missing pet or a lost diamond, to the maker of a speech—although political orators who were not assured of television coverage generally withheld their words. The strike, however, had no consequential effect on world economics or politics, and it did not last long enough to revive the art of secret diplomacy nor to deflate the art of trial balloons. New Yorkers wishing to remain informed did so—although, without
The Times
, not so thoroughly—by reading what was available, and by tuning into the expanded coverage on radio and television. While the absence of
The Times
deprived electronic journalism of its greatest news guide, the media responded admirably to the challenge, and NBC’s Channel 4 in New York also presented a series of Sunday-afternoon telecasts featuring
Times
men who had not struck the paper and who read or commented on the news that might have appeared in the Sunday
Times
had there been one. Clifton Daniel was the star of the show, his suave and understated manner reminding some viewers of the British actor Leslie Howard; but all the
Times
men presented the news and themselves commendably—Bernstein and Salisbury, Reston and Oakes, Bosley Crowther and Charlotte Curtis; James Roach, the sports editor, and Craig Claiborne, the food editor, and dozens of others. Perhaps only Claiborne seemed petrified by the camera, his hands trembling and the dishes clattering as he demonstrated his cooking, but he turned this nervousness to his own advantage with the home audience when, as he prepared to pour the sauce, he said: “And you take a shaky gravy boat …”

As the strike continued into its sixth week, and as the Secretary of Labor and even President Kennedy were unable to influence
a settlement, or even to get serious negotiations under way, James Reston became indignant. Reston, together with his bureau in Washington, the bureaus around the nation and overseas, and a small force of executives and nonunion employees in the New York office, had now perhaps felt the strike more strongly than the strikers themselves. The nonstrikers were getting paid for doing very little, and were feeling uneasy about it, and Reston was especially aware of the anguish that the strike was causing the Sulzbergers and Orvil Dryfoos. On January 12, 1963, Reston wrote a column for
The Times
’ Western and International editions, and its news service to seventy-two out-of-town papers, that attacked Bertram Powers and the printers’ union, advocating that the publishers print their New York papers in nonunion shops if necessary and distribute the editions through the mail. Reston’s column read in part:

This column was killed by
The Times
. It did not appear in the Western or International edition of
The Times
, and a cancellation notice was sent to the out-of-town papers subscribing to the
news service. The decision was ultimately Orvil Dryfoos’. When Dryfoos saw Reston’s column, there seemed a faint sign of hope around the bargaining table, an illusory sign that quickly faded. But Dryfoos was taking no chances. Reston was disappointed but powerless on this occasion to influence Dryfoos. Dryfoos was still Reston’s very close friend and admirer, but more than that Dryfoos was a publisher. He did not wish to affront Bertram Powers, the villain of Reston’s piece, and possibly cause more discord between labor and management.

Nevertheless, the strike went on. And ten weeks later, with the strike still on, Reston’s unpublished column appeared in the
New Republic
, with a rejoinder from Murray Kempton. Though admiring Reston’s spirit, and critical of
The Times
’ decision to censor Reston, Kempton did not agree with the general thesis of Reston’s article. “We read here about devils and holy men as we used, to Reston’s discomfort, to read about them in the speeches of Secretary Dulles,” Kempton wrote. Reston’s anger, Kempton thought, was not aroused so much by the printers’ strike against newspapers as by the printers’ striking against
The Times
. “He is not so much a man of the left or right as he is a man of
The Times
,” Kempton wrote, wishing that Reston were less cavalier about strikes in such places as steel mills and meat factories. “If a strike at a meat factory throws 20,000 persons out of work,” Kempton wrote, “theirs is a private interest which deserves to be a public concern.” The striking printers, Kempton concluded, were men who were out to affirm their pride as trade unionists if not as craftsmen—“They have a notion of society’s debt to them as inflated as Reston’s and my own notion of journalists’ contribution to society.”

As the strike extended through the winter, Dryfoos seemed frustrated and weary. Though he had just turned fifty and was considered a healthy man, Dryfoos had had rheumatic heart disease as a younger man, a discovery that he made when he was rejected for military service in World War II. Now, as publisher, he tried to influence a fair and conciliatory settlement, and during a crucial moment when the negotiations seemed about to break up in angry recriminations, Dryfoos persuaded the chief negotiators to resume talks and submerge their hostility. Much of the hostility
had been directed at Dryfoos’ own colleague and adviser, Amory H. Bradford,
The Times
’ general manager, who had been nominated by the Publishers Association before the strike to serve as its chief spokesman with the union. The publishers were aware of Bradford’s imperiousness but they admired his independence and assurance, and they believed that they had in Bradford a formidable emissary to protect their interests against the ambitions of the union. What they did not anticipate was the unionists’ reaction to Bradford. If there was one man who was utterly incapable of affecting the “regular guy” manner that executives so often try to project during their talks with union leaders, it was Amory Howe Bradford. When Bradford mingled with unionists, it was like the rigid proctor of a proper boys’ school mingling with slum children. Bradford’s smile was reminiscent of the way the Duke of Edinburgh used to smile at native chieftains while touring the African colonies: a downward-tilting, royal-eyed, bonny look into the distance. No matter what Bradford did or said in the company of the unionists, it seemed somehow wrong. His towering height was wrong; his lean blondish New England handsomeness was wrong, and so were his pipe and his dark double-breasted Foreign Office suit. It was also no advantage that his opposite number across the bargaining table was Bertram Powers, a tenacious up-from-the-ranks American-Irishman with unpleasant memories of Harvard students romping with detachment through his Boston neighborhood. That Bradford was a Yale man made little difference to Powers. At the slightest sign of conceit on Bradford’s part. Powers would stiffen. And as the continuing strike put Bradford under greater pressure from the newspaper owners, from the business community, and from politicians and peacemakers in New York and Washington, Bradford’s manner became increasingly chilly and arrogant. Not only did Powers and other unionists feel this, but it extended also to New York’s Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who had held several conferences in behalf of the strike; to Theodore W. Kheel, an impartial strike mediator; and to Dorothy Schiff, publisher of the
New York Post
. As the strike approached its third month Mrs. Schiff became so exasperated that she quit the Publishers Association and resumed publication. She felt that New Yorkers should have at least one local paper to read, and so far there seemed little hope of a settlement. Dozens of meetings, some of them lasting until dawn, had produced few concessions on either side, only more bitterness. Bertram
Powers was particularly embittered by the personal attack made upon him by President Kennedy during a televised news conference. Kennedy, reading a statement that favored the publishers, accused Powers of holding out for unreasonable demands and he urged that the dispute be put up to a third party for settlement. “It is clear,” President Kennedy said, “in the case of the New York newspaper strike that the local of the International Typographical Union and its president, Bertram Powers, insofar as anyone can understand his position, are attempting to impose a settlement which could shut down several newspapers in New York and throw thousands out of work.”