One month after Ochs’s death, Arthur Hays Sulzberger became the publisher of The Times. He was forty-four years old and he had been on the paper for eighteen years. On the day after his elevation he announced in The Times that he would never depart from the basic principles of Ochs, but privately he told his editors that there would be some changes in the paper within a year. The era of the patriarch was over.
Now organized labor, stronger than ever, was trying to recruit all The Times’ reporters and copyreaders. Sulzberger objected to this, saying that while he did not oppose unionism he did not want his entire staff to be affiliated with any single group with a “smaller common denominator than its Americanism.” He agreed to testify before the National Labor Relations Board, and, wishing to present his position effectively, he kept as a reminder in his vest pocket a small piece of paper on which he had written: “Keep calm, smile, don’t be smart.” He smiled throughout the four-day hearings, never agreeing to the closed-shop ambitions of the Newspaper Guild but never antagonizing the labor leaders. His gentle manner was an undeniable asset.
At The Times, Sulzberger was mildly aloof without seeming directorial. Some of his senior editors would never let him forget that he had been Ochs’s son-in-law, but Sulzberger accepted this as graciously as he could, and a few of his speeches in public began: “Perhaps you wonder how to get to be the publisher of a great newspaper. Let me tell you my own system. Get up early, work hard—and marry the boss’s daughter.”
He liked to present this side of himself, the lightly humorous and mildly self-deprecating side that, while ingratiating, revealed very little. In his home he also behaved at times like an entertaining guest, telling funny stories and making puns and surprising the family with clever little gifts or gimmicks. One night after dinner a servant placed on the table a cake that Sulzberger said marked the date on which Iphigene had turned down his initial proposal of marriage. The icing on the cake read: “For A.H.S. Only.” Sulzberger took a knife, sliced a piece for himself, and then passed the cake around the table. The rest of the cake was wooden.
On another occasion, after Sulzberger’s children were fully grown and had neglected his request to contribute some personal anecdotes and remembrances to be included in a privately published book on the Sulzberger-Ochs family, Sulzberger decided to do the book alone. When finished, he presented to each family member a handsome leather-bound volume entitled “An Anthology of Humorous Tales in the Sulzberger-Ochs Clan”; it began: “With my children’s assistance I have put together a collection of stories of both them and their children. As the years roll on you may find it amusing to glance over and recall the episodes.” The rest of the book’s pages were blank.
He rarely forgot a birthday or anniversary, and the cards that he sent usually contained one of his clever drawings or limericks. When he was absent from one of his children’s graduations, which was often, he invariably wrote them tender letters. He sometimes seemed closest to his children when he was farthest away. He was a complex man whose inner tension was evidenced by the occasional rash on his face, by his long silences and the way he drank at night, although he nearly always held his liquor well. He was an extremely handsome man, courtly and sophisticated, the center of romantic gossip, but he was also a totally dedicated publisher under whom The Times prospered beyond Ochs’s grandest dreams. But it would be part of Sulzberger’s burden to live a life of secret victories, private triumphs in the name of Ochs. Neither man would have had it any other way. Even when expressing a personal opinion in a letter to be published in The Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger preferred to sign it with a pseudonym, “A. Aitchess.” He was relatively unknown outside the world of politics and journalism; he blended into the institution and worked through his senior executives, and yet he was keenly aware of the staff and was more human in his feelings toward them than was his more formal father-in-law. When a certain staff member died, Sulzberger sent a note of sympathy not only to the man’s widow, but also to his mistress.
Sulzberger assumed command of The Times during a very delicate period in its growth. The paper was not only being challenged from within by the Newpaper Guild but it was also being condemned in public: by the Zionists because of the paper’s policy toward Jews, by the Catholics because of Herbert Matthews’ reporting from Spain, by the isolationists who charged that The Times was helping to push the nation into another world war. Every week, it seemed, there was a delegation representing one faction or other that visited the publisher’s office or issued a statement denouncing The Times. “I am not used to being called a son-of-a-bitch,” Sulzberger remarked to an editor after one unpleasant experience, “but I suppose I shall learn to like it.”
Sulzberger’s closest associate during these years was his chief editorial writer, Charles Merz, a tall, hefty, well-tailored man who wore a blue homburg, walked with the stride of a Prussian officer, and, partly because of a ruddy complexion that suggested high blood pressure, and partly because his small steel-rimmed glasses were so tightly drawn around his broad face and nose that his ears pressed forward, he seemed like a man about to explode. Actually Merz was an even-tempered, amiable gentleman. He had been educated at Yale, had served as a lieutenant in military intelligence during World War I, and he later wrote for Harper’s Weekly, Collier’s, and the New Republic. One of his contributions to the latter, in 1920, was a two-part series coauthored by Walter Lippmann in which The New York Times’ coverage of the Russian Revolution between March of 1917 and March of 1920 was severely criticized. Merz and Lippmann wrote that The Times’ reporting day after day was so slanted against the Soviet revolutionaries, was so eager to present the facts that were most digestible to the United States and its allies, that Times readers were lulled into thinking that the Bolsheviks could not win. The facts favorable to the Bolsheviks were made to seem like propaganda; the unfavorable facts were presented as irrefutable truths. And one of the major conclusions of the Merz-Lippmann analysis of The Times’ reporting was that:
The news as a whole is dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organization. They began as passionate partisans in a great war in which their own country’s future was at stake. Until the armistice they were interested in defeating Germany. They hoped until they could hope no longer that Russia would fight. When they saw she could not fight, they worked for intervention as part of the war against Germany. When the war with Germany was over, the intervention still existed. They found reasons then for continuing the intervention. The German Peril as the reason for intervention ceased with the armistice; the Red Peril almost immediately afterwards supplanted it. The Red Peril in turn gave place to rejoicing over the hopes of the White Generals. When these hopes died, the Red Peril reappeared. In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see.
Charles Merz had worked closely with Lippmann on the New York World, and it was from Lippmann that he first heard about the secret negotiations concerning the sale of the World; and in 1931, a day before the World folded, Merz was hired by The Times, relieved that no Times editor had mentioned his criticism in the New Republic, causing him to wonder if The Times’ editors had even read it.
Almost immediately, Merz and Sulzberger, who were about the same age, were liberal politically, and had much in common, became good friends. They went on vacations together with their wives, spent weekends at Hillandale. Merz at one moment would be discussing Times policy with Sulzberger; a few moments later, he would be helping Sulzberger to complete The Times’ crossword puzzle, a hobby that Sulzberger got into the paper only after Ochs’s death.
Sulzberger’s relationship with his other editors was not nearly so personal as it was with Merz. The managing editor, Edwin James, who replaced Birchall in 1932, was a bit too crusty for Sulzberger’s taste although the publisher did not find James intolerable. The Sunday editor, Lester Markel, who had come from the Tribune in 1923, was despotic and self-important but he was doing extremely well with the Magazine and the “Review” section, and Sulzberger did not interfere. The Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, did cause Sulzberger considerable uneasiness, however, and there were moments when Sulzberger could not believe that he had been among Krork’s enthusiastic admirers shortly after Krock had come to The Times from the World in 1927. It had been Sulzberger, in fact, who had strongly supported Krock’s ambitions to write a political column from Washington in 1933 after Ochs had expressed reluctance, fearful that such a column would draw The Times into endless controversies with very important people. It was bad enough by Ochs’s standards that The Times had an editorial page and allowed its critics to express opinions on the arts and entertainment; but the idea of permitting a correspondent to pass judgment on the President of the United States and the Congress was, in Ochs’s opinion, highly injudicious. Ochs had proposed instead that Krock write a kind of “letter” from Washington to an imaginary “Aunt Hattie,” a suggestion that Krock had thought was terrible, and Sulzberger had agreed and finally prevailed upon Ochs to let Krock write the sort of column that he wished. But now, a few years after Ochs’s death, Sulzberger was beginning to appreciate Ochs’s circumspection.
Even when Krock’s prose was dignified and convoluted, which it most often was, there was an undercoating of acid between the lines, particularly when Krock was writing about the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt. While Sulzberger himself did not greatly admire Roosevelt, and while The Times’ editorials had condemned him for such maneuvers as attempting to pack the Supreme Court, The Times’ opposition had never been so personal as Krock’s, and Sulzberger could understand Roosevelt’s bitterness and his tendency to refer to Krock in public as “Li’l’ Arthur.”
“Li’l’ Arthur,” Roosevelt said, delivering a typical parable to a press gathering that did not include Krock, “once made a trip to Paris and wanted to see the sights. He asked for a guard of honor and was given the President of the Republic and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, for that is the way he likes to do things. By and by, they came to the Louvre Museum, and there they saw the Venus de Milo. ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Li’l’ Arthur, ‘what grace, what classic beauty, what form divine!’ But—approaching nearer—‘Alas, alas! She has halitosis!’ ”
Arthur Krock responded with satires in which Roosevelt was portrayed as a cunning “Professor” or “Br’er Fox,” and Krock charged that Roosevelt was guilty of “more ruthlessness, intelligence, and subtlety in trying to suppress legitimate unfavorable comment than any other figure I have known.” Krock, a conservative Southern Democrat, regarded the New Dealers as a menacing group who were destroying States’ Rights, were using the Federal Treasury to perpetuate themselves in office, and were fostering legislation that could one day allow the country to succumb to a more virulent type of liberals, or “a species of fascists.”
Among Krock’s habitual targets within the Roosevelt circle was the Undersecretary of State, Sumner Welles, whose eventual resignation was partly the result of all the publicity that Krock gave to Welles’s disagreements with the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who was Krock’s friend. Another recipient of the Krock stiletto was Roosevelt’s close adviser Harry Hopkins, about whom Krock once wrote: “Mr. Hopkins may, at times, have thought that something the President said or did was not perfect. If so, he suppressed the unworthy thought with ease.”
Short of replacing Krock, there was little that Sulzberger could do except to hint that the columnist was going too far, a hint that Krock could and did ignore. Krock was one of the most powerful and best journalists in America. During his years as a political reporter he had established valuable news sources and he had produced countless exclusives for The Times throughout the Roosevelt era. In 1933, on a tip from Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, Krock revealed the outline of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act, a decision to abandon the conservatism within the 1932 platform in favor of a vast public-works program. Roosevelt quickly denied knowledge of any such plan, and a few reporters printed refutations of Krock’s story as a result, but not long afterwards the NRA was legislated by Congress at Roosevelt’s request.
While Roosevelt’s financial advisers were believed to be debating the question of whether to issue scrip for currency, Krock telephoned a high official to verify a report that the scrip plan had been canceled. “Yes,” the official said, “that’s good, isn’t it? But don’t you think it’s wonderful about gold?” Krock was momentarily silent. Could this mean the abandonment of the gold standard?—Krock was afraid to ask, suspecting that any indication of surprise or ignorance on his part would merely call attention to his informant’s unwitting disclosure. Krock hung up and called the most unwary man he knew in Washington, the Secretary of the Treasury, William H. Woodin, who was playing the piano in his hotel suite when Krock’s call interrupted him. Casually, quickly, Krock asked, “When will the President announce that the United States has gone off the gold standard?”
“Saturday morning,” Woodin replied unhesitatingly, and Krock’s story dominated the next day’s Times.
After Woodin had resigned because of ill health in 1934, Roosevelt appointed in his place an old friend, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., a man much disliked by Krock, and during the next decade Morgenthau would complain often to Sulzberger and others about the “intrigues” of Arthur Krock, being particularly offended by Krock’s often-expressed opinion that Joseph P. Kennedy, Jesse Jones, or John W. Hanes would make ideal replacements for Morgenthau, and being embarrassed near the end of his career by Krock’s premature exposure of the so-called Morgenthau Plan. Krock first learned of it after an important source had invited him for a drink of bourbon and then asked, “Do you know where Henry Morgenthau is?” Krock, admitting that he did not, was promptly told that it might be wise for him to find out. It developed that Morgenthau was at the Quebec Conference pressing his plan to transform postwar Germany into a wholly agricultural nation; also that this mission had received Presidential sanction and that Morgenthau had left for Quebec without notice to either the Secretary of State or the Secretary of War. It was such reporting as this, the recognition of Krock’s great contacts, that made Sulzberger reluctant to intrude. As much as any Timesman was irreplaceable anywhere, Krock was irreplaceable in Washington. He had gone there in January of 1932 for The Times as a favor to Ochs, having previously covered the capital for other newspapers and grown tired of the town, preferring to live in New York. But Richard V. Oulahan’s unexpected death from pneumonia in December of 1931 left Ochs with no Timesman’ very willing or able to take over the bureau, and so Krock accepted the job on his own terms, which amounted to almost complete autonomy. There are very few moments in a reporter’s life when he has his publisher at a disadvantage, but this was one of them, and so Krock pressed his luck while he could, finding the experience strange and wonderful.
His previous relationships with publishers had invariably ended in his disappointment. At the World where he had been assistant to the publisher, Ralph Pulitzer—who had once written: “Krock has a tongue as sharp as emery and a heart as soft as hominy”—Krock had imagined himself to be in a very favored position, but he was suddenly soured when Walter Lippmann was appointed editor of the World and not long afterwards Krock joined The New York Times. A decade before, when Krock had been an editor on the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times, working for a while under the walrus moustache and sardonic nature of Colonel Henry Watter-son (for whom Adolph Ochs had worked as a printer in Louisville in 1875), Krock’s position was undercut after Robert W. Bingham, the future Ambassador to England, acquired the papers. When Bingham installed another editor over Krock, Krock quit and headed for New York. (Many years later, while Ambassador Bingham lay dying in a hospital, Krock reported exclusively in The New York Times that Joseph Kennedy would be the next Ambassador to England, infuriating President Roosevelt, who complained that Krock did not even have the courtesy to wait until Bingham was in the grave before announcing his successor.)
Nothing had come easily to Krock in his professional or private life, and men of privilege, impressed by Krock’s humor and his soft and stately manner, were often surprised by his depth of rancor. A plain-looking bespectacled man of five-feet-nine, with hazel-brown eyes and clear, almost pink complexion, Krock possessed no physical distinction until his full head of dark fine hair had turned a fluffy white during his senior years; then, honored three times by the Pulitzer Prize committee, Krock was known within press circles as a “pundit” and “dean.” He did not consider the latter title especially flattering, it reminding him of the elders who dominated Washington journalism when he arrived in the capital in 1910—a “small group of pompous frauds,” he wrote of them, “identifiable not only by their disinclination to do legwork, which was great, but in most cases by their attire. They habitually wore frock coats and silk hats, dropped big names in profusion, carried canes and largely made contacts with their single news source in the noble saloons of the period.”
Arthur Krock might be accused of many things, but never of a “disinclination to do legwork.” He had hustled throughout his working life, being equally diligent as a Times pundit as when he was a young reporter on horseback galloping to an assignment in his native Kentucky. He had been born in the southern part of the state, in the city of Glasgow, near the Tennessee border, on November 16, 1886. His father, an intelligent man who was frustrated in his work as a bookkeeper and wrote verse in his spare time, was Jewish; his mother, the daughter of a local dry-goods merchant, was part Jewish. When his father left home for Chicago, pursuing a dream that Krock could never envision, his mother moved in with her parents, and it was in their home that Arthur Krock was reared.
In 1904 he was sent to Princeton, but he had to drop out after one year, because of a lack of money, which deeply distressed him. He did receive a junior-college degree from the Lewis Institute in Chicago, and then he returned to Kentucky hoping to get a newspaper job in Louisville. As with many journals in those days, the Louisville papers had a “cub system” in which young men of no experience began without a salary for the honor of learning the craft, an honor that Krock could not afford; so he presented himself convincingly as a reporter of vast experience, and thus he was hired by the Louisville Herald at $15 a week.
Krock learned fast. Within a few years he was one of the busiest reporters in the state, covering all sorts of assignments—including a few back-country elections in Kentucky that were conducted with Hatfield-McCoy shotgun etiquette. One evening while assigned to the Breathitt County election, Krock was sitting with a few people in the home of the county attorney, who was on the wrong side politically, and a shotgun blast shattered the window and blew up a lamp. Everybody crouched down, and then Krock gallantly volunteered to escort the two women in the room across the Kentucky River bridge to the other side. Soon he was leading them across a trestle two hundred feet above the water, carrying in front of him a lantern that within seconds was shot to pieces by one of the sharpshooters standing under the bridge. Krock and the women crawled the rest of the way, and when they arrived he had an acute attack of appendicitis.
On another day, also in Breathitt County, Krock met a pretty girl along the road who smiled at him and, after a brief conversation, suggested that he walk her home. As he was doing so, he noticed a surly-looking man observing them from the other side of the road, and Krock asked the girl, “Who’s that?”
“He’s my beau,” she said.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He don’t like your walkin’ with me.”
Without hesitation, Krock abandoned the girl and approached her beau and said, “Listen, this is nothing. I have no intentions of any sort and I’m going back to town right now.” And he did.
In 1911, when Krock was twenty-four, he married the daughter of a railroad official, and they had a son who later went into public relations. Krock’s marriage was a happy one that lasted for twenty-seven years, ending with the death of his wife after a long illness in 1938. Krock then was introduced at a Washington party to a fashionable Chicago divorcée named Martha Granger Blair, a society columnist for the Washington Times-Herald. She had seen him before and had listed him in her column as one of Washington’s “glamour boys.” She had described him as a man who tries very hard to be charming to women and “thinks he has a deceptive charm, but hasn’t.” Although “he looks so fierce and takes everything so seriously,” she wrote, he has “enticement.”
They were married in 1939. They lived with her two children (one of whom later became a Times reporter) at a country home in Virginia surrounded by 296 acres and in a large apartment in Washington. Krock was earning more than $30,000 a year from The Times, had been honored by foreign governments for his reporting, had received an honorary degree from Princeton, and had fulfilled most of his professional and social ambitions. At home with his wife and stepchildren, he was relaxed, warm, and informal. On returning from the bureau in the evening, if he and his wife were not going out to dinner, he would make a bourbon old-fashioned, puff his fine cigar, and read to the family the column he had just written, an effort that was rarely appreciated although they pretended to follow every word.
In the office with his men, Krock was a paragon of formality. He was Mister Krock even to reporters who had known him for years.
“How long does a man have to work around here before this ‘Mister’ business stops?” a Timesman once asked him.
“As long as you care to stay here,” Krock replied. “I’m sorry, that’s the way I am.”
Arthur Krock had much more in common with Ochs than Sulzberger. Though Sulzberger was only five years younger than Krock, Krock seemed part of the Ochs era. Krock and Ochs were regally remote, politically conservative; they were self-made men, confident and vain and hardened by experiences that Sulzberger had never had.
Finally Sulzberger came to accept Krock as part of the Ochs legacy—not a painless inheritance, to be sure, but Sulzberger had little choice. Krock knew every important figure in Washington, was possibly more influential in the nation than the Secretary of State. If Krock was made unhappy, he might quit and accept one of the many offers of other publishers. Krock was not so attached to Washington that he would not leave: as Krock himself said, “I like Washington the way a chemist likes his laboratory—in spite of its smell—because it has the materials with which he must work.” Sulzberger did not want Krock to leave, not having as yet a replacement of sufficient stature who could get the news and run the bureau as Krock was running it. There was no doubt in Sulzberger’s mind that Krock had greatly improved the daily performance of the Washington bureau over what it had been under the previous bureau chief.
And so Sulzberger turned his attentions elsewhere, allowing Krock and the bureau more self-rule than The Times had ever permitted before and ever would again. When The Times endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt for President in 1944, Krock wrote a column opposing Roosevelt, and the editors in New York did not change a word; this was part of Krock’s understanding with Ochs. Conversely, when The Times had supported Wendell Willkie for the Presidency four years before, and the editor-in-chief of the Chattanooga Times had insisted on endorsing Roosevelt, Sulzberger had objected, insisting that the Chattanooga Times’ editor and his associates either endorse Willkie or take six months’ leave of absence with pay. They chose the latter, and thus the Chattanooga Times backed The New York Times in supporting Willkie in 1940. Sulzberger’s reasoning was that since he and the other Times policy makers in New York were responsible for the editorial viewpoint of both papers, it was somehow improper to support a Republican in the North and a Democrat in the South, a stringency that Sulzberger did not apply in his dealings with Arthur Krock in Washington.
Turner Catledge worked under Krock for almost ten years. He actually joined the bureau two years before Krock took it over—Catledge had arrived in Washington in January of 1930, five months after he had been hired in New York, while the Washington bureau chief was Richard V. Oulahan—and Catledge could later see and feel, not always happily, the stylistic differences between these two men: Oulahan, a dignified gentleman who had run the bureau since 1912, had permitted his staff to cover Washington with a kind of roving detachment; Krock, after Oulahan’s death, informed the staff that it would now function as a team, which meant taking orders.
Krock installed under himself a vice-chief, an administrative assistant who was loyal and efficient and not excessively ambitious or egotistical; his job, among other things, was to coordinate the coverage of the capital. Krock also did not want his reporters to vary their assignments from day to day, or week to week; instead he wanted each of them to concentrate on a particular area of the government and to develop sources and stories within that area-one reporter might focus on the Pentagon, a second on the White House, a third on the State Department, a fourth on the Department of Labor, and so on until every agency in the government had a Timesman watching over it.
In theory this system had obvious advantages. Reporters would become more knowledgeable and would presumably write with more depth, would be less likely to make mistakes, or to misinterpret, or to be duped by government spokesmen. But there were also inherent disadvantages in this system—reporters could become too familiar with their subject, eventually assuming, unconsciously, a familiarity on the reader’s part that did not exist; and reporters might also become victims of what Walter Lippmann considered the bane of the newspaper business, “cronyism,” a camaraderie among the press and government sources, resulting from their close daily relationships, their personal trust in one another and mutual reliance on professional cooperation, that eventually could—and often did—mean that the reporter became spiritually a part of the government. Or if not a spiritual part, the reporter had at least a proprietary interest in his section of the government, his daily by-line depending on his ability to get information from sources in that section, and their cooperation was unlikely if he had written an unfavorable story on the previous day. So it was in the best interest of most reporters to have a positive approach to government news, and only the very best reporters, the most independent and ambitious ones, would be unsusceptible to cronyism.
While this did not present a problem during Krock’s years as the bureau chief, he being too vigilant and skeptical of the government and too demagogic to permit any personality but his own to flavor the news, the regulation of the Washington bureau was less rigid after James Reston, a more patriotic and flexible man, took over in 1953. But even under Reston, cronyism was never too noticeable; and even if it had been, the editors in New York would have been reluctant to condemn it strongly. Reston, like Krock, was a man of rank and reliability who condoned little interference from New York. As Krock had built his empire under Ochs, so did Reston have a strong alliance with Sulzberger, and an even stronger one with Sulzberger’s successor, Orvil Dryfoos. It was also true that when Reston assumed command of the bureau, the possible existence of cronyism would not have caused great concern or notice in the New York office because the United States government was still a popular and trusted institution, the “credibility gap” was years away—the triumphant spirit of World War II, the complaisance during the postwar prosperity, the faith in the nation’s wisdom and righteousness was deeply infused in American thought, and this philosophy was not shattered by the Korean War or by the scandals in the Truman administration. It was not until Eisenhower’s final years that many illusions about America began to fade.
The disillusionment was hastened by such factors as the shock of Soviet achievements in space, and by the United States’ being caught in a lie during the U-2 incident, an opening round in the “credibility gap”; and by the Nineteen-sixties the national doubt had intensified into nationwide dissent, inspired primarily by a new generation of Americans untouched by old illusions. This generation was unwilling to support on moral grounds the United States military acts in Vietnam or its Civil Rights posture at home, and it was also motivated by hundreds of private reasons and human fears that found release in the larger voice against the government—flags and draft cards were burned, patriotism became the property of the nut fringe, and the old attitudes and terminology were twisted—“law and order” could really mean racism; “mother” and “peace” could be controversial words; the media manufactured dramatic events and colossal characters out of many small incidents and minor men. The government’s word was to be accepted with suspicion, and The Times’ editors in New York, influenced as much as anybody else by the new disenchantment and skepticism, began to prod the Washington bureau as never before to keep a watchful eye on the government, to expose its sins; and if the Washington bureau failed to do so, a few editors in New York, among them Harrison Salisbury, began to quietly suspect that the bureau was overly protective of its sources, was a victim of cronyism.
The bureau chief at this time, beginning in 1964, was Tom Wicker. Wicker had been on The Times only four years when Reston, wishing to devote more time to his writing and also a bit weary of office politics, vacated the bureau job after almost twelve years and installed in his place the thirty-eight-year-old Wicker, in whom Reston saw qualities that reminded him of himself. But what Wicker did not yet have in common with Reston—and Krock—was singular strength with the publisher’s office, a personal bond that is built slowly during years of outstanding service on The Times. And so without a solid relationship with the owners of The Times, and not having had sufficient time to establish a national reputation as a journalist, Tom Wicker, from his very beginning as the bureau chief, was vulnerable in ways that Reston and Krock had never been.
Wicker’s added disadvantage, that of inheriting the bureau when the government’s honesty was widely doubted, required of his bureau an escalation of its right to question and challenge—and this at a time when Wicker lacked the power to direct his staff with anything approaching autonomy, and when The Times itself was undergoing vast internal changes and second-guessing, in part because of its sudden growth as a newspaper (a growth accelerated by the disappearance of the New York Herald Tribune), and also because of the expanding ambitions and philosophical differences of some important executives within The Times.
No matter what Tom Wicker’s personal limitations might have been in the mid-Sixties, he seemed to be plagued also by several forces beyond his control—his dilemma seemed to be linked, in fact, with the larger problems of the government of the United States. As the Johnson administration had lost much of its stature and believability with the American people, so had Wicker’s bureau lost much of its prestige and persuasiveness within the Times organization—the afflictions of the administration had infected the bureau, or so some New York editors thought, or preferred to think. For now they were trying to downgrade the bureau and to eliminate the last vestiges of its self-rule so that The Times could become one corporate body with all the power centered in the main office in New York. In this sense, it was the New York office that was moving on a parallel course with the government of the United States, a government of increasing federalization, of unprecedented power in the Presidency, of deteriorating States’ Rights. And it was neither coincidental nor surprising that The New York Times as a whole would reflect, in miniature, the collective style of the government because the two institutions at the top are shaped by the same forces historically, socially, and economically—what happens to the government inevitably happens to The Times. Should the United States continue as a preeminent power, The Times’ words will continue to carry weight in the world. Should the United States decline as an international influence, so will The New York Times—following in the wake of The Times of London, which today does not thunder across the sea as it did during the glorious days of the British Empire.
And yet despite the United States’ incredible wealth and growth in the Nineteen-sixties, both the government and The New York Times were beset by internal conflicts, factionalism, executive scurrying—part of which had undoubtedly resulted from the sudden changes at the top following the premature death of a chief executive. Orvil Dryfoos, whose death occurred in 1963 some months before Kennedy’s, had been The Times’ publisher for only two years. His sudden departure, shaking as it did the executive order and alliances within the institution, added momentum to forces already in motion, and it led some older Timesmen to believe, with regret, that the paper had now completely severed its spiritual ties with the permissive patriarchy of Adolph Ochs. In Ochs’s earlier days, when the United States government was an isolationist power with more lofty and independent ambassadors, The Times was characterized by bureau chiefs and correspondents who enjoyed a kind of ambassadorial status in the major cities of the world. But now in the mid-Sixties, the home office of The Times, like the White House, seemed bent on ruling by direct control. Through the marvels of instant communications, jet airplanes, and various computerized gadgets available to a modern oligarchy, the New York office was indeed capable of directing the movements and minds of its men around the globe with speed and without having to work through bureau chiefs. There was no longer a need for strong bureau chiefs. Now the job could be done by superclerks. An electronic edict from New York could flash almost instantly thousands of miles away on the desk of the superclerk, who could convey it to his Times colleagues, who, ideally, would quickly comply with New York’s wishes.
And it was such an assumption as this, if not by such methods, that led some New York editors to believe, in the summer of 1966, that the Washington bureau would accept New York’s conclusion that Tom Wicker should be replaced—perhaps by a Timesman from the New York office. Wicker had held the job for two years. This was long enough, it was believed in New York, to prove the point that Wicker had not adequately inspired the staff to the kind of aggressive reporting that was desired in Washington. Not only was Harrison Salisbury of this opinion, but so were Clifton Daniel and A. M. Rosenthal, among others, and the same might be said of Turner Catledge; although Catledge seemed to be stalling for time, as if hoping to let the forces play out their aggressions before making his move.
If there was particular hesitancy on Catledge’s part to push for Wicker’s removal, it was perhaps understandable. Catledge had been part of the Washington bureau; he was the only New York editor who had ever worked in the bureau on a regular basis. He had been able to observe firsthand the power-building process of Arthur Krock during the Nineteen-thirties, knew the strengths and weaknesses of the Krock system, and had also benefited from it, had gotten the front-page by-lines that helped to establish his own reputation in the capital with the Congress and the President. Krock had regarded Catledge as the finest reporter on the staff, and in 1936 Krock had given Catledge the title of Chief Washington News Correspondent. But by 1941, it was obvious to Catledge that he could go no further. The bureau was really a one-man show. Catledge felt that his progress had stalled—he was hitting his head “against the bottom of Arthur Krock’s chair,” he described it to a friend—and so in the winter of 1941 Catledge quit The New York Times. He accepted what appeared to be a dream job, that of roving chief correspondent for the Chicago Sun, founded by Marshall Field III to compete with the Chicago Tribune. But Field’s ambition was never fulfilled, and Catledge was never happy in Chicago. His “roving” job consisted mainly of covering the Rio Conference in 1942, and there was considerable discord among the management members of the paper. Even his later promotion to the position of editor-in-chief of the Chicago Sun did not elate him. He had never caught the mood of Chicago, never felt a part of it. He became acutely aware of this one day as he sat in a courtroom, representing the Sun in a lawsuit; as the lawyers mentioned various sections of Chicago, the names of particular streets, Catledge realized that he had never heard of them. After seventeen months in Chicago, he was still very much a stranger.
He also missed working for The New York Times. There is a very agreeable sense of privilege about employment on The Times that can forever spoil an individual who identifies personally with corporate greatness and tradition. Catledge had grown accustomed to The Times’ size and sway, the way it facilitated the opening of doors on almost every level of life. He let it be known that he wanted to come back, and in the spring of 1943 he was rehired by The Times. He was given the title of national correspondent, meaning that he could travel around the country reporting on politics and related subjects; his salary of $12,000 was not to be compared with the $26,500 he had been making in Chicago just before he left, but he did not quibble.
Returning to The Times, even after a relatively brief absence, Catledge was able to see the newspaper with more perspective. The Times had made many changes since Ochs’s death—obvious changes such as the printing of fashion and food pages, which Ochs would never have allowed, as well as the increased use of photographs, the greatly improved Sunday Magazine, and the brighter daily reporting, particularly by such men as Meyer Berger of the New York staff, and James Reston, who in 1944 became the diplomatic correspondent of Krock’s bureau, after having worked in London and as an assistant to Sulzberger. But The New York Times was also coasting a bit on its success, Catledge thought. It had now grown so enormously in the New York newsroom, mainly because of the hiring of many new editors and deskmen to handle the war news, that there was a vast depersonalization and coolness about the place. The paper lost a fine reporter, Robert Bird, to the New York Herald Tribune, and it would later take from the Tribune such men as Peter Kihss and Homer Bigart, but the New York editors seemed generally unconcerned over who came or went: The Times was unquestionably the best newspaper in sight, even though the Tribune in those days was a serious and interesting newspaper, and was no doubt a more congenial place for reporters wanting literary freedom. For straight reporting, however, and depth of coverage, The Times was incomparable. It was especially clear during World War II, when The Times’ staff so outnumbered and outdistanced the Tribune’s, despite the remarkable efforts of some Tribune reporters who were as good as The Times’ best, that the Tribune could never again gain on The Times in circulation or advertising.
The decision to increase The Times’ staff and spare no expense in covering the war was Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s, and within that decision he revealed a business acumen that may rank as the wisest move he ever made as publisher. Since the raw materials for producing a newspaper—paper, ink, metal—were rationed during the war, the newspaper publishers around the nation had to decide whether they would try to become rich by filling their newspapers with more advertising, which was then available in great abundance, or whether they would resist the easy revenue and print more news. Sulzberger chose the latter alternative with a resoluteness that the Tribune’s owners did not try to match, and as a result The Times conceded millions during the war years, but produced a superior newspaper. Sulzberger also maintained the good will of his advertisers, large and small, by permitting them to publish minimum-sized ads in The Times: a national advertiser who formerly might have purchased a full-page ad in The Times was restricted to a quarter-page, and a merchant seeking employees through the help-wanted columns could not exceed two lines for each appeal. But the additional space that The Times was able to devote to war coverage instead of advertising was, in the long run, a very profitable decision: The Times lured many readers from the Tribune, and these readers stayed with The Times after the war into the Nineteen-fifties and Sixties, while the Tribune, which featured columnists and sprightly makeup at the expense of solid reporting, began to lose its circulation, and its advertisers began to withdraw.
Sulzberger himself made trips to the European and Pacific fronts during the war, and a few Times staff members not normally associated with international reporting went overseas to bolster the war coverage. Brooks Atkinson temporarily left his job as drama critic to report from Burma, India, and China; he flew with Chennault’s Flying Tigers on a bombing mission over Japanese targets, and he was the first journalist to report that General Joseph W. (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell, who was having arguments over policy with Chiang Kai-shek, was being called home.
Meyer Berger left his sidewalks-of-New York beat to report briefly from London, and as the war was ending he toured North Africa and Europe. Turner Catledge, too, visited the European battle-fronts in 1943, writing articles about the activities of the American Red Cross. In the fall of 1944, while Catledge was scouting the political campaign in Fargo, North Dakota, he received a telegram from Sulzberger asking him if he would be interested in taking a trip with the publisher to inspect the Pacific front. Catledge wired back his acceptance, and in November they began their 27,000-mile flight with a stop at San Francisco. They checked into the Mark Hopkins Hotel, went almost immediately to the Top of the Mark for a few drinks before dinner. They were seated at a comfortable divan, and through the big windows that surrounded them they could see the panorama of the north side of the city, the neck of San Francisco Bay with the ships coming and going, and to the left, the Golden Gate Bridge.
They ordered a Scotch, then a second round. On the third round Sulzberger proposed that they be “doubles.” Then they ordered two more “doubles” and continued to talk about everything—The Times, the San Francisco landscape, The Times, women, The Times, the strange workings of the Oriental mind. They ordered still another round of “doubles.” When the waiter brought them, Sulzberger asked, “Are you sure these are doubles?” The waiter said, “Am I sure? You’ve drunk practically a bottle already.”
They had a few more rounds and then they stood up to go to dinner. But before they left, Arthur Hays Sulzberger looked at Catledge, then extended his hand, saying, “Well, you pass.”
Catledge asked what he meant, but Sulzberger changed the subject. Then later, during dinner, Sulzberger recalled a trip that he had made to Russia the year before with Reston, mentioning how Reston’s engaging companionship during the day was not so satisfactory at night. Reston was not one for night life and drinking, and it was Reston himself who had suggested that the publisher’s traveling companion during this Pacific tour should be someone who could keep up with Sulzberger at night. And so, in San Francisco, Sulzberger had decided to put Catledge to the test, and Catledge had passed.
The nocturnal drinking and many discussions throughout their long trip gave Sulzberger the opportunity of knowing a great deal about Catledge; though the publisher did not reveal it at this time, he was considering Catledge for an executive position in the New York office, perhaps as the heir apparent to Edwin James as managing editor. Reston was also under consideration, but Reston was not anxious to leave Washington or to give up his reporting career. Sulzberger now also had a nephew on the staff, Cyrus L. Sulzberger—the son of Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s brother, Leo—but C. L. Sulzberger was enamored of life as a foreign correspondent, and the publisher was content to let him remain overseas. Catledge also was uncertain about the choice of moving permanently to New York. He had a home, a wife, and two daughters in Washington, and there was always the possibility of his replacing Krock. But this might take years, and Catledge, now in his early forties, saw in the New York job a more immediate opportunity. There seemed to be no other Timesman of his generation with a better chance of succeeding James. Catledge had had many years’ experience as a reporter on several newspapers, and he had worked as an editor in Chicago. He was ambitious, and he knew that Sulzberger liked him. Catledge would have to work under Edwin James, who could be a difficult man, but James was at least a Southerner and Catledge was sure that he could get along with him.
And so Catledge accepted Sulzberger’s proposal to move to New York, and in January of 1945 Sulzberger named him an assistant managing editor. There were other assistant managing editors, of course, but all were older men, contemporaries of James, and when Catledge’s desk was placed in the spot nearest to James’s office, the newsroom observers were sufficiently convinced that Catledge would be the next managing editor. A few days after his arrival in New York, Catledge received a note from Krock that read: “Now that you’re my boss, won’t you please call me Arthur?”