The Kingdom and the Power (73 page)

Salisbury’s reputation with American readers might not have been so controversial if
The Times’
editors had made it clear that the articles that they were printing under Salisbury’s by-line had previously been censored by the Russians. On several occasions, Salisbury had written the editors requesting that the notation
Passed by Censor
be inserted over his dispatches, but this was never done, and so he was regularly attacked in the letters-to-the-editor columns and in American magazines as being soft on Communism. Salisbury was not quite sure why there was reluctance on the part of
The Times’
management to the use of Passed by Censor, but he wondered if it was because Jewish censorship in Israel then was equally harsh, and that some
Times
editors or the owners did not wish to antagonize the powerful Zionist groups in America by putting a censorship tag on their stories. But this might have been called preposterous reasoning by his superiors on
The Times
, and Salisbury decided that it was better left unsaid. And besides, censorship existed then in one form or another from Egypt to the Dominican Republic, and how could
The Times
accurately label all those varying degrees of censorship on its dispatches?
The Times
did occasionally express regret in its editorials for the “distorted or incomplete report from Russia, through no fault of our correspondent.” This helped Salisbury to a degree, but not to the degree
of offsetting the sting that came on those days when
The Times
would run, next to one of Salisbury’s censored-soft pieces, a highly critical piece on Russia by
The Times’
resident Soviet expert, Harry Schwartz.

A former Soviet-affairs analyst for the OSS and State Department, later a professor at Syracuse University, Harry Schwartz had been denounced by the Russians as a “capitalist intelligence agent.” He had started writing for
The Times
about Russia from Syracuse in 1947, the year that the Russians had denied Drew Middleton’s reentry; by 1951 Schwartz had moved down to New York as a full-time staff writer for
The Times
, producing his stories in an office on the tenth floor that was stacked with Communist newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. The way that Schwartz wrote about Russia 4,600 miles from Moscow, and the way that Salisbury could write about Russia from Red Square, resulted, of course, in Salisbury’s seeming to be a Red propagandist, and resulted eventually in a private little Cold War between these two
Times
men.

Salisbury became furious when he had heard that Harry Schwartz, attending the
New Republic
’s forum on the Soviet Union, indicated that Salisbury was being “taken in” by the Russians or was “trying to get in good with them.” The charge was investigated in New York. After an examination of the transcript of Schwartz’s remarks, the editors could find no such statements, and Salisbury was advised to pay no attention to such rumors, merely to continue his fine work under the obvious handicaps. Still, the Salisbury-Schwartz relations remained cool, as many of Salisbury’s dispatches were discarded in New York in favor of the uncensored pieces that Schwartz produced after analyzing the latest Communist journals and consulting his Soviet sources in Washington and elsewhere. (Years later, after Salisbury had returned to New York, he reviewed in
The Times
a book by Harry Schwartz. Schwartz was not pleased.)

In 1954, after more than five years in Moscow, and after Clifton Daniel had volunteered to replace him there, Harrison Salisbury returned home. He was forty-five, he had gotten a divorce after years of separation, and he hoped that he could adjust to a quiet
and productive life in New York City. It is never easy for a foreign correspondent of
The Times
to return to the home office, no matter how severe his life might have seemed abroad. There are compensations with those hardships. One is not surrounded by so many editors, so much interoffice pettiness when one is thousands of miles away. While the foreign correspondent is occasionally aroused from his sleep at 4 a.m. by anxious editors from New York requesting an insert in a story to match information published in another newspaper, he nevertheless enjoys long stretches of freedom, writing and moving about as he wishes. All this stops when the correspondent returns, as Salisbury did in 1954, to the home office. The correspondent is first assigned to a desk within one of the many rows; he no longer has a secretary, as he probably did overseas; and now instead of a chauffeur he will travel by subway. Seated around him in the newsroom are many ambitious young men and also some tired old correspondents who have been everywhere and will never go again. Their only sign of having been abroad is the suits they wear, somewhat threadbare now, but obviously made by foreign tailors. These old correspondents sometimes also continue to wear their hair long, in the style of their last European city, but they no longer write many stories for
The Times
that appear on page one. These go to the young spry men shooting for the big overseas assignments.

When Salisbury returned, at forty-five, he was considered neither old nor young. His reputation was too formidable for him to be seated in the middle or rear of the room, surrounded by the
carnivore
or the older men, and so he was put on the aisle in the first row, next to
The Times’
top frontline reporters, Peter Kihss and Russell Porter and, later, Homer Bigart. But Salisbury was operating under an added disadvantage. His final assignment for the foreign desk, a series of articles on Russia that he had written shortly after arriving back in New York (and that would win for him the Pulitzer in 1955), made Salisbury suddenly quite famous as a correspondent. His photograph appeared in
The Times’
promotional ads, circulation soared, and people around town were talking about him. Yet some editors on the New York desk, for whom Salisbury had never worked, were skeptical of his talent, and so they indulged in a procedure that no longer persists at
The Times
but was then quite common: they would level Salisbury a bit, bring him down to earth. The first assignment they handed Salisbury
upon starting as a member of the New York staff was about trash and garbage. This was a recurring assignment, Salisbury discovered, being revived almost every time that Iphigene Sulzberger had returned from Europe—a trip during which she usually observed that the streets of London, or Paris, or wherever she had been, seemed cleaner than those in New York. Her gently phrased, delicate memos containing her observations might then come bouncing out of the managing editor’s office to an assistant managing editor, then to the city editor, and finally to an assistant editor who would look around the room for a reporter. None of the editors were offended by this chore: the Sulzberger family, after all, owned the paper and were far less intrusive than the publishers of other newspapers; and only in infinitesimal ways might the Sulzberger taste be felt, such as
The Times’
radio station, WQXR, not playing Mozart too often because Arthur Hays Sulzberger did not like him—and then, of course, there was Mrs. Sulzberger’s interest in such things as parks and in a cleaner New York. The reporters assigned such stories usually dispensed with them in less than an hour: a quick phone call to the New York City Sanitation Department would get either a shocked denial from the commissioner, or perhaps his sudden announcement of an antilitter drive in New York. This story could be done in six paragraphs, and would land near the bottom of page 41 of tomorrow’s
Times
, and that would be it until Mrs. Sulzberger’s next trip.

When Salisbury, in 1954, got this assignment he did not know what to think at first. But he suspected that this was a subtle little plot to cool him off, and his reaction was sudden: he would turn this into the biggest trash-and-garbage story in the history of
The Times
. And he did.

He spent weeks digging up facts about trash and garbage, discovering that on certain days 16,402 tons of trash were collected in New York, that this collection is handled by 9,675 city cleaners, that the amount is almost four and one-half pounds of rubbish for each person in New York, or almost one-and-a-third tons for each sanitation worker, there being one trash collector for every 835 New York inhabitants. Salisbury wrote thousands of words on this subject, it became a three-part series that started on page one, and it began:

When Clifton Daniel returned from Moscow to the newsroom in 1955, and began his gradual rise as an executive, life became more pleasant for Salisbury as a reporter, and, beginning in 1962, as an editor. Salisbury’s personal life also began to improve around this time with a courtship that would lead, in April of 1964, to his second marriage. His new wife was a lovely divorcée who had been reared in Boston, and had worked as a Powers model. He had met her through friends in Salisbury, Connecticut, and she had accompanied him during the summer of 1966 on his trip to Asia, that he hoped would lead into Peking or Hanoi. In anticipation of succeeding, Salisbury and his wife, Charlotte, had had their passports cleared beforehand in Washington for travel into China, or North Vietnam, or North Korea, a fact that some people in Washington would in time regret, but not at this juncture, for the Salisburys had been unable to visit any of those places. In August of 1966, Salisbury returned to New York thinking there was little hope, but he continued to send messages to Hanoi advising the authorities of his continued interest in reporting events from within North Vietnam. He got no response. In November, Salisbury cabled Hanoi suggesting that if there were a truce at Christmastime this might make an appropriate moment for a trip into North Vietnam. No response.

The Times’
editorial page had been critical of the war in Vietnam for years, and the dispatches from
Times
reporters on the scene had repeatedly angered or embarrassed President Johnson and President Kennedy, the latter once even suggesting to Punch Sulzberger that the paper replace its man in Vietnam, David Halberstam.
The Times
refused, and Halberstam’s reporting won a Pulitzer in 1964.

This did not mean, however, that there was not disharmony within the
Times
building on the subject of Vietnam. There existed,
in fact, a wide variety of hawks and doves—there were hawks in the News department, in the Advertising department, and in the Advertising Acceptability department (which refused, for “legal reasons,” a protest ad from a group of artists, writers, and editors, including a
Times
editor on the Sunday
Magazine
, Gerald Walker, who had organized the protest that advocated nonpayment of a portion of the Federal income tax). And there was a preponderance of doves among the younger reporters, the copyreaders, and particularly the copyboys and campus correspondents. One young man, hoping to employ the influence of the bullpen in the peace movement, scrawled in red indelible ink on the walls of the private elevator that carries the bullpen editors up to the composing room each night to make up page one: “Mr. Bernstein, Please Stop the War!”

Punch Sulzberger, a Marine veteran of Korea, had sanctioned
The Times’
antiwar editorial policy on Vietnam, but this policy more approximately reflected the strong dovish attitude of Sulzberger’s cousin, John Oakes. The
Times
editor most appalled by Oakes’s viewpoint was the tall, lean, gray-haired Hanson W. Baldwin, the paper’s military specialist since 1937, and an individual who in 1960 could barely conceal his displeasure over the failure of the captured U-2 pilot, Gary Powers, to kill himself after being shot down by the Russians. (“… why did the pilot survive? This is a question that only Mr. Powers can answer,” Baldwin wrote in
The Times
, “and he may spend the rest of his life trying to answer it satisfactorily.…”)

Lined up behind Oakes or Baldwin, or taking positions between the two extremes, were other editors and editorial writers whose views on Vietnam occasionally fluctuated, being more emotional on some days than on other days; and one result was that
The Times’
tone on Vietnam was never entirely predictable. There was even an example in November of 1966 when an editorial on Vietnam changed its tone between the first and second editions. In the first edition, the lead editorial, commenting on the absurdity of a Christmas truce in Vietnam that lasted only for a few hours, began:

When Punch Sulzberger received his
Times
early edition at home that night and read the editorial, which had been written by Herbert L. Matthews, he called Oakes at home and said that he felt it should be killed. Sulzberger felt that the editorial was too emotional. Oakes, who had been off that day, it being Sunday—his place being taken by his deputy, A. H. Raskin, the former labor specialist—read the editorial, agreed that it was too emotional, but thought that killing it would be too obvious. Oakes convinced Sulzberger that it should be merely toned down, and Oakes did the editing himself in time for the second edition that night, eliminating Herbert Matthews’ opening paragraph and starting the editorial with Matthews’ second paragraph: