The Kingdom and the Power (79 page)

Sometimes Reston thought that the influence of the press was exaggerated; at other times he seemed not so sure. It could not be denied that Herbert Matthews had influenced Castro’s career, that Halberstam had caused ripples in South Vietnam and Salisbury in North Vietnam. Television’s dramatic films of the clubbing of black marchers by Alabama state troopers in Selma had suddenly aroused millions of Americans, sending thousands of sympathizers into Selma in the next few days to support the marchers, to inspire new legislation, and to stir temporarily in America a national guilt and concern that would then fade as Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, and other racists, black and white, would dominate the news. Reston himself had on occasions during his career encouraged or inhibited political decisions by his words in
The Times
; and in the
Time
magazine cover story about him it was said that he sometimes planted one of his own ideas with government officials and, after being assured that it would be discussed, he wrote in
The Times
about the idea that was under consideration without hinting that he was its originator. There is nothing unusual about this in Washington, where some journalists have been known to write speeches for their favorite senators and to serve as unofficial advisers on policy, and where a large portion of the press corps’s identity with the national interest had become so deep-rooted during and just after World War II, when Reston began his rise, that it is now often impossible to see a sharp line of demarcation between the role of the press and that of the government. In a capital where there were more journalists, about 1,400, than Congressmen, and where the columnists may remain in power for decades while the politicians come and go, there is an understandable desire on the part of politicians to cooperate with the press, to flatter and possibly confuse with confidence those journalists who are the most important or critical—but one result of close cooperation between the press and the government is that they often end up protecting the interests of one another, and not of the public that they presume to represent.

Reston saw the situation from various angles: he believed that the President had, perhaps, too much power, and that the press had to help counterbalance him; but Reston also believed that such criticism could also be excessive, as it might have been in the case of President Johnson, encouraging dissent throughout the nation, aiding the enemy. While Lippmann had argued that it was fallacious reasoning to consider that a divided public opinion would have
any effect on the enemy, Reston thought that there was something to be said for both sides—for both the danger and the necessity of criticism. Reston, as Murray Kempton had once described him, was not so much a man of the left or right as he was a man of
The Times
.

Now in 1967 Reston saw himself locked in a debate with his colleagues in New York over the priorities and traditions of news coverage. Reston was urging more reportorial freedom, New York wanted tighter controls. New York’s definition of
news
was often contrary to that of Reston and Wicker; Reston saw the world as revolving around Washington, while Catledge, Daniel, and the bullpen saw Washington in relationship to New York and the world. The place where the two factions in the debate might agree was that the modern newspaper could not stand still, but the proper course was questionable. Reston believed that the new role of the press was in the field of thoughtful explanation.
The Times
and other newspapers had already begun to rely more heavily on news analyses, articles that ran adjacent to news stories and interpreted controversial facts and statements, and counterbalanced them with the views of other authoritative spokesmen. Turner Catledge had been an early advocate of the newsanalysis article, recognizing a need for modernizing Ochs’s definition of objectivity, but Catledge later became disturbed, perhaps more so than Reston, by what he believed to be occasional abuses of this innovation. Catledge had not wanted the news analysis to become a reflection of a reporter’s opinion, for opinions were to appear only on the editorial page and in the critics’ columns. And so memos from New York warning reporters about opinions were sent to all the bureaus, which raised some doubts in a few reporters’ minds about the sincerity of Catledge’s previous exhortations about brighter writing.

In the Washington bureau, Tom Wicker pinned to the bulletin board one of Catledge’s statements that included the comment that responsibility for maintaining
The Times’
traditional fairness “rests with the desks as well as with the reporters.” This, one Washington reporter said, was a clever maneuver by the cagey Catledge to refuel the old antagonisms between reporters and copyreaders, keeping everybody off balance. But Reston had not felt that Catledge had a personal motive, preferring to believe that
The Times’
intramural differences were not really a reflection of personalities but were a genuine disagreement on principles.

Reston continued to think this way with regard to the New York editors through 1967, but in 1968 there would occur an incident that would suddenly disturb this conviction. That was when Reston would learn that New York had found the man to replace Wicker and to take over the Washington bureau.

J
ames Lloyd Greenfield, an agile and urbane dark-haired man of forty-three, cared a great deal about how he looked and about the impression he was making on each new person that he met. He remembered names, was always attentive, was often complimentary. His suits were well tailored and of excellent fabric, usually set off by a colorful shirt and a silk handkerchief sprouting from his breast pocket. He revealed a sense of humor through an easy Midwestern accent, and he reminded one somehow of the successful executives shown in the television commercials, the wellgroomed youthful men being served martinis by blond stewardesses in the friendly skies of United; which is to say that there was nothing carelessly arranged about Jim Greenfield, that his taste was contemporary, that he symbolized the sort that large organizations were proud to display in public—men who did not quite get to the very top but who were often more presentable than those who did. Greenfield had worked hard to get to where he was, however, and the emphasis on his manner and appearance is not to demean his character but merely to suggest that he had cultivated what a more uncaring man, a presumptuous or ruthless man, might have been unlikely to cultivate. James Greenfield liked people, wanted to be liked in turn, and he was.

He had been born in Cleveland, the son of a job-printer and a former regular army sergeant, and his home life had been unhappy,
particularly with regard to his father. Forced to shift for himself at an early age, working at fourteen in the office of the
Cleveland Press
, living with friends or relatives, Greenfield prematurely developed an adaptability to new people and places. He obtained a scholarship to Harvard, earning extra money by working in the university’s news bureau. After his graduation in 1949 he joined the Voice of America, serving in New York and in the Far East. During the Korean War he became a correspondent for
Time
, remaining in the
Time
organization for ten years, moving from Tokyo to New Delhi, from London to Washington, acquiring a taste for the better life through a liberal expense account, meeting people around the world who would be his friends for years. One person whom he met in India, in 1955, was
The Times’
correspondent Abe Rosenthal. They were immediately companionable, and they sometimes traveled together on assignments through India and once into Ceylon.

When they were both transferred to bureaus in Europe—Greenfield to London, Rosenthal to Warsaw—they and their wives continued to remain in touch. In 1962, after Greenfield had spent a year in Washington as the chief diplomatic correspondent of the
Time-Life
bureau, he resigned to join the State Department as a public-affairs official. When Rosenthal visited Washington, he saw Greenfield; when Greenfield was in New York, he saw Rosenthal, and through Rosenthal he came to know Clifton Daniel, Arthur Gelb, and Punch and Carol Sulzberger.

James Greenfield left the State Department in 1965 to work with Pierre Salinger in Los Angeles as an executive with Continental Airlines, but this, he soon discovered, was not really what he wanted to do. He hoped to return to journalism, and during a business trip to New York, having lunch one day with Rosenthal at Sardi’s, Rosenthal mentioned the possibility of Greenfield’s joining
The Times
. When Greenfield expressed interest, Rosenthal discussed it with Daniel. In June of 1967, Greenfield came to New York as an assistant metropolitan editor under Arthur Gelb. Gelb had at least a half-dozen assistant editors on the local staff, and it was several days before a desk for Greenfield could be wedged into the tight fleet of gray metal that surrounded Gelb near the front of the room behind the silver microphone; but it was finally managed after the upanchoring and rearranging of a few other desks, and Greenfield’s own graceful manner facilitated his entry. He did not appear to be jockeying for position among his peers,
but rather he conversed with them and with the staff in a casual, pleasant way; and when he began to make suggestions, after a few weeks, he did so with delicacy and tact.

Rosenthal did not know specifically where Greenfield might best serve the paper, but he gradually came to regard him as perhaps the most imaginative subordinate editor in the newsroom, an idea man in ways quite different from Gelb. Gelb’s ideas were largely attuned to the cultural or social life of New York City, while Greenfield’s interests encompassed the nation and overseas; and not only those countries in which he had lived, but others to which he had been drawn by his journalist’s curiosity. Greenfield was very well informed about the student protest movement in America, a problem that he had studied during his years in the State Department; after he had left Washington for the airlines job in Los Angeles, he had continued to remain intimately interested in the thinking on campuses and in such hippie centers as Haight-Ashbury, which he had personally visited. He knew about the latest fads, the philosophies, and the language of the young, and he was one of the first
Times
editors to perceive the hippie movement as national in scope, spreading from San Francisco to Madison Avenue, and he encouraged the wider coverage of teen-age preoccupations.

Greenfield’s personal knowledge of the inner workings of Washington was regarded as a significant asset by some senior editors in New York. He provided them with a check against Wicker’s bureaumen. Greenfield had many contacts within the government and among those departed New Frontiersmen who hoped to regain power someday behind Senator Robert F. Kennedy; from these and other sources, Greenfield often received tips on matters that the Johnson loyalists were not anxious to discuss. If this information was not always substantial enough to produce major stories, it often added to the dimension or understanding of the news that was available. When the American ship
Pueblo
was captured by the North Koreans, Greenfield obtained information that described some of the drama and the scurrying on deck just before the ship’s radio went silent and the crew was captured—the sort of detail that New York had long claimed it was not getting out of Washington. But at this time there was no plan to move Greenfield from his present position to Washington. Greenfield was to remain in New York for an indefinite period, and his first important assignment was to help in the production of the experimental afternoon
newspaper that Punch Sulzberger had been contemplating ever since the disappearance of the
World Journal Tribune
.

Sulzberger was not the only publisher interested in the afternoon newspaper market in New York; the owners of the New York
Daily News
were also exploring the possibilities, as was the publisher of New York’s Spanish-language
El Diario—La Prensa
, although these men, like Sulzberger, were extremely secretive about their projects. The only thing known about
The Times
’ venture was that it would be six columns wide and would somewhat resemble the
Observer
in London. Rosenthal was put in charge of a twelveman committee to supervise the first edition; he was assisted by a bullpen editor named Lawrence Hauck, by Arthur Gelb and James Greenfield, by numbers of other deskmen, makeup men, and reporters, all assembled in a temporary newsroom on the eleventh floor behind locked doors and windows that were covered to prevent outside peeping. There the plans were made for columns, features, and the entire news format, while outside the building representatives of the advertising and circulation departments conducted surveys to estimate the income such a newspaper might expect in New York.

After weeks of work and careful planning by Rosenthal, a dummy edition was laid out and was printed in the subbasement of the
Times
building at 5:30 one morning. Guards protected the stack of freshly printed forty-page papers from the random perusal or theft by outsiders. Then later in the day the papers were delivered to the office of the vice-president, Ivan Veit, where forty-five copies were numbered and distributed to a select list of executives through the building. A few days later all the copies were recalled, but one was missing. Tom Mullaney, editor of the Financial-Business department, had locked his copy in his desk drawer before leaving the building for the weekend; when he returned on Monday he discovered that his drawer had been jimmied; his copy was gone.