That fall I took the train over to Baltimore for the last lunch with Buck Dorsey. On the phone I’d told him there was an important matter to talk about, and he said something like, “Why don’t you come over here and we’ll have lunch?” So I found myself back in Hasslinger’s looking at another martini.
I had become a two-fisted drinker. Like heavy smoking, it was one of the things newspapermen were supposed to do in those days, and I drank because it was the thing to do, not because I needed it. This day, however, I needed it and welcomed the martini because it was a drink that did its work fast.
While waiting for the gin to give me courage, I made small talk about the president, telling Buck what Eisenhower was up to and what he was really like. Seven years ago, when he was awesome Mr. Dorsey, I’d sat amazed in his office while he asked somebody in the Washington bureau what Truman was up to. It had seemed the most exciting thing in the world. Now I was telling him what Eisenhower was up to, and it didn’t matter, it was just White House lobby wisdom about Eisenhower trying to pretend he wanted the Republican Congress reelected despite the agony it had given him the past two years.
I was careful not to go to a second drink before I told Buck what I’d come to tell him. In the grip of the second martini, solid ground quickly turned treacherous, and I didn’t want to say anything false or foolish or maudlin.
What Buck expected to hear, I never guessed. Maybe he thought I was trying to get up the nerve to ask for more money and wondered why I didn’t come right out with a demand, the way Tom O’Neill would have done. He obviously knew I needed more money because he had got the company to give me a twenty-dollar raise on moving to Washington. Twenty dollars was a big salary boost for the Sun, but even that left me relatively poor compared to the London life with its easy expense accounts, office car, and $250 monthly living allowance.
Whatever he may have been expecting, he showed absolutely no surprise when I said Scotty Reston had offered me a job in the Times Washington bureau and I intended to take it. Telling it was painful. When I got it out, I couldn’t let it go quietly, but launched into a meandering, apologetic explanation: how dearly I loved the Sun, there was no newspaper to match it for excellence, certainly not the Times, it was the hardest decision I’d ever had to make, I hoped Buck understood that I wasn’t leaving because I thought the Times was a better paper than the Sun, or even as good…
Buck listened, poker-faced. He was a gambling man, after all. A gambling man didn’t let his face betray his mind. I was aware that I was babbling.
“Would a little more money help?” he asked.
Absolutely not! Money had nothing to do with this. I tried to suggest that if it were only a question of money I wouldn’t dream of leaving the Sun because a man didn’t walk out on the most important things in his life for mere money. There was a more compelling reason…
This may even have been true, but it’s still hard to know for sure. I felt so guilty about walking out on Buck that I had persuaded myself I was doing it not for shabby money reasons, but in response to a summons from some mystic power. For the first time, I told Buck about Cousin Edwin. Despite the family tie, I told him, I had never approached the Times and asked for a job, but now that the Times had come to me, I felt duty bound to fulfill a family destiny.
This must have sounded strained and improbable to Buck, because he didn’t take up the invitation to argue against the mystic power of destiny, but returned the conversation to a more rational level. He was flattered, he said, that The New York Times wanted to hire his people. They knew the best paper to look at when they wanted quality. It showed Reston had good judgment, and though he didn’t want to lose me, he felt honored in a way, because the Times was a great newspaper.
“Tom O’Neill says it’s the only real paper,” Buck said, “though I don’t agree entirely.”
It was the only time I ever knew Buck to be in even partial disagreement with Tom O’Neill.
We were well into the second martini when Buck made the only argument he was ever to make for my staying with the Sun. He pointed out that if I made the switch, I would be sacrificing a place near the top of the tree at the Sun for a relatively minor spot in a very large outfit. In a way, it would be like starting over again. It might be harder than I imagined.
“At The New York Times you’re going to be a little fish in a very big pond,” he said. “With the Sun you’re a big fish in a small pond.”
Come on now, the Sun wasn’t exactly a little pond, I said. It might not be a gigantic organization like the Times, but…
“The question,” he said, “is, do you want to be a big fish in a little pond, or a little fish in a big pond?”
We went to a third martini, and there was more talk about fish and ponds, but it didn’t change things, and Buck probably didn’t expect it to. He probably realized my mind had been made up when I phoned him. When lunch ended we were surprisingly clearheaded and making sense, though not having the good time we’d had with gin in the past. Finally we talked about when to cut the cord. Buck hoped I could stay on through Election Day to cover Eisenhower’s campaigning. I said of course and we parted outside on the street after Buck said, “If you ever want to change your mind, just let me know.”
I had known him seven years. He didn’t come back into my life until another seven years went by.
It was the tedium of White House vacationing that persuaded me to accept Reston’s offer. In our first meeting back in Washington, unable to make up my mind, I’d told Scotty I had emotional ties to the Sun and asked for time to think things through; then left Mimi and the children in Washington to get settled in a rental house off Connecticut Avenue, and went off for what turned out to be an eight-week presidential vacation in Denver.
There the White House correspondents were quartered luxuriously at the Brown Palace Hotel. Most of us breakfasted largely and leisurely on fresh trout, huge melons, waffles, elegant egg dishes, and anything else that took a long time to eat. Some golfed in the afternoon, some napped, some caught up on their reading. Bob Donovan of the Herald Tribune, a canny veteran of presidential vacations, worked on a scholarly book about presidential assassins. There was a pressroom at Lowry Air Force Base where the president and a small staff had office space. In the morning there were usually a couple of reporters waiting for Dr. Walter Tkach, the deputy White House physician, to give them vitamin B12 shots for hangovers. For professional company and the illusion of being close to the action, I spent a lot of time at Lowry playing fan-tan and Scrabble.
Day after day, week after week, we wrote stories about the president playing golf, signing bills, and reacting. Jim Hagerty made sure the president did plenty of reacting while on vacation. The president might not be doing much, but Hagerty kept him in the news by having him react to people who were.
IKE PRAISES STEVENSON E.D.C. STAND was a story that got me twenty inches of type starting on the front page. Story: Hagerty said Eisenhower was “delighted” with a diplomatic message Adlai Stevenson carried to France. EISENHOWER PLEASED WITH TEXAS RESULT ran for ten inches. Story: Hagerty said “the President is highly pleased” with primary election results in Texas.
There was also a regular trickle of presidential visitors available for interviews. Frank Leahy, a onetime Notre Dame football coach, came out of Eisenhower’s office to report, “I think every one of us ought to get down on our knees and thank God we have him.” Politicians emerged saying they had talked vital political strategy with the president. Generals came out declaring that the president believed in strong national defense. Vice-President Nixon showed up to give “wholehearted approval” to everything the president was doing in a congressional political campaign in which the president, at this stage, was doing nothing.
I used a lot of the Sun’s money wiring such trivia to Baltimore by Western Union. My first instinct was not to bother with it, figuring Baltimore could use the A.P. story if any of it seemed worth printing. All the other reporters, however, were sending at least one story a day, and some were sending two and three. It seemed sensible for a new man on the beat to do as the old-timers did.
The theory was that since the home office was paying expenses for a long vacation, you should at least pretend you were working. So you filed the trivial routine. If you didn’t file it, you wouldn’t file anything at all because there was nothing but trivial routine to report. When President Eisenhower vacationed, he vacationed with all his might and main. The story of this Homeric vacationing was quickly told:
The president and Mamie had settled into his mother-in-law’s modest, gray-brick house on Lafayette Street. There were blue canvas awnings on the front porch. His mother-in-law was Mrs. John S. Doud. The president called her “Min.” The neighborhood was not notably flossier than Marydell Road, where canvas porch awnings were also part of the summer decor, and Mrs. Doud’s house was not much bigger than my mother’s.
Modern presidents have got us used to thinking that men so great must always be housed in sprawling grandeur, but in Eisenhower’s time the small, middle-class ordinariness of Lafayette Street did not seem remarkable enough to rate more than a sentence near the end of my first-day arrival story. Remembering how much racket Uncle Gene could make in a house that size and how hard it had been for Herb to get his rest, I often wondered whether Ike, like Herb, didn’t sometimes feel like climbing the walls. Information about domestic relations inside Mrs. Doud’s house, alas, was impossible to come by.
Daytime the president usually spent on the golf course at Cherry Hills Country Club. Some evenings he stayed at home with Mamie and her mother. Others he played bridge in a penthouse suite at the Brown Palace with some of the country’s richest corporate leaders. With his military sense of rank, Eisenhower felt socially comfortable only with men at his own level of importance. These men, who ran giant oil corporations and companies like Coca-Cola, qualified by Eisenhower’s measure. Larry Burd, the Chicago Tribune’s correspondent, christened them “Ike’s millionaires” in new lyrics he wrote for the old Depression song “I’ve Got a Pocket Full of Dreams”:
We’re Ike’s millionaires,
We’re Wall Street’s bulls and bears,
And we’ve got our pockets full of dough…
We’re Triple-A in Dun and Bradstreet,
We’ve got fleets of Cadillacs,
And we calculate
We’re overweight
In income tax…
A White House reporter’s isolation from the president was as complete in these lazy vacation weeks as it had been in the no-nonsense atmosphere of the White House. We were permitted to watch him tee off at Cherry Hills only once while the photographers took his picture. If you kept close watch on his office at Lowry Air Force Base, you might see him coming and going, but it wasn’t very rewarding. His manner was polite and correct, but there was always a cool distance between him and us. There was no striving to be a regular guy. He was always the five-star general; we were always enlisted men, and not very heroic ones either. The only regular White House correspondent I ever heard him call by his first name was Merriman Smith of United Press, and his pronunciation suggested he thought Smitty’s first name was “Mariam.”
I had come on the White House beat thinking I would enjoy some personal contact with the great man himself. Why not? Everybody had seen dozen of pictures of White House reporters gathered around Franklin Roosevelt’s desk and chatting with Harry Truman as he took his morning walks around Washington. It was gall to discover that under Eisenhower a reporter was little more than a courtier swelling the presidential scene. In a way, I suppose, Jim Hagerty was trying to help us all save face by providing a never-ending stream of junk news with which to justify our existence.
After we had been in Colorado a while we were ready to accept anything that could pass for news. When the president retreated from Denver for a week’s fishing at Fraser, up on the far slope of the Continental Divide, I admitted our desperation in a piece for the Sun. Herbert Hoover, then in his eightieth year, had joined Eisenhower up there, and a squad of reporters with nothing to do and nothing to write were leaning on Hagerty for help.
“What did the president eat? How did he cook? How many fish did he catch? Did he play bridge with Hoover? How does he relax when he’s not in the trout stream? What do the two call each other—Herb and Ike, Dwight and Herbert, or are there two ‘Mr. Presidents’?
“Hagerty, wearing a New York Yankees’ baseball cap, a wool shirt, blue jeans and looking in desperate need of some relaxation for himself, was testy about such queries. First, he clamped a news blackout on the chow picture. There would be no reports on what was eaten for lunch, he decreed. The president was up here to relax and he was entitled to privacy.
“‘How’s it going to stop him from relaxing if we print what he eats?’ asked one man, but Hagerty was adamant. No chow releases. This put the press on his back, and a flurry of warm-tempered, mocking questions ensued. Did Hoover wear a ‘Herbert Hoover’ collar when he fished? Was it true that the President was feasting on smoked dove for breakfast?
“Hagerty relaxed and gave ground. President Eisenhower, he revealed, was doing a twenty-four-hour cooking job on a vegetable soup of his own recipe…”
It was no secret that neither Hoover nor Eisenhower had much affection for the press, but somehow Hagerty, that wonderfully resourceful scoundrel who knew how to win the hearts of the reporters he exploited, got us into the ranch for a few minutes to see the two presidents together while the photographers took pictures.
Eisenhower, wearing natty sports attire, bore the invasion patiently, turning sirloins on a charcoal grill while the photographers worked. During the hubbub, Hoover came out of the cabin wearing a gray, double-breasted suit, a wrinkled gray shirt with a necktie, and a tan straw hat. To most of us, Herbert Hoover was only a sad legend whose name evoked memories of sad, sad times, so it was worth the trip into the Rockies for the chance to hear him speak. And speak he did, about presidential privacy.
“Thirty years ago we used to believe there were only two occasions on which the American people would protect the privacy of the President. That was at prayer and fishing. I now detect”—and he turned to Eisenhower—“that you have lost that last one. The press no longer regards the privacy of the President when he’s fishing. That is one of the degenerations of the last thirty years.”
I thought Hoover was displaying a dry, ironic sense of humor appropriate for a basically silly situation. Most of the reporters couldn’t see it, though. That business about our work being “one of the degenerations” was too close to the truth for comfort.
Late that summer Scotty Reston turned up at the Brown Palace and sat in on one of Hagerty’s briefings. Afterward we went down to the coffee shop. He asked if I’d made up my mind.
I didn’t say yes, and I didn’t say no. I talked more than necessary, and what it meant was “Well…”
“If you’re going to jump, jump,” Reston said.
I thought, Oh, oh! Sounds like his patience is running out. With all my delicate hesitating, maybe I’m throwing away a golden opportunity.
I jumped.
Afterward he explained I would have to spend three months working in New York. Turner Catledge, the managing editor, insisted on that. Turner wanted all new correspondents to know their way around the home office. Reston said I would also have to be interviewed by Catledge, but needn’t fear Catledge would veto me, the interview was just a formality. Funny, I hadn’t thought about the managing editor having any say-so in all this. Mindlessly, I’d assumed Reston was supreme.
“Mimi, darling, I know there’s no valid reason for sending you letters, but, as expected, I have nothing but time on my hands.”
I was writing from a desk in The New York Times city room on West Forty-third Street. It was Sunday night, November 7, my first day in the newsroom Cousin Edwin had once ruled. The place was vast and bleak. Desks, aligned as neatly as stones in a military graveyard, stretched from Forty-third Street on my right to Forty-fourth Street on my left.
About halfway down the block several men in shirt-sleeves were playing bridge. Here and there others were working crossword puzzles or browsing in newspapers. All newsrooms were quiet on Sundays, but the vastness of this one made its silence funereal. Distances were so great that the city desk had a microphone tied into loudspeakers for summoning reporters from remote corners. Now and then the quiet was broken by an amplified voice calling for Mr. Perlmutter, or Mr. Phillips, or Mr. Robinson to come to the city desk.
In my experience, reporters who sat around doing nothing didn’t keep their jobs long, so I was writing to Mimi partly to look busy:
“Having read the Times word for word, through the ads, obituaries and classifieds, and having neglected to bring ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ with me, I’m at a complete loss for something to do, so will give you a blow-by-blow account of my first day with the NYT. Exceedingly bleak. I mean by that, having to sit in a city room all day with nothing to do.”
Under the routine, I would spend five days in New York, then get two days off to be with Mimi and the children in Washington where we were renting a house, then go back to New York for another five days. I’d come up from Washington this first morning on the Pennsy.
“The train ride was sleepy. I bought the Sunday Times, but it kept putting me to sleep. I ate breakfast as soon as I got on in Washington and was finished by time we arrived in Baltimore, which was a mistake—eating too fast, I mean—since it put only forty miles of the trip behind me…”
This was a letter from a man with a thousand hours to kill.
“In New York I checked bags at Penn Station and having ninety minutes to kill, strolled leisurely up to Times Square. It was a sunny, cold day and the streets, as usual on Sundays, were all but deserted, and you know how drab New York looks under strong light when there is no one about. I felt very unhappy, and went to Child’s for lunch, which did nothing to raise my spirits. Then to the office, up to the third floor and to the city desk. I wouldn’t have been altogether shocked if Caulfield had spun around in his chair and said, ‘You’ve got the west side.’ He didn’t. Instead—what an efficient organization the Times is—one of multitudinous assistant city editors handed me my police card, keys to a locker, and a memo reminding me to meet the personnel director at one P.M. tomorrow for a two-hour interview.”
Personnel director. This turned out to be a cheerful little man named Dick Burritt who was Turner Catledge’s idea. Catledge had succeeded Cousin Edwin as managing editor, but, as I later discovered, his admiration for Edwin’s management skills was very low. He judged Edwin had made a mess of the personnel situation, principally because he wouldn’t lay a firm managerial hand on his correspondents, shake them vigorously, and remind them they had a boss in New York.
Catledge meant to change all that. He was already shaking correspondents vigorously and would have liked to shake Scotty Reston especially vigorously, but was apparently forbidden to do so. Apparently he couldn’t even stop Reston from hiring his own people for the Washington bureau. He could, however, make Reston’s new troops sit in the home office long enough to realize that there was a home office and that Catledge was its master.
“A kind man by the name of Murray Shumach gave me a guided tour of some of the building. National desk. Picture desk. Foreign desk. Wire room. Radio room. Composing room. Library. Morgue. Editorial writers’ department. Etcetera. Hung around the city desk for a while. Nobody seemed to know what to do about me. Finally sat down at my desk and started reading the paper. Wrote two three-paragraph stories. Then a third-assistant editor from the foreign desk asked me to write three paragraphs from the handout of a North African lobbyist.
“That done, an assistant city editor invited me up to dinner. Nice cafeteria; mediocre food. I asked the editor I ate with how many people he had on the city staff. He seemed shocked at the question and didn’t really seem to know himself, though he estimated about 175, ‘if you include all the side departments that are nominally under the city desk.’ Looking over the city room here, I can count about 175 desks.”
The Catledge interview was pleasant enough. It was conducted in the big managing editor’s office that had once been Edwin’s. So here I was at last, just as I’d imagined in my childish revenge fantasy, except that I got there too late to catch Edwin.
Tall, florid, and beautifully custom-tailored, Catledge didn’t look like a managing editor. Buck Dorsey looked like a managing editor. Catledge looked like one of those southern senators who ran all the important committees on Capitol Hill and were always described as “powerful.” He had bright button eyes set in a round face that was born to grin from ear to ear with the self-satisfaction of a cat that has just finished off the canary. He was from Mississippi, had one of the fast-talking southern accents, and was always described, quite correctly, as polished, courtly, and charming.
He had also been a top-drawer Washington political reporter during the New Deal and war years and knew what it was to be at ease with men who ran the Congress, men who ran for president, as well as with President Roosevelt himself.
Trying to look like a suave man of the world while facing him across Edwin’s big desk, I was a child in the hands of a master but too young to realize it. He was so easy to talk to. I decided to impress him, so told him my mother was first cousin to the man who had occupied this very office.
“Mister James,” Catledge said. Yes, he had worked with Mr. James for several years. Mr. James was a wonderful man. Then, Catledge was suddenly being confidential with me, talking to me like an old friend, like another man of the world with whom he could exchange gossip about the mighty.
Mr. James was a wonderful man, but he had made a serious mistake.
Really?
Yes, Mr. James had made a serious mistake when he let his own son, Michael, go to the Paris bureau.
Paris for Michael was a mistake, was it?
A serious mistake. It gave the Paris correspondent, C. L. Sulzberger, a hostage he could use to resist New York’s efforts to take control of the paper’s foreign correspondents.
Catledge might just as well have been speaking in ancient Babylonian dialect because I hadn’t the least notion what he was talking about. I didn’t even know Edwin had a son, and the reference to what was obviously some antique and obscure piece of office politics was completely beyond me. I tried not to look baffled, though. I was flattered that the managing editor, the man who held Edwin’s old job, this impressive man, so powerful, so polished, should confide deep company secrets to me. Secrets about the weakness of Cousin Edwin, for heaven’s sake!
I tried to put on a face that looked wise, noncommittal, but gravely reflective, and Catledge gave me the ear-to-ear grin, stood up, pumped my hand again while maneuvering me out the door, and committed me to my three-month term in the newsroom.
The close of my first night’s letter to Mimi said:
“Critique on the day: Depressing.
“I’ll probably write you every night if this job maintains its searing pace.”
It was Mimi who got me sprung before I’d served my full sentence in New York. Just before Christmas she got exasperated and phoned Reston. With two small children and a third due any day now, she was left alone in Washington to cope with the horrors of an American Christmas while I sat in the New York newsroom week after week reading Dostoyevsky. Reston must have heard desperation in her voice. A day or two later Frank Adams, the Times city editor, interrupted my reading with the news that I would be freed for good at two A.M. on Christmas morning.
At the last minute I had the nastiest experience of my newspaper life.
Christmas Eve fell on Friday that year. Around eleven o’clock that night the wire services started moving bulletins about a bad airplane crash in Prestwick, Scotland. It was a big Boeing Stratocruiser. London to New York. It looked as if everyone on board had been killed.
About one o’clock in the morning we had a list of passengers. Four had New York addresses. Some ghoul on the city desk decided we could print the list if we could make sure the names and addresses of the New York passengers were correct. He handed me the list with orders to get busy on the phone.
All I had to do was find if there was a phone number for each address, dial it, tell whoever answered that the Times wanted to know if a person who spelled his name this particular way happened to live at this particular address. If the answer was yes, you asked if this particular person was expected home for Christmas aboard BOAC’s night flight from London.
The first number I rang produced a sleepy feminine voice. She said yes, and yes, and yes, before her mind shook off sleep’s cobwebs and she realized a phone call from the Times before dawn on Christmas morning could only be bad news.
“What’s wrong? What’s this about? Has something happened?”
“No, no. Just a routine check,” I said, disconnecting before she could demand to know more.
It was cowardly and terrible, but all the other possibilities were worse.
Fortunately, the desk man behind this enterprise had already enlisted another reporter to check two of the four names. This left me only one to go. I spent a lot of time talking to the telephone company and finally came up with a phone number for the address, but not the name on the passenger list. A dedicated reporter would have phoned the number anyhow, but I never kidded myself that I was one of the great ones. I told the city desk there wasn’t any number, got a “Good night” and a “Merry Christmas” from the desk at two in the morning, and took a taxi down to Penn Station, where I drank coffee and nodded over the morning papers until the dawn train pulled out for Washington.
The seven weeks in New York hadn’t been a complete waste of time. I had read a lot of Dostoyevsky after realizing that you weren’t expected to work much at the Times. With so many to cover so little, a reporter improving his mind in the classics was a greater blessing to editors than the ambitious pest hanging around the desk asking for something to do.
The paper seemed comically overstaffed. Remembering nights at the Sun when we had half a dozen reporters to cover the whole city, I marveled at the swarms in the Times newsroom with nothing to do for days at a time. At the Sun, I had written two thousand words a night without feeling overworked. At the Times, writing a six-hundred-word story seemed to be considered a whole week’s work. Some reporters never seemed to write anything.
Sander Vanocur, who worked there briefly before I came, was dismayed by the excess of manpower. As an American in London, he had done a little freelance work for the Manchester Guardian and had come to New York in hopes of getting back to Europe as a foreign correspondent. Catledge hired him, and he was given a desk so far back in the newsroom that he was practically in Sardi’s restaurant. Catledge immediately forgot him.
Sitting there one night, feeling blue and forgotten and wondering how he had managed to get himself buried, Vanocur found his glum expression had attracted the sympathetic attention of sweet-tempered Meyer Berger. Berger was a superb reporter and the brightest ornament of the New York city staff, as well as a gentleman and a historian. He had written a loving history of The New York Times and learned a great deal about Adolph S. Ochs, the Tennesseean who had bought the Times for a trifle and built it into a colossus of journalism.
“Mister Vanocur,” said Berger, “I know it looks strange here with all these people sitting around playing bridge and doing crossword puzzles, but it’s always been this way since Mister Ochs’s time. Mister Ochs always liked to have enough people around to cover the story when the Titanic sinks.”
When I first sat down in that great sea of tedium, I thought somebody at the Times was trying to make me feel humble about working for the paper that printed all the news that was fit to print. Everything seemed aimed at making me feel like the smallest fish in the biggest pond on earth.
For housing, I’d been put into the Dixie Hotel, directly across Forty-third Street from the Times building. The Dixie had not yet achieved fleabag status, but was working on it. In my first few days there, the chambermaids finished off a fifth of whiskey I’d brought from Washington. The lobby was heavily trafficked by the kind of men who wore sunglasses at midnight escorting dramatic women they had just met. A far cry from my days of Savoy grandeur in London, it made me suspect I was dispensable to the Times.
At the office, somebody occasionally remembered I was there and asked me to do an obituary on a businessman dead in New Jersey, hold it to three paragraphs, please. Once I was sent to help cover a fire on the East Side. It was out before I got there, but I was reprimanded for taking a taxi instead of the subway. The craziness of it! A newspaper that kept a hundred reporters on the payroll to do nothing bridled at spending cab fare to cover a fire. Another night I was allowed to do legwork for a reporter covering a political rally at Madison Square Garden.
These were jobs for kid reporters, but I quickly realized I’d be flattering myself if I supposed the Times was trying to haze me as the new boy on the block. This place was so big that I didn’t even exist. With so many reporters on the staff, there just wasn’t much for anybody to do. Things moved much more slowly here than at the Sun. Much more slowly. Much… more… slowly.
In seven years at the Sun, I had gone from beginner police reporter to White House correspondent, had learned to do rewrite, write features, edit copy, do makeup, crop pictures, write captions, and compose headlines that fit. For a new man to get that much experience at the Times would take seven hundred years.
The vastness of the place produced comical situations. Visiting one day in the newsroom, Peter Lisagor of The Chicago Daily News was talking to two Times reporters he knew when he realized they didn’t know each other, and introduced them. There were editors who didn’t know the names of reporters they passed in the corridors. Looking out over the newsroom one night, Tad Szulc told me, “This room is filled with people waiting for Catledge to think of them, and he doesn’t even remember their names.”
Once I understood how things were there, I started reading Dostoyevsky and got through Crime and Punishment and The Possessed and was started on The Idiot when Christmas came.
At the Sun, people who had been around five years were old hands, and ten years on the staff was forever. At the Times, everybody was contentedly planning to stay until life’s sunset. This made for pronounced dullness in the newsroom.
“Drink is the curse of the Herald Tribune, and sex is the curse of the Times.” This ancient pronouncement on New York journalism was several times recited to me by Times men, who always seemed pleased to think of themselves as potential slaves to sex. During my New York term the curse seemed very feeble. There was a famous telephone romance going on between a woman reporter and an underworked editor, both of them of advancing years. Whenever the two were on their phones at the same time, somebody was apt to nudge you and point, first down to her section of the city room, then up to his at the far end, and wink.
There was also a youthful Don Juan, whose exploits were certified later in a book, thinly disguised as a novel, by his angry wife. After the turmoil of the Sun’s newsroom, however, the Times’s seemed a sedate place of contented, middle-aged folks in business suits going home happily to their families. For one whose idea of a newsroom had been formed at the Sun, the Times’s felt like an insurance office.
Inactivity, the Christmas blues, the midnight train rides every week to Washington, the Dixie Hotel, and Dostoyevsky combined to put me in low spirits as November gave way to December. How had I got myself into this dreary pickle? The year had started so brightly in London when I seemed to be on top of the world and was ending in grimness. I had made two terrible decisions. One had ended the joys of London and replaced them with the boredom of the White House. The other had brought me from the comfortable security of the Sun to the chill of this immense, inhumane bureaucracy.
What’s more, I’d picked up enough gossip about office politics in New York to realize that there was some kind of rivalry going on between Catledge and Reston. I realized, too, that I was not Catledge’s man, but Reston’s man, and that I had come to work for an outfit where your entire future might depend less on how well you did the job than on whose man you were.
Buck had cautioned that I might not like being a little fish in a big pond, but my silly, mother-driven ambition to amount to something, my nonsensical fool’s fantasy about being bigger than Cousin Edwin had brought me from the felicities of London to the Dixie Hotel and that huge murky pond right across the street that I didn’t like at all. It had been a year of letdown.
The train got me to Washington on Christmas morning in time to have a late breakfast with Mimi, Kathy, and Allen amid Santa Claus’s ruined wrappings. It was Saturday. On Monday I reported for work at the Times’s Washington office at 1701 K Street. Nine days later our third child was born at George Washington University Hospital. We named him Michael Lee, not after anybody in the family, but just because we thought it sounded like a good name. He was born around dawn. By noon I was at the Capitol to do a feature story on the Joint Session of Congress meeting to hear the president’s State of the Union speech. The Times ran it for a full column under a jazzy headline. It was my third big by-lined story that week.
Washington suddenly looked quite wonderful. So did Scotty Reston, who had brought me to this place where so much glory suddenly seemed possible in the world’s greatest newspaper.