The Kingdom and the Power (72 page)

Around this time, one Amasa Salisbury traveled along the Great Lakes and moved into Wisconsin, and had one son whom he named after President Harrison—Augustus Harrison Salisbury. This son fought in the Civil War, later became a doctor and distinguished citizen in Minneapolis, and it was in honor of him that his grandson, the journalist on
The Times
, was named.

As a boy, Harrison Salisbury was extremely shy. Surrounded in his neighborhood by Orthodox Jews and their children, he was an outsider from the start. And yet in having such friends, in overhearing their references to life in Russia and sensing their conflict with remote rulers and issues, he became prematurely curious about geography and politics. At this time, too, there was living in the Salisbury home an old white-bearded man, a great-uncle who had fought in the Civil War and been imprisoned at Andersonville; he had been released in such poor health that he never recovered nor married, and so he lived in this big house with Salisbury’s mother and father, an aunt and uncle, and young Salisbury and his sister, and each evening before dinner the old man would take the children, a youngster on each arm of his chair, and read aloud the Minneapolis
Journal
’s latest dispatches from the battlefronts of World War I.

Salisbury devoured them. He placed large maps on the floor and pointed to the places. At the age of ten he had written his own history of the Great War, beginning “All Europe was astire …” In class he was a precocious student, graduating from grade school at twelve, from high school at sixteen. Being two years younger than his classmates kept him outside the contemporary circle, and nearly all of the Jewish friends he had grown up with had been forced to drop out of school and take jobs. So Salisbury spent more time reading, his home being lined with books, and writing poetry and essays, one of the latter on Alexander Hamilton, winning Salisbury a prize from a local historical society. He joined the Boy Scouts and earned enough merit badges to become an Eagle, and he particularly liked the long hikes and camping out all night; at first he could not sleep without a pillow, but he trained himself
and then he could not sleep with a pillow, it being one of many little comforts he learned to avoid.

Though his father was an atheist, his grandfather, Dr. Salisbury, had been a leader in the Minneapolis Universalist Church, now merged with the Unitarians, and this church, which Harrison Salisbury attended, partly influenced his political philosophy. The Universalists were opposed to strict dogma, advocating instead a broad and liberal attitude, urging that its members not fail to look at things also from the other man’s point of view. This was healthy, harmless advice for a young man growing up, but when that man continued to reflect some of it twenty-five years later as a newspaper correspondent in Russia during the Cold War and the McCarthy era, he inevitably became controversial.

It seemed unlikely from the start that Salisbury could have become anything but a journalist. He had those qualities that so many journalists have. He was very shy, very curious, and journalism was the perfect vehicle for overcoming the first and satisfying the second. At the University of Minnesota, Salisbury became editor of the campus newspaper and, coming out of his shell a bit, became the center of what was then called the Great Nicotine War. After the university’s president had issued an ultimatum banning the smoking of cigarettes in the vestibule of the library, Salisbury dispatched his reporters to test the law, to smoke and see what would happen. He then sent other reporters to record the dialogue that would invariably ensue between the janitor of the library and the smoking students being evicted; and Salisbury himself later personally appeared on the scene. These confrontations, of course, provided lively stories for Salisbury’s newspaper; but, to his surprise, caused his sudden suspension from the university in 1930. This event, which even made page one of
The New York Times
, inspired student demonstrations around the campus, though the suspension of Salisbury was not lifted for several months. But the United Press bureau in St. Paul, Minnesota, which had covered the story, offered him a job during the interim—his first step in professional journalism.

Salisbury worked for the United Press for nearly twenty years, moving from St. Paul to Chicago, from Washington to New York to London to Cairo to Moscow, a hundred cities in between, moving so quickly to the clamor of new disasters and datelines and deadlines that his own life sometimes ceased to exist—he became
an action addict, blurring the reality of his own personal problems while blending into the restless, competitive world of the agency man. There simply was no time to think about anything but the news, to get it and write it, and write it
fast
, and this was particularly true at the United Press during Salisbury’s earlier days. The United Press had neither the manpower nor money to compete on equal terms with the larger, richer Associated Press, and so to offset the odds the UP men had to travel more and type faster, and there appeared within the United Press, and the still smaller International News Service, an almost special breed of journalists: aggressive young men willing to be underpaid and overworked for the experience and adventure; they were the low-budget boys who came tearing into town, who shot from the hip and caught the next plane out, and among this group Harrison Salisbury was a star.

He loved the long hours, possessing phenomenal energy, and he loved the excitement and tactics. He was in Chicago during the days of gangland killings, wrote stories about Al Capone, and covered his tax trial. One day at the United Press bureau one of Salisbury’s reporter friends, a man who had a pipeline into the mob, received a tip that the mayor of Chicago, Tony Cermak, would be shot. Appreciative of the help, the UP bureau quickly planned the coverage, arranging for telephone lines to be kept open and selecting a code word to flash the news. It never occurred to any of them to notify the mayor or the police. When the event did not materialize, however, the reporter who had been tipped off became confused; and his confusion turned to anger when Mayor Cermak, traveling with President Roosevelt, was shot in Miami. “Those bastards double-crossed me,” the reporter said, insisting that Cermak and not Roosevelt had been the target.

Salisbury got married in 1933 to a girl he had met in Chicago a year or so before, and he would regard it as one of the unfortunate decisions of his life. But he was part of the busy Washington bureau a year later, working most of the night, and by 1942 he was off to cover the war from London, leaving his wife and son in New York. The departure from his son, who was three years old, was difficult for Salisbury, but he had been anxious to get overseas for years, to be part of a historic event that would be the high point of so many reporters’ lives, and so he went. And he can remember very vividly, even now, the sharp small details of England then—the decor of his room in the Park Lane Hotel, the clatter of rooftop
shingles as the planes roared low, the rustle of people moving very close to him in the night on the dark streets of London’s blackout—London would never seem more beautiful to him than during those dangerous, glamorous nights of the blackout. Some friends he made then would remain friends for years, among them Daniel of the AP and Walter Cronkite of the UP; and Salisbury also met a marvelous young woman, a Red Cross worker, who would reappear in the United States after the war to complicate his already complicated personal life.

In 1944, following a short tour in North Africa, Salisbury was sent to the UP bureau in Moscow, and he began reporting the Russian army’s destruction of the retreating Germans, the recapturing of Russian villages and towns, and in May of 1944 he reported the bloody scene on the Black Sea off Sevastopol in which 25,000 Germans were trapped, waiting in vain for evacuation ships:

After the war Harrison Salisbury returned to New York, to his wife, and to a new job as foreign-news editor of the United Press. The war had been his escape, he admitted that, and now he hoped to adjust to life at home. The birth of his second son in 1947 brought a new closeness between his wife and him, but it did so only temporarily. He was tense much of the time, and the woman he had known in London appeared in New York. He wanted to quit the United Press and work for
The New York Times
, but there were no openings, and he would not accept the editorships available to him at
The Reporter
magazine or
Time
. The indecisiveness of his private life, the frustrations of his professional life; the end of the war, the end of the marriage, the general wretchedness of his daily existence drove him to a point where he could not
work at all. He was a victim of what he believed was anxiety neurosis. One day he entered the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.

Many years later some of his friends would point to this period as the nadir of his life, expressing admiration at his ability to rebound and to continue to rebound when things seemed to be going against him still later in his life. But Salisbury always dismissed such interpretations as melodramatic. Exaggerations. The logic of people wishing to arrive at too-easy conclusions. He saw his life not as one of ups and downs, but as a slow, steady progression. His time of tension was not a breakdown, he asserted, but a wonderful opportunity for reevaluation and reexamination, the kind of thing that every man can use periodically in his lifetime. It would surprise him, during those later years after he had risen within
The Times
, to be told that some people feared him or disliked him or considered him conspiratorial. Such opinions would not greatly concern him, merely surprise him, for he was confident that they were unfounded. If he was disliked by others because he was so sure of himself—well, he
was
sure of himself. Some
Times
men were a little pleased in 1960 when his racial reporting from Alabama became part of a big libel suit, thinking this might teach him a lesson. But
The Times
won the case on appeal. A young
Times
reporter was shocked when Salisbury suspected CIA men in very respectable circles, but the young man thought differently after the CIA’s activities were exposed, being featured most tellingly in
Ramparts
magazine. Salisbury was not surprised in 1964 when Clifton Daniel made him an assistant managing editor (“I’d have been surprised if he hadn’t”). Few things caught Salisbury admittedly unaware; he conceded few weaknesses and dismissed as melodramatic the little insights other people claimed to have into his character. It seemed impossible to hurt his feelings, or to catch him in a revealing moment of self-doubt. He seemed always busy, always preoccupied with his work at
The Times
, yet occasionally he suggested his skill at quiet observation: “I like the way you walk, and the way your eyes move around the room,” he once told a young reporter he knew only slightly. But nobody at
The Times
claimed to know him well, and so they were left with their unverified versions. Or with what little they could learn about him from his
work, but this was difficult. As Salisbury himself wrote in 1961 in
The Northern Palmyra Affair
, his novel in a Russian setting that now could be anywhere:

Harrison Salisbury was hired by
The Times
in January of 1949, after persistent visits to the office of the managing editor, Edwin James. Salisbury was assigned immediately to Moscow. Had Salisbury not succeeded, after equal perseverance, in getting a visa from the Russians, he would not have gotten onto
The Times
, for the Moscow bureau, unstaffed for eighteen months, was the only job open.
The Times’
last regular correspondent there, Drew Middleton, who had written with relative unrestraint, had been denied reentry in 1947, and the newspaper frequently had difficulty in covering Russia. Its coverage of the Russian Revolution at first overlooked, then underestimated, the impact of Lenin. Its correspondent in the Twenties and Thirties, Walter Duranty, had become, in the opinion of
Times
editors, an apologist for Stalin. The
Times
man in Russia from 1941 to 1943 turned up later writing for the London and New York editions of the Communist
Daily Worker
. Before Salisbury had been sent to Moscow,
The Times
had conducted an investigation of his past activities, political and personal, and the bullpen had been alerted by the publisher to keep a “sharp eye” on his reporting. Even so, Salisbury soon became controversial; his dispatches reflected what many readers considered excessive sympathy for the Soviet Union, and there was the hint within journalistic circles, particularly from the right wing, that the only reason the Russians had granted Salisbury a visa was because he was politically naive. This was not true; but these were years of passionate opinion, not of measured restraint: it was McCarthyism in America, the worst days of the Cold War,
and Moscow had become a city of suspicion and dark plots. There was conflict between Mao and Stalin; Tito had broken away; a new state secrets act had been imposed which was so strict that it could be interpreted as preventing a Russian telephone operator from giving the correct time to a foreigner. For Salisbury in Russia these were days of denial and loneliness, a time when he came to suspect that his every move was watched, his every story censored, when nearly every young Russian woman who caught his eye was later questioned by the secret police. One day word was received in the newsroom that Salisbury’s life was in danger—the Soviet secret police, believing him to be a CIA agent, were about to torture him, bring him up for a spy trial, and dispose of him. When Salisbury had not been heard from for several days, a reporter on the New York staff, Will Lissner, wrote the advance obituary of Harrison Salisbury.