The Kingdom and the Power (74 page)

The emotional version drew a great number of approving letters from readers around the country, while the second version received a few; but hardly anyone outside the
Times
organization noticed these changes that morning, the meshing of minds, the soul-searching, the treatment of touchy subjects being matters that usually stay within the walls of the
Times
building—usually, but not always. For within a month of the Matthews editorial there would be edited within the
Times
building a story so big and controversial that it would cause conflict and reappraisal not only among
Times
editors but through the nation and the world.

The hint of something unusual began in Washington on December 14, 1966, when, after Hanoi radio broadcasts charged for the second straight day that American planes had bombed residential areas of North Vietnam’s capital, the United States admitted for the first time that it had raided military targets in Hanoi; and reporters in Washington now wondered if these raids had also killed civilians.

The next morning a cable from Hanoi arrived at the
Times
building for Harrison Salisbury. The newly appointed foreign-news
editor, Seymour Topping, received it first, read it, and walked over to Salisbury’s desk, asking, “Does this say what I think it does?”

Salisbury studied it. “Yes,” he said finally, the language of the cable not being entirely clear. “I think it does.”

“You’re in,” Topping said.

Salisbury’s visa into North Vietnam was awaiting him in Paris. To make sure he was interpreting it correctly, Salisbury sent a return cable asking the North Vietnamese for a confirmation of this message; the next day the confirmation was received. He was to fly to Paris to pick up his visa, then fly on the International Control Commission plane into Hanoi.

Salisbury’s older son, the one who had been three years old when Salisbury had gone off to London in 1942, was going to be married in New York at the end of December. Salisbury telephoned his son now and told him he would be unable to attend the wedding, that he would be out of the country. But he did not say where or why, and the young man did not ask.

Salisbury’s departure was a well-kept secret. Daniel, Topping, and Catledge knew of it, of course, but they discussed it with no one—not even John Oakes, who was later piqued by their failure to keep him informed. The reporters and copyreaders in the newsroom soon became aware of Salisbury’s absence from his desk, but they imagined that he was on one of his out-of-town speaking tours—in Siberia, perhaps, for they now thought of Salisbury as a man doomed to some exiled spot within the executive suite of
The New York Times
. In a matter of days, the rumor went, Rosenthal’s elevation to assistant managing editor, and Salisbury’s departure from the newsroom, would be announced.

Harrison Salisbury’s stories from North Vietnam began to appear in
The Times
during the last week of December, and they landed like bombs on Washington. In his first, after inspecting the damage in Hanoi and talking to the people, Salisbury reported:

Two days later, in describing the devastation done to the North Vietnamese city of Namdinh, Salisbury wrote:

Now in Washington, for the first time, American officials conceded to the press that American pilots had accidentally struck civilian areas in North Vietnam while attempting to bomb military targets. And a quiet bitterness and even an open hostility began to develop between some government officials and
Times
men in the Washington bureau.

“Here come the men from the Hanoi
Times
,” said one official to two
Times
reporters from Wicker’s bureau, one of whom liked Salisbury no more than the government spokesman. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, in a television appearance at the CBS studio, became aggressive with another Washington bureauman after the show; drinking his third Scotch, Rusk looked hard into the
Times
man’s eyes and asked, “Why don’t you tell your editors to ask Mr. Salisbury to go down and visit the North Vietnamese in
South
Vietnam?”

A few nights before, as Punch Sulzberger slept in his apartment on Fifth Avenue, he was awakened by a telephone call from Washington. It was Secretary Rusk. It was around 10 p.m., and though not fully awake, Sulzberger thought he heard Dean Rusk saying apologetically, “I hope I haven’t taken you away from the dinner table.”

Sulzberger, forty-one years old, was too embarrassed to admit that he had gone to bed so early. But he was alert enough to know that Rusk was surely calling about Salisbury.

“What were his instructions?” Rusk asked Sulzberger.

“He had no instructions,” Sulzberger said.

“When is he coming out?”

“I guess I’ll have to amend that, sir—he did have instructions to stay as long as he could with the proviso that he not become the resident correspondent of
The Times
in Hanoi.”

“Is Mr. Salisbury asking the right questions?”

“I hope so,” Sulzberger said.

There was no hardness in Rusk’s voice—none of the tension that Sulzberger remembered of his talk with John Kennedy when the President wished to have
The Times
replace Halberstam in Vietnam. After Rusk had hung up, Sulzberger called Clifton Daniel and asked him to call the Secretary of State back and get from him any questions that Rusk might wish to have Salisbury ask the North Vietnamese. Daniel did, but Rusk had no questions.

Other people had questions, however, many of them, and they reechoed much of the old criticism of Harrison Salisbury as a newspaperman—he was politically naive, he was being taken in by the Communists, he did not properly attribute his sources in North Vietnam. The
Washington Post
charged that Salisbury’s casualty figures in the Namdinh raid were identical to those given in Communist propaganda pamphlets—to which Clifton Daniel replied in a statement, “It was apparent in Mr. Salisbury’s first dispatch—and he so stated in a subsequent dispatch—that the casualty figures came from North Vietnamese officials. Where else would he get such figures in Hanoi?”

Within
The Times
, too, there was criticism of Salisbury’s reporting, particularly from Hanson Baldwin, who was overheard muttering unpleasantries about Salisbury through the halls. Other
Times
men sincerely believed that Salisbury’s lack of exactness in identifying his sources in his early dispatches had needlessly dragged
The Times
into another controversy. Still others, partisans of the desk wars in the newsroom, found new excuses for attacking Salisbury, with one
Times
man saying, “If Hanoi keeps Salisbury, we’ll stop the bombing.”

But Walter Lippmann wrote:

Harrison Salisbury returned to the United States in January, 1967, tired but exhilarated, ducking platoons of photographers and reporters at the San Francisco airport to take a different route to his plane to New York; and then, later in the morning, his taxicab pulled up outside the
Times
building, he hopped out, and walked through the marble-floored lobby toward the open door of an elevator. The first
Times
man he saw in the elevator was Hanson Baldwin. Salisbury greeted Baldwin with a wide grin. Baldwin nodded stiffly.

At the third floor, Salisbury stepped out and entered the newsroom. Had he been riding a chariot behind three white horses, his entrance would not have been more conspicuous.
The Times’
editors behind their desks stood. They walked over to shake his hand. His stories had gotten a fantastic reaction around the nation and the world, and the criticism of his reporting, so very trivial in view of the achievement, was now forgotten within
The Times
. Although it would take historians to evaluate the impact of Salisbury’s reporting on the peace movement in America in 1967, the growing disenchantment with the Johnson administration, and the general public’s disbelief and disillusionment with the men who were running the government, the Salisbury stories were considered by
The Times’
editors to be worthy of a Pulitzer, and thus he was nominated.

He would not, however, receive the prize for international reporting in 1967. While the Pulitzer jury had recommended him to the Pulitzer advisory board, the latter would reject the recommendation in a six-to-five vote, a decision that would be widely protested in editorials around the nation, but to no avail. Harrison Salisbury’s stories, as Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana later conceded, had provoked a “sort of vendetta,” or as a past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors said, Salisbury failed to get the prize because he had “embarrassed the hawks in and out of the United States Government,” and the hawkish members of the Pulitzer advisory board had gotten even. But Salisbury himself, after the disappointing announcement had been made, said
that he did not care so much about the dissenting votes of the advisory board; he was more gratified by the vote of confidence that he had received from his fellow editors on
The Times
.

As Salisbury had arrived in the newsroom on that January day from North Vietnam, there was hanging on the bulletin board a memo to the staff from Clifton Daniel. It read:

What was not said, however, was that Salisbury was
not
being kicked upstairs. He would also remain an assistant managing editor. Rosenthal would assume many duties as Daniel’s deputy, and Salisbury would be answerable to Daniel for special stories: he had a dream assignment, one in which he would have the rank to travel and write as he wished. He would begin by planning the coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, an assignment that would take him back to Russia for a few weeks. He would continue to write his books, his articles, his speeches. Salisbury’s victory abroad, it seemed, had fortified his position at home.

And so on the day following his arrival home, Salisbury began a series of guest appearances and speeches around the country—he stood before a large crowd of journalism students and others in a crowded auditorium at Columbia University. Salisbury stood very tall in front, looking around the room through his sturdy steel-rimmed glasses for a moment waiting for the audience to settle itself before beginning his speech. Seated in the back was a twenty-year-old boy that Salisbury knew, a student with very long blondish hair that fell over his ears. The hair was too long, but Salisbury knew that the boy would not cut it. He had worked as a
Times
copyboy the summer before in Punch Sulzberger’s office, Salisbury knew, and
Sulzberger
had dropped hints, but the boy had reappeared each day with the long blond hair over his ears. The boy was Salisbury’s younger son, Stephen.

Stephen listened quietly with the rest, now, as his father spoke about the adventure behind the enemy lines in North Vietnam. After Salisbury had finished, there was great applause. Then the
students raised their hands to ask many, many questions about Vietnam, and China, and Russia.

Then one student, not Stephen but another young man with very long hair, stood and asked Harrison Salisbury if he did not find it irritating sometimes to be criticized so much. Salisbury shook his head.

Then, pausing just a moment, Salisbury added, “I have a little distrust for a newspaperman who gets too many bouquets. He must be missing part of the story.”

T
here was room for only four assistant managing editors in the News department, and since Salisbury was being retained, one of three others would have to be transferred or retired to accommodate Rosenthal’s promotion. The man selected was Robert Garst, and not unexpectedly, he responded with indignation. Garst was a quietly proud Virginian, lean and aloof, a man who since 1952 had sat against the south wall as an assistant managing editor observing, with feelings of mild discomfort, the trends of
The Times
. He had joined the paper as a copyreader in 1925, a period that he and a few of his contemporaries considered the golden age of
The Times
—Van Anda had then been the managing editor, Birchall had been Van Anda’s chief assistant; there had been numbers of truly dedicated reporters, such men as Russell Owen, Joseph Shaplen, and the renowned Alva Johnston; and there had been Ochs himself.