The Kingdom and the Power (6 page)

Wicker had chosen that day to be without a notebook, so he scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of Kennedy’s two-day tour of Texas. Today Wicker cannot read many of these notes, but on November 22 they were as clear to him as 60-point type. He wrote his story with other reporters in the pressroom of the Dallas air terminal, having gotten there after a half-mile run while lugging his typewriter and briefcase, jumping a fence along the way without breaking stride, remembering almost everything he saw and heard after Kennedy had been shot, although remembering relatively little of what had happened before that. Wicker had been riding in the Presidential motorcade in one of the press buses, he is not sure which one; and when Kennedy was hit, Wicker heard no shots, although another reporter in the bus noticed that the President’s car, which was about ten cars ahead, was speeding away.

The press buses continued to travel at a parade pace. But things quickly began to change. Wicker noticed a motorcycle policeman bump over a curb, dismount, and begin to run. There seemed to be some confusion within the crowds of people who had been lined along the road to get a glimpse of the President. The press
buses stopped at the place where Kennedy was to address the crowd. Wicker noticed how the heads of the large crowd of people began to turn as the word was passed back. Wicker was literally
seeing
a rumor travel. It reminded him of wind sweeping over a wheat field. Then a stranger grabbed him by the arm and asked, “Has the President been shot?” “I don’t think so,” Wicker said, “but something happened.”

Wicker and the other reporters, about thirty-five of them, moved to where they were to hear Kennedy speak, and it was there that another reporter came running with the news. Then all the reporters ran. They jumped into the press buses that would take them to Parkland Hospital During the next few hours, the details began to pile up—the eyewitness accounts, the medical reports, the words of White House spokesmen, the recollection of one newsman that he
had
heard shots, the description of a Dallas television reporter who had seen a rifle being withdrawn from the corner fifth- or sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. There were truths, half-truths, errors, illusions, rumors, secondhand accounts, thirdhand accounts—all these were passed freely to the press, were circulated among them, and there was very little time to check these facts or allegations. Wicker and the rest had to go largely on instinct, the totality of their experience so far in life, their insight into others, a special sense that good reporters develop and use in a crisis. And Wicker’s instincts in this crisis served him well.

It is probably true that Wicker’s reporting from Dallas that day, one afternoon’s work, will live longer than any novel, or play, or essay, or piece of reportage that he has ever written or will ever write. It was not that he had produced a classic. He had not. He had previously reported as well, written better. But the test in Dallas was like no other test. It was the sort of assignment that could make or break a
Times
man’s whole career in a few hours. Wicker was writing for history that day, and his story dominated the front page, was spread in double measure and set in larger-than-usual type, as was his by-line—this edition of
The Times
would not be thrown away by readers a day later, it was a collector’s item. It would be saved by hundreds, perhaps thousands of readers, and they would store it for decades in their attics or closets, and would pass it on as a family heirloom or a relic or a vague testimony to their existence on the day a President was shot.

If there were major errors in Wicker’s story, which there were not,
they too would survive, degrading Wicker among his colleagues but degrading
The Times
much more among its readers, not only the million or so who would see the story that day, but also those who would read it a half-century from now, the students and historians who would be turning it up again and again on microfilm.

The Times
is expected to cover this kind of story, the single spectacular event, as no other newspaper in the world. This expectation is partly based on
The Times
’ traditional commitment to being the paper of record, and partly on the fact that
The Times
has the facilities for meeting any emergency—its large reportorial staff with supernumeraries waiting in the wings; its many deskmen, rewrite men, and clerks in the infinite morgue, a combination that permits large volumes of copy to be quickly processed, checked, and fortified by background or sidebar material; its financial wealth that will support any expense in communications and travel; its echelons of editors who, while they sometimes seem to get into one another’s way during those days when the news is normal, nevertheless can transform themselves into a remarkably well-coordinated team during a crisis. And finally, mixed in with this mélange, is the unseen force of the ruling family, the ghost of Ochs.

Many years ago, after a task force of
Times
men had acquitted themselves very well on a big story, the editors sat around at conference the following day extending congratulations to one another; but Adolph Ochs, who had been sitting silently among them, then said that he had read in another newspaper a fact that seemed to be missing from
The Times
’ coverage. One editor answered that this fact was minor, and added that
The Times
had printed several important facts that had not appeared in the other newspaper. To which Ochs replied, glaring, “I want it
all
.”

It is this thinking, rigidly enforced, that has created an odd turn of mind and fear in some
Times
men, and has created odd tasks for others. For several years there were clerks in
The Times
’ newsroom assigned each day to scan the paper and count each sports score, each death notice, making sure that
The Times
had them
all
, or at least more than any other newspaper. At night there were
Times
editors in the newsroom pacing the floor waiting for a copyboy to arrive with the latest editions of other newspapers, fearful that these papers might have a story or a few facts not printed in
The Times
. When Tom Wicker’s story began to come in from Dallas, two pages at a time, he running down the steps of the Dallas terminal each time across the waiting room into a phone booth, miraculously
never having to wait for a booth or a line to New York, the main concern was not with Wicker’s prose style—it was with whether he had it
all
, and had it right, even things that would have seemed too trivial on any other day: the names of certain streets in the motorcade route; the fact that the Texas School Book Depository, from which the shots were fired, was a leased state building; the names of the witnesses, and where they stood, during the swearing-in ceremony of Lyndon Johnson in the airplane; the name of the judge who presided at the ceremony, and the date of judgeship; the names of the two priests who administered the last rites to Kennedy; the identity of witnesses who claimed to have seen this or that, and the precise time of each happening—and of all that happened during that long afternoon in Dallas, Wicker saw almost none of it. He was writing blind. He was feeling the facts and was guided by instinct. There were 106 paragraphs in his story in
The Times
the next day, and yet only slightly more than one of these paragraphs described what Wicker had seen with his own eyes. That occurred while Wicker stood with other reporters near the emergency entrance in the hospital as Mrs. Kennedy walked out, and Wicker later wrote: “Her face was sorrowful. She looked steadily at the floor. She still wore the raspberry-colored suit in which she had greeted welcoming crowds in Fort Worth and Dallas. But she had taken off the matching pillbox hat she wore earlier in the day, and her dark hair was windblown and tangled. Her hand rested lightly on her husband’s coffin as it was taken to a waiting hearse.”

After the assassination story that day, and the related stories that followed, Wicker’s stock rose sharply at
The New York Times
. He was then thirty-seven, having been on Reston’s staff only three years, and he had undoubtedly been lucky at being at the right place, at the right time; but in Dallas on that particular afternoon he had also been the right man. He had made the most of things as they exist in his somewhat bizarre profession, one that often bestows the greatest fame on chroniclers of the greatest chaos, and it was not surprising a year later when Reston selected Wicker to succeed him as the Washington bureau chief, although there were members of the bureau who were not enchanted by the choice. They believed that Wicker had been moved up too fast. And one of Reston’s bright young men, Anthony Lewis, disappointed that he had not gotten the job, arranged a transfer to the London office, becoming the bureau chief there. Another Reston protégé, Max Frankel, resigned from
The New York Times
altogether, accepting a job with
The Reporter
magazine, although Frankel suddenly had second thoughts about it a few days later, and asked
The Times
to rescind his letter of resignation, which it did. But there was no doubt that the meteoric rise of Tom Wicker, engineered by Reston, who was then also involved in some interesting executive choreography on a higher level, had bruised the egos of a few ambitious
Times
men, and it had also displeased some of the editors in New York, among them Clifton Daniel.

Daniel had not even known of Wicker’s appointment until after it had been made, so quick had Reston been in arranging the details. But in the two years that followed, life was not so smooth for Wicker. His scene in Daniel’s office was just one of several disagreeable incidents that he had experienced since becoming the bureau chief, and by the spring of 1966 the persistent rumor in the New York office was that Wicker would soon be replaced. Daniel was in favor of this, but he knew it was a very delicate proposition. Regardless of whatever differences exist between
Times
men, they do share a concern for
The Times
’ image. Any executive shifting must be executed gracefully. It should not appear to be a hasty decision, for nothing is done hastily at.
The Times
, nor should it seem that
The Times
had made an internal mistake and was now trying to correct it. It must all be handled quietly and in a gentlemanly fashion, with no conspicuous bickering or open dissension that might produce office gossip and possibly leak out to one of the news magazines. If this happened, it would be most unfortunate.
The Times
is supposed to report news, not
make
it, particularly not this kind of news. And yet it was the considered opinion of Daniel and his subordinate editors in New York, among them Harrison Salisbury, his close ally, that Wicker was not the right man for the bureau-chief job in Washington and should be moved, gracefully, to some other position.

Precisely
what
position was a bit of a problem for New York. Wicker was a talented man, there was no question of that. He deserved an important place on the paper and he was young enough to be relied upon to carry a large part of
The Times
’ burden into the future. If only Arthur Krock would retire, the editors knew, Wicker could take over Krock’s column. That would be an ideal spot for Wicker.
If
Krock would retire. Krock was seventy-eight years old, but he seemed as nimble now as when he first joined
The Times
in 1927, and a relatively recent attempt by New York to get him to retire had failed. A letter concerning Krock’s retirement
had been sent to Krock’s home in Washington but, according to the word in New York later, the letter had been intercepted by Mrs. Krock without her husband’s knowledge; she had told Reston about it, and Reston had pulled a few strings with the publisher’s office, and that took care of that. The durable Arthur Krock, who had survived ten presidents, four wars, countless rebellions, and various awkward events, had done it again.

Still, a place had to be found for Wicker somewhere. And this was one of the things that occupied Daniel’s thoughts now, in the early summer of 1966, although not to the exclusion of other more pressing problems, of which there were many, even if they did not show on his face or have a disquieting effect on his manner. Daniel seemed very much in control of things, sure of himself and the position he held. The memory of the outburst with Wicker had represented a rare bad day to him, a wildly distorted picture of the individual he imagined himself to be. He was by nature a man of containment and poise, he felt sure, and a more recognizable picture of himself would be one showing him as he was on this summer afternoon, seated sedately behind his desk in his black leather chair in his office, fifteen minutes before the four-o’clock news conference was to begin, dictating notes to his secretary, Patricia Riffe, an extremely pretty blue-eyed young woman who dresses impeccably. He chose her himself, and one is not surprised.

When Miss Riffe first appeared at
The Times
a few years before, there was hardly a reporter in the newsroom who was not aware of her—feminine beauty not being all that common in the newspaper business, at least not in front of the office door of
The Times
’ managing editor. Daniel’s predecessor had hired only male secretaries, and the editor before
him
had employed a dogmatic gray-haired woman whose hauteur conveyed the impression that
she
was the managing editor.

This woman had worked for various managing editors of
The Times
between 1928 and 1951, during which time she discovered where most of the bodies were buried and lost whatever awe of her superiors she might have once possessed, and she came to regard the younger executives on
The Times
as office boys, clerks, or worse. But she had made the mistake of including in this category one assistant managing editor who in 1951, upon the death of her boss, became his successor. One of the new editor’s first acts was to accept her resignation, replacing her with a series of male secretaries, and this went on until Clifton Daniel moved into the big
office in 1964 and brought in Miss Riffe. Many staff members were anxious to date Miss Riffe, and a few did, but her obvious discretion and mildly aloof manner soon discouraged them, all but one forthright young copyreader who worked on the foreign desk. Soon he was taking Miss Riffe to lunch, and later they were exchanging little notes through
The Times
’ housemail, and chatting briefly during the day on office telephones—he sitting at one end of the newsroom behind a post that permitted him to peek at her without seeming too obvious, she sitting at her desk outside Daniel’s office looking straight ahead, striking a pose of rigid efficiency.