The Kingdom and the Power (84 page)

The telephone rang on Rosenthal’s desk. It was Reston calling from upstairs. He wanted to get together with Rosenthal and Wicker, at Wicker’s suggestion, and Rosenthal proposed that they meet during the early evening at his apartment on Central Park West in the Eighties. It was a very spacious apartment with thick walls where they could have privacy; Rosenthal’s wife was not feeling well but he would send out for Chinese food and perhaps it would be beneficial to bring their differences out into the open at once, before a hardness had set in.

But after Reston and Wicker had arrived, and after drinks had been served, it was obvious that this meeting was too charged with emotion and fury to serve any useful purpose. Reston had wanted Rosenthal to explain himself, and Rosenthal said exactly what was on his mind. He charged that Reston, who was presumably dedicated to preserving the paper’s image, had now helped to tarnish that image, adding that while Reston himself would not give up his writing to edit the paper, Reston would not refrain from interfering with those who had devoted their energies solely to editing. Wicker, Rosenthal continued, was not equipped to write a column and run the bureau, and then Rosenthal, his voice rising, demanded to know why Wicker did not give up the bureau. Wicker objected to Rosenthal’s tone and presumption, and he suspected Rosenthal of excessive ambition. Wicker had no designs on the managing editor’s office, and had even implied as much in a note he had sent to Rosenthal the year before, pledging that he would do all that he could to help Rosenthal achieve his ambition. But now Rosenthal had gone too far, and Wicker was tired of being the political football between New York and Washington. After a few more caustic exchanges, Wicker got up and left the apartment.

Reston remained until the early hours of the morning. During this time he and Rosenthal came to know one another better than they had before, which was not to say that the experience was one of harmony or satisfaction. Each man argued from his own position, believing it to be in the best interest of
The Times
, and Reston resented Rosenthal’s treatment of Wicker, and he also thought that
Rosenthal had been impetuous during the whole Greenfield episode. Rosenthal felt now that he was on trial with Reston, and he resented being put in so defensive a position, and the situation was far from resolved as Reston stood up to leave in the middle of the night. After he did leave, Rosenthal paced through the apartment in a state of anguished monologue; and, at daybreak, unable to resist, he telephoned Reston’s hotel, woke him up, and continued the tense discussion. It was an outrageous thing to do, and Rosenthal regretted doing it, but it was somehow consistent with the bizarre events that had gripped the upper echelon of
The Times
during the last several hours—it had been a total nightmare for Rosenthal, an executive theater of the absurd.

When he arrived at
The Times
later in the morning, exhausted yet invigorated by the turmoil of the past twenty-four hours, Rosenthal went directly up to the fourteenth floor to keep an appointment he had with Sulzberger. The publisher was expecting him, and when Rosenthal had emerged from the elevator he saw Sulzberger coming toward him down the corridor with his arms outstretched; and then, in the spirit of men who had shared a sadness, they embraced and walked together into Sulzberger’s office.

If Rosenthal had had any serious doubts about his place on the paper, Sulzberger quickly dispelled them. Sulzberger was personally relying on him, he said, to help repair the damage done and to restore to
The Times
the harmony that had once prevailed. They had learned a good deal about
The Times
and about themselves during this experience, and Sulzberger thought that perhaps some good would come of it. The discord had at least been played out to the hilt, it had hit deep and low, and now there was nowhere to go but up. Sulzberger asked Rosenthal to spend the weekend at his country home for further discussions, and Rosenthal felt better. Returning to the newsroom, Rosenthal informed Daniel and Catledge of his weekend plans; he hoped that they also would attempt to reach an understanding with the publisher.

The next day, on page three of the
Washington Post
, under a headline that read: “A
New York Times
Coup That Was Almost Fit To Print,” was the story. It reported the details of James Greenfield’s departure and mentioned that there had been cheering in the Washington bureau after the announcement, with one bureauman having exclaimed: “We’ve won.”

Rosenthal resented the story, as did most
Times
editors, including Reston and Wicker. There is a tacit understanding among
most responsible newspapers that they not expose one another’s internal difficulties—
The Times
, after all, had not focused on the
Post
’s executive machinations in past years—but the
Post
on this occasion had obviously not played by the rules, even though Reston had spoken on the telephone during the previous afternoon with his friend Katharine Graham, the president of the
Post
, and with her editor Benjamin Bradlee. But it had not suppressed the story, and now on the morning of February 9 it was in print, and
The Times
’ editors suddenly had a fuller understanding of the meaning of the freedom of the press, and they knew, possibly for the first time, what it is like to be on the receiving end of reporting when the news is not favorable.

Despite the peace that Rosenthal had made with the publisher, the older editors still felt betrayed, and they ignored Sulzberger for several days. Catledge finally agreed to Sulzberger’s earnest request that their years of friendship not be destroyed by this single incident, but Daniel continued to snub Sulzberger for almost two weeks; and when he finally did speak freely with him, late one day after the news conference, in the small room adjacent to his office, Daniel lost his composure and, in a shrill voice, lectured the publisher like a schoolboy. After that, it seemed unlikely that things could ever be entirely reconciled between Clifton Daniel and Punch Sulzberger.

The Times
continued to publish as usual during the weeks ahead, although there were days when Catledge and Daniel seemed listless and utterly dejected. The embarrassing aspects of the Greenfield affair had received national exposure through such publications as
Time
and
Newsweek
, and there were rumors in the newsroom that Daniel was looking for another job and that Catledge was merely marking time until his retirement. But as disjointed as the executive situation was within the paper, the events of the outside world were worse, and this tended initially to have an almost positive effect on the editors—they were forced to submerge their own differences somewhat to concentrate on the sudden chaos in the nation. There was such flagrant disunity within the United States that Lyndon B. Johnson was driven to admit, on March 31, that he could not unify the country, and thus would not seek renomination for the Presidency.

The Vietnamese war continued to be a hopeless struggle, draining both the economy and the patience of citizens young and old, creating factions shile common trait seemed only to be hate and violence. In April, Martin Luther King was fatally shot by a sniper in Memphis, setting off riots in Chicago and Washington. In June, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, where his bid for the Democratic nomination, begun three months before, had just peaked with his victory in the California primary. Between the two deaths, there had been clashes across the land between peace marchers and the police, with white racists calling for “law and order” and Negro racists calling for “black power”; and on the Columbia University campus in New York, in the most dramatic student protest of the year, five buildings were seized, classes were suspended, 720 demonstrators were arraigned, and the president of the university would resign during the summer. The Columbia protest had begun in April as students attempted to force the university to sever its ties with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a twelve-university consortium that performed military research for the government, and also to halt the construction of a nine-story gymnasium in Morningside Park that would form a kind of buffer between Harlem and the Columbia community—“gym crow” was the protest term for it.

But these issues were linked to larger breaches between students and administrators, were part of what was popularly being referred to as a worldwide “generation gap.” Now there were student boycotts in Poland, organized protests in Czechoslovakia, surges of youthful idealism throughout Europe and Asia—while old men rushed to buy gold, seeking security and solidity against the unsteady standards of the Sixties. In America the large corporations, computerized, profit-minded, were producing new cars that were grated with flaws and worthless luxuries for a nation that had the best and worst of everything. As the corporations continued to make millions, young men died in Vietnam, and older young men like Punch Sulzberger seemed caught between the prismatic vision of the generation above and the one below. At forty-two, Sulzberger felt what other heads of institutions were now feeling: it was as if they had all been tuned into the same channel and were now all being jammed by the same static. On every level, authority was being challenged by the pressures for change, the prod of publicized protest; young people, though powerless themselves, had gained a fleeting influence through some mysterious combination
of electronics and histrionics in a synthetic age—Mark Rudd, Danny the Red, Rap Brown; discothèque radicals and guitar-strumming nuns were the creations of a climate that had turned the heat on Johnson and de Gaulle, on the international banker, the neighborhood schoolteacher, the cop on the beat. Even such a fundamentalist institution as the Roman Catholic Church was being forced into making concessions, being questioned about what had once been unquestioned.

Shortly after the riots had paralyzed Columbia, the demonstrators turned their attention toward what they considered another bastion of the enemy—
The New York Times
. The Sulzberger family, products of Columbia education, had long been influential in the university’s activities—like his father before him, Punch Sulzberger was a trustee of Columbia, and he had supported the Columbia policies (including its military research ties with the government) that the students now found morally reprehensible. On May 2, eighty-two young people assembled outside Punch Sulzberger’s home at 1010 Fifth Avenue, demonstrated for forty-five minutes, and chanted: “
New York Times—print the truth
!” They charged that
The Times
’ reporting of the Columbia protest had sided with the administration and had shown little understanding of the students’ position, and they also questioned the ethics of a
Times
publisher who served as a trustee of a university that was regularly in his newspaper’s headlines. They saw this as a conflict of interest, but Sulzberger denied the charge in a statement printed in the next morning’s
Times
, adding: “We do not believe that executives of a newspaper need divorce themselves from some service to the community.” While he admitted that the editorials—which had condemned the campus disorder under such titles as “Hoodlumism at Columbia”—had reflected his opinion, he insisted that the reporting had been objective.
The Times
, he said, “had used its resources to provide full, accurate and dispassionate coverage.” But the students and their supporters disagreed. The reporting, they believed, had been neither fair nor dispassionate, and they were particularly incensed by one story that had appeared on page one of
The Times
on May 1. It was a compassionate article that featured the president of Columbia University, Grayson Kirk. It described him as he stood in his large office that had been invaded by demonstrators—furniture was broken; the floor was littered with tin cans, half-eaten sandwiches, and dirty blankets—and Dr. Kirk, passing a hand over his face, was quoted as saying, “My God, how could human beings
do a thing like this?” The story had been written by A. M. Rosenthal.

Rosenthal had given himself the assignment, appearing on the Columbia campus one evening, in response to an inner urge to experience again the fulfillment that he had felt as a reporter. He saw the Columbia story as a very tragic but significant event: a proud old institution of learning was being ravaged by young men that it was endowed to assist, and he wanted to know what had gone wrong, and why. But when he had informed Clifton Daniel of his plan to write about Columbia, the managing editor had objected. It had been understood that Rosenthal, on being made an editor, would retire from reporting, adhering to the policy and practice of both Catledge and Daniel. And until this time Rosenthal had complied. But now the power of authority had temporarily been weakened within the newsroom as elsewhere, and Rosenthal’s more independent attitude was also possibly influenced by the recent triumph of Reston, who had never taken the vow of obscurity when
he
had become an editor and who had proven to be the most formidable man on the staff. When Rosenthal insisted that he wanted to write about Columbia, Daniel withdrew his objection. Daniel’s eighty-three-year-old father had just died after a long illness, and he went immediately to Zebulon to be with his mother. Rosenthal was left in charge of the newsroom, free to do as he saw fit, and it was then that he wrote the story that described Columbia’s tormented president, Grayson Kirk, walking in his disheveled office after having listened for hours to the sounds of police sirens, the smashing of glass, the students’ chants of “Kirk must go”: