As the Times’ managing editor, Clifton Daniel is often invited to deliver speeches around the nation, and whenever his schedule permits, he accepts with pleasure—he enjoys appearing at banquets as a featured guest, likes traveling first-class by jet, is soothed by the tidiness of terminals, the well-dressed people, the muted sounds of women’s heels and soft music; he relishes the two drinks before dinner served by winsome stewardesses who appeal to him not only because of their good grooming and precise tailoring, their pleasant smiles and desire to please, but also because of their almost ritualistic movements as they bend to serve, so graceful and controlled. They are America’s geisha girls, he once thought, flying back to New York after a speech in the Midwest, and then he remembered, almost wistfully, that he had never known an airline stewardess. A few of them had once lived above his apartment in London years ago, and he used to hear them at night, but he had never gotten to know them.
The speeches that Daniel makes around the country, usually concerning the role of a free press, are intoned in his style of cool elegance, and are followed by questions from the audience. People are very curious about The Times, and many of them get from hearing and seeing Daniel a confirmation of their own ideas about the paper, its calm posture and pride in appearance, the respect for its tradition and the certainty of its virtue. They get from Daniel the image the institution has of itself, which is not necessarily all the reality beneath the surface. For there are other sides to The Times, other speeches made by Timesmen gathered at a Forty-third Street bar, or Timesmen talking to themselves in bed at night that reveal the frustration in working for a place so large, so solvent and sure—a fact factory where the workers realize the too-apparent truth: they are replaceable. The paper can get along without any of them. The executives like to deny it, and nobody likes to talk about it, but it is true. And this truth evokes both sadness and bitterness in many who deeply love the paper, who have romanticized and personalized it, thought of it as some great gray goddess with whom they were having an affair—forgetting that no matter who they are, nor how well they have performed, they will soon be too old for her. She is ageless and they must yield to newer, younger men.
Sometimes they are replaced as casually as light bulbs in a great movie marquee—changed automatically, though luminous as ever, once they reach a certain age; and this act was not going unnoticed by Timesmen still on the scene. During the mid-Sixties they lamented the automatic retirement, while still in fine health, of Brooks Atkinson, the theater critic, and William L. (“Atomic Bill”) Laurence, the science writer; and the baseball writer, John Drebinger, who at his farewell party announced, trying to seem cheerful after a few drinks, “Well, if I’d known retirement was so great, I’d have done it long ago,” to which an executive responded, coolly, “Well, then, why did you give us so much trouble, John?”
Automation, together with the process of depersonalization, was a complex problem shared by big businesses around the nation, and yet at The Times there was a lingering notion that The Times was not a business, but a calling, and expressions of mockery greeted the half-dozen machines that were rolled into the newsroom before election night to do what the late Leo Egan and Jim Hagerty, Sr., used to do so well, predict the outcome; and there was contempt among the workers in the composing room for the technological gadgets that did everything better than men—except strike. There was irreverence in the newsroom for those items promoting communication without contact—the memos, the silver microphone; and there was perhaps also a realization among the top executives that The New York Times, which had long taken pride in being “in touch,” had now become so large that it did not really know what was going on under its own roof. Thus it was that Punch Sulzberger, reaffirming his faith in new techniques while striving to preserve something of the old Times spirit, announced that a team of trained psychologists would be engaged by The Times to interview a “scientifically selected random sample” of Times employees in an effort “to determine how, in this large and varied organization, it can establish greater rapport with the men and women who work for it.”
This move was considered absurd by some editors, while others, including Clifton Daniel, wondered what impact the employees’ complaints against such men as himself might have with the publisher. Daniel did not know exactly where he stood with Punch Sulzberger, or, for that matter, with the Sulzberger family. Daniel had been Catledge’s choice as the managing editor during the great shuffle in 1964, following Dryfoos’ untimely death. Sulzberger had endorsed Catledge’s nomination of Daniel as the managing editor, but Sulzberger’s concurrence did not necessarily signify personal approval of Daniel—nor was Daniel’s formal British manner likely to charm the informal young publisher, it being in fact reminiscent of the stiff Tory tutors who had once horrified Sulzberger as a schoolboy at St. Bernard’s. Further, there was the personality of Daniel’s wife. Ten years of marriage, the birth of four children, and her husband’s position on The Times had in no way diminished Margaret Truman Daniel’s singular concept of herself as an American princess, and she was not the sort who would ever indulge in small corporate games as a Timesman’s wife—paying court to the Sulzbergers, ingratiating herself with Ochsian heiresses, or tempering her strong opinions when in the company of those gently spoken women. Daniel, to be sure, was a model of correctness with everyone—with his employers as with his wife. He had sought to impress Iphigene Sulzberger with his attentiveness and courtesy, and hoped that he had. Recently he had begun a speech with her favorite anecdote about The Times being the product of “cathedral builders, not stonecutters.” But Daniel could not really know what the family thought of him privately, having never gotten close enough socially to perceive his status, and he had so far been unable to establish a direct working relationship with the publisher because Catledge was in the way. This was no doubt the most unfortunate aspect of Daniel’s managing-editorship—his benefactor, Catledge, after vacating the managing editor’s office, had not retired or severed his connections with the News department. Instead, while occupying a new third-floor office unseen from the newsroom, and acquiring the vague new title of “executive editor,” Catledge had proceeded to pull the strings from behind Clifton Daniel. Catledge could do this because he—and he alone—had the friendship, the confidence, and the ear of the young publisher. In addition, Catledge’s and Sulzberger’s wives had become fast friends, and the couples had solidified their relationship by spending weekends together out of the city, and by taking trips together to Europe.
There were times when Daniel felt that Catledge was sufficiently satisfied with the way things were going, or was sufficiently uninterested, to allow Daniel free rein. During such periods Daniel felt a pleasant identity with the photographs of the men on the wall—Van Anda and Birchall, James and Catledge. He felt confidence in himself as an executive, satisfaction in the reporters or critics whom he had hired, reassurance in the style in which The Times was covering the world. While Daniel often gave the impression of vaingloriousness and was unquestionably proud of his title, he also saw himself as an instrument of the institution, a good soldier, a loyal subject, and there was not a man in the building who was less likely to betray a corporate secret than Clifton Daniel. Catledge had recognized this quality of organizational loyalty in Daniel many years ago. He had seen it in Daniel’s performance as the number two man in the London bureau, had observed it at closer range during the years that Daniel had been a subordinate editor in the newsroom, after his return from Moscow, and in 1964 it had influenced Catledge’s nomination of Daniel as his successor—although the promotion was of questionable significance as long as Catledge continued to hover in the background. Ostensibly, Catledge’s presence was essential to The Times during this transitional period caused by Dryfoos’ death—the inexperienced Sulzberger preferred an old trusted adviser like Catledge to be close at hand—but Daniel did not know how long the sixty-five-year-old Catledge would remain, nor what would happen after Catledge had retired. Perhaps the title of “excutive editor” would be retired with him and “managing editor” would again be preeminent on the third floor. Or perhaps Daniel would become the executive editor. Or there was always the grim possibility that another individual closer to Sulzberger would be moved in over Daniel. Daniel could only hope that this would not happen. During his twenty-two years on The Times, Daniel had played by the rules, had never stepped out of line or gone over Catledge’s head. He had sulked on occasion, as in 1953 when hearing that Drew Middleton had been appointed the London bureau chief instead of himself, but Daniel had submitted finally to the wishes of The Times. He had conceded that The Times’ purpose was more important than an individual’s preference—he liked to think of The Times as functioning somewhat along the lines of the English monarchy: despite its variety of weak or great rulers, the monarchy had perpetuated itself from century to century, maintaining its formality and tradition and its predictable line of succession.
As a Timesman, Daniel had respected this system. It had brought him compensation and an identity with greatness, and it would hopefully continue to do so unless the system was abruptly altered by the young publisher. This prospect had not concerned Daniel during Sulzberger’s first two years at the top—Sulzberger had then seemed to be gently and effectively guided by Turner Catledge. But during the late summer of 1966, and into the fall and winter, things had occurred within the organization that had made Daniel wonder. Decisions that had seemed imminent were suddenly changed; there seemed to be a subtle shifting of attitude, of pondering and postponing from Catledge’s back office. It was as if Catledge’s regentship was now being counterbalanced by the weight of an emerging figure from above.
The plan to hire a team of psychologists under the auspices of an independent research firm—Daniel Yankelovich, Inc., of 575 Madison Avenue—to sample the thinking of Times employees seemed rather injudicious. Not only was it an open admission that all was not well within, but it seemed contrary to Times policy to permit outsiders to probe into the paper’s internal affairs, and it also suggested a lack of confidence in the paper’s own editors to analyze the situation and deal with it. There were other things, too, that had begun to concern Daniel. There was the continuing prospect that his chief aide, Harrison Salisbury, might be transferred out of the News department. And there was the unexpected survival of Tom Wicker as the Washington bureau chief after Wicker had been told by Catledge during the summer that he would have to relinquish the bureau if he wanted to take over Arthur Krock’s column upon Krock’s retirement, at the age of seventy-eight, on October 1, 1966. Wicker had agreed, saying that if forced to choose between running the bureau and writing the column, he would take the column. But then somehow, after becoming a columnist, Wicker had also managed to hold onto his title as bureau chief.
But what had most directly and personally perturbed Clifton Daniel during the late summer of 1966 was the abrupt dismissal, on orders relayed by Catledge, of the theater critic, Stanley Kauffmann, whom Daniel had hired eight months before and whose work he admired. Kauffmann had come to The Times from the New Republic, where he had been the film critic, but he had also had a background in the theater: he had been trained for the theater through four years of college, had spent ten years in a repertory company devoted to classics, had written and published plays, had directed in summer theaters and elsewhere, and between 1963 and 1966 he had been the drama critic of the educational television station in New York, Channel 13. Before being hired, Kauffmann had been invited by Daniel and Salisbury to the Times building for conversations about the so-called “cultural explosion” in America, the affluent society’s fling with the arts, and how The Times had responded to this by forming, in 1962, a Cultural-News department with a staff of forty to examine, report, and appraise the cultural scene. It had worked out quite well, Daniel and Salisbury conceded, but they were not entirely satisfied with some of their critics’ intellectual capacity or writing style, which was too often couched in generalities and glib journalese. When they sought Kauffmann’s own opinion of The Times’ cultural coverage, he said frankly that it seemed like a “cultural dump,” adding that it was also the opinion of the intellectual community, as he knew it, that The Times’ critics were held in very low esteem. He excepted The Times’ critic on architecture, Ada Louise Huxtable; its dance critic, Clive Barnes; and one of its art critics, Hilton Kramer.
Kauffmann could not have made three more appropriate exceptions when condemning the critics—Daniel and Salisbury were also admirers of the work of Mrs. Huxtable, and they had been active in the hiring of Hilton Kramer and Clive Barnes. In the case of Kramer, whose criticism had appeared in The New Leader, Commentary, and The New York Review of Books, Harrison Salisbury had seemed more knowledgeable than Daniel about Kramer’s work—although before Kramer had been hired officially, he had talked not only with Daniel and Salisbury, but also with Emanuel R. Freedman, an assistant managing editor; Joseph G. Herzberg, the cultural-news director; Seymour Peck, the editor of the arts and leisure section; Daniel Schwarz, the Sunday editor; and Turner Catledge. Clive Barnes had gone through pretty much the same ritual, although his employment by The Times had been entirely Daniel’s idea. Daniel, who had become an appreciator of ballet during his years in London and his friendship with Dame Margot Fonteyn—about whom he wrote his final Magazine piece in 1956 before settling down as a Times editor—had read and enjoyed Clive Barnes’s dance reviews in the London Times and the Daily Express, and thus began a series of transoceanic phone calls from Daniel to Barnes that led, in 1965, to Barnes’s leaving London to join The New York Times.
After Daniel’s and Salisbury’s consultations with Kauffmann, and after Kauffmann had made the rounds and made his recommendations on how The Times might improve its cultural coverage, he was offered the position of drama critic, replacing Howard Taubman, a former music critic who had succeeded Brooks Atkinson in the drama chair after the latter had begun writing a critic-at-large column. But with Atkinson’s retirement, Howard Taubman was assigned to write critic-at-large pieces on cultural affairs, although not as a regular columnist, and Kauffmann was to move into Taubman’s spot. It was agreed that Kauffmann would have the job for a minimum of a year and a half, but as one executive put it, the hope was that “this will be for life.”
Kauffmann’s career as a Timesman had begun on January 1, 1966, and except for minor complaints about his polysyllabicisms and elliptical references, he had received only praise from the editors. But as one who took his critic’s job very seriously, perhaps too seriously, Kauffmann was soon making enemies among a number of Broadway producers, performers, and backers. In several letters to the publisher’s office, and in visits to certain of the publisher’s representatives, they complained that Kauffmann did not seem to like anything, and there was the indication that even when he did, he could not write a selling review. Although this was not really true, a few Times executives privately felt that Kauffmann was a bit too ponderous and professorial about the theater: he seemed mainly interested in analyzing the play, examining its weaknesses and strengths, and did not create sufficient excitement in his reviews, a sense of anticipation and pleasure that many ticket buyers associate with the theater.
In fairness to Kauffmann, he had problems that no other critic had on The Times, that of being second-guessed behind his back by numbers of Times executives who regularly attend Broadway shows, who socialize with producers and investors in Sardi’s and around New York, who have an emotional interest in, and a conviction about, the theater that they do not have about films or ballet, art, television, or architecture. Kauffmann was also unfortunate in joining The Times during its transitional period when no editor knew precisely which way the new publisher and the top executives were leaning, and there was also the problem of the power inherent in the drama job itself. Unlike the movie critic, whose influence on the box office is mitigated by the fact that a film may be opening in fifty different cities simultaneously, the theater critic’s comments are directed at one stage in New York, and bombardment by The Times can possibly destroy a play’s chances of survival on Broadway as well as its touring opportunities elsewhere—unless the production is endowed with a large advance sale, or a superstar with great appeal, or with several fine reviews in other publications, particularly from Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune and from the news magazines and The New Yorker. After the departure of Brooks Atkinson, whose eminence and seniority as a drama critic had made him invulnerable to countercriticism from Times editors or Broadway people, The Times’ top executives had thought of Kenneth Tynan as a replacement, having respected his judgment and literary style in The New Yorker, and seeing him as a kind of witty, skillful surgeon who could cut without killing. The drama job on The Times, the executives generally agreed, was potentially a blunt and dangerous instrument in improper hands—The Times was fearful of the power invested in that one employee, and it was felt that Tynan might concurrently fulfill the need of serious criticism, responsibility to the theater, and entertainment to Times readers. But Tynan himself admitted that he could not produce his kind of review in the little more than one hour that was available to a critic on a morning newspaper; and Tynan was also anxious to be getting back to London.
When Stanley Kauffmann had been approached by The Times, he had raised the same point—there simply was not sufficient time between the end of the play and the paper’s deadline to write a considered review, and as a result of this discussion, Clifton Daniel had arranged for Kauffmann to attend plays during their final preview before opening night—the assumption being that if a play was not then in shape it could not be significantly improved within twenty-four hours, and it would also permit the critic to give more time and thought to the words that carried such weight with ticket buyers. Daniel had hoped that the critics on other newspapers would follow this practice, but they did not, and one reviewer described The Times’ plan as a confession of Kauffmann’s journalistic inability to meet a deadline. When Kauffmann’s reviews began to appear, the producers mounted their protest; but at first neither Catledge, Sulzberger, nor anyone else on the paper seemed unduly concerned. Times executives are accustomed to a certain amount of criticism of their critics: Howard Taubman had been condemned regularly around Sardi’s as a weak replacement for Brooks Atkinson; and even Atkinson had been denounced by producers on many occasions, and one of his predecessors, Alexander Woollcott, had even been barred from a theater after an unfavorable review. This had occurred in 1915 after Woollcott had described a particular Shubert brothers’ comedy as “not vastly amusing” and “quite tedious”; and the Shuberts had retaliated by sending a set of tickets to their next production to Carr Van Anda, with a note suggesting that The Times assign another critic to review it, adding that if Woollcott presented the tickets they would not be honored. When Adolph Ochs learned of this, he instructed Woollcott to buy his own ticket. Woollcott did, but when he arrived at the theater door he was blocked by a doorman and Jacob Shubert himself.
Ochs immediately sought an injunction in court and he eliminated from The Times all of the Shuberts’ advertising. The controversy became the talk of Broadway, was publicized around the nation, and was not settled in court for months. Although Ochs’s injunction was ultimately overruled—an appellate division contended that while a theater owner could not bar a patron because of color, creed, or class distinction, he could do so for certain private reasons—the Shuberts, wishing to resume advertising in The Times, finally conceded The Times’ right to select its own reviewers, and the bitterness ended with the Shuberts sending Woollcott a box of cigars at Christmas.
Ochs had made his point—outsiders were not going to tell The Times how to run its business—but this did not mean that Ochs was not personally offended on occasions when reading a snide or excessively negative review in his newspaper. Ochs’s philosophy was that of a booster, particularly insofar as business or community affairs were concerned; and since the Broadway theater was one of the major attractions of New York, he hoped that his critics would not fail to appreciate and applaud fine efforts whenever possible. In his final will, completed three months before his death, Ochs urged that his editorial page continue to be “more than fair and courteous to those who may sincerely differ with its views,” and he expected the same from his critics. At the same time, he expected them to uphold standards, and he rarely interfered with the publication of a review once it had been written. In Brooks Atkinson’s long career as the drama critic, which had begun in 1925, he could remember only one occasion when Ochs had personally approached him and asked, after reading an advance copy of a review, that a word be changed. This occurred after Ochs had attended the opening of one of S. L. (Roxy) Rothafel’s theaters in Rockefeller Center, an extravagant spectacle that Atkinson criticized for its gaudiness. Ochs, dressed in formal clothes, had walked back to Atkinson’s desk later that evening and asked to read the review, and when he did Atkinson could see a look of pain beginning to crease Ochs’s face. Ochs was a friend and admirer of Roxy, a remarkable show-business entrepreneur and the son of an immigrant German shoemaker—Ochs admired any successful man who had come up the hard way, and he could anticipate how distraught Roxy would be upon reading this review. Ochs said nothing for a few moments. Then very softly and timidly, the white-haired publisher pointed to a line in the review and he asked, “Mr. Atkinson, would you mind changing this one word?” Atkinson looked at the word and thought that its removal did not alter the meaning of the sentence in any way; it was such a minor change that Atkinson soon forgot what the word was: but he changed it, and then Adolph Ochs thanked him, said good-night, and left.
Ochs’s successors, while equally reluctant to interfere with their critics, nevertheless have shared Ochs’s booster philosophy toward the community, and when in 1966 the paper’s critics panned the opening of the new $45.7 million Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center, Punch Sulzberger was appalled. The opening featured Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, which The Times’ music critic, Harold Schonberg, found “vulgar” and “exhibitionistic”; the ballet within the opera was not satisfactory to Clive Barnes; the art on the walls was unexciting to John Canaday; the architecture was “sterile” to Ada Louise Huxtable; and the 3,800 first-nighters, which included Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, John D. Rockefeller 3d, and Mayor John Lindsay, were characterized by Charlotte Curtis variously as “overachievers,” “nabobs,” “moguls,” and a “mob.” When Punch Sulzberger had finished reading the views of these five Times writers in the paper, he exclaimed, “My God, couldn’t they find anything good to write about?” He expressed his feelings to a few executives, but there was no hint of restraining the critics. If he wished to temper a critic’s tone, or was otherwise dissatisfied, he would not lecture the critic—he would remove him. And that is what Sulzberger had done during the previous month, in August of 1966, in the case of Stanley Kauffmann. Clifton Daniel had learned of Punch Sulzberger’s plan gradually: first Daniel had heard from Catledge that the critic Walter Kerr, whose Herald Tribune had just merged with the Journal-American and the World-Telegram after a long strike, and who had not joined the new World Journal Tribune, was being considered for employment by The Times. Daniel was told to tell Kauffmann, who was on vacation in Connecticut, of the discussions that The Times had been having with Kerr. (Kerr was then in Austria participating in the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies.) But before Daniel could arrange to meet with Kauffmann, in fact on the very day that Kauffmann was scheduled to appear in Daniel’s office, Catledge told Daniel that Walter Kerr had just accepted The Times’ offer.
When Kauffmann walked into Daniel’s office, the managing editor was obviously shaken, blushing from embarrassment—Kauffmann had never before seen a man more acutely embarrassed, and Kauffmann began to feel sorry for him. Daniel said what he had to say as briefly as he could—Walter Kerr, having been offered the critic’s job, had just accepted it; and now, Daniel continued quickly, the next step was to find something else that Kauffmann might do on The Times. Daniel said that he would give thought to this over the weekend, hoping that Kauffmann would do the same. Kauffmann, seated across the desk, a soft-spoken man with gray, wavy hair, very dignified and controlled, had not reacted angrily; he was upset, but on this occasion he was Daniel’s superior at keeping up appearances. He was not even privately disappointed in Daniel, realizing that Daniel had had nothing to do with this decision, a fact that was perhaps almost as disconcerting to Daniel as the decision itself. Kauffmann was also not entirely surprised by the news. He had imagined that something was wrong when Daniel had requested Kauffmann’s appearance during his vacation.
Daniel proposed that they meet again on the following Monday outside the office, perhaps in the evening, to continue their discussions about Kauffmann’s future on The Times. Later Kauffmann received a telephone call from Daniel’s office saying that the managing editor could not get away for the Monday night meeting, and asked that Kauffmann come into the office. When Kauffmann arrived, wishing to relieve both Daniel and himself of continued embarrassment, Kauffmann said that he had been unable to think of anything that he could do—or would wish to do—on The Times; instead he proposed that The Times fulfill its contractual obligations to him, and that he leave the paper. Daniel nodded in agreement, and on his desk he had Kauffmann’s file from the auditing department ready and waiting.
Stanley Kauffmann returned to his desk, planning to spend the rest of the day getting his private affairs and correspondence in order, and then he received word that Catledge wished to speak with him. In the executive editor’s office, Kauffmann heard Catledge explain that the decision to replace him had been part of a “consensus,” and with a certain awkwardness Catledge added: “I was part of that consensus.” Whether the consensus had also included the publisher’s advisers who operate outside the News department—Harding Bancroft, the executive vice-president; Ivan Veit and Andrew Fisher, the two vice-presidents from promotion and production—Kauffmann did not know, nor did he care. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Kauffmann had felt no vindictiveness toward anyone as he left Catledge’s office. He did not now think of the paper in human terms, but rather as an impersonal institution. As an institution it had behaved badly, he thought; it had promised that his tenure would last for a minimum of a year and a half, and it had ended after eight months. He was quite certain that he would never again enter the Times building.
After leaving the paper, he regained his position as the drama critic for Channel 13 and returned to the New Republic as a literary critic and cultural commentator. He soon lost touch with most of his acquaintances on The Times, although after his pieces had begun to appear in the New Republic he received a complimentary note from Clifton Daniel. He also received one day at home a rather odd letter from Daniel Yankelovich, Inc., the research organization that The Times had hired to conduct its scientific survey on employee morale. The Yankelovich correspondence, which included forms to be filled out, informed Kauffmann that he had been among the 150 Timesmen chosen to give confidential opinions on The Times and its executives. Kauffmann was amused by this obviously unintended final note of irony. He was seriously tempted to fill out the forms and tell what he really thought. But this impulse soon passed, and Kauffmann never replied.
Tom Wicker’s position had also been threatened in the summer of 1966, and his survival as the Washington bureau chief was a strange reversal on New York’s part that Wicker was content to accept without further explanation. To dare to inquire into the causes of his good fortune might jinx its continuance, although he had heard that Punch Sulzberger himself had altered the New York editors’ plan that would have removed Wicker as the bureau chief while giving him a Washington column after Krock’s retirement. Now Wicker had a column and the bureau, and he often wondered if the controversial Broder memorandum might have helped his cause in some way.
David Broder’s lengthy criticism, written shortly before Broder had resigned from The Times in August of 1966 to join the Washington Post, had not only attacked Claude Sitton and the bullpen, indeed the whole New York bureaucracy, but it had cited the low morale in Wicker’s bureau that was the result of New York pressure, a condition that Sulzberger was perhaps not fully aware of. He had quickly become more aware of it, however, after Wicker had personally placed the Broder memo in Sulzberger’s hands while the two men were riding a train together between Washington and New York. Wicker had brought up the subject rather casually, “What did you think of that Broder memo, Punch?” Sulzberger had looked at Wicker quizzically. He had obviously never heard of it. Apparently Daniel or Catledge had not relayed it to the publisher. Wicker, smiling, told Sulzberger, “I just happen to have a copy with me”—and he pulled it out and handed it to Sulzberger.
The publisher’s interest seemed stirred as he scanned it, and he undoubtedly might have wondered why Daniel or Catledge had never mentioned it to him, although it certainly was not in their own interest to do so. It appeared that Sulzberger might personally look into the matter of Washington’s morale more deeply, but Wicker was not counting on it. Wicker’s optimism had reached a low point between 1965 and 1966, a period during which he had constantly been criticized by the New York editors for his handling of the bureau. Their habitual complaint was that he was not producing enough front-page exclusives out of Washington—Rosenthal was in New York—and Wicker’s executive career seemed to hang in the balance. It sometimes also seemed, however, that Tom Wicker’s competence or incompetence in Washington was really a side issue to something deeper, more complex—it was as if he had become the symbolic figure in a psychodrama that other men yelled at, a focal point upon which Times editors could concentrate their personal grievances and professional differences. Wicker himself was incidental to the cause, he was a tall, ruddy, hefty, ambitious, shrewd, almost folksy Southerner whose presence in Washington had provoked so much emotion and reaction among the other editors that they had inadvertently revealed more about themselves than they had about him. Wicker was a product of events, an individual whose career had been advanced by the reporting of the John Kennedy assassination and by the death of Dryfoos, the latter shifting as it did the balance of power within the newsroom away from Reston to Catledge, prompting Reston to vacate his bureau to his hand-picked successor, Wicker, and to withdraw mainly into his column on the editorial page, over which Catledge had no jurisdiction. Wicker’s appointment had been very acceptable in 1964 to the new publisher, Punch Sulzberger, who was eager to keep Reston on The Times; although the elevation of Wicker had hardly been pleasing to Clifton Daniel when Daniel had learned of it. It meant that Daniel—whose promotion to managing editor had been procured by Catledge while Reston was advancing Wicker—had been deprived of any role in the selection of his chief subordinate in Washington. In the two years that followed, Daniel had tried to limit his criticism of Wicker to the coverage of news, but Wicker could nonetheless sense an undercurrent of personal coolness, and Wicker could understand it. Wicker was Reston’s boy, a reminder of Reston’s lingering influence; and there was perhaps another factor that was of no small annoyance to the class-conscious Clifton Daniel: Wicker, like Daniel, was from North Carolina, and Wicker knew where Zebulon was.
Salisbury’s quarrel with Wicker was much more political than personal. Salisbury had become increasingly suspicious in 1966 of the Johnson administration’s self-righteous and optimistic attitude toward the war in Vietnam and American issues at home—the government machinery in Washington had seemingly become a manufacturer of illusion, and Salisbury believed that Wicker’s bureau had been derelict in its duty to probe and expose. It was not that Wicker himself was naive; since taking over Krock’s column, Wicker’s writing had reflected a growing concern in the capital over the way things were going, but Salisbury was less interested in Wicker’s perceptions as a columnist than he was in Wicker’s ability to push his staff toward a more aggressive brand of investigative reporting. Salisbury felt that Wicker could not do justice to both jobs, could not write a column and direct the bureau, and A. M. Rosenthal had agreed with Salisbury in this instance, it being one of the few things that Rosenthal and Salisbury could agree upon.
But Rosenthal had not been very vocal in his criticism of Wicker during the summer and winter of 1966, even though Wicker, a contemporary of Rosenthal’s, was the only man in sight who seemed to pose a threat to Rosenthal’s dream of one day becoming the top executive in the newsroom. This was all the more reason for Rosenthal to restrain himself, not to behave ungraciously or impulsively when it appeared that he was soon to be promoted to an assistant managing-editorship. Rosenthal’s image as a driving editor of the New York staff had done him no harm with higher management when he had taken over the staff in 1963, for it was then generally conceded that drastic action was necessary; but now, more than three years later, when Rosenthal seemed destined for a higher office, he was wise to refrain from any display of partisanship or derogation. If the older editors wished to indulge in it, that was their prerogative; but Rosenthal had more at stake. He had given up his writing career to become an editor, had forsaken the by-line and public acclaim—which neither Reston, Salisbury, nor Wicker had done—and Rosenthal’s goal was to eventually run the entire department. At forty-four he could look forward to fulfilling his ambition, if he did not foolishly incur the displeasure of his superiors in the years ahead. Within a decade or much less, nearly all the senior editors currently running the paper would be gone. Catledge was sixty-five, and within a few years he would probably retire in the South with his pretty wife and write his memoirs, as Krock was now doing. Reston was fifty-seven, and he had often indicated that he preferred living in Washington to living in New York. Clifton Daniel was fifty-four, and, without Catledge, his position on the paper would undoubtedly be weakened, unless he could establish a better rapport with Punch Sulzberger. Failing to achieve that, and if the Democratic party remained in power, Daniel might pursue—with a bit of help from his father-in-law—an ambassadorship. The four assistant managing editors—Bernstein and Garst, Freedman and Salisbury—were all pushing sixty, or were beyond it. Of the younger editors coming up, there was Claude Sitton, the national-news editor, who had had his troubles; and Sydney Gruson, the foreign-news editor, an epicurean who was about to accept a more prepossessing assignment in Paris, where he would take over The Times’ International edition, which Sulzberger hoped would catch up with the stronger Paris Herald Tribune, now jointly owned by John Hay Whitney and the Washington Post. Drew Middleton had been interested in replacing Gruson as the foreign-news editor, but Daniel had not helped him to get the job, endorsing instead a forty-four-year-old correspondent named Seymour Topping, a very efficient, very loyal organizational type who, like Daniel, had come up from the AP, had headed The Times’ bureaus in Moscow and Bonn, and had married well—the daughter of the Canadian diplomat Chester Ronning.
And so of the whole caravan of characters passing through the great timeless tundra of The Times in the second half of the twentieth century, none at this point seemed in a more advantageous spot than A. M. Rosenthal, and nothing would be less providential of him than to display signs of impatience or impiety, or to join in the chorus of dissent against Tom Wicker. Wicker was being criticized enough by other New York editors, and such criticism might have already been carried too far, having achieved for Wicker perhaps increased sympathy from Punch Sulzberger, and having perhaps given Sulzberger the idea that Salisbury, the troubleshooter, might more valuably serve The Times in another department—namely the Book Division, where the newsroom rumors had divined him, with Rosenthal moving up into Salisbury’s spot. Or it could have been that Catledge and Sulzberger, after deciding that Wicker should devote himself entirely to the column, could not find a suitable substitute who could take over the bureau without further demoralizing the Washington staff. Harrison Salisbury, who might have performed remarkably well in Washington, would perhaps also inspire mutiny. Max Frankel, a popular member of the bureau, was unacceptable in New York. Frankel had been described as “too emotional,” the executives having not forgotten his long letter of resignation in 1964. James Reston mean-while continued to defend Wicker, believing that New York, while charging Wicker with a lack of administrative initiative, usually failed to explain what specific big stories Wicker was missing; the criticism seemed too often vague and unconstructive to Reston, and he was not appeased when he was reminded that during his younger days in Washington, he had come up with numerous exclusives. Washington was a very different city in those days, Reston replied—World War II had recently ended, it was a world of emerging nations, news was more easily gotten. But now Washington was pretty much a one-man town, Johnsonville, and if Wicker were the sort who was merely interested in protecting his own flank from New York’s attack, Reston continued, Wicker could have focused each day on President Johnson’s movements and moods, the ruffles and flurries, and remained unconcerned with a more balanced, objective coverage of the capital.
Wicker himself had been deeply upset during this period not only by his own inner frustration but by the effect that it was having on his staff. The bureau, until Broder’s resignation had seemed to lend veracity to its complaints with New York, had considered itself voiceless, unrepresented, or misrepresented in the Times hierarchy. Reston had seemed to be building a stronger relationship with Sulzberger, as the publisher himself was becoming more independent, but Reston did not wish to intercede too often or too quickly for Wicker. Wicker was the bureau chief, the hope for the future, and Reston preferred biding his time in the background while Wicker attempted to deal with the bureau’s problems, to build his own relationship with the Sulzberger family, and to build up confidence in himself. Hearing from Reston, as Wicker had in July of 1966, that New York had decided to retain him as the bureau chief, had been encouraging news for a while, but the pressure from New York had not subsided. Two weeks after Broder had quit, it seemed that another Timesman, a man admired and respected, was destined to resign. This reporter, who had been covering the Senate ethics committee’s investigation of Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, had become so repulsed by the bullpen’s frumpishness and haggling that he demanded that Wicker take him off the assignment. In a memo to Wicker the following day, the reporter wrote:
I am sorry about having exploded yesterday, because you have enough troubles without my adding to them. I am staying out to-day to try to straighten out in my mind what I think I should do.
Let me begin with the treatment of the Dodd story, and then move on to what—it seems to me—it illustrates.
As you know, I resisted the pressure from New York, after the first Pearson-Anderson stories appeared, to duplicate their stuff. My position was that when the case reached the courts, or when the committee set to work on the documents, then we should go into it. I did not wish to repeat the allegations without having any evidence of our own, or supplied by hearings.
The first trouble we ran into was that mandatory kill of the Dodd-Klein relationship, on the ground that it was “potentially libelous.” This, after the allegations had been repeated in the plaintiff’s complaint. It took three weeks to get New York straightened out on this.
Now the bullpen holds up the story on Sunday night on the ground that we seemed to be “persecuting” Dodd.
First, I do not believe that the bullpen would have taken that attitude if the Washington Post had the story fronted. It would have had a message down demanding that we duplicate it.…
In any event I should like to drop the story and have no responsibility for it for the reason set forth below:
This Dodd story illustrates, in a small way but vividly, what seems to me the basic problem in our relations with the editors in New York, but particularly with those in the bullpen. This is that they do not have confidence in those employed to report the news, nor respect for the reporters’ judgment.
Let me give some instances that leap to mind on what were extremely important developments:
1. On the Cuban white paper in 1961, the insistence of the bullpen that the lead be based on an insignificant point, with the result that a totally wrong impression of the paper was given and that we were a laughing stock at the White House and the State Department.
2. On the Vietnam white paper, the mandatory kill on Finney’s first story, which accurately reflected the substance of the paper, and the substitution of a lead based on what Dean Rusk told Catledge.
3. On the Mansfield report last January, the refusal to devote a separate story to the report when the release was broken by the Paris Herald Tribune and the insistence that the report be inserted in a rather pro forma story on Dirksen. (We never did run that report, unlike the Post and the Star.)
4. On Bobby Kennedy’s first long statement on Vietnam, the resistence of Sitton to the importance of the story, overcome only after long argument about whether the clips would not show that Kennedy had said the same thing before.
We can make mistakes down here, and when we do, we should be hauled up short. But what takes the sap out of a reporter who is doing his level best to make the Washington report worthy of his idea of The Times is that all-too-apparent lack of confidence.…