When Abe Rosenthal first read The Times on this June day in 1966 he did not notice the item; it was on page 30, and it was printed in agate type deep within a long list that announced the names of City College students who had received awards: and yet there it was:
BRETT AWARD to the student who has worked hardest under a great handicap—Jake Barnes.
To anyone who has read Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the references were clear: Lady Brett and the sexually impotent man who loves her, Jake Barnes. In The Times!
Rosenthal’s deskmen, who had edited and checked the story the night before, had obviously overlooked the item too, and perhaps it would have gone completely unnoticed by Rosenthal if he had not just received a telephone call from a Newsweek staff member who had asked about it, thinking it very imaginative and funny. But Rosenthal saw no humor in it. He was, in fact, infuriated, and was not assuaged by the fact that on the same page, spreading across the top, there was a story from Princeton with a five-column headline that read: “Goheen Tells Princeton Class a Sense of Humor Is Needed.”
If the young Times correspondent who had been assigned to cover the City College story, and to compile the list of awards, had been guilty of deliberately inserting false information into The Times, there was no recourse, Rosenthal thought, but to fire him. Many years ago, A. J. Liebling, then employed as a copy-reader in The Times’ sports department, had done something like this: instead of listing the correct name of the basketball referee in the agate box score, as was required, Liebling—who always experienced difficulty in getting the reporters to remember to get the referee’s name—would merely write, in place of the name, the Italian word ignoto—“unknown.” Mr. Ignoto would sometimes be listed in The Times as the referee of two or three or even four basketball games a night, in various cities—far too energetic and rambling a referee to go undiscovered indefinitely. When the prank became known, Liebling was fired, and he went on to use his imagination more wisely on The New Yorker.
The difficulty in the City College incident was that the correspondent who might have been guilty—Rosenthal had not yet called him—was Clyde Haberman, one of Rosenthal’s favorites, a young man of twenty-one who reminded Rosenthal very much of himself. Haberman was skinny and driving, as Rosenthal had been twenty years ago when he was the City College correspondent for The Times, and Haberman had quickly demonstrated an ability to sense a story, then to write it well. In the eight months he had been the City College correspondent, Clyde Haberman had produced more than sixty pieces, a remarkable achievement for an individual whose beat was limited to one campus. Haberman had made one slip, in an article about college tuition, but he had otherwise been reliable, had seemed very dedicated to journalism, and he had impressed Rosenthal as an excellent candidate for the reportorial staff of The Times.
Rosenthal hoped that Haberman had not inserted the “Brett Award.” There was no chance of supporting a young man in this situation as Rosenthal had supported another man two years before, a Negro named Junius Griffin, who had written a frontpage piece for The Times about the existence of a “Blood Brother” gang in Harlem, a militant band of men who were trained in karate and would soon invade white Manhattan if conditions in the ghetto were not quickly improved. The Blood Brother story was immediately picked up by the networks and other newspapers, spreading minor panic in some quarters, provoking angry denials elsewhere, including in Harlem, where the story was challenged as an exaggeration and even an outright hoax. Rosenthal had checked into the story, and had claimed that his reporter was not writing fiction. But The Times was nonetheless doubted and criticized in other newspapers and periodicals—an opportunity they never miss when they think The Times has overstepped its traditional caution. They could find no such organization, and even in The Times’ newsroom there were older staffmen who smiled cynically, saying that this sort of thing was bound to happen when inexperienced reporters were given wider range, and when the New York staff felt the pressure of having to make a fine showing each day in the paper. Some reporters began to refer to the Blood Brother story as Rosenthal’s Bay of Pigs.
Clyde Haberman was in bed when Rosenthal called his home in the Bronx. Haberman had been awakened fifteen minutes before by a call from the City College publicity department saying that it had been receiving inquiries about the “Brett Award.” It was then, and only then, that Haberman remembered that he had forgotten to remove the humorous award, as he had intended, or as he had perhaps intended, from the long list before turning it into the desk the afternoon before. He remembered how bored and drowsy he had then been in the newsroom, having spent hours behind the typewriter copying the interminable list of names and awards that were to be presented at the college’s commencement ceremony two nights hence—hundreds of names and awards whose publication in The Times was a waste of space, he thought, was an annoyance to his eyesight, was giving him a headache—he could understand that The Times, a paper of record, would devote space to a Congressional roll call, or would print long texts of speeches … but to fill three columns with City College student awards seemed absolutely preposterous to Haberman: and the more he typed, the more frustrated he became …
the RICHARD MOBY AWARD for excellence in community relations—Eugene Scharmann;
the THEODORE LESKES MEMORIAL AWARD to the student who has demonstrated unusual promise in the field of civil liberties and civil rights—Phyllis Cooper;
the BENJAMIN LUBETSKY MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP to the deserving student of engineering—Arnon Rieger;
the NEHEMIAH GITELSON MEDAL to the student who best exemplifies in his undergraduate career the spirit of the search for truth—Gregory Chaitin;
the …
BRETT AWARD to the student who has worked hardest under a great handicap—Jake Barnes.
It had just popped into Haberman’s head, his fingers reproduced it quickly on paper, he had laughed, he had thought it very funny, he had decided to take it out, not to take it out, he continued to type … and later he had become busy with something else, forgetting about Barnes and Lady Brett as he had turned the story, and the long list, into the desk. And it had taken the morning phone calls to remind him, first from the City College press agent, and then from Rosenthal.
“Clyde,” Rosenthal began softly, “did you see the City College prize list this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see a Brett Award?”
“Yes.”
“How did that get there?”
“I, uh, guess I put it in,” Clyde Haberman said timidly, “in a moment of silliness.”
“You did,” Rosenthal said slowly, his voice getting hard. “Well, that moment finished you in newspapers.”
Haberman could not believe the words. He was stunned. Finished with newspapers, Haberman thought, he must be kidding! It isn’t possible over an inane thing like this!
Haberman got dressed, having been told by Rosenthal to appear in the newsroom immediately, but even as he rode the subway to Times Square, Haberman could not believe that he was finished at The Times. Haberman had sensed that Rosenthal was an extremely sensitive man, a feeling that Haberman had first gotten from reading Rosenthal’s classic on the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. It was so revealingly sentimental, Haberman had thought, reading the piece a second time, that he wondered how Rosenthal could have exposed such tender emotion. Now in the subway Haberman thought that Rosenthal was merely upset by the joke in The Times; Haberman knew him well enough to sense that Rosenthal regarded a joke on The Times to be a joke on him. Yet he was confident, once the lack of malicious intent had been explained, that the mistake would pass and be forgotten.
It was noon when Haberman entered the newsroom. Nearly everybody was out to lunch. He walked up to the big desk where Rosenthal sits, and he addressed a broad-shouldered gray-haired clerk named Charles Bevilacqua, who had been there for years.
“Is Mr. Rosenthal in?” Haberman asked.
“Out to lunch,” Bevilacqua said.
Haberman walked away, but Bevilacqua called after him harshly, “You’d better stick around. He wants to talk to you.”
Haberman wanted to whirl around and say. No kidding, you idiot, why didn’t somebody tell me? but being in no position to act offensively, he retreated meekly into the newsroom’s rows and rows of empty desks, occupied only by the obituary writer, Alden Whitman, a reporter, Bernard Weinraub, and a young man on tryout, Steve Conn, a friend of Haberman’s.
“Hey, Clyde,” Conn said, laughing, “did you see that Brett Award in the paper today?”
Haberman said he had. Then he admitted writing it, and Conn smacked a hand gently against his forehead and groaned, “Oh, God.”
Haberman took a seat in the middle of the newsroom to await Rosenthal’s return. He focused on the silver microphone up ahead—a most intimidating gadget, he always thought, for most young men on the paper: they feared, after having turned in their story, the sight of an editor picking up the microphone and booming out their names, paging them to the New York editor’s desk to explain their ambiguities or errors. Just from the sound from the microphone, Haberman knew, a young reporter could usually tell the mood of the editor: if the editor paged the reporter in a snappy, peremptory tone—Mr. Haberman! very quick—it meant that there was only a small question, one that the editor wished to discuss hastily so he could get on to other matters elsewhere. But if the editor languished on the sound of a young man’s name—M r H a b e r m a n—then the editor’s patience was thin, and the matter was very serious indeed.
Twenty-five minutes later Haberman saw Rosenthal walk into the room, then stride toward his desk. Haberman lowered his head as he heard the microphone being picked up. It was the voice of Charles Bevilacqua, a low sad note of finality, M r H a b e r m a n.
Haberman got up and began the long walk up the aisle, passing the rows of empty desks, thinking suddenly of a course he had taken under Paddy Chayefsky in screenplay-writing, and wishing he had a camera panning the room to capture permanently the starkness of the scene.
He saw Rosenthal standing before him. “Sit down,” Rosenthal said. Then, as he sat, Haberman heard Rosenthal begin, “You will never be able to write for this newspaper again.”
Haberman now accepted the reality of it, and yet made one final attempt at reminding Rosenthal of the work he had done from City College, the many exclusives and features, and Rosenthal cut him off: “ ’Yes, and that’s why you acted like a fool—I had backed you, and written memos about you, and you could have been on staff in a year or two.… You made me look like a jackass. You made The Times look like a jackass …”
There was silence. Then, his voice softening and becoming sad, Rosenthal explained that the most inviolate thing The Times had was its news columns: people should be able to believe every word, and there would never be tolerance for tampering. Further, Rosenthal said, if Haberman were pardoned, the discipline of the entire staff, the younger men and the established reporters, would suffer—any one of them could err and then say, “Well, Haberman got away with it.”
There was a pause, and in this time Rosenthal’s voice shifted to yet another mood—optimism for Haberman, not on The Times but somewhere else. Haberman had talent, Rosenthal said, and now it was a question of accepting the fact that it was all over with the Gray Lady and moving on determinedly to make the grade somewhere else.
Rosenthal talked with him for another five minutes, warmly and enthusiastically; then the two men stood up, and shook hands. Haberman walked back, shaken, to a desk to type out his resignation. Rosenthal had given him the option of doing this so that he would not have officially been fired. Rosenthal had discussed this point an hour before with Clifton Daniel, and also with Emanuel Freedman, an assistant managing editor, and Richard D. Burritt, the personnel specialist, and they all agreed to accept the resignation as soon as Haberman could type it out.
Having done so, and after handing it in, Haberman was aware that other people in the newsroom were now watching him; he felt a strange sensation of being in a warm spotlight. He did not linger. He quickly collected some papers in a manila folder, tucked it under his arm, and walked out of the newsroom and through the lobby toward the elevators. He stood there momentarily, then heard his name being called by Arthur Gelb, who had come running, saying, “Clyde, wait.”
Haberman had never particularly liked Gelb, having been influenced by the Old Guard’s view; but now Gelb was deeply concerned about Haberman, and he reassured the young man that the world was not over, that there were brighter days ahead. Haberman thanked him and was very moved by Gelb’s concern.
Then Haberman rode the elevator down to the first floor, not pausing as he passed the stern statue of Adolph Ochs in the lobby, nor stopping to talk with the few friends he met coming through the revolving door. He would return to City College for his final session in the fall, and then after graduation worry about what would happen next. He might work briefly for another newspaper, and then he would probably have to serve for two years in the Army.
The next day there was a “correction” in The Times, only a single paragraph. Yet it reaffirmed that there were a few things that had not changed in the slightest at The Times. The paragraph, written by Clifton Daniel, read:
In Wednesday’s issue, The New York Times published a list of prizes and awards presented at the City College commencement. Included was a “Brett Award.” There is no such award. It was put in as a reporter’s prank. The Times regrets the publication of this fictitious item.
Despite the occasional tension and shifting, the revitalization that Catledge had wanted in the newsroom was being supplied by Rosenthal and Gelb, and one result of all the chasing, writing, and rewriting was the disappearance of the late-afternoon card game. Another was the traditional “good-night,” inasmuch as Rosenthal did not care when his reporters came and went, so long as they got the story. A third result was that the national and foreign staffs, once so superior to New York’s, were now beginning to feel intensified pressure and competition for space on page one. On some mornings, The Times’ front page would carry five or six stories that had been produced by the New York staff, while the national and foreign staffs would each have three or four. During the early evenings, after the stories had been turned in and were being edited or set in type, Rosenthal and Gelb would wait for the layout sheets that would show which stories had been selected by the bullpen for page one, and if there were five or more by the New York staff, Rosenthal and Gelb would leave the office in a triumphant mood. Once when Rosenthal had left the office before seeing the layouts, he telephoned a subordinate editor and was told that five stories had made it. But moments after Rosenthal had hung up, the subordinate editor received a revised layout showing that two New York stories had been replaced by late-breaking stories from out of town. The editor, upset, walked over to the bullpen carrying the revised layout and said, “Look, I already told Abe we had five stories on page one.”
“Well,” one bullpen editor replied casually, “you now have three.”
“Yes,” the New York man said quickly, “and what’s Abe going to say about that?”
“You mean Abe is going to get mad at you?”
“Well,” the New York man said tentatively, “you know Abe.”
Perhaps no editor in the newsroom felt the pressure of the New York desk more than Claude Sitton, the forty-year-old national-news editor. It was unlike anything he had known during his grueling years as a reporter, a period during which he had been away from home about twenty days a month, working sometimes twenty hours a day while traveling through his native South covering the Civil Rights movement. He had then aroused the contempt of the Klan and other racists with his reporting, had braved the dogs and harassment of Chief “Bull” Connor in Birmingham, had once been thrown out of a store in Mississippi by one of Catledge’s kin. As a reward for his work, and with Catledge’s blessing. Sitton had been brought back to New York in 1964 and made the national-news editor, succeeding Harrison Salisbury, who had been promoted to assistant managing editor.
But the emergence of Rosenthal and Gelb, and the shadow of Salisbury, had introduced Sitton to challenges that were occasionally more aggravating than any open animosity he had felt in the rural South. He had known that it would not be easy as Salisbury’s successor. Salisbury had been enormously energetic—an individual of great prestige and persuasion. But Sitton had not fully anticipated the interoffice competitiveness that went with the job, the barely perceptible but nonetheless real and constant crosscurrent of tension that seemed to exist between the desk that Salisbury had just vacated to Sitton, and the one occupied by Rosenthal across the room. It was as if Salisbury, despite his elevation, was still anxious that his old bailiwick, the national staff, not fall behind the fast pace being set by Rosenthal, and Sitton was immediately caught in the middle. There seemed little doubt that Salisbury was not Rosenthal’s favorite person, and the driving personalities that they both possessed often enabled them to see things only one way, their own way; and the divergent backgrounds from which they came, the totality of their experiences at home and abroad, their egos and ambitions, the way they saw the world, seemed destined to keep them apart both socially and philosophically—Rosenthal, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia, the correspondent who had been banished from Communist Poland, was more nationalistically American and reverential toward its American institutions than was the more sophisticated Salisbury, an almost stoical Midwesterner who had lived through the worst years in Stalin’s Russia, and had descended from a family of individualists who had settled in America more than three hundred years ago and had lived under a variety of political saviors and scoundrels that were often indistinguishable. When Harrison Salisbury, cool, overtly direct, seemingly unselfconscious, would approach the New York desk with an idea or an opinion, Rosenthal seemed almost to bristle. Salisbury appeared to be unaware of the effect that he was having on the sensitive Rosenthal, and he would be surprised, or would claim to be surprised, when hearing that Rosenthal had gone to Clifton Daniel to settle issues that Salisbury had not even known were issues.
When Claude Sitton became the national-news editor in 1964, he began to experience incidents similar to those that had arisen between Salisbury and Rosenthal during Salisbury’s last year on the national desk—differences that were not always due to personalities but were the result of honest disagreements over whether certain stories should be handled by the New York desk or the national desk. While stories from overseas uncontestably fell under the jurisdiction of the foreign desk, the jurisdictional boundaries between the national desk, which included the Washington bureau, and the New York desk often overlapped. The Kennedys, for example, were considered the property of the national desk, but when the Kennedys, after the Presidential assassination, divided their time between New York and Washington, and established residences in New York, the question of which desk was responsible for which Kennedy story was often debatable.
In 1965 the New York desk blocked an attempt by The Times’ national political correspondent, David S. Broder, stationed in Washington, to cover President Johnson’s speech in Princeton, New Jersey, because Princeton was part of the New York desk’s territory. In possible retaliation, the national desk refused to let the New York reporter who had covered Johnson’s speech make a trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to report on the National Young Republican board’s action on the New Jersey Rat Fink case. Instead, David Broder was ordered to Arkansas by Sitton. Broder wrote his story from there and filed it with the New York desk, and it was killed after one edition. Broder felt the rivalry of the desks in a number of his assignments and he also felt restricted by The Times’ bureaucracy; and in August of 1966 he resigned from The Times to join the Washington Post. At Clifton Daniel’s request, he wrote a memo listing his grievances against and impressions of The Times, and his view of its political coverage and the situation in the Washington bureau. Broder’s typed memo, single-spaced, ran nearly eight pages. In it he described elaborately, sometimes scathingly, the frustration of dealing with the New York office. The morale in Washington, he wrote, was very low, and he chafed repeatedly at the editorship of Claude Sitton and at the general tendency in New York to overplay news stories with big names and to underplay trend stories or stories of a more analytical character:
For example, The Times front-paged my story about the Eisenhower-Reagan meeting, though nothing of significance happened there, but it gave routine, inside-page treatment to my carefully-documented, ground-breaking report that Nixon, far from lacking a political base, had already lined up almost solid support from the South for his 1968 candidacy.…
In general, it was my impression that Times editors had a certain few stimuli to which they reacted in a political story: Instances of extremism, either of the New Left or the Radical Right; political action by Southern (but not northern) Negroes; Kennedy stories of any variety. These may be the grist of political talk at New York cocktail parties, but, as you know, they do not begin to embrace the variety of concerns that really animate national politics.
… Bureaucratic frustrations. I hesitate to bore you with these, but they are so much a part of the difficulty of covering a beat for The Times that they cannot be ignored. Every reporter has his own set of horror tales; the only thing distinctive about this particular beat is that frequently you’re out somewhere alone on a story, and when you get raped in New York, your cries of anguish can never be heard. Examples: You file a “dope story” from Washington, telling how Romney is under heavy pressure from Congressional Republicans not to blackball Bob Griffin for the Senate nomination for a second successive time, and you tell how Romney’s impending decision on the matter bears on his presidential prospects. The national editor [Sitton] reads it and says it’s “too speculative, let’s wait until he decides.” When he decides, you’re off on another story, and all that appears in The Times is a two-paragraph stringer item, devoid of any of the necessary background.…
You’re leaving California two days after the primary to fly cross-country to your next assignment in Boston. In early morning, from the L.A. airport, you phone the national editor to tell him you have a California story you want to write, if it’s OK with him and the L.A. bureau. He says fine. You write the story on the plane and as soon as you land in Boston, you phone the L.A. bureau to check a couple details; the aide on duty there says nothing to indicate any conflict in plans, so you dictate the story from the Boston airport to New York. When you reach your hotel an hour later, you call in to the national desk to see if there are any problems, and you are told your story is being held out because L.A. has decided to file a Q-header [news-analysis piece] and there isn’t room for both. You protest but are overruled. Inexplicably, the next day’s paper contains neither the Q-header nor your story. Your story finally runs two days later and the Q-header never shows up.…
David Broder was one of many Washington reporters who had become disenchanted with Claude Sitton, expecting him to stand up to the bullpen and the other senior editors as Abe Rosenthal was doing, demonstrating the stubborn partisanship that had enabled the New York staff to make its strong showing. But Sitton seemed to have neither Rosenthal’s chutzpa nor his editorial leverage. As the national-news editor, Sitton presided over a dozen regional bureaus around the nation as well as the national copydesk in New York that edited both the regional stories and those filed from Tom Wicker’s bureau in Washington. When Wicker’s men became angered by the editing or cutting of the copyreaders, or by the imputations from Salisbury or Daniel that a certain Washington story had been inadequately covered, they usually channeled their explanations or objections through Claude Sitton, but they did not often feel that he was sufficiently sympathetic; or if he was sympathetic, he seemed powerless to avert the continued second-guessing that emanated from Daniel’s office, or from the desk of Harrison Salisbury, or from the bullpen. In the old days when the Washington bureau had such ranking figures as Arthur Krock or Reston to do its bidding, it had been accustomed to getting quick results, and usually favorable results; but now in 1966 it felt mainly frustrated, and it believed that Sitton was partly to blame, and Washington reporters sometimes wondered aloud over what had become of the raw nerve and toughness that had once characterized Sitton’s stand against Bull Connor and the Klan.
Sitton was aware of his image in Washington and of the Broder memo, and he considered both to be unjustified. Sitton was, after all, answerable to Salisbury and Daniel, and if they were displeased with Wicker and the bureau, which they were, there was little that Sitton could do about it. One of the complaints against Sitton in Broder’s memo was that, as the national political correspondent, he, Broder, had been refused the necessary freedom to do a proper job: it was Broder’s contention that the national political correspondent should have the right to visit any state where he (and the national-news editor) thought there was a political story of national significance, and that the correspondent should be in charge of that political coverage unchallenged by the regional bureau chief in that state. But such free-floating reportage was rare on The Times, being limited to such men as Reston and Salisbury, and if it were permitted in the cases of less-established correspondents, it could be dispiriting to those bureaumen permanently located in those regions. Nevertheless when Broder quit and joined the Washington Post, it was not taken lightly in New York by Daniel, which was one reason why Daniel had asked for the memo. It was not often that a political correspondent on The New York Times quit to become a political correspondent on another newspaper. The fact that that other paper was the Washington Post, the major competitor of The Times in the capital, added to the significance of Broder’s resignation, and he quickly became a kind of martyr in Wicker’s bureau, a symbol of its frustrations with the New York office. Xerox copies of Broder’s memo were bootlegged out of the bureau and were distributed through the mail to Timesmen in Paris and other foreign posts. Sitton, not knowing how much importance Daniel had attached to the memo, was feeling increased pressure from many sides. He was being doubted in Washington, was feeling the daily squeeze of the New York desk, was being pressed from above and within himself to meet challenges that were rather unfocused. He wanted to be fair both to the regional correspondents and to the staff in Washington, but felt sometimes that there were prima donnas in Washington who were incurably spoiled by the privileges of the past. He tried to live with their criticism, however, to work long hours in New York and to react quickly to any incident or angle that might produce stories for the national desk. He allowed his bureau chief in the Southwest, Martin Waldron, to spend several weeks investigating the increased land holdings of President Lyndon Johnson, recording the fact that as President Johnson had purchased new land in Texas, the state highway improvements were never far behind. Sitton also kept an alert eye on the daily activities of the Civil Rights movement in the South, his old beat, and he put particular pressure on a reporter who had succeeded him, Roy Reed. After James Meredith had been shot in Mississippi, and a wire service photograph of his prone body on the road was received in New York, Sitton grabbed the photo and scanned its edges, asking, “Where’s Roy Reed?”
In the spring of 1966, a novelist and biographer named William Manchester had completed a 380,000-word book on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It would be called The Death of a President, and would be published by Harper & Row. The Kennedy family had first approached Theodore White and Walter Lord to write the book, but both were unavailable—the book was to be an “authorized version,” and the Kennedy family would have prepublication approval of the manuscript. Manchester, however, agreed to the Kennedy conditions, and no great difficulty had been anticipated by either side. The Kennedys regarded Manchester as a friend—he had in 1962 published a pro-Kennedy book, Portrait of a President, that The Times’ book reviewer had described as “adoring”—and after being approached in 1964 by Pierre Salinger, in behalf of Mrs. Kennedy, to consider writing a book about the assassination, Manchester felt that it was both an honor and an obligation to history to do so. This was to be the book on the Dallas tragedy. It would be done with the utmost in accuracy and good taste, it was hoped, and would negate attempts by other authors to produce books about the assassination that might be crassly commercial or inaccurate.
So William Manchester, with humility and dedication, accepted the assignment in 1964. During the next twenty-one months, sometimes working fifteen hours a day, he interviewed hundreds of people who had known President Kennedy, had worked for his administration in Washington, or had been involved in some way with the fatal day in Dallas. Manchester had also taped two interviews with Mrs. Kennedy, during which she had revealed intimate and poignant details about her last hours with her husband, and her first hours as his widow. Manchester had also received close cooperation from other family members and friends, had received access to personal letters and other memorabilia. The book was to be edited by Harper & Row’s executive vice-president, Evan Thomas, who had edited John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. Harper & Row had published Robert Kennedy’s The Enemy Within, also edited by Evan Thomas, as well as other books by such Kennedy associates as Theodore Sorensen. Thus the publishing house, the editor, and the writer had seemed ideally suited for the production of a historical work that would be pleasing to the Kennedy family, and the first indication that this was not exactly the case was learned by Claude Sitton during the early winter of 1966. He had heard rumors from some of his sources in government, and had also read an item in a tabloid-sized monthly trade paper called Books, that Mrs. John F. Kennedy had requested the cancellation of the Manchester book.
As Books/October went to press, it was exclusively learned that Mrs. John F. Kennedy had requested Harper & Row to cancel publication of William Manchester’s official and candid account of her husband’s assassination, “The Death of a President.” Mrs. Kennedy has been quoted as having said, “If I decide the book should never be published—then Mr. Manchester will be reimbursed for his time.” Reimbursement talks have begun.
Top-level meetings have been held at Harper’s to determine its response to Mrs. Kennedy’s request. Should Harper’s elect to ignore Mrs. Kennedy’s request—the moral issue of censorship, $3,000,000 in international book and magazine sales, and future relations with the Kennedy family are at stake …
The “candid” details that Mrs. Kennedy found objectionable dominated the news and gossip channels for the next two months. The details were leaked to the press each day from both Kennedy partisans and the forces rallied behind Manchester—each side sought the sympathy of public opinion in its attempt to ban the book as an invasion of privacy, or to publish it as a testimony to truth. The book, it was said, contained scenes of the Kennedys’ last night together in Texas; Mrs. Kennedy’s thoughts following her husband’s death; how she had wrestled with a nurse at Parkland Hospital, how she had placed her wedding ring on the late President’s finger. The book also was said to describe tensions on the flight from Dallas to Washington, the bitterness between the Kennedy and Johnson factions on board; how Johnson occupied Kennedy’s quarters, how Johnson’s aides, while shocked and saddened by the assassination, could barely conceal their pleasure over Johnson’s takeover; and how the loyal Kennedy aides, namely Kenneth P. O’Donnell, had literally blocked Johnson’s exit from the plane at the Washington airport, preventing the new President from descending with Jacqueline Kennedy and the other close Kennedy mourners.
These details, and many more, were leaked to the press by individuals who had read, or who claimed to have read, Xerox copies of the Manchester manuscript—individuals employed in the publishing house, or within the magazine that had purchased the book’s serialization, or the literary agency, the book club, the law firms, the friends of friends—these people collectively became the press’s “spokesmen,” and for weeks their revelations and opinions dominated the news. Prior to the Manchester controversy, there had been front-page articles in The Times and other metropolitan dailies about a dispute in Washington between Senator Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover that Time magazine had described as the “Battle of the Bugs”: Hoover had charged that Kennedy, while he was the United States Attorney General, had known that the F.B.I. was using bugging devices to invade the privacy of private domains and conversations; Kennedy denied the charge. It seemed that a larger story might emerge, festered by the old hostilities of these two men. But then the Manchester—Jacqueline Kennedy affair suddenly mushroomed—and the Hoover-Kennedy story faded.
The New York Times’ first major story about Jacqueline Kennedy’s objections had been reported by one of Rosenthal’s men, responding to reports already published in other newspapers; it had occurred during a weekend, while Claude Sitton was off, but Sitton immediately asserted that this story was a national-desk assignment, and it was. To Rosenthal’s displeasure, Sitton took it over on the second day. Sitton now had an episode that could produce front-page stories for weeks—and it did.
Normally, the national-news editor did not have direct control over a single reporter in the newsroom; all the newsroom reporters were under Rosenthal. Sitton’s closest reportorial subject, geographically, was in the Philadelphia bureau. So if Claude Sitton wished to assign a newsroom reporter to an out-of-town assignment that was perhaps more quickly or easily reached from New York than from a regional bureau, or if Sitton wished to use a newsroom reporter on a New York story that was deemed to be of national political significance, as was the Kennedy-Manchester issue, then Sitton had to approach Rosenthal and ask for the loan of a reporter. Sitton would naturally desire the services of one of Rosenthal’s best men, such as Homer Bigart, but whether or not he got Bigart might depend on how Rosenthal felt toward Sitton on that particular day. If Rosenthal was feeling kindly, and if Homer Bigart himself liked the assignment and wanted to work on it, Sitton might get Bigart. But if Rosenthal was piqued, he might claim that all the top reporters were occupied on other stories and assign Sitton the reporter he was most anxious to get out of sight.
When the Kennedy-Manchester story broke, however, Sitton was very lucky. He happened to have working in the newsroom, on temporary duty, his Philadelphia bureauman, an individual named John Corry. Corry had been part of a team of Timesmen assigned to travel around the country, including Dallas, to check the findings of the Warren Commission’s Report. When Sitton took charge of the Manchester coverage, Corry was sitting quietly in the newsroom reviewing his Warren Commission notes—but there proved to be nothing very newsworthy in this venture, and so Corry was reassigned to the Manchester affair, a story that would influence Corry’s future career on The Times.
John Corry was a clean-cut, outwardly bland but pleasant man of average height and build, hazel eyes and light brown hair, neat but not fastidious. At thirty-four he was happily married, the father of two girls. Although he did not inspire confidence, he did not discourage it, and as seen by Sitton he was entirely reliable, solid, possessing keen powers of observation balanced by good judgment—Corry was not the sort who, wishing to call attention to himself, would overdramatize a story or distort it with clever or conspicuous phrases. But simmering within Corry, unknown to Sitton, was a deep dissatisfaction with the image that people like Sitton had of him. What Corry really wanted out of life, precisely, he was reluctant to admit, conceding that his ambition was possibly inconsistent with his character and probably beyond his reach. Corry wanted fame. Not great fame, just a touch, enough to lend a bit of flicker to his name, a few nods of recognition around New York—enough to justify the secret little outbursts of absurdity and wildness that he knew were within him, awaiting the slightest excuse to erupt. Usually, he suppressed the urge.
As a boy in Brooklyn, Corry had planned to become a minister. His father had been a bank clerk, rigid and predictable, an Irish Protestant antipathetic to most Irish Catholics, a man whose suit-and-tie to work each day were his mark of elevation in this lower-middle-class neighborhood. John Corry hated the place, the repressed existence within tight rows of apartment houses with fire escapes in front; he was happy to be off to Hope College in Michigan, run by the Dutch Reformed Church, and he lived in a boarding house with other students. One night after a house party, drunk and wearing only his Jockey shorts, Corry crawled down the steps into the bedroom of the landlady, through her room as she became hysterical, into the hall, out the front door, and into the cool night air. He spent the next three years at Hope College on probation.
In the Army, where he conveyed an impression of high discipline, he was trained for the Military Police. But one day, harassed by a young lieutenant, Corry became wildly insubordinate and was court-martialed. Later he received an honorable discharge. He returned to New York in 1956 and found a job as a copyboy in the Times’ Sports department, and soon he was promoted to agate-clerk, his concern being the tiny type of baseball batting averages and team standings. Within a few years he was made a copyreader, editing stories about the great outdoors—but he could barely stand it. He was transferred in 1961 to another long desk in the newsroom, the national desk, which was more interesting for him, although he really wanted to become a reporter, to get outside the office and see the city. On his own initiative he began writing stories for the daily Times and the Sunday Times’ Magazine that displayed an uncommon perception, and in 1966, ten years after joining The Times, he became a reporter. In October of that year, he was assigned to Philadelphia.
When Claude Sitton approached Corry with the Manchester assignment, he did not want it. There had been so many books about the Kennedys since the assassination, so much merchandising of the myth, that Corry did not want to be part of any more of it. Corry had greatly admired John Kennedy and had voted for him, but he also felt sympathy for William Manchester. During Corry’s visit to Dallas earlier in the year on the Warren Commission assignment, he had been cursed and threatened one evening by a mob, and he could imagine how difficult Manchester’s research in that city must have been, and he could understand Manchester’s anxiety now that his book, his years of sweat and total commitment, was being threatened with sudden suppression. A writer rarely pleased the people he was writing about if he tried to write with honesty—Corry knew this already from personal experience. On two recent occasions he had sent Magazine articles in advance to the persons being profiled, and in both cases they had tried to change what he had written. One of the men, Algernon Black, had carried his case to an executive on The Times. He did not get very far, but it was nonetheless unpleasant for Corry. The other man, the novelist Ralph Ellison, thinking Corry’s article hinted at Uncle Tom-ism, suggested that this might be grounds for a law suit. Ellison did not sue; in fact, he later wrote Corry a complimentary note about the piece. But Corry vowed that he would never make that mistake again. And yet had he been faced with Manchester’s decision, with the stakes so high and opportunities so great, he honestly did not know how he might have reacted. Perhaps he also would have consented to write the authorized account of the most dramatic event of his lifetime. Every word he wrote for The Times, after all, was authorized.
But Corry’s instinct was to shy away from this assignment and let some other Times reporter take it. It was a fine opportunity to move with the Kennedy crowd, to bask in the limelight, to get some feel of fame, Corry admitted, but his ultrasensitive side urged him not to take it. Claude Sitton, however, seemed to exude such Gelb-like enthusiasm for the story, such confidence in Corry, that Corry found himself reacting. There was a great deal of interest in this story, Sitton said, hinting that someone high up, perhaps Daniel, was personally involved in the coverage—and if Daniel were fascinated by this story, Corry knew that the space would be almost unlimited. It was the kind of story that almost every editor, and particularly Daniel, would be intrigued by, for it combined the elements of history and tragedy with high fashion. Corry deliberated momentarily, and then he told Sitton, yes, he would be glad to take on the assignment.
In the beginning it was exhilarating; he sensed the vast machinery of The Times moving and reaching across the world grasping for the truth. From the Times’ bureau in Madrid, a cable was sent to Corry stating that Mrs. Kennedy had called Look magazine’s Gardner Cowles during the summer imploring him to revise the serialization plans. From Washington, Reston had called Corry with a tip about a Kennedy pep rally in New York, adding that Senator Robert Kennedy was not really concerned about the book—it was largely Mrs. Kennedy’s doing, inspired by her horror of the death of Camelot, the killing of the myth. Corry later recognized these phrases in Reston’s column; Reston had apparently been trying out his column in advance on Corry, and Corry hoped that he had responded properly. Corry had also received tips and memos from other Timesmen around the nation, and he was constantly impressed at how smoothly the enormous organization seemed to be closing in on a single story—dozens of men all contributing to one reporter’s work.
Hoping to get an exclusive interview with Manchester before the other newspapers got to him, Claude Sitton arranged for Corry to board a cutter one day at 4:30 a.m. and ride it out to meet the Queen Mary, which was bringing the writer back to New York from England, where he had sought escape from the clamor; but now he was forced home by the rumors of Mrs. Kennedy’s legal threats. Corry had been up until 3 a.m., unable to sleep, and his usual nervous stomach was worse than ever. Corry arrived at the ship and found Manchester; but he refused to be interviewed, saying that he could not talk until after the difficulties were settled. Corry, feeling too sick to argue, returned to the Times office happy that he had only a small story to write about Manchester’s arrival. But then, without knowing exactly why, he telephoned Evan Thomas, Manchester’s editor at Harper & Row, and boldly said that he had heard from an “unimpeachable source” that Mrs. Kennedy was threatening to sue them over the Manchester book. There really was no “unimpeachable source”—Corry was only guessing. But with sudden astonishment, Thomas asked how Corry knew, the legal papers had just been served!
John Corry’s story was on page one that night, and he felt like a small hero as he walked into the newsroom the next day. The other reporters congratulated him, and asked Corry how he managed to get the exclusive. Corry tried to look knowing. Claude Sitton came by, smiled, and repeated that The Times was “going all out” on this one, and offered Corry more help. “What do you need—money, more reporters?” Sitton asked. “How about hiring a helicopter?” Sitton smiled again, but Corry felt that had he requested it, The Times might have given him a helicopter.
Later that morning, Sitton told him that the Kennedy people were planning a press briefing, and he gave Corry a telephone number that turned out to be Senator Kennedy’s New York apartment. Corry called the number, identified himself, there was a pause; then Richard Goodwin, a thirty-five-year-old former Kennedy speech writer, came on the phone and told Corry that the briefing would be in Mrs. Kennedy’s office at 3:30 p.m. but, if Corry wished, he might drop over to Senator Kennedy’s apartment earlier for a private session.
When Corry arrived at the address, a towering new glass skyscraper at Forty-ninth Street and United Nations Plaza, a doorman greeted him deferentially but firmly, asking if he could help. “The Senator’s apartment,” Corry said. “Oh, yes,” the doorman said, seeming to sense who Corry was, and he made a motion to a uniformed guard behind the revolving doors of the lobby. The guard, smiling, led Corry to the elevator. Corry was impressed that the doorman had not called ahead, which he imagined a lesser doorman would have done; Corry had passed some little test. He brooded about this in the elevator.
The housekeeper led Corry into a large room with big windows all around, some paintings on the walls, pictures of President Kennedy and other Kennedys on the shelves, a curiously unlived-in atmosphere. There were two white telephones with maybe six buttons on each, and several men were seated or standing at one end of the room. Richard Goodwin stepped forward, dark, big eyes, bad skin, looking like a hungover Italian journalist. He introduced Corry to Burke Marshall, a slightly-built forty-four-year-old lawyer wearing glasses, the chief spokesman for the Kennedy family; John Seigenthaler, thirty-nine, a rugged-looking Nashville newspaperman credited with helping Robert Kennedy dig up the evidence to convict James Hoffa; and Frank Mankiewicz, a somewhat stocky balding man of forty-two who was Kennedy’s press secretary, and a nephew of the Hollywood producer.
Corry began by asking Burke Marshall if he would help The Times get a look at the autopsy photos on President Kennedy, Marshall having represented the family when the photographs were turned over to the Federal archives. But Marshall refused and quickly shifted the subject to the Manchester book, going through the whole chronology—when the manuscript had been finished, who had read it, what Mrs. Kennedy’s objections were. John Corry listened, nodded, and took notes. But every once in a while he kept reminding himself, I am being told exactly what they want to tell me. But this was fair enough, he thought, and he found himself liking Kennedy for having such smart men around. None of Corry’s questions, even those he thought provocative, seemed to disturb the composure or patience of Marshall or Goodwin, nor to cause them to give the impression that the Kennedys were ever at a disadvantage. When Corry asked, “Won’t the book strain political relations between Senator Kennedy and President Johnson?” one of them said, softly and off the record, “Bob comes off very well in the book” and its publication would only help him.
Burke Marshall’s briefing was over within an hour, and then Goodwin explained that they were going to hold a strategy session and he hoped Corry would not mind going over to Mrs. Kennedy’s office alone while they huddled in the car. Corry graciously agreed. No matter how often he had reminded himself to keep his emotional distance, he could not help admiring their informality, their disarming way of letting him in on their little behind-the-scenes planning. It’s not me, it’s The Times they’re catering to, Corry corrected himself. These people wouldn’t spit in my eye if I wasn’t on The Times. He had to be careful with them, stick to the facts. Make one mistake in any of these stories, and these men will go right over your head, over Sitton’s head, and complain to Sulzberger himself. Still, Corry had felt very comfortable in the presence of these four Kennedy men. They had made his job easier, and he felt very relaxed around them. Perhaps it was Goodwin’s bad complexion, he thought, or the fact that Burke Marshall speaks in a squeaky voice and looks like a clerk. Or that Seigenthaler was wearing a checked shirt and a crummy-looking tie, or that Frank Mankiewicz was a chain-smoker. John Corry, now up to three packs a day, could not help noticing how Mankiewicz had nearly kept pace puff by puff.
Fifteen minutes later Corry was in Mrs. Kennedy’s office on the fourteenth floor of a building on Park Avenue. The room was crowded with newsmen, and against a wall were four gray steel cabinets with twenty boxes of envelopes on top, and on the floor were cardboard cartons, one of which, in ink, was labeled “Tributes for Library.” A small color photograph on the wall showed Mrs. Kennedy in the foreground, the President in the background. Mrs. Kennedy was not present at this gathering, but Corry noticed in the crowd Mrs. Kennedy’s secretary, Pamela Turnure, wearing a ratty cardigan, her hair limp, no makeup. Corry distrusted her instantly. Irrationally but instantly.
A moment later Burke Marshall walked in with Goodwin, Seigenthaler, and Mankiewicz. Marshall, presiding, immediately began to brief the press on the Manchester book. He presented the facts in exactly the order that Corry had heard them an hour before. Corry smiled. It now occurred to him that he had served as a dress rehearsal for this briefing. He was almost sure that, on their way to Mrs. Kennedy’s office, they had evaluated his knowledge of the controversy, observed his reaction to what they told him, and had gained from his questions a better idea of what questions they might now expect from the other newsmen. And it had worked. Corry’s questions were now being repeated by the other newsmen, and the Kennedy men answered with ease.
For the next week or so, life went very well for John Corry. His stories were on the front page nearly every day, and Sitton seemed pleased. Late one afternoon in the newsroom when Corry let it be known that he was due at a black-tie dinner party that night, and had been unable to get away from the typewriter long enough to go out and buy a suitable pair of shoes and a cummerbund, Sitton offered to send a copyboy out to shop for Corry. But another editor, hearing that Corry wore size 9½ shoes, volunteered to lend Corry his shoes and cummerbund, and a copyboy was dispatched to get them.
Corry had not yet gotten to Manchester, but he had gotten a close look at Jacqueline Kennedy during the past week. Having learned that she would appear at 1 p.m. in the law offices of Sullivan & Cromwell, 48 Wall Street, Corry arrived one hour early and waited along the sidewalk with a second Times reporter and a photographer. At 1:15 p.m. a new blue Oldsmobile cruised down the street—in it were Mrs. Kennedy, her lawyer Simon H. Rifkind, and Richard Goodwin. The car slowed down, but then Goodwin spotted Corry, and it sped away. Corry told the other Times reporter to run after it and see if they got into the building through a side or rear entrance. A few minutes later, the Olds-mobile came around again. This time it stopped, and Mrs. Kennedy stepped out, followed by Rifkind and Goodwin. The Times photographer began snapping pictures of the three of them entering the building, and Goodwin glared at Corry. The look was so expressive that The Times used that photograph on page one the next morning, and it was picked up by both Newsweek and Time and used again. The three of them marched past Corry through the revolving doors into the building, the wrong building. Corry had been standing in front of Number 50 Wall Street, not Number 48, and he watched the three of them in the lobby staring up at the directory on the wall while a cleaning man with a mop stood nearby, gazing at Jacqueline Kennedy, his mouth open. A moment later Rifkind came spinning through the door, squinted up at the building number, then went back in again, and then came out this time with Mrs. Kennedy on his arm. Goodwin followed. Goodwin looked at Corry and smiled, weakly.
Corry, after they had disappeared into the law offices, returned to the Times building, leaving the other reporter to patrol the sidewalk and get any comment that might be made after the session in the law office. The story that Corry wrote that day was typically objective and made no reference to their entering the wrong building at first, nor to the startled expression of the cleaning man with the mop. Corry was tempted at times to slip these little absurdities into his stories, but he doubted that they would get past the copydesk.
For no particular reason, and without his awareness at first, things began to go wrong for John Corry in early January, 1967. It he had to pinpoint a date of decline, he could not, nor could he logically analyze what was happening. It was just a vague feeling within him that things were not as good as they had been. The compliments were not coming, and he sensed that some Times editors felt that they had overplayed the story, and now wanted to jump off this merry-go-round that they had helped create but could not because the other newspapers and media kept it going day after day. Corry suspected that he was tired of writing about this subject, Times editors were tired of printing it, the Kennedys and Manchester were tired of reading it, and everybody was a little tired of one another. He did not know. But the second-guessing within the newsroom, he was sure, was increasing.
On the Friday before, January 6, Look magazine had sent over six advance copies of its issue containing the first installment of the Manchester book, and the Times’ editors sent one copy to Tom Wicker in Washington, who was to read it for political revelations; one copy to Gene Roberts in Atlanta, who was to read it for any data on the assassination; and gave one copy to Corry, who was to do the general wrap-up story containing all other details. The Look release date was 6 p.m., Monday, January 9. But during the weekend the Chicago Daily News broke the release, and suddenly on Saturday before noon John Corry was called and told to come quickly to the office and do his story for the Sunday edition. Since Roberts in Atlanta had not yet seen his copy, Corry was told to include any assassination angle in his story. Sitton then telephoned from his home in Westchester and told a deskman to have Corry also include items of political significance, but another editor in the bullpen later countermanded this. Then Clifton Daniel, who was hardly ever seen in the Times building on a Saturday, appeared. He withdrew to his office and sent out word that he wanted to read Corry’s story page by page as it came out of the typewriter. After Corry had written a few pages he received word that Daniel wanted something in the story, high up, on how the Chicago Daily News broke the release date. Daniel left shortly afterward, but later telephoned an editor in the bullpen with the reminder that Times readers would wish to know what, exactly, had been revised by Look in its first installment, and he also wanted to know if anything had been taken out of Look’s first installment and moved into later installments.
As these and other questions were relayed down to Corry, who was writing against an early deadline, he began to fret. Replying to one of Daniel’s questions, Corry quickly typed out an insert: “It was not known if anything had been taken out of Look’s first installment and moved into later installments.” But other requests for new inserts kept arriving—it was as if Daniel’s mere presence had made the editors more literal-minded than usual. After Corry had written that Look’s first installment “tells of laxity in the Secret Service,” there was a discussion among four editors, three from the national desk and one from the bullpen, on Corry’s use of “tells.” Was that the right word? Corry was too distracted to care. And he was also disturbed by something else. He had gotten a telephone call from William Manchester a few moments ago, a complete surprise after weeks of unsuccessful effort, and the conversation had left Corry very nervous and confused. Manchester had apparently called in response to a telegram or note from Daniel, requesting that he cooperate with The Times, but what confused Corry was Manchester’s friendly informality over the phone—he called Corry “John”—and Manchester’s conditions under which he would agree to be interviewed.
“Do you take shorthand, John?” Manchester had asked.
“No.”
“Do you take notes rapidly?”
“Average.”
“You ought to use a tape recorder, John. I have all these letters, memos, documentation …”
And then Manchester said something that left Corry completely stunned: he suggested that Corry tape their interview with a recorder, and then he, Manchester, would edit it!
“I’d want any tape to begin with the words ‘This tape is the property of William Manchester, and will not be re-recorded or transcribed’ …”
Incredible, Corry thought, incredible, mad, wild—here is Manchester, the persecuted writer and victim of Kennedy censorship, trying to do the same thing to me that they were trying to do to him!
There was a pause on the phone. And Manchester seemed to sense the irony too.
“This would in no way be censorship,” he said quickly. “It would just be to see if the names, dates, that kind of thing, were accurate …”
“I d-d-don’t know,” Corry said, looking at the clock, his deadline getting closer.
“It’s not censorship,” Manchester repeated.
“I just … it’s not Times policy to do that,” Corry said finally. Corry wanted to get off the phone, fast. He did not want to antagonize Manchester and ruin a possible future interview, but Corry could not commit himself to what Manchester was suggesting. Corry would never be that naive again, not after his experiences with Ralph Ellison and Algernon Black.
“Would The Times let you come down to the Caribbean for a couple of days?” Manchester asked.
“I don’t think so,” Corry said, contemplating the scene of his isolation on some island, with Manchester peeking over his shoulder as he wrote.
After a few more minutes of halting conversation, Manchester mercifully hung up.
The next morning, as the telephone rang in Corry’s apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan, Corry decided not to answer it. He was tired. His wife and children had chicken pox. He was disillusioned—this whole experience was distorting so many wonderful illusions he had once had about fame and power, and he had stayed up drinking the night before, hoping it would calm his nerves and allow him to sleep. It had not. Now the phone was ringing and he was sure it was the office. It was probably Sitton calling, Corry thought, and he let it ring four, five times. Then he picked it up. It was Sitton.
Claude Sitton, born on a Georgia farm, was accustomed to rising at dawn, and when he became a newspaperman he continued to live farmer’s hours: now he was enthusiastically telling Corry, who was groggy and unhappy, that there was some action in progress at the State Supreme Court—a Manchester-Kennedy settlement seemed near.
Corry rolled out of bed and took the subway to lower Manhattan. At the courthouse he was told that things had been delayed, and returning uptown to the newsroom Corry learned that Manchester and Cass Canfield, the head of Harper & Row, would read statements that afternoon at the Overseas Press Club. They had apparently reached an out-of-court settlement with the Kennedys.
At the press club, dozens of reporters and photographers were gathered around Manchester as he prepared to read his statement. Corry slipped in close and said quietly, “Hello, I’m John Corry.”
“Oh, yes,” Manchester said, smiling. Then, holding Corry’s arm, he leaned forward and added quietly, “Get to me later.”
Maybe he would grant the interview, Corry thought: Sitton would be very pleased.
After the statement, which conceded the settlement, Manchester refused to answer questions about the Kennedys or his book. Then, flanked by his lawyers and agent, he headed for the elevator. Once outside, Corry, assuming the air of one of Manchester’s lawyers, walked near Manchester along Fortieth Street toward Madison Avenue. He entered an elevator with Manchester at the Harold Matson Company, literary agents for the book, where he was told to wait briefly in an outer room. After ten minutes, Manchester returned and agreed to meet with Corry for an exclusive interview on the following evening, in Middletown, Connecticut, where Manchester lived. Corry thought of little else during the next twenty-four hours.
The next morning, Tuesday, January 17, the telephone rang in Corry’s apartment. Sitton. He said that The Times was thinking of using a long roundup story by Corry, a “takeout,” in the Friday edition. The “takeout” would run approximately four thousand words, taking up a full page in The Times; it would summarize everything that had so far transpired in the Kennedy-Manchester case. Corry, knowing the work involved in doing such a long piece, said he could not possibly do it for the Friday edition. The takeout also did not excite Corry’s interest now because he was looking ahead to the exclusive interview he had been promised by Manchester on this evening in Connecticut. Sitton was interested in the Manchester interview, too, but there seemed to be some confusion in Sitton’s voice—it was as if the editors above Sitton, perhaps Daniel, were having second thoughts about some phase of the coverage. Later, Sitton telephoned Corry a second time, telling Corry to proceed with the Manchester interview, and not to worry about the takeout for Friday’s edition. But, Sitton added, he hoped that Corry would finish the takeout by late Friday afternoon so that the editors could read it during the weekend. Corry sulked. He repeated that he could not do all the necessary work in so short a time—he had to be in Connecticut with Manchester on this evening, Tuesday; on Wednesday he had to organize his notes and write the interview; on Thursday, in preparation for writing the takeout, he had to check back with all the principals involved in the dispute during the last several weeks—the Kennedy people, the Harper & Row spokesmen, the lawyers, the agents, the Look editors, the people who could evaluate the political repercussions at home and abroad—he could not possibly finish the takeout by Friday afternoon. “John,” Sitton interrupted softly, trying to conceal the pressure that he was apparently feeling from above, “John, you’re working for a daily newspaper, not a magazine.” Corry continued to sulk, then hung up. He got out of bed and took the subway downtown. Soon he was riding a big Trailways bus upstate to Middletown, Connecticut.
The interview with Manchester had gone fantastically well. Corry had had dinner with Manchester on Tuesday night, had talked afterwards at Manchester’s home, receiving from Manchester stacks of documents and letters to use as he wished—no conditions had been set about preediting what Corry elected to quote, and Corry did not dare bring up the question. Manchester had seemed delighted by the opportunity to finally open up to a Timesman, to present his side of the story after the weeks of restraint imposed on him by his lawyers. Corry spent the night at a motel in Connecticut, had breakfast with Manchester the following morning, talked with Manchester through the afternoon. Corry had a great interview, he knew, and he contemplated the reaction it would get when published in The Times. As Corry sat in the Trailways bus bound for New York City that night, he was very tired but very happy. He had done his job, had gotten an exclusive interview with the most-talked-about writer in the world. At 2 a. m. Thursday, instead of going directly home after getting off the bus, Corry walked across Eighth Avenue to the Times building. There were only a few rewrite men and copyreaders on duty then. Corry sat at a typewriter in the front row and prepared to leave a memo for Sitton describing the extraordinary interview. Corry pecked at the machine but seemed to miss the keys. It was as if he were drunk, although he had not had a drink all day. It was possibly the combination of fatigue, tension, excitement. He finally managed to type a single paragraph telling Sitton that he was back in town, had gotten the exclusive, and would telephone him later in the day after he had gotten some rest.
Later in the day, Corry telephoned Sitton, and Sitton told him that The Times did not want the Manchester interview. The words did not get through to John Corry. Sitton repeated them, gently. There was now “resistance” in the office, he explained, to doing so much more on this Manchester-Kennedy thing. One big roundup story, the takeout, should cover everything nicely, Sitton said. No need for Corry to write a separate interview with Manchester; he could weave some of the Manchester interview into the takeout, which was now due after the weekend. Corry was despondent. He mentioned that Newsweek magazine was on Manchester’s trail and would probably publish their interview with Manchester in the next issue. Corry had heard that Newsweek was after Manchester but he had never thought of mentioning it until now. This tactic is common among reporters—whenever an editor is reluctant to run a story, they counter with the threat that another publication is onto it, and this usually frightens the editor into running the story right away. Sitton was onto this trick, of course, having probably used it himself many times when he was a reporter. And yet, there was the possibility that Corry was telling the truth, and so Sitton said he would discuss it with Clifton Daniel at lunch.
Corry called back after lunch. Sitton said that Daniel was still opposed to the idea of the interview. Corry quickly got dressed, appeared in the newsroom, and pleaded his cause in person—but unsuccessfully. The Times just wanted the takeout, Sitton repeated, adding that Corry would have to give equal space to the views of all the principals—there must be balance. Corry walked back to his desk. He thought of turning in his resignation. He had talked to his wife about it earlier in the week, and she agreed that this story was taking its toll and perhaps he should quit The Times.
On Sunday afternoon, January 22, Corry was at home organizing his research to write a first draft of the takeout. He had had several interviews during the last few days, and he was very tired. The phone rang shortly before 5:30 p.m.—it was the office. An editor on the national desk was on the line now asking Corry to please come into the office right away. They needed him to write a story for the first edition of Monday’s paper. An advance copy of Newsweek had arrived, the editor said, and it carried an exclusive interview with Manchester, and would Corry now cover The Times with a story?
Corry wanted to cry. He held the telephone away from his mouth for a moment, then rested his forehead against the butt end of the speaker, tapping it lightly against his skull.
“Go to hell,” Corry said quietly. He hung up. Then Corry called Sitton at home. Sitton called Daniel. Sitton then called Corry. At 6:30 p.m. Corry was in the newsroom at his typewriter scrambling through stacks of notes trying to carve out a story based on his earlier interview with Manchester. It was all very disorganized, imprecisely recollected in his mind, and Corry was forced to spend valuable time separating his Manchester notes from all the other notes he had collected during the week. Later Sitton appeared in the office. A six-column hole had been opened up in the paper by the bullpen. Corry was told that after his first-edition story was completed, he could then write more expansively for the second edition—that would be the takeout. Corry said that he could not do it. There must have been something in his manner at that moment; nobody argued with him.
He wrote a first-edition story of a column and a half, about 1,100 words, and then Sitton told him that a “hard” lead was needed for the second-edition story. Sitton suggested something that had appeared near the bottom of Corry’s first-edition story—Senator Kennedy’s telling Manchester to “shred and emasculate” the manuscript so that Look could not print it. Corry began his second-edition story with this in the lead, but later an editor in the bullpen came over to ask Corry if “shred” meant that Senator Kennedy had wanted Manchester to literally tear the manuscript to pieces. Corry, numb, said no it did not mean that.
He continued typing, completing a two-and-one-half column story, about two thousand words, in time for the second edition. It quoted Manchester, related the author’s sadness that a controversy had arisen through a misunderstanding—it was a case of too many people becoming involved, of emotions gone rampant—but Corry could not properly convey all that he had hoped in this story. The story was out of focus, badly organized, awful, he thought. And the next morning when he reread the story on page one, Corry was sure that it was awful. But this did not really upset him. He was so tired, beaten, it was all so laughable in a way, that he got out of bed on Monday relieved that the nightmare was over, and, by rote, continued his research on the takeout. He had an interview with Evan Thomas at Harper & Row; Thomas sat with his lawyer, Nancy Wechsler, on one side, and his publicity man, Stuart Harris, on the other. Corry heard Thomas say, “I’m deeply distressed by all that’s happened,” and then Thomas turned to his lawyer and asked, “It is all right if I say that, Nancy?” Corry wrote this in his notes, thought it was funny, but did not smile.
He returned to the office that afternoon. Sitton came over, put an arm around Corry, and suggested that Corry write a follow story on the Manchester interview. Corry said he did not know how to do it. The next day, Tuesday, Corry was asked to do a short piece about the Kennedy dispute with Look. Corry tried, but could not get past the third page. Corry’s first lead was returned, not “hard” enough. His second lead was rejected, so was his third. Sitton spoke to Daniel. It was decided to hold off and give Corry another day on the story. The next day, Wednesday, Corry appeared and began the story with the first lead that had been rejected the day before. He had kept a carbon and copied it word for word. It got through.
Then Corry resumed work on his takeout. At the end of the week, he had finished it. It had grown to six columns in length, and he finished it on Friday, determined to stay out of the office the rest of the weekend and let the editors do whatever they wanted with it. Corry went home. On Saturday, the phone rang. It was the office with many questions on his takeout, and he was asked to return and to help answer them. When he arrived, he saw that there were between thirty and forty questions to be replied to: Claude Sitton had written some questions on the margin of the piece, and Clifton Daniel had answered some of the questions himself just below. Eerie, Corry thought—here are two top editors writing notes to themselves on the margin of my story. Here was Sitton’s handwriting in the margin asking, “Why did Life get two copies of the manuscript?” and below it Daniel had written, “Because one of their editors was sick and wanted to read it at home.” On another spot Sitton asked, “Why did Kennedy call Harding?” and Daniel answered below, “Because Harding is the general counsel.”
On Sunday afternoon, Corry was asked to come into the office again. Daniel had requested that the galley proofs be sent to his home. He had a few more questions. So did Sitton. On Monday, the takeout appeared in The Times. Corry read it. Deadly dull, Corry thought, shaking his head, deadly, deadly dull.
Corry thought that he had to get away, now, far away. He conveyed this to Sitton, who gave Corry five weeks off. Corry had meanwhile received a call from a book publisher, Putnam, asking Corry to write a book about Manchester’s book. Corry was intrigued, although he was quite literally sick of the story. He had kept a little diary of sorts during the past several weeks, a therapeutic dodge to release some of the venom that The Times would never print. Yes, Corry finally said, he would be glad to do the book. He saw it as an opportunity to write something that he had so far been unable to write, and which might say something about America in the Sixties, its fascination with glamour and trivia, its vulgar commercialism, its hypocrisy. So he signed a contract with Putnam, and left word with his wife that he would be unavailable for the next five weeks. He moved to another apartment within the same building on West End Avenue, an apartment temporarily vacated by a couple visiting Corpus Christi, and Corry began his book. He flipped through his diary and his stacks of notes accumulated during the long assignment. He reread his comments, his day-by-day experiences. Here was a copy of Seigenthaler’s telegram to Turner Catledge complaining about one of Corry’s stories, and here were memos on telephone talks that he had had with Richard Goodwin and assorted lawyers, with friends of friends and political tipsters with axes to grind. Here was a comment he had made about Mrs. John F. Kennedy, doubting that she really wanted privacy, but rather enjoyed playing at it—liked appearing in the smart ski resorts, on yachts in the Mediterranean, titillating the papparazzi. The press was as much to blame, Corry conceded, including The Times; the press built her up, we built her up, and so did the fashion magazines photographing her in every mood, and peddling pillbox hats and bouffant hairdos through the advertising—everybody had a piece of the action, it was a very big business, and I am now part of it. This book he was beginning, he agreed, was part of the whole scheme. Okay, Corry thought, so how do I begin?
At first he planned to begin the book in the form of an open letter to his younger daughter, Janet, not yet one year old. Many years from now she might like to know about the ridiculous fuss made over this episode—but on second thought, Corry did not really want to get his daughter involved, did not want to begin the book “Dear Janet.” It was an invasion of her privacy, he thought, and as he thought this he was amused. Yes, here I am, part of possibly the biggest invasion of privacy of all time; I am taking advantage of it, making money off Jacqueline Kennedy, parlaying Manchester’s misery into a book of my own; but when my privacy is concerned, or that of my daughter, I behave as badly as the others. I am no better, Corry conceded: but who said I was better? he asked. So he tore up his first page, put another piece of paper into his typewriter, and began his book again.
John Corry’s book, The Manchester Affair, would not become the big best seller that Manchester’s own book was destined to be, but Corry would receive respectful reviews, would make some money, and would derive professional satisfaction from seeing his work between hard covers. After finishing the manuscript, Corry thought that he had gotten the whole journalistic nightmare out of his system, and he returned to The Times. But the thought of resuming his career in the Philadelphia bureau filled him with gloom. He also discovered that he was no longer enthusiastic about newspaper reporting. He seemed stricken with inertia, confusion, conflicting values. He did not know precisely what was wrong; he merely felt that he was changed from what he had been.
He confessed this sense of confusion to Sitton, and Sitton was very concerned. Soon Corry was in Clifton Daniel’s office, seated across the desk from the managing editor, and Daniel also seemed troubled and sympathetic.
“What would you like to do on The New York Times?” Daniel asked, as if Corry had his pick of any job.
“Well,” Corry said, thinking about it, “nothing, really.”
“What does that mean?” Daniel asked.
“Well,” Corry said, “I … I can go back to the copydesk.”
Daniel looked at him, curiously. Then Daniel, trying to relate to Corry, recalled his own despondency during his assignment in Russia in 1954, his last tour as a foreign correspondent before returning home and meeting Margaret Truman; Daniel remembered his loneliness as a forty-year-old bachelor in Moscow, how fatigued he had become from overwork, how ill he had been from an ulcer … and Daniel wondered if Corry might also be physically ill. Before Corry could reply, Daniel was saying that he wanted Corry to go up to the thirteenth floor and visit The Times’ Dr. Goldstein—Daniel himself picked up the phone, making the appointment. Corry, thanking Daniel, left the office and took the elevator to the medical department. Dr. Goldstein was waiting for him, smiling, reassuring, saying to Corry, “I’d like you to meet our Dr. Hess.”
“Who?” Corry asked.
“He’ll talk to you,” Dr. Goldstein said, guiding Corry softly toward another office, and it suddenly occurred to Corry that Dr. Hess must be The Times’ psychiatrist.
“Is Dr. Hess a psychiatrist?” Corry asked, in a voice rising with suspicion, but Dr. Goldstein seemed not to hear the question—he merely said, comfortingly, “Dr. Hess is a wonderful man … some of our top executives see Dr. Hess.…”
After seeing Dr. Hess, John Corry was apparently discovered to be in working order. He returned to the newsroom, but he felt no better than before. He continued to resist the Philadelphia bureau, and it was eventually agreed that he could remain in New York, working once again as a deskman. For the next several months Corry worked quietly in the newsroom, writing on rare occasions—one notable exception being a long profile on Cardinal Spellman for Harper’s magazine. Then one day, John Corry’s feeling of indecisiveness left him as inexplicably as it had come—suddenly he wanted to write long pieces of more depth and emotion than he thought was permissible on a newspaper. When he received a contract to write for Harper’s, Corry thought that this might be the challenge and the change that he had been seeking; and so deciding to find out, he summoned the courage and he resigned from The Times.