A month before leaving London, the mail brought a letter from James Reston. His name was typed on the envelope under fancy lettering that said “The New York Times Washington Bureau.” It was a thrilling envelope to look at, and I spent a lot of time enjoying the pleasure of looking at it before slitting it open. Getting a letter from James Reston was even more exciting than getting a letter from James Cagney would have been. I didn’t want to spoil it by opening it too soon and discovering it was only a form letter asking for ten dollars to help support the Old Reporters’ Home.
Scotty Reston was the most exciting man in American journalism. I didn’t know much about The New York Times, but I knew that much. Like everybody in journalism, I knew he was called Scotty because Scotland was where he was born. I knew his parents brought him to America briefly in infancy, then took him back to Scotland until he was eleven years old, knew he’d gone to a Big Ten college somewhere in the Middle West, knew he played golf, knew he had worked for the Cincinnati Reds baseball team.
All this had been in the news magazines recently when the Times made him chief of its Washington bureau. He was journalism’s shining new star, the man of the future at The New York Times, and, so, a celebrity whose career had been reported as fully as an up-and-coming politician’s. Even in faraway London, heavily absorbed in myself, I’d been excited to learn the Times had given Reston its top Washington job. Maybe a new age had dawned at the Times, a paper where dull, plodding earnestness had become such a tradition that Time magazine referred to it with a reverential sneer as “the good gray Times.”
Good grayness was not my idea of what Americans wanted in a newspaper, and maybe Reston’s promotion meant the Times was tired of it, too. With people like Buck Dorsey taking over at the Sun and Scotty Reston moving up at the Times, things were looking up for the business. The stories about Reston suggested he had a romantic touch of the old-fashioned, swashbuckling, cutthroat reporter. He wrote a lean, punchy English that was a model of clarity and spiced it with wit and sass. Like Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns of The Front Page, he had a zealot’s passion for scooping the opposition.
He also had a genius for saying a great deal in a tight space, as I learned when I finally opened his letter:
“This is just a note to tell you how much I have admired some of the dispatches you have sent from London. I was told that you were coming home soon, and I should like very much to have a talk with you. I don’t know whether you are wedded to the Sun, but, in any event, I should like to meet you when you get back.”
Interpreting this didn’t take much skill at reading between the lines.
“I assume he may be thinking of offering me a job with the Times,” I wrote my mother. “If so, I’d probably be a sap to turn it down, as the NY Times Washington office is just about the summit of everybody’s journalistic ambition. Anyhow it is flattering to have the Times approach me about coming to work for them. Even if it doesn’t pan out.”
“Flattering” was not quite the word I was looking for. “Eerie” would have been more accurate. After those boyish fantasies of being sought out by the Times, then standing revealed before Edwin as my mother’s avenger, if not “eerie” it was a hilarious stroke of irony. As always, my mother showed no undue excitement:
“I was happy to get your letter, especially the news that someone else has noted your writing ability. It may be just the break you need. Anyway, we will be knowing before too long.”
With which, she changed the subject. At times like this she could be infuriating. “…may be just the break you need.” As though she thought I still needed a break. She was maddening.
Here I was, sitting on top of the world, headed to the White House, publicly hailed by Buck Dorsey as the greatest thing since Tom O’Neill, a tantalizing letter in my pocket from the magnificent Scotty Reston, and she still thought I needed a break. It was impossible to succeed enough to satisfy this woman.
Well, she had been through the wars, and probably didn’t really ever expect any good news, and was afraid I’d be lulled by an early triumph or two and let ambition burn out too soon. Her letter was a way of saying, all right, things are looking up, you may still make something of yourself, but don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.
Her next letter showed that the old Depression worry about money still haunted her. It was all very fine, the fancy international travel, gaudy titles like London correspondent and White House correspondent, praise from big shots, all well and good. But what about money? She had obviously been thinking about Reston and the Times, but her letter did not mention it. Instead, she had E. P. Kavanaugh in mind. In my days as a union agitator in the Sun newsroom, the financial meanness of the Sun was embodied in E. P. Kavanaugh, the company’s business manager whose genius for making inflammatory comments had been invaluable for building union morale.
“While dusting your books last week,” my mother wrote, “I found a communication from Kavanaugh, in which he stated for the benefit of the union paper that, ‘A man who could make more money elsewhere was a sucker to stay on the Sun,’ and it occurred to me that you might do well to remember that statement in case you got a better offer from another source.”
In plainer English, I would be a fool to let sentimental feelings of loyalty tie me to the Sun if the Times offered bigger money. She made no mention of the Times as Edwin’s paper and the sentimental satisfaction she might gain if I were to follow those colossal footsteps in service to all the news that was fit to print. In fact, she had mentioned Edwin only once in all the dozens and dozens of letters she wrote to London. It was as though she were determined to stop reminding me of the Edwin connection.
The one slip had occurred months ago after I’d written her about meeting Drew Middleton, the Times correspondent newly assigned to London.
“Mr. Drew Middleton might be an interesting contact over here in case the Sun has nothing interesting when you get back to Baltimore,” she wrote back. “Did you ask him if he knew Edwin James? What a silly question, but I wrote it down before I thought.”
With three sentences, Reston had created a complication that was both delightful and painful. I wrote back right away. Well, I was not “wedded” to the Sun, but I was very happy there, I said, but…
I was full of buts, and they disclosed a mind that was already filling with thoughts of treachery to Buck Dorsey. Happy though I was with the Sun, I replied to Reston. I would certainly like to meet him, and would get in touch after arriving in Washington.
The voice of the secretive plotter surfaced in the letter reporting all this to my mother:
“Don’t mention this around to anybody as I don’t want it to get back to the Sun or get around generally that I am toying with the idea of going elsewhere. It might be a good bargaining point at the Sun, if nothing else, but I want to handle it my own way.”
It took many years for me to understand the bad conscience Reston’s letter caused me. Rather late in life, when my own children were grown, I became aware that when they were growing up I had not been a very good father. Not a particularly bad father, at least no worse than most, I suppose. Just not a very good father. At this time people were having smaller families, maybe just one precious baby rather late in life, and men were working hard at being good fathers. My own sons had children by now, and were wonderful fathers, or so it seemed. It made me realize how different I had been at fatherhood.
Well, there were a lot of possible explanations for my shortcomings. Children were plentiful in the 1950s, and you took them for granted, loving them dearly to be sure, but not giving them the royal attention children naturally got later, after babies became such rarities.
Then there was the tremendous prosperity of the 1950s, so different from the relatively hard times that overtook the next generation. The country was so rich in the Fifties. So rich. A typical American family could afford three children, a house, two cars, three weeks at the seashore, a television set, and meat seven nights a week, all on a single wage earner’s income. As in our case, the wage earner was usually the husband and father. I’d come of age in this astounding prosperity when a husband’s role was to go to the office and become a success while the wife’s job was to get the children born and smartened up for a really good college. Men from this world obviously wouldn’t give fatherhood the priority, the energy, the study, and the seriousness it required.
There were plenty of excuses like this, none of them quite persuasive to me. Then one day I had a letter from a man, a stranger, with whom I’d had a brief conversation. About what, I couldn’t even remember, but his letter got off onto father-son relationships and the rifts between fathers and children that keep them from knowing each other. Something in its tone produced a moment of inner light, a recognition that had escaped me until that moment. I wrote back. It was an extremely personal letter to send to a stranger, but of course it was a letter written to myself, telling me something so simple that the wonder was I hadn’t always known it:
“My father’s dying when I was very young created the obvious problems we all read about when we first learn to spell psychology. I first invented him, using little more than a handful of memories so fragmented they were like strobe-light freeze frames in the theater.
“Later I began casting about for surrogates. As I settled into journalism I took my father figures from the older men along the way—editors, executives, always authority figures, never reporters; reporters are footloose, irresponsible corsairs according to the newspaper myth of my youth. One wanted to be a reporter. They were the romantic devils. But one would not have wanted a reporter for a father. So I tended toward bosses.
“Rather late in the day, I realized that I had been a somewhat inferior father. Looking back on events, I realized that I had never been much interested in being a father. Of course I loved the children, but nowadays I see fathers whose lives are to some extent devoted to careers in fatherhood. They study the role, live it as a role and take pride in doing it well, suffer when they do it inadequately.
“It never occurred to me to take fatherhood so seriously. Though I had children, I remained a son while my children were growing up. Offhand I don’t know when I finally quit searching for a father. But I did, and I slowly and quietly realized that I had turned into the father figure I’d spent my life seeking, and that I wasn’t cutting a very good one for my children. I am still not very good at it. The role doesn’t come naturally to me. I feel like an impostor, and I laugh privately at myself faking it. Being eternal son was better.”
I was on my third surrogate father when Reston wrote. The first was Ed Young, whom I had loved immediately. He was father as best man in the business, the grown-up version of the father who could lick any other father on the block. The second was Gerry Fay, the father as dazzler, a man to make a son’s eyes sparkle with delight at his erudition, charm, sophistication, wit, and power to command other good men.
The third, of course, was Buck Dorsey, and I felt bound to him more tightly than I ever did to Ed or Gerry, possibly because the relationship had grown so slowly. It had passed through several of the stages common in father-son relationships. When I first came to the Sun, he had been fierce, remote Mr. Dorsey, the figure of ultimate power. He had been the teacher explaining how to do things right, lecturing me on good taste and bad. He had been the beneficent bestower of good things, presenting me with the London bureau. And finally he had become an older friend and companion who confided in me and might even be preparing me to inherit his mantle at the Sun.
About all this, of course, I was extremely secretive, never letting on by word or gesture that I had laid private claims on these men who, as it turned out, all had sons of their own blood and would doubtless have been irritated and embarrassed to learn that my respect, admiration, and affection for them were expressions of my secret yearning to be the eternal son.
None of the three, surely, would have been more irritated than Buck, who would probably have found it in inexpressibly bad taste. There was plenty of evidence that Buck liked me well enough, and even that he planned a bright future for me at the Sun. After “a long ginny conversation” with Buck in Baltimore, Brad Jacobs, who was to succeed me in London, reported:
“I learned nothing worthwhile except that he has a very high opinion of you. He clings to the notion that Tom O’Neill is the best reporter in the world but, with that one possible exception, he figures you for doing the best London job he ever saw.”
Yet, despite my feeling toward Buck, and his for me, it had taken only three sentences from Reston to tempt me to betray him. In business affairs like this, I later was told, there can be no such thing as betrayal, and such talk shows a weakness for melodrama and false sentimentality. Still, this father-son business in which I was secretly engaged made it painful to think of disappointing Buck by playing the ingrate and walking out on the wonderful White House assignment he had arranged for me.
There was another complication. As a gloomy Protestant, I knew that an unpleasant price must be exacted for all this success. As the time in London ran out, I began to realize vaguely that I had made a bad choice in so eagerly saying yes to Washington. Turning down Buck’s offer of Washington and asking for another year or two in London was impossible for a young man as greedy for success as I was. In the end, I would eventually have to leave London anyhow, and the chance at Washington might be gone. If you were going to make something of yourself, if you wanted to amount to something, you had to jump when opportunity beckoned. Still, I sensed that the best of times was over.
“It’s hard to realize that we have only six weeks left here,” I wrote my mother. “We’ve really had a glorious time and it’s going to be heartbreaking to face up to the fact that it is ended once and for all.”
The night before sailing, Mimi and I had a farewell dinner with Gerry and Alice Fay that lasted two bottles of wine too long. To make the dinner party, we had to suspend packing. When we got home after midnight, we were not interested in packing. When we awoke with throbbing heads, only three hours remained before the boat train left for Southampton, and we discovered we had far more unpacked goods than we had suitcases for. A desperate early-morning tour of secondhand shops around railroad stations turned up an ancient trunk at the last possible minute. We threw in all the unpacked goods it could hold, left the rest scattered on the floor, and at the last possible moment set out for Waterloo Station.
At the last possible moment we flung ourselves, children, and luggage aboard. The train was exactly like the one that had brought me up to London in the fog with the man who hated America. Now it reminded me of a thousand things I was going to miss about England, and as it sped toward Southampton on a beautiful June morning, Mimi and I drank a final pot of tea while feeling melancholy, uneasy about the future, excited about going home, and hung over.