The Kingdom and the Power (78 page)

At eighty, Krock had lost none of his tartness, and he missed few opportunities to express his opinion of the editors in New York. In November of 1967, after the resignation of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was followed by rumors that McNamara had
been eased out of office by a cunning President, Krock remarked in the bureau with a knowing smile, “Well, that’s the way it is with large organizations.”

James Reston, who was never entirely enamored of Krock’s acerbic wit, saw no solution in a hardened cynical attitude toward the editors in New York, although he was no less concerned than Krock by New York’s tireless attempt to run the Washington bureau by remote control. Reston, however, preferred at this time to remain a bit above the battle, to mark time and observe the trends. He had done considerable thinking during the last two years about the direction of journalism in general, and
The Times
in particular; he had delivered lectures on journalism at universities and before the Council on Foreign Relations, the latter series forming the basis of Reston’s book
The Artillery of the Press
, published in 1967 by Harper & Row. There were moments when Reston felt that the discord within
The Times
was a rather healthy thing—like many great and enduring institutions,
The Times
was undergoing a period of self-analysis, experimentation, seeking to determine whether the techniques of the past were adequate for the future. While Reston was personally protective of the bureau, he was striving to see the Washington—New York issue in more practical and philosophical terms, was attempting to elevate and associate the struggle within
The Times
with something greater, more historically universal and less Byzantine.

Perhaps part of the problem, he thought, was that the world was changing faster than people were able to change themselves, and the leaders in government and the press were being guided by theories and assumptions that had once worked but were now outmoded.
The Times’
editors in New York, and editors everywhere, were possibly in a state of confusion or reappraisal over what news was really important in the Sixties, and how it should be presented. In the era of television, should newspaper editions print less hard news and more interpretation, or vice versa? Should the modern reporter be given more freedom and the editor less, or the reverse? Reston sometimes wondered, during moments that he regarded as slightly heretical, if the world was not becoming too complex and serious a place to be left to the reporting of news-papermen.
The United States had been a world leader for two generations during which it had produced a large base of brain power in the universities, the foundations, big business, and other centers—a force comprising numbers of individuals who were as well informed on international and domestic affairs as anyone in the world. And yet, Reston thought, and said in his lectures, they were not sharing with other Americans a great deal of what they knew. Some were, to be sure, and these individuals were in the vanguard of what Reston saw as a new class of public servant, a group operating within the “triangle” of the university-foundation life, the communications media, and the government. They were roving writers, educators, government officials—McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith and Theodore Sorensen, Richard Goodwin and Douglas Cater. But these were only a few of many, and Reston also felt that it was not enough that such men as these wrote occasionally for
The New York Times’
Sunday
Magazine
—he believed that their analysis of current developments should be in the daily paper, perhaps on a special page next to the editorial page.

This idea was considered meritorious in New York, was seen as something that
The Times
might incorporate into its future format if the space could be found, but the suggestion did not address itself to the more immediate issue of the aggressive reporting that New York seemed to want and claimed that it was not getting from the Washington bureau.
The Times
did not need essayists or more columnists, the New York editors felt, but it did need reporters who, untouched by cronyism, would probe into the activities of government more deeply and revealingly. These reporters should not violate the national security, but they should know the difference between the national security and the national interest. Theodore Bernstein had often said that when matters of national security arise in a war situation, or a near-war situation, there is not the slightest question about what course the press should follow; editors cannot have the information or specialized knowledge that would allow them to dispute an official determination that the country’s safety might be jeopardized. But matters of national interest, Bernstein believed, were different: they may well be political issues, and one man’s opinion of what is in the nation’s interest may be as good as another’s. The press had to keep in mind that the President himself plays different roles on different occasions, Bernstein had said; sometimes he is the Constitutional
Commander-in-Chief, sometimes he is the country’s political leader. The press had to draw the line between the national security and the national interest, and then to act appropriately, Bernstein had said, and it should not be swayed by outside judgments, including those of the President himself.

In principle, Reston agreed. It was in the application of these principles that differences arose, that sentiment and ego came into play, that the lifetime’s experience of each editor produced a variegated vision. Reston saw New York as tradition-bound despite its many changes. It was a vast cumbersome operation that was often archaic in its attitude toward news. The bullpen reflected the values of Bernstein fundamentalists, desk dons who had risen through, or become influenced by, the desk maze and the value judgments that were formulated during World War II. These men had become conditioned to responding to happenings, particularly if they were dramatic, rather than to the causes of happenings. The deskmen too often regarded the causes as speculative, and therefore not hard news enough for page one or top priority treatment within the paper.

The Times
was allowing considerable space for food recipes and society parties, and it was also devoting about 40 percent of the daily space allotment to business and financial information, at the expense of some space that might be more wisely devoted to exploring what Reston considered the affairs of the mind—the world’s
thinking
, not merely its deeds, for here was where the rebellions, revolutions, and wars began. But the entire American press, not only
The Times
, was predisposed to minimizing the conflict of ideas in favor of the conflict in the streets, Reston stated in a lecture, without relating the second to the first. Reporters raced from crisis to crisis, like firemen, and then left when the blaze went out. Newspapers had sent hundreds of correspondents to Vietnam after the big war had begun, and the front pages were filled each day with their reports, simultaneously crowding out news reports from the rest of the world; but sufficient numbers of correspondents had not been sent into such inflammatory areas
before
the holocaust, when reporting might have alerted corrective political action. In Cuba the crumbling of the Batista government had made headlines, but the social inequality and unrest under previous regimes had been inadequately displayed in the press, Reston thought, although the exact solution to these journalistic shortcomings was not entirely clear even to Reston.

This seemed obvious to anyone who read his speeches carefully. While they were lucidly written and raised the most important questions, they did not have the most important answers. In some instances there seemed to be no answers, certainly none that Reston could completely accept and also remain consistent with his own sense of responsibility to the United States government’s best interests at home and abroad. This was the dilemma of James Reston. He recognized idealism but he was ultimately influenced, as were the statesmen that he so carefully wrote about, by the realities of Washington. Reston could insist, as he did in one of his lectures, that a better-informed American public was more essential than ever before, adding that the rising power of the United States in world affairs, the unprecedented power in the Presidency, demanded not a more compliant press but one that was more critical and less nationalistic. And yet Reston himself had not exemplified this spirit during his many years in Washington, feeling at times that it was obligatory to conceal from the public certain controversial truths that might have shattered whatever illusion of honesty was left in Washington in the Sixties. He had not only encouraged
The Times’
restraint during the Bay of Pigs coverage but he had secretly known for a year that the United States was flying high-altitude planes (the U-2) over Russia from a base in Pakistan, and until one was shot down
The Times
had not reported the information. It was a proper decision, Reston was sure, for it was in the national interest to protect American intelligence operations. The CIA was essential to the preservation of democracy, he believed, although he would phrase it more delicately. Since this was not an ideal world, there were occasions when Reston and
The Times
would have to be an accomplice to a White House lie. It was complicated, Reston might admit, and was no doubt unacceptable to student idealists picketing a dean’s office. But since neither Washington nor Moscow nor Peking was being ruled by holy men, moral accommodations had to be made. The public had a right to know—up to a point. A premature publication of the movement of American ships and men to intercept the Soviet ships bringing missiles to Havana in the second Cuban crisis of 1962, Reston said in one of his lectures, could easily have interfered with what proved to be a spectacularly successful exercise of American power and diplomacy.

However, in the case of Vietnam, the Washington press corps learned too late of President Kennedy’s decision—supported by
Rusk and McNamara, and opposed by Undersecretary of State George W. Ball—to increase the American military “presence” in Vietnam from a few hundred “advisers” to a force of more than 15,000—the first big step in the American escalation. If the press had known of this meeting at the time, and had published stories about it, Reston guessed that all the headlines and leads would have highlighted the three key points: the decision to increase the American force to 15,000, the dispute among the Presidential advisers about escalation, and the fact that they were aware, according to Reston, that this move might result in a commitment of 300,000 Americans to Vietnam. Congressional clamor and national debate would have undoubtedly followed, and it might have resulted in a reversal of the decision and the saving of thousands of lives and of billions of dollars. Instead, the press in 1961 naively reported that the Kennedy administration was planning only a “modest” increase in American advisory help to South Vietnam, and in retrospect the government’s conduct seemed to Reston like willful deception, and he also believed that the subsequent escalation was achieved almost by stealth. But he did not dwell on this subject during his lectures to the Council on Foreign Relations, and nobody knew precisely what he would have done had someone leaked to him the full facts of the Kennedy meeting. One could only presume, on the basis of Reston’s philosophy as revealed in his work and conduct, that he would have kept the secret.

Reston was more sensitive to the awesome delicacy of White House decisions than any editor in New York. He wished to soften the sound of national alarm and to spare the President any unnecessary personal nagging. He thought that the press had been unfair with Lyndon Johnson during the summer of 1964 with its “silly” stories about Johnson’s speeding along a Texas highway while drinking beer from a paper cup; and Reston, who had been sitting in Johnson’s office when an aide had brought in a magazine’s account of the incident, remembered how upset Johnson had become after reading it. Turning to Reston, Johnson had remarked, forlornly, that his one main ambition was to “unify the country,” but he doubted whether he could do so because of the determination of some hostile elements of the press to portray him as “an irresponsible hick.” Reston had tried to disagree, but Johnson would not be interrupted, wondering aloud whether the nation was “far enough away from Appomattox” for a Southern President to be able to unify the country. Reston conceded that Johnson had
had problems with the press, but denied that it was antipathetic to Southerners, adding that there were enough real problems in the South without inventing new ones. Johnson had remained unconvinced. He had long felt that the Eastern liberal press establishment was incapable of total objectivity to such men as himself. Then he told Reston that the real question he had to decide, before the start of the 1964 convention, was not whether Robert F. Kennedy was a likely running mate but whether he, Lyndon Johnson, should agree to be nominated for President under circumstances where he did not think he had a chance of unifying the country. Reston had left the White House that day feeling both dejected and astonished.

It was not possible to live on the edge of power for more than two decades in Washington, as Reston had, and not to identify in some way with the President, to be affected by his conditions, troubled by his doubts. Although Reston had regularly left Washington and had traveled around the country, and back and forth to Europe, his views and sensitivities were pivoted around Washington. If Reston had not carried such weight with the Sulzberger family, he might have been removed from Washington years ago and been transferred to another city or capital, as other bureau chiefs had been rotated in the recent past on the assumption that they had become too cozy or familiar with the landscape and the leaders. But
The Times
traditionally had treated its bureau in Washington differently than it had those in other cities. The Washington bureau was the paper’s principal embassy, and its chief was the Sulzbergers’ ambassador to the White House. Ever since the days of Ochs, the ruling family had preferred that its Washington bureaumen be on familiar and friendly terms with those who occupied the seat of power in the capital, and this was at the heart of the New York editors’ problem with Washington. Ochs, contrary to his slogans about independence, probably wanted cronyism to exist between his Washington chief and the leaders in the government. Ochs had not made a fortune out of the newspaper business by offending the mighty, crusading for reforms, espousing the causes of the have-nots against the haves. Ochs had refused to upbraid Oulahan, Krock’s predecessor, despite complaints from the New York editors that Oulahan was adoring of President Wilson. While Krock had been considerably less adoring of Roosevelt, it also happened that Ochs and Arthur Hays Sulzberger had privately shared much of Krock’s distaste for the President, who felt likewise
about
The Times
. The paper’s editorial page had been critical of every administration at one time or another, but the reporting out of Washington had invariably been sensitive to the system, and it was the reporting, the subtle shadings and emphasis, that made the greater impact with readers. And so while John Oakes’s editorials condemned Lyndon Johnson’s policies, and while such New York editors as Salisbury called for sharper reporting, the Ochsian heirs, having it both ways, maintained their traditional ties with the Establishment through such couriers as James Reston. Although the bureau had now lost its autonomy and although Reston was no longer its chief, he was still the Sulzbergers’ main link to the capital, and no editor in New York had the power to transfer him or to change a word that he wrote. Reston’s writing would have pleased Ochs, the family was sure, as it had pleased them. Hope sprang eternally from Reston, attracting Iphigene Sulzberger to his vision years ago. Now, during her son’s apprenticeship at the top, she had remained somewhat silent, and the elder Sulzberger was regrettably inactive; but Reston continued to respond to
The Times
and the government in his gentle fervent way, never forgetting, as Ochs had not, his ultimate and similar obligations to both, and not becoming overly distressed by the detours that both now seemed to be taking. It was a period of dissent and change everywhere, within
The Times
, within the nation, and as New York’s editors would look dourly at the government Reston would write spirited columns on weekends from Fiery Run, Virginia, that would be printed on Oakes’s dovish editorial page, which was adorned with an eagle. When
The Times
would publish a series of articles out of Washington revealing that the government was selling more arms around the world than any other nation, while government officials were making speeches deploring the international arms race, Reston would attempt to put things in perspective by reminding readers that the Russians were selling arms, too, and that it was in the “vital interest” of the United States to maintain control of the Middle East oil wells against possible aggression by Soviet-armed Arabs. When one United States government dove had leaked to the press the fact that American escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam was imminent, Reston became upset by the disclosure, and he wrote, “Public discussion of the wisdom or stupidity of extending the bombing to the populous areas of these two cities [Hanoi and Haiphong] is fair enough, but public disclosure of the timing of operational military plans is not.”