The Kingdom and the Power (70 page)

When Kauffmann walked into Daniel’s office, the managing editor was obviously shaken, blushing from embarrassment—Kauffmann had never before seen a man more acutely embarrassed, and Kauffmann began to feel sorry for
him
. Daniel said what he had to say as briefly as he could—Walter Kerr, having been offered the critic’s job, had just accepted it; and now, Daniel continued quickly, the next step was to find something else that Kauffmann might do on
The Times
. Daniel said that he would give thought to this over the weekend, hoping that Kauffmann would do the same. Kauffmann, seated across the desk, a soft-spoken man with gray, wavy hair, very dignified and controlled, had not reacted angrily; he was upset, but on this occasion he was Daniel’s superior at keeping up appearances. He was not even privately disappointed in Daniel, realizing that Daniel had had nothing to do with this decision, a fact that was perhaps almost as disconcerting to Daniel as the decision itself. Kauffmann was also not entirely surprised by the news. He had imagined that something was wrong when Daniel had requested Kauffmann’s appearance during his vacation.

Daniel proposed that they meet again on the following Monday outside the office, perhaps in the evening, to continue their discussions about Kauffmann’s future on
The Times
. Later Kauffmann
received a telephone call from Daniel’s office saying that the managing editor could not get away for the Monday night meeting, and asked that Kauffmann come into the office. When Kauffmann arrived, wishing to relieve both Daniel and himself of continued embarrassment, Kauffmann said that he had been unable to think of anything that he could do—or would wish to do—on
The Times
; instead he proposed that
The Times
fulfill its contractual obligations to him, and that he leave the paper. Daniel nodded in agreement, and on his desk he had Kauffmann’s file from the auditing department ready and waiting.

Stanley Kauffmann returned to his desk, planning to spend the rest of the day getting his private affairs and correspondence in order, and then he received word that Catledge wished to speak with him. In the executive editor’s office, Kauffmann heard Catledge explain that the decision to replace him had been part of a “consensus,” and with a certain awkwardness Catledge added: “I was part of that consensus.” Whether the consensus had also included the publisher’s advisers who operate outside the News department—Harding Bancroft, the executive vice-president; Ivan Veit and Andrew Fisher, the two vice-presidents from promotion and production—Kauffmann did not know, nor did he care. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Kauffmann had felt no vindictiveness toward anyone as he left Catledge’s office. He did not now think of the paper in human terms, but rather as an impersonal institution. As an institution it had behaved badly, he thought; it had promised that his tenure would last for a minimum of a year and a half, and it had ended after eight months. He was quite certain that he would never again enter the
Times
building.

After leaving the paper, he regained his position as the drama critic for Channel 13 and returned to the
New Republic
as a literary critic and cultural commentator. He soon lost touch with most of his acquaintances on
The Times
, although after his pieces had begun to appear in the
New Republic
he received a complimentary note from Clifton Daniel. He also received one day at home a rather odd letter from Daniel Yankelovich, Inc., the research organization that
The Times
had hired to conduct its scientific survey on employee morale. The Yankelovich correspondence, which included forms to be filled out, informed Kauffmann that he had been among the 150
Times
men chosen to give confidential opinions on
The Times
and its executives. Kauffmann was amused by this obviously unintended final note of irony. He was seriously
tempted to fill out the forms and tell what he
really
thought. But this impulse soon passed, and Kauffmann never replied.

Tom Wicker’s position had also been threatened in the summer of 1966, and his survival as the Washington bureau chief was a strange reversal on New York’s part that Wicker was content to accept without further explanation. To dare to inquire into the causes of his good fortune might jinx its continuance, although he had heard that Punch Sulzberger himself had altered the New York editors’ plan that would have removed Wicker as the bureau chief while giving him a Washington column after Krock’s retirement. Now Wicker had a column
and
the bureau, and he often wondered if the controversial Broder memorandum might have helped his cause in some way.

David Broder’s lengthy criticism, written shortly before Broder had resigned from
The Times
in August of 1966 to join the
Washington Post
, had not only attacked Claude Sitton and the bullpen, indeed the whole New York bureaucracy, but it had cited the low morale in Wicker’s bureau that was the result of New York pressure, a condition that Sulzberger was perhaps not fully aware of. He had quickly become more aware of it, however, after Wicker had personally placed the Broder memo in Sulzberger’s hands while the two men were riding a train together between Washington and New York. Wicker had brought up the subject rather casually, “What did you think of that Broder memo, Punch?” Sulzberger had looked at Wicker quizzically. He had obviously never heard of it. Apparently Daniel or Catledge had not relayed it to the publisher. Wicker, smiling, told Sulzberger, “I
just
happen to have a copy with me”—and he pulled it out and handed it to Sulzberger.

The publisher’s interest seemed stirred as he scanned it, and he undoubtedly might have wondered why Daniel or Catledge had never mentioned it to him, although it certainly was not in their own interest to do so. It appeared that Sulzberger might personally look into the matter of Washington’s morale more deeply, but Wicker was not counting on it. Wicker’s optimism had reached a
low point between 1965 and 1966, a period during which he had constantly been criticized by the New York editors for his handling of the bureau. Their habitual complaint was that he was not producing enough front-page exclusives out of Washington—Rosenthal
was
in New York—and Wicker’s executive career seemed to hang in the balance. It sometimes also seemed, however, that Tom Wicker’s competence or incompetence in Washington was really a side issue to something deeper, more complex—it was as if he had become the symbolic figure in a psychodrama that other men yelled at, a focal point upon which
Times
editors could concentrate their personal grievances and professional differences. Wicker himself was incidental to the cause, he was a tall, ruddy, hefty, ambitious, shrewd, almost folksy Southerner whose presence in Washington had provoked so much emotion and reaction among the other editors that they had inadvertently revealed more about themselves than they had about him. Wicker was a product of events, an individual whose career had been advanced by the reporting of the John Kennedy assassination and by the death of Dryfoos, the latter shifting as it did the balance of power within the newsroom away from Reston to Catledge, prompting Reston to vacate his bureau to his hand-picked successor, Wicker, and to withdraw mainly into his column on the editorial page, over which Catledge had no jurisdiction. Wicker’s appointment had been very acceptable in 1964 to the new publisher, Punch Sulzberger, who was eager to keep Reston on
The Times
; although the elevation of Wicker had hardly been pleasing to Clifton Daniel when Daniel had learned of it. It meant that Daniel—whose promotion to managing editor had been procured by Catledge while Reston was advancing Wicker—had been deprived of any role in the selection of his chief subordinate in Washington. In the two years that followed, Daniel had tried to limit his criticism of Wicker to the coverage of news, but Wicker could nonetheless sense an undercurrent of personal coolness, and Wicker could understand it. Wicker was
Reston’s
boy, a reminder of Reston’s lingering influence; and there was perhaps another factor that was of no small annoyance to the class-conscious Clifton Daniel: Wicker, like Daniel, was from North Carolina, and Wicker knew where Zebulon was.

Salisbury’s quarrel with Wicker was much more political than personal. Salisbury had become increasingly suspicious in 1966 of the Johnson administration’s self-righteous and optimistic attitude toward the war in Vietnam and American issues at home—the government
machinery in Washington had seemingly become a manufacturer of illusion, and Salisbury believed that Wicker’s bureau had been derelict in its duty to probe and expose. It was not that Wicker himself was naive; since taking over Krock’s column, Wicker’s writing had reflected a growing concern in the capital over the way things were going, but Salisbury was less interested in Wicker’s perceptions as a columnist than he was in Wicker’s ability to push his staff toward a more aggressive brand of investigative reporting. Salisbury felt that Wicker could not do justice to both jobs, could not write a column
and
direct the bureau, and A. M. Rosenthal had agreed with Salisbury in this instance, it being one of the few things that Rosenthal and Salisbury
could
agree upon.

But Rosenthal had not been very vocal in his criticism of Wicker during the summer and winter of 1966, even though Wicker, a contemporary of Rosenthal’s, was the only man in sight who seemed to pose a threat to Rosenthal’s dream of one day becoming the top executive in the newsroom. This was all the more reason for Rosenthal to restrain himself, not to behave ungraciously or impulsively when it appeared that he was soon to be promoted to an assistant managing-editorship. Rosenthal’s image as a driving editor of the New York staff had done him no harm with higher management when he had taken over the staff in 1963, for it was then generally conceded that drastic action was necessary; but now, more than three years later, when Rosenthal seemed destined for a higher office, he was wise to refrain from any display of partisanship or derogation. If the older editors wished to indulge in it, that was their prerogative; but Rosenthal had more at stake. He had given up his writing career to become an editor, had forsaken the by-line and public acclaim—which neither Reston, Salisbury, nor Wicker had done—and Rosenthal’s goal was to eventually run the entire department. At forty-four he could look forward to fulfilling his ambition, if he did not foolishly incur the displeasure of his superiors in the years ahead. Within a decade or much less, nearly all the senior editors currently running the paper would be gone. Catledge was sixty-five, and within a few years he would probably retire in the South with his pretty wife and write his memoirs, as Krock was now doing. Reston was fifty-seven, and he had often indicated that he preferred living in Washington to living in New York. Clifton Daniel was fifty-four, and, without Catledge, his position on the paper would undoubtedly be weakened, unless he could
establish a better rapport with Punch Sulzberger. Failing to achieve that, and if the Democratic party remained in power, Daniel might pursue—with a bit of help from his father-in-law—an ambassadorship. The four assistant managing editors—Bernstein and Garst, Freedman and Salisbury—were all pushing sixty, or were beyond it. Of the younger editors coming up, there was Claude Sitton, the national-news editor, who had had his troubles; and Sydney Gruson, the foreign-news editor, an epicurean who was about to accept a more prepossessing assignment in Paris, where he would take over
The Times’
International edition, which Sulzberger hoped would catch up with the stronger Paris
Herald Tribune
, now jointly owned by John Hay Whitney and the
Washington Post
. Drew Middleton had been interested in replacing Gruson as the foreign-news editor, but Daniel had not helped him to get the job, endorsing instead a forty-four-year-old correspondent named Seymour Topping, a very efficient, very loyal organizational type who, like Daniel, had come up from the AP, had headed
The Times’
bureaus in Moscow and Bonn, and had married well—the daughter of the Canadian diplomat Chester Ronning.

And so of the whole caravan of characters passing through the great timeless tundra of
The Times
in the second half of the twentieth century, none at this point seemed in a more advantageous spot than A. M. Rosenthal, and nothing would be less providential of him than to display signs of impatience or impiety, or to join in the chorus of dissent against Tom Wicker. Wicker was being criticized enough by other New York editors, and such criticism might have already been carried too far, having achieved for Wicker perhaps increased sympathy from Punch Sulzberger, and having perhaps given Sulzberger the idea that Salisbury, the troubleshooter, might more valuably serve
The Times
in another department—namely the Book Division, where the newsroom rumors had divined him, with Rosenthal moving up into Salisbury’s spot. Or it could have been that Catledge and Sulzberger, after deciding that Wicker
should
devote himself entirely to the column, could not find a suitable substitute who could take over the bureau without further demoralizing the Washington staff. Harrison Salisbury, who might have performed remarkably well in Washington, would perhaps also inspire mutiny. Max Frankel, a popular member of the bureau, was unacceptable in New York. Frankel had been described as “too emotional,” the executives having not forgotten his long letter of resignation in 1964. James Reston mean-while
continued to defend Wicker, believing that New York, while charging Wicker with a lack of administrative initiative, usually failed to explain what specific big stories Wicker was missing; the criticism seemed too often vague and unconstructive to Reston, and he was not appeased when he was reminded that during
his
younger days in Washington, he had come up with numerous exclusives. Washington was a very different city in those days, Reston replied—World War II had recently ended, it was a world of emerging nations, news was more easily gotten. But now Washington was pretty much a one-man town,
Johnsonville
, and if Wicker were the sort who was merely interested in protecting his own flank from New York’s attack, Reston continued, Wicker could have focused each day on President Johnson’s movements and moods, the ruffles and flurries, and remained unconcerned with a more balanced, objective coverage of the capital.