The Kingdom and the Power (7 page)

The Times
’ newsroom is an odd setting for a courtship: it is an enormous, functional room stretching from Forty-third to Forty-fourth Street through the third floor of the fourteen-story
Times
building, and it is lined with rows and rows of gray metal desks, teletype machines, telephones, and a few hundred men sitting with pencils in their hands, or keyboards under their fingers, writing or editing or reading about the world’s latest horror. Every five minutes, it seems, there arrives in this room a late report of another disaster—a riot in Rangoon, turmoil in Tanzania, a
coup d’état
, or an earthquake. But all this seems to make no impression on the people within this room. It is as if so much bad news has punctured the atmosphere of this place for so long that now everybody within is immune to it. The news is just a harmless virus that comes floating into the building, is circulated through the system, in and out of typewriters, under pencils, into spinning molten metal machines, is imprinted on paper, packed in trucks, delivered to newsstands, and sold to worrisome readers, causing reactions and counterreactions around the world—but the inhabitants of
The Times
’ newsroom remain unaffected, uninvolved, they think of other things. Love. Or, in the case of Miss Riffe and the young man on the foreign desk, marriage. One day they went off quietly and got married. And then, with Daniel’s blessing, they returned, resumed their places behind their desks in the room, and proceeded to conduct their private lives in such a way as not to distract from the larger purpose of this place. Which is as Daniel wishes it.

He is interested in appearances, and this extends not only to an individual’s grooming or clothes, but also to the manner in which he conducts his private life. Daniel is not a puritanical man. It matters little to him if the whole staff of
The New York Times
is engaged in a vast assortment of pleasurable pursuits, sexual or otherwise. But how a thing appears is often as meaningful to him as
how it really is, and this attitude has influenced his life, the things he has done, the way he has done them, his reaction toward people and places, his taste in objects, his choice in women, be they wife, lover, or secretary. Even his office reflects this. Traditional English, thirty-five feet long and eighteen feet wide, trimmed in draperies of a white linen stripe, it is lined with a blue-black tweed rug that conceals the inky footprints of editors who have been up to the composing room. Toward the front of the room is an oval walnut conference table surrounded by eighteen Bank of England chairs, modeled after one that belonged to Adolph Ochs. In the rear of the room, a long walk for visitors, is Daniel’s big desk and his black leather chair which, according to the decorator, was selected because it produces a minimum of wrinkles in Daniel’s suits.

To the right of the desk is a door leading into a small, tastefully appointed sitting room, on the walls of which are hung photographs showing Clifton Daniel and his wife at White House receptions with the Lyndon Johnsons, the Harry Trumans, the John Kennedys—these being but a sample of many such photographs that the Daniels have, a few of which, blurred, were taken by Jacqueline Kennedy. Behind this little room is a bathroom and also a small kitchenette and bar. On the walls of the kitchenette are posters representing the nations in which Daniel has worked as a
Times
correspondent—England, Egypt, West Germany, Russia—and there are other personal mementos in this small room. But there is nothing that is conspicuously personal in the large room of Daniel’s suite. Everything in this room reflects the institution, Daniel’s taste here being infused with subtlety. The framed photographs along one side wall, blown up and changed periodically, are recent news pictures that appeared in
The Times
and caught Daniel’s eye. Lined along the shelves behind Daniel’s desk are many books written or edited by
Times
men, and when these men appear in his office their eyes invariably scan the shelves quickly, hoping that their books have survived his latest scrutiny. To the left of the bookshelves are hung the photographs of the publishers who have so far guided the paper through this century, Ochs and his three successors. To the right, overlooking Daniel’s left shoulder as he sits at his desk, are photographs of the four men who preceded him as managing editor, men who both presented their era and were representative of it.

In the first picture, Carr Van Anda. He was appointed managing editor by Ochs in 1904, having been hired away from the
New York Sun
,
to which he had gone in 1888 after some distinguished years on the
Baltimore Sun
and on smaller papers in his native Ohio. Van Anda poses in this picture with firm lips and cool pale eyes, a formal man with a high forehead, rimless glasses, a high stiff collar, and a pearl stickpin piercing his tie. He appears to be a distant, impersonal man, and he appears as he most often was. One
Times
reporter of that period described Van Anda’s look as a “death ray,” and when a group of
Times
men petitioned Van Anda to put by-lines on their stories he snapped, “
The Times
is not running a reporters’ directory!” But if he was not a folk hero with his staff he was nonetheless respected as few editors would be, for he was not only a superb newsman but also a scholar, a mathematical genius, and a student of science and logic. It was he who pushed
The Times
toward its expanded coverage of the great feats in polar exploration and aviation, forming the foundation for the paper’s portrait of the space age. He was the first editor to publicize Einstein—and once, in checking over a story about one of Einstein’s lectures, discovered that the scientist had made an error in an equation. Van Anda, who read hieroglyphics, printed many stories of significant excavations, and one night, after examining under a magnifying glass the inscription of a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian tomb, he discovered a forgery, and this fact, later confirmed by Egyptologists, led to the conclusion that a young Pharaoh, Tutankhamen, had been assassinated by a military chief named Horemheb. It was Van Anda who disputed the new
Titanic
’s claim to being unsinkable and when the ship’s radio went silent, after an emergency call for help, he deduced what had happened and drove his staff to get the story of the disaster that would be a world scoop. During World War I, Carr Van Anda, equipping himself with every available military map, charted the course of battle, and he anticipated many future campaigns, getting his reporters there in advance, and
The Times
’ coverage during that time was unparalleled.

By 1926 Van Anda had gone into semiretirement, devoting more time to his lifelong study of mathematics, astronomy, and cosmogony, and his place at
The Times
was taken by his assistant of many years, Frederick T. Birchall. Birchall was an impulsive, quick, tiny Englishman who, because he chose to remain a British subject, never received the full title of managing editor from Ochs, performing for the next five years as
acting
managing editor. He had been a brilliant deskman under Van Anda in the 1890’s on the
New
York Sun
, and he had joined
The New York Times
at Van Anda’s urging in 1905. In the newsroom Birchall always wore a green eyeshade that partially covered his bald head, and he also had an impressive Vandyke beard that, from the photograph in Daniel’s office, appears to be black. Actually it was pink. “Old Pink Whiskers” was Birchall’s nickname in the newsroom, and the staff felt a bit more relaxed around him than it had with Van Anda. Birchall was more liberal, a luxury
The Times
could then afford since the staff had been so thoroughly disciplined under Van Anda. Not being a genius, Birchall was more human, but he worked hard to maintain the standards of his mentor. Birchall worked at his desk half the night rereading stories for errors in fact or tone, and he read galley proofs upside down to see if any typos would come popping into his sharp scanning sight. Sometimes he would remain all night at
The Times
, sleeping in a little room down the hall from his office, and occasionally he would be awakened by a copy-boy as a big story broke. Then he would reappear in
The Times
’ newsroom wearing his pajamas, slippers, and bathrobe; suddenly alert, excited by the news, he would put on his green eyeshade and proceed to pad around the room giving instructions to his reporters and subordinate editors.

Outside the newsroom, Birchall was something else. There seemed to be some romantic fantasy trapped within him, and he was once spotted up in
The Times
’ library moving between high shelves of books with his eyes slightly closed, twirling tiptoe in a trance of secret ballet. With his British wife he lived, among other places, near the Hudson River in a large farmhouse around which he kept dozens of monkeys, birds, stray cats and dogs, and a parrot who would greet each of Birchall’s arrivals with a cockney call, “ ’Allo, dahling,” and then make
click-click
noises simulating the sound of the ice cubes that Birchall was dropping into a highball glass. Birchall’s eye for women was never a secret at
The Times
, and it was said that a particular woman, a German baroness, was a factor in his decision to vacate the acting managing editor’s job in 1931 and go overseas as
The Times
’ chief European correspondent. He saw a good deal of her in Europe, and one day while driving in his car with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the Baroness’s leg, and with two American friends in the back seat, Birchall rammed into the rear of a German bus. No one was seriously injured, but shortly afterward Birchall made the observation, “Foreign correspondents should be eunuchs.” He was a living
refutation of that statement. He was an outstanding correspondent for
The Times
in the early Thirties, reporting perceptively the early rise of Hitler, and in 1933 he won the Pulitzer Prize.

Birchall’s place in the managing editor’s office had been taken by a flamboyant Virginia dude named Edwin Leland James. Of the four editors whose pictures hang on Daniel’s wall, James was undoubtedly the most popular with the staff and they referred to him by a variety of names—“Jimmy James,” “King James,” “Jesse James,” “Dressy James.” A stocky little man with blue eyes and suits tailored in Paris, where during the Twenties he had been
The Times
’ chief correspondent, James continued to live the life of the boulevardier long after he had returned to the New York office as an editor. He would appear each morning wearing one of his brightly colored suits and highly polished pair of shoes, sometimes carrying a cane that he rapped against the elevator when it moved too slowly. In his office, sitting behind an eight ball on his desk, he puffed cigars and talked at length to almost any visitor, and he also found time each morning to study the racing form and place a bet with a bookmaker who doubled as a clerk on one of the news desks.

It was in many ways remarkable that such a man could ever have attained such a demanding editorial position. One possible explanation was that Ochs, Van Anda, and Birchall had been both charmed by his personality and impressed with his reporting during World War I and through the Twenties. And when Ochs wished to escape temporarily from the Victorian citadel he had created, he would go alone to Paris and make the nocturnal rounds with James, then to the racetrack the following day. James was Ochs’s tonic.

James could do these things, and still succeed at his job, because he had great physical stamina and incredible speed at a typewriter. He never labored over his writing, and he was no stylist, but he did achieve a high level of readability by packing his stories with interesting details and by coming up with angles that gave his stories a twist. In fact, on his very first assignment as a
Times
reporter on the local staff in 1915, after he had been sent to the Astor Hotel to cover a reception for the new consul-general from Romania—an event attended by New York dignitaries and preceded by an eleven-gun salute from the battleship
Wyoming
—James became suspicious of the consul-general, wondering if he might be a fraud. The consul-general’s boots were scuffed and untidy, and his accent seemed artificial, and there were other things, too, that
somehow seemed wrong to James. He later reported this to Van Anda, and then began to investigate further—and finally, with cooperation from government officials in Washington, James exposed the consul-general as a psychopathic poseur who had previously served time in the Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York. This story appeared in
The Times
the next morning under the headline, “Bogus Consul General Gives Dinner at Astor,” resulting in another jail term for the impostor, and quickly establishing James’s identity with Van Anda.

Three years later, when James was twenty-eight, he was getting by-lines regularly from Van Anda for his war reporting from Europe, an assignment that he sometimes covered on horseback, wearing jodhpurs and a hacking jacket under his trench coat. After the war he covered the conferences at Versailles, Locarno, and Geneva, bringing to his reporting a descriptive touch that is not unusual now in
The Times
but was then quite rare: “At the end of a perfect day, just as nightfall descended rapidly from surrounding mountains, two middle-aged figures, both stoop-shouldered, one with flowing hair, the other bald as can be, stood arm in arm framed in a brightly lighted window and looked out together on the lengthening shadows fast reaching across Lake Maggiore. There was Aristide Briand, Foreign Minister of France, and Hans Luther, Chancellor of the German Republic. Behind their backs secretaries were blotting the ink on the signatures of a treaty by which their two countries promised never to fight one another again.”

For five years, beginning in 1925, James roved around Europe covering the best stories, and in 1927 he was at the Le Bourget Airdrome as Lindbergh landed (“P
ARIS
, May 21—Lindbergh did it. Twenty minutes after 10 o’clock tonight suddenly and softly there slipped out of the darkness a gray-white airplane as 25,000 pairs of eyes strained toward it.…”); and then, in 1930, with his French wife and three children, and with a Legion of Honor ribbon in his lapel, Edwin James returned to New York as Birchall’s assistant, and in 1932 he was named managing editor. He held this position until his death in 1951, and during his tenure
The New York Times
became larger and more prosperous than ever before, expanding its coverage around the nation and the world. But James was easily bored by much of the necessary trivia of his job, and he permitted other men of talent and ambition, men with their
own
ideas of what was best for
The Times
, to move in and assume more responsibility.
The Times
, with Ochs dead, soon became splintered into several
small office empires, little dukedoms, with each duke having his loyal followers and special territory to protect. One of the grand dukes of
The Times
, of course, was Arthur Krock. Another was Lester Markel, an autocratic figure who in 1923, at the age of twenty-nine, had been hired by Ochs as the Sunday editor with a staff of five; by 1951, Markel had a staff of eighty-four. This included fifty-eight editors, layout and picture crews, and special correspondents in Paris, London, and Washington. He had converted the Sunday department, which in 1923 had consisted of a slim magazine and a flimsy feature supplement, into a gigantic operation that published a book review, a review of the week’s news, a section on entertainment and the arts, and a thick magazine that, while often criticized for its ponderous articles and endless advertisements of ladies’ underwear, was nonetheless very influential and profitable. Lester Markel, in effect, had built a major newspaper within the newspaper, and his taste dominated his product and the men who helped produce it, and for forty years his authority within the Sunday department was unquestioned—he was the Sun King.