The Kingdom and the Power (64 page)

“Well,” one bullpen editor replied casually, “you now have three.”

“Yes,” the New York man said quickly, “and what’s Abe going to say about
that?
”

“You mean Abe is going to get mad at
you?
”

“Well,” the New York man said tentatively, “you know Abe.”

Perhaps no editor in the newsroom felt the pressure of the New York desk more than Claude Sitton, the forty-year-old national-news editor. It was unlike anything he had known during his grueling years as a reporter, a period during which he had been away from home about twenty days a month, working sometimes twenty hours a day while traveling through his native South covering the Civil Rights movement. He had then aroused the contempt of the
Klan and other racists with his reporting, had braved the dogs and harassment of Chief “Bull” Connor in Birmingham, had once been thrown out of a store in Mississippi by one of Catledge’s kin. As a reward for his work, and with Catledge’s blessing. Sitton had been brought back to New York in 1964 and made the national-news editor, succeeding Harrison Salisbury, who had been promoted to assistant managing editor.

But the emergence of Rosenthal and Gelb, and the shadow of Salisbury, had introduced Sitton to challenges that were occasionally more aggravating than any open animosity he had felt in the rural South. He had known that it would not be easy as Salisbury’s successor. Salisbury had been enormously energetic—an individual of great prestige and persuasion. But Sitton had not fully anticipated the interoffice competitiveness that went with the job, the barely perceptible but nonetheless real and constant crosscurrent of tension that seemed to exist between the desk that Salisbury had just vacated to Sitton, and the one occupied by Rosenthal across the room. It was as if Salisbury, despite his elevation, was still anxious that his old bailiwick, the national staff, not fall behind the fast pace being set by Rosenthal, and Sitton was immediately caught in the middle. There seemed little doubt that Salisbury was not Rosenthal’s favorite person, and the driving personalities that they both possessed often enabled them to see things only one way, their own way; and the divergent backgrounds from which they came, the totality of their experiences at home and abroad, their egos and ambitions, the way they saw the world, seemed destined to keep them apart both socially and philosophically—Rosenthal, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia, the correspondent who had been banished from Communist Poland, was more nationalistically American and reverential toward its American institutions than was the more sophisticated Salisbury, an almost stoical Midwesterner who had lived through the worst years in Stalin’s Russia, and had descended from a family of individualists who had settled in America more than three hundred years ago and had lived under a variety of political saviors and scoundrels that were often indistinguishable. When Harrison Salisbury, cool, overtly direct, seemingly unselfconscious, would approach the New York desk with an idea or an opinion, Rosenthal seemed almost to bristle. Salisbury appeared to be unaware of the effect that he was having on the sensitive Rosenthal, and he would be surprised, or would claim to be surprised, when hearing that
Rosenthal had gone to Clifton Daniel to settle issues that Salisbury had not even known were issues.

When Claude Sitton became the national-news editor in 1964, he began to experience incidents similar to those that had arisen between Salisbury and Rosenthal during Salisbury’s last year on the national desk—differences that were not always due to personalities but were the result of honest disagreements over whether certain stories should be handled by the New York desk or the national desk. While stories from overseas uncontestably fell under the jurisdiction of the foreign desk, the jurisdictional boundaries between the national desk, which included the Washington bureau, and the New York desk often overlapped. The Kennedys, for example, were considered the property of the national desk, but when the Kennedys, after the Presidential assassination, divided their time between New York and Washington, and established residences in New York, the question of which desk was responsible for which Kennedy story was often debatable.

In 1965 the New York desk blocked an attempt by
The Times’
national political correspondent, David S. Broder, stationed in Washington, to cover President Johnson’s speech in Princeton, New Jersey, because Princeton was part of the New York desk’s territory. In possible retaliation, the national desk refused to let the New York reporter who had covered Johnson’s speech make a trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to report on the National Young Republican board’s action on the New Jersey Rat Fink case. Instead, David Broder was ordered to Arkansas by Sitton. Broder wrote his story from there and filed it with the New York desk, and it was killed after one edition. Broder felt the rivalry of the desks in a number of his assignments and he also felt restricted by
The Times’
bureaucracy; and in August of 1966 he resigned from
The Times
to join the
Washington Post
. At Clifton Daniel’s request, he wrote a memo listing his grievances against and impressions of
The Times
, and his view of its political coverage and the situation in the Washington bureau. Broder’s typed memo, single-spaced, ran nearly eight pages. In it he described elaborately, sometimes scathingly, the frustration of dealing with the New York office. The morale in Washington, he wrote, was very low, and he chafed repeatedly at the editorship of Claude Sitton and at the general tendency in New York to overplay news stories with big names and to underplay trend stories or stories of a more analytical character:

David Broder was one of many Washington reporters who had become disenchanted with Claude Sitton, expecting him to stand up to the bullpen and the other senior editors as Abe Rosenthal was doing, demonstrating the stubborn partisanship that had enabled the New York staff to make its strong showing. But Sitton seemed to have neither Rosenthal’s
chutzpa
nor his editorial leverage. As the national-news editor, Sitton presided over a dozen regional bureaus around the nation as well as the national copydesk in New York that edited both the regional stories and those filed from Tom Wicker’s bureau in Washington. When Wicker’s men became angered by the editing or cutting of the copyreaders, or by the imputations from Salisbury or Daniel that a certain Washington story had been inadequately covered, they usually channeled their explanations or objections through Claude Sitton, but they did not often feel that he was sufficiently sympathetic; or if he was sympathetic, he seemed powerless to avert the continued second-guessing that emanated from Daniel’s office, or from the desk of Harrison Salisbury, or from the bullpen. In the old days when the Washington bureau had such ranking figures as Arthur Krock or Reston to do its bidding, it had been accustomed to getting quick results, and usually favorable results; but now in 1966 it felt mainly frustrated, and it believed that Sitton was partly to blame, and Washington reporters sometimes wondered aloud over what had become of the raw nerve and toughness that had once characterized Sitton’s stand against Bull Connor and the Klan.

Sitton was aware of his image in Washington and of the Broder memo, and he considered both to be unjustified. Sitton was, after all, answerable to Salisbury and Daniel, and if they were displeased with Wicker and the bureau, which they were, there was little that Sitton could do about it. One of the complaints against Sitton in Broder’s memo was that, as the national political correspondent, he, Broder, had been refused the necessary freedom to do a proper job: it was Broder’s contention that the national political correspondent should have the right to visit any state where he (and the national-news editor) thought there was a
political story of national significance, and that the correspondent should be in charge of that political coverage unchallenged by the regional bureau chief in that state. But such free-floating reportage was rare on
The Times
, being limited to such men as Reston and Salisbury, and if it were permitted in the cases of less-established correspondents, it could be dispiriting to those bureaumen permanently located in those regions. Nevertheless when Broder quit and joined the
Washington Post
, it was not taken lightly in New York by Daniel, which was one reason why Daniel had asked for the memo. It was not often that a political correspondent on
The New York Times
quit to become a political correspondent on another newspaper. The fact that that other paper was the
Washington Post
, the major competitor of
The Times
in the capital, added to the significance of Broder’s resignation, and he quickly became a kind of martyr in Wicker’s bureau, a symbol of its frustrations with the New York office. Xerox copies of Broder’s memo were bootlegged out of the bureau and were distributed through the mail to
Times
men in Paris and other foreign posts. Sitton, not knowing how much importance Daniel had attached to the memo, was feeling increased pressure from many sides. He was being doubted in Washington, was feeling the daily squeeze of the New York desk, was being pressed from above and within himself to meet challenges that were rather unfocused. He wanted to be fair both to the regional correspondents and to the staff in Washington, but felt sometimes that there were prima donnas in Washington who were incurably spoiled by the privileges of the past. He tried to live with their criticism, however, to work long hours in New York and to react quickly to any incident or angle that might produce stories for the national desk. He allowed his bureau chief in the Southwest, Martin Waldron, to spend several weeks investigating the increased land holdings of President Lyndon Johnson, recording the fact that as President Johnson had purchased new land in Texas, the state highway improvements were never far behind. Sitton also kept an alert eye on the daily activities of the Civil Rights movement in the South, his old beat, and he put particular pressure on a reporter who had succeeded him, Roy Reed. After James Meredith had been shot in Mississippi, and a wire service photograph of his prone body on the road was received in New York, Sitton grabbed the photo and scanned its edges, asking, “
Where’s Roy Reed?
”

In the spring of 1966, a novelist and biographer named William Manchester had completed a 380,000-word book on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It would be called
The Death of a President
, and would be published by Harper & Row. The Kennedy family had first approached Theodore White and Walter Lord to write the book, but both were unavailable—the book was to be an “authorized version,” and the Kennedy family would have prepublication approval of the manuscript. Manchester, however, agreed to the Kennedy conditions, and no great difficulty had been anticipated by either side. The Kennedys regarded Manchester as a friend—he had in 1962 published a pro-Kennedy book,
Portrait of a President
, that
The Times’
book reviewer had described as “adoring”—and after being approached in 1964 by Pierre Salinger, in behalf of Mrs. Kennedy, to consider writing a book about the assassination, Manchester felt that it was both an honor and an obligation to history to do so. This was to be
the
book on the Dallas tragedy. It would be done with the utmost in accuracy and good taste, it was hoped, and would negate attempts by other authors to produce books about the assassination that might be crassly commercial or inaccurate.