The Kingdom and the Power (75 page)

A decade later, with Edwin James, a fellow Virginian, in charge of the newsroom, Garst had begun his rise through the desk system: he became a slotman on the New York desk, then a night city editor in 1938, then the city editor in 1948. With the death of James in 1951 and Catledge’s succession, Garst began to feel inauspicious changes. Catledge’s folksy manner was not Garst’s idea of Southern charm, and Garst was affronted by the backroom political style of the managing editor, and also by the little clique in the
bullpen that had been assembled by Garst’s onetime friend and colleague on the Columbia journalism faculty, Theodore Bernstein. Although Catledge had promoted both Garst and Bernstein to assistant managing-editorships in 1952, it was immediately obvious to Garst that Catledge favored Bernstein, and Garst was relegated to the lesser roles—the housekeeping chores of the managing editor’s office: the equipment and supplies, the staff expense accounts, the personnel problems, the liaison duties with other departments within the building. On weekends, or when Catledge was out of town, Garst was in charge of the staff, but otherwise he functioned as Catledge’s left arm; and when Clifton Daniel arrived on the scene, Garst felt even more removed from the vibrations of the newsroom.

With Daniel’s promotion to managing editor in 1964, and Salisbury’s rise as Daniel’s chief assistant, Robert Garst was asked by Daniel one day to vacate his desk, which was close to the managing editor’s door, to Harrison Salisbury, and to occupy a desk that was farther away, closer to the bullpen. Garst obliged, after directing a few cutting remarks at Daniel; and when Daniel asked Garst two years later to vacate the newsroom entirely to make room for Rosenthal, Garst was even more caustic. Unlike Daniel, Garst said what he thought, which was one reason why Garst had never been entirely popular with his fellow executives. But he nonetheless again complied with Daniel’s instructions, occupying an office within Catledge’s interior complex, and accepting the title of “special assistant to the executive editor,” with the understanding that in March of 1967 he would retire from
The Times
.

Thus Daniel, seeking the appearance of orderliness and harmony, drafted a long executive memorandum as the new year began, outlining the different duties of Rosenthal and Salisbury, as well as restating Bernstein’s position as the bullpen head and Emanuel Freedman’s responsibilities in such areas as the recruitment of talent, labor relations, salary administration, and the travel and living allowances of
Times
men overseas; and Daniel also acknowledged that Arthur Gelb was succeeding Rosenthal as the New York editor, and that Garst was joining Catledge’s office. Daniel added:

Daniel also affixed to the bulletin board a memo to the staff that noted Gelb’s appointment and Garst’s departure:

Garst spent the next two months seated in an office doing very little. His responsibilities were to supervise the expanding
Times
News Service, which during 1966 had added forty-seven clients, and which was now wiring daily reportage, columns, and features to 155 newspapers in the nation and to eighty-eight overseas. But the News Service was very adequately directed by subordinate editors, and there was nothing in the work that Garst found challenging.

At the end of February, Garst arrived at
The Times
on a Saturday, which was a normal working day for him, and which was usually a very quiet day within the office. Only a minimum of reporters and editors were working since much of the Sunday edition—the
Magazine
, the real-estate section, the drama section—was already printed and distributed to newsstands, and since most of the business centers in New York and the government agencies in Washington were closed for the weekend. Except for the Sports department, which always had a busy schedule on weekends, the newsroom was characterized by small clusters of reporters sitting around and talking across rows of empty desks, or standing around a television set in the Sports department watching a game, the audio being low so as not to distract the copyreaders. The upper floors of the building were largely abandoned and dark, and there was about
The Times
a rather strange, hollow atmosphere.

Late in the afternoon, unobserved within his office in Catledge’s interior suite, Garst began to clean out his desk. He stuffed a stack of personal papers and letters into manila envelopes, and he composed a note of good-bye to the secretary in the News Service and another to
The Times’
chief copyboy, the white-haired, stout Steven
Moran, who had joined the paper in 1917. After depositing these into an out basket, and putting on his gray tweed overcoat, Garst took the elevator down, carrying the manila envelopes under his arm, and nodding as he passed the guards who are always conspicuous in the lobby on weekends. Then he pushed through the revolving door of the
Times
building for the last time. Outside, feeling no regret, Garst waved to a taxicab.

During the next week, it occurred to the other executives that Garst was gone for good, and he began receiving notes and letters from Catledge, Bernstein, Salisbury, and others. But Garst did not reply. When he received a call from Punch Sulzberger’s office inviting him to an executive luncheon, which he suspected would turn into a farewell ceremony with forced smiles for a photograph to be printed in
Times Talk
, he declined the invitation, saying that he was otherwise occupied.

Punch Sulzberger was certainly aware of the awkward position he occupied as the deporter of men that his grandfather had employed, and he was also cognizant of the decline in staff morale. The Yankelovich report, when it was completed, told Sulzberger nothing that he had not previously suspected—“it just rubbed our noses in it,” he explained one day, after reviewing it; and he had already embarked on programs that he hoped would improve personnel relations, and might also resurrect, with the help of modern techniques, some spirit of the past.

During the early winter of 1967, each
Times
employee received a handsomely designed blue cardboard kit that contained a letter from the publisher, a pamphlet itemizing employee benefits and health plans, facilities and services, and there was also included a brief history of the paper by Meyer Berger, a reporter whose death in 1959 had inspired perhaps the last surge of sentimentality and shared emotion to be felt through the building.

When Berger had been alive, everybody on
The Times
—printers, clerks, telephone operators, cafeteria cooks—knew him and admired him, and when he died suddenly of a heart attack at sixty, it seemed to mark the end of something quite special on
The Times
, and it evoked memorable reactions from the staff. A veteran journalist,
assigned to write Berger’s obituary, found it very difficult to do; and numbers of staff members, including copyreaders, cursed the bullpen for not putting the obituary on page one; and a woman put a rose in a glass of water and placed it on Berger’s desk in the front row, the rose remaining there days after it had withered. Nobody wanted to remove Berger’s name from the office mailbox, and the printers kept Berger’s by-line set in type, ready and waiting.

Now, in 1967, Berger’s by-line reappeared in the kit, on the cover of a twenty-page supplement that was a condensation of the paper’s history written by Berger in 1951: the words described
The Times’
modest beginning under Henry J. Raymond, its coverage of the Civil War and the Tweed ring; its bankruptcy and its eventual revival under Ochs; its exclusive coverage of the Russo-Japanese naval battles, the expeditions of Peary and Amundsen, the
Titanic
and Lindbergh; its expanding influence from World War I into the space age. Punch Sulzberger’s accompanying letter explained that while the primary purpose of the informational kit was for the enlightenment of new employees, he felt that older
Times
men might also find it interesting; it was all part of a new method of introducing
Times
men to
The Times
, Sulzberger explained, adding, “The truth is, we had been somewhat casual about it.”

In another move to remain in touch with its past,
The Times
encouraged the occasional publication of articles in the daily paper by retired
Times
men; and soon Brooks Atkinson’s by-line reappeared over an essay on nature, and there was a piece on the sports page by the retired racing-car specialist Frank M. Blunk; a political appraisal by Arthur Krock, who had continued after his retirement to occupy his desk in the Washington bureau. Krock’s stepson, a very personable
Times
correspondent in London, W. Granger Blair, was brought to New York to serve management as its interoffice public-relations adviser and liaison man with the staff, and Sulzberger also sought to improve morale by sharing the wealth more generously with higher salaries to employees and with stock options and other benefits to ranking editors and executives. The New York Times Company’s stock splits in 1964 and 1966 helped to make relatively rich men of such executives as Catledge and Reston, Ivan Veit and Monroe Green; and numbers of editors and executives on a lower level were earning between $45,000 and $65,000 a year; critics were in a $20,000 to $30,000 class; and the very top reporters were receiving between $350 and $500 a week.
The key editors and executives also had access to a new status symbol that had caught Sulzberger’s fancy for gadgets: a small jet airplane that could transport them to Florida on weekends, or to various business visits around the nation. The plane’s number, painted in black across the rudder, was N1851T (1851 being the year that
The Times
was founded).

Punch Sulzberger was now spending more money than ever, but he was also making more. With the discontinuance of the
Herald Tribune
and the strike against the newly merged
World Journal Tribune
, which lasted from April 24 to September 12, 1966,
The Times’
daily circulation climbed to more than 875,000, an increase of about 100,000, and its advertising rates were raised 8 percent. The Times Company’s consolidated net earnings for 1966 set a company record—a net profit of more than $9 million ($4.28 per share) as compared with a net profit in 1965 of more than $5 million ($2.25 per share). With the closing down of the
World Journal Tribune
in May of 1967.
The Times’
daily circulation went over 900,000 and its advertising rates were raised another 9 percent. Monroe Green was not very happy about this, but Green, sixty-two, the advertising director since 1946, was on his way out. Sulzberger wanted higher rates, being unconcerned about advertisers’ reactions or a possible temporary decline in advertising linage; Sulzberger also wanted to consolidate the Advertising, the Production, and the Circulation departments under a younger man, Andrew Fisher, forty-seven, an apostle of the computer. Since Sulzberger could not satisfactorily achieve this as long as Green remained—Green being accustomed to running his department with autonomy—Sulzberger planned to announce Green’s retirement, with regret, at the end of 1967. Green, sated with stock and a large retirement, would go quietly and agreeably.

The Times’
slim overseas edition, whose printing operation had in recent years been transferred from Amsterdam to Paris, had been losing money during most of its eighteen-year history—a total estimated to be $10 million since Arthur Hays Sulzberger had launched it in 1949; but it was nevertheless assumed by most editors in New York that Punch Sulzberger would continue to absorb the losses. They reasoned that he was sentimentally committed to the edition because his father had started it, and they also
believed that the International edition of
The Times
was a prestige item of promotional value, and was not, like the
Times’
defunct Western edition, a venture that was supposed to be self-supporting.

Their lack of insight into the young publisher became quickly apparent in the spring of 1967 when he announced that he was folding the International edition. Although it had made gains during the year under the editorship of Sydney Gruson, having increased its circulation from 40,000 to 47,000 and having achieved a 20 percent increase in advertising, it was still losing more than $1.5 million annually. It also had failed to overtake the solidly established Paris
Herald Tribune
, which had been in Europe for seventy-nine years, and which recently had been strengthened by its partnership with the
Washington Post
. The Paris
Herald Tribune
’s circulation was 60,000 and it was a more readable and sprightly paper than
The Times
for Americans abroad. So, unable to beat the
Tribune
in Europe, Sulzberger decided to join it. By merging his edition with his rivals’, he attained a one-third interest in the new operation, which was expected to approach a circulation of between 75,000 and 100,000. Hoping to appeal to a wide readership, it would publish James Reston, Russell Baker, and other
Times
columnists along with Walter Lippmann and Art Buchwald and the reporting of the
Los Angeles Times—Washington Post
News Service as well as
The New York Times’
News Service. The new combination would continue, however, to feature the
Tribune
’s name on its masthead and would be supervised by a
Tribune
editor.

Sydney Gruson remained only during the transition period; then he returned to
The New York Times’
staff as a roving correspondent, assisting in the coverage of the Arab-Israeli war, and within a year he would resign from
The Times
to become the associate publisher of the Long Island newspaper
Newsday
. Although Punch Sulzberger would attempt to dissuade Gruson, sending his jet up from Florida to New York to bring Gruson down for pool-side reflections, there was not really an important executive position open to Gruson at this time. And although Sulzberger also regretted the loss of his International edition, he did not fret about it for very long, having more important concerns in the home office, where he wished to build up great cash reserves to be able to respond to the many new challenges he saw around him.