For years I expected to die at the age of thirty-three. This was a heritage from my father. He had died at thirty-three. Therefore, I might too.
It was silly, of course, and I pushed the idea as far to the back of my mind as possible and tried to bury it there. A young man trying to make something of himself could never get to the top if he sat around brooding about dying young.
I suppressed it the way people suppress a childish superstition they are ashamed of but cannot help believing in. It surfaced now and then when I needed an excuse for drinking too much or was straining to impress desirable women who might have a tender streak for a doomed youth. Most of the time, though, I must have suppressed it very well because I had never turned down a single chance to get ahead in the world by saying, “It’s no use, I’ll be dead at thirty-three.”
Suppressed or not, it existed, and when I reached my thirty-fourth birthday in robust health the sense of relief was wonderful. I had escaped my father’s bleak destiny. I was going to live, after all. I would know what it was to have gray hair and see my children grow up and make something of themselves.
Mimi was as happy as I was. Now, she said, she would no longer have to listen to me talk about dying at thirty-three when I got into the gin.
That birthday on which I became older than my father had ever been was the beginning of the end of my days as a reporter. Before that, I had been just a little unsure there would be a future. Now I was presented with a gift that had been denied my father. A gift of time. It would be terrible not to use it well.
I became haunted by a fear that I was using it badly. At home the children seemed to be growing up without me. I seemed to be constantly packing to take to the road. The good times seemed to have vanished. The youthful pleasures of living in airplanes, hotels, and campaign buses had worn thin. I no longer rejoiced in hopping from Washington to Indianapolis to Salt Lake City to San Francisco in a day and cramming India into a three-day presidential visit. Was this all there was?
I felt life’s possibilities slipping away as I trudged through roaring crowds with a suitcase clutched in one hand, a portable typewriter in the other, and a dirty raincoat slung over my shoulder.
Sometimes, arriving home in the middle of the night, bowed under the weight of these tools of the trade, I thought a reporter was not so different from the pathetic Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, wasting life in pursuit of a fool’s dream of glory.
I was starting to worry about fatherhood. I couldn’t be a very good father, could I? Always away from home, or sleeping till noon because I’d worked the night before, or coming home in the middle of the night smelling of booze served on the press plane from Denver or Chicago or Miami.
Sometimes I seemed so consumed by the job that I had no time for fatherhood. It was Mimi who walked Kathy and Allen to school every morning, usually pushing Michael along with her in a stroller. One morning she left Michael in my care. Returning home, she was astonished to see a police car going down Connecticut Avenue and one of the policemen holding a baby on his lap. What astonished her was the baby’s startling resemblance to Michael.
Rushing home, she found me sound asleep and Michael gone. Having worked late the night before, I had been too groggy with sleep that morning to hear her say, “Watch Michael until I get back.” Thinking himself alone in the house, Michael walked out wearing nothing but a diaper and was three blocks away strolling Connecticut Avenue when the police picked him up.
Very late in my reporting days, there was another Michael incident that made me feel like the father who wasn’t there. I was due home in the middle of the night after a long trip, and Mimi came downstairs at midnight to find Michael, now seven years old, standing in the hall by the front door. What was he doing out of bed at that hour of the night? asked Mimi.
“I’m going to stay right here until a certain thirty-seven-year-old man walks through that door,” he said.
I was beginning to feel guilty. Maybe I was so absorbed in newspaper work that I was cheating my children out of a father. There were Freudian possibilities to be explored here, I suppose. I had always felt cheated of a father by death. Still, the easier explanation, I thought, was that, not having had a father to study under, I didn’t know how to do it.
Whatever the case, I was finally having grave thoughts about something other than newspapers. I was finally discovering there were other aspects of life that needed just as much care as the pursuit of success. I was finally becoming a family man. I guess I was finally growing up. Or maybe just getting old.
Either possibility could account for a growing sense that the good times were behind me, and the serious times ahead.
My fatigue with the reporter’s life became apparent slowly through an accumulation of small incidents.
Scotty Reston and I were headed across Farragut Square to lunch one day when two cars ran together a half block behind us on K Street. Police reporting had made me a connoisseur of auto accidents. Some people could tell a fake Rembrandt from the real thing; I could tell a run-of-the-mill fender bender from a real accident.
On hearing the crash, I glanced back briefly without seeing much. I didn’t have to. Heavy traffic was moving at such a crawl that the crash couldn’t have done much human damage.
“Just a fender bender,” I told Reston without breaking stride toward lunch.
“Let’s see what happened,” Reston said, turning and hurrying back toward the source of the bang.
I started to say nothing could possibly have happened, let’s go get lunch, but Reston had already put distance between us, so I tagged along, amused by his boyishness.
Here was the most influential newspaperman in Washington running to a minor accident. Even if there were blood, Reston was wasting time. Newspapers didn’t devote much space anymore to death by car. It was too commonplace. The New York Times was certainly not going to report Washington’s traffic fatalities. Why didn’t we just go to lunch?
After on-site inspection assured Reston the accident was indeed routine, we did go to lunch, but as we crossed Farragut Square, I realized this trivial incident contained a message I ought to heed. It dramatized the difference between a great reporter and a reporter who would never be special.
The great reporter was never too big to investigate the faintest hint of news. He went through life fueled by a bottomless supply of curiosity. When fenders banged, his very soul needed to know what happened, and he was powerless to go blithely off to lunch until he was sure he wasn’t walking away from a story.
The great reporters took nothing for granted. That was true not just of Reston, but of Tom O’Neill, Phil Potter, Bill Lawrence, Harrison Salisbury, Homer Bigart, and a half dozen other veterans who were superstars of the trade. They had reporting in their genes. Most reporters lost the passion for it by middle age, but the precious few seemed just as fervid about it at sixty as they’d been the first day they walked into a newsroom.
The more I thought about that car accident, the gloomier it made me. My amusement at Reston dashing to the scene told me very plainly that my passion for reporting had faded with age.
Hearing two cars collide, Reston instinctively heard the possibility of news. Sure, it might be just a fender bender, but if you walked away without checking, how could you be sure one of the passengers wasn’t the secretary of state with a bump on the head so bad he’d forgotten who he was? My instinct, by contrast, was to make an unwarranted assumption—“just a fender bender”—that wouldn’t spoil the prospect of a pleasant lunch.
When a reporter avoids a possible story because he’d rather eat lunch, it is time to think about doing something else.
After the political excitements of 1960 and the European adventure that brought Lawrence’s resignation the following spring, I returned to the Capitol to discover that I had had enough of the Senate. I knew how it worked now. I knew pretty much what it would do in most situations. I even knew what most of the senators would say when they rose to speak. I now looked on most Senate doings as little more than high-level fender benders.
I had loved covering the Senate when everything was new and strange. It was like attending the best graduate school of political science in the world. When you had a question, you called the appropriate senator off the floor, and he came out and talked to you. You got one-on-one lessons from masters like Lyndon Johnson, Styles Bridges, Everett Dirksen, Richard Russell.
When you stop learning, though, even the best school may feel like the end of the line. In 1961 I was thirty-six, had been fourteen years in the business, and was restless. I had begun to think of myself as grownup. I had decided that while reporting was a delightful way to spend a youth, it was not a worthy way for a grown man to spend his life. At least not for this grown man. The indignities of the reporter’s life no longer seemed like fun, but just indignities.
I was sitting on a marble floor in a corridor of the Senate Office Building one day when I experienced a moment of vivid inner clarity and realized that I was sick of it.
With a half dozen other reporters, I was covering a meeting of the Armed Services Committee. The committee usually met in private, doors locked against the public. Doing public business in private was common practice at the Capitol, so reporters spent a lot of time idling outside closed doors. Afterward, a couple of senators usually came out to posture for television and issue hollow, misleading, or deceptive accounts of what had happened.
Sitting there, looking down the long marble tunnel toward the elevator, I thought of my father. Maybe it was the marble that did it. He had been a stone mason. I thought:
“Here I am, thirty-six years old. When my father was thirty-six he had been dead three years. Still he managed to build something, to leave something behind that can still be seen, touched, used. Given three years more than my father had, how have I used the time? I have built nothing worth leaving and don’t even know how. Instead, I spend my life sitting on marble floors, waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me.”
From that moment on, I was emotionally ready to end my reporting days. What else could I do, though? I seemed caught in a job toward which I would become progressively more contemptuous as it became a familiar, then boring, series of annual routine events. This was the fate of too many aging reporters. When I was full of youth’s sassy zest, I had often facetiously declared that most reporters by the age of forty should be hanged if they refused to step aside and let youth replace them. Now I confronted the tiring reporter’s destiny myself.
As he had before at other moments crucial to my life, Buck Dorsey descended to save me. I say “descended” because his timing was so close to perfect that it reminded me of those climactic interventions in my high-school Aeneid when Juno or Minerva or Venus, this god or that, sent down agents or came down themselves from Olympus to save one of their favorites from destruction. What Buck did now was so timely that afterward I was half tempted to think of him as great Zeus the Father looking after me from the Olympian heights.
Seven years had passed since our good-bye lunch in Baltimore. He had cautioned me that day about the potential problem at the Times. Was I going to be content being a little fish in a big pond? Maybe he had understood all along how deeply ambition had infected me with restlessness. I hadn’t seen him since, but had not forgotten his farewell words: “If you ever want to change your mind, just let me know.”
Now, seven years later, like great Zeus who knew all, he stepped back onto the scene, not appearing in person this time, but sending an agent. This was Price Day, whom Buck had elevated to the office of editor in chief of the Sun editorial pages. That spring Price Day phoned from Baltimore with an invitation to lunch.
Price was a Texan who had gone to Princeton, been a cartoonist, written fiction in the Thirties for the slick magazines, been a city editor somewhere in Florida, covered the Italian campaign for the Sun in World War Two, and gotten the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the partition of India. He wrote with an essayist’s touch and spoke so softly you could hardly hear him sometimes, but with the humor and irony of a man who had been everyplace and seen everything.
We met at the Mayflower. It was a very dry lunch by Buck Dorsey standards. Price came to the point after the first martini. Buck wanted to know if I would be interested in returning to the Sun to take the best job at his disposal.
What might that be?
Would I be interested in writing a column for the editorial page?
What kind of column?
Travel where you want to travel, write what you want to write, said Price. Washington. New York, California. Move around the country as much you like. Write from abroad when you want.
He was offering every newspaperman’s dream.
I would be very, very interested if the Sun were to make such an offer, and said so.
A column meant the end of routine reporting and freedom from the obligation to keep judgments out of the paper. Columnists were paid to make judgments. A columnist was a player. Some of them were big-time players. Reston, Walter Lippmann, Joseph and Stuart Alsop—these were columnists in whom presidents confided.
Price was offering the stuff that dreams are made of, but I wasn’t so deeply mesmerized that I forgot the Sun’s lean way with a paycheck.
Yes, such an offer would be tantalizing, I told Price. If Buck were to make it. But—well, I was paid very well by the Times. As he knew, the Times paid top dollar.
How much were they paying me?
I told him and did not lie by inflating the figure because I was sure it was already enough to make a Sun man gasp, and, after all, I didn’t want the column offer withdrawn.
Price thought the Sun could match that, but he had to talk to Buck. If I was interested, of course.
I said I was very interested.
Price promised to get back to me quickly, and did. Miracle of miracles! The Sun offered more than the Times was paying.
But don’t forget, said Mimi, at the Sun that will probably be the last raise you ever get. Still, she was as enthusiastic about it as I was.
On the phone I told Price I would be delighted to take the job and would immediately give notice to the Times. Through all this, Buck and I neither met nor talked.
My discontent with the Times was more complicated than a case of boredom with the work. Buck had put his finger on it when he warned about the difficulty of being a little fish in that big Times pond. Besides being bored with the job, I had gone as far as I could go on the Times, and it wasn’t far enough.
For too many years I had been under mother’s orders to amount to something and borne the obligation to pursue success with plenty of gumption so I might be worth more than the powder and shot it would take to blow me up with.
In life as my mother taught it, no matter how successful you were, you never rested. You started working at something bigger, higher, grander. That was the only way to amount to something. This was her tradition, and I went through life with it like a fever in my bones. In the end you had to be a fish so big that no pond was big enough.
The better the assignments the Times gave me, the unhappier I became about the certainty that the Times would always consider me just another second-rate-hotel man. Second-rate-hotel man: That was a classification of Times reporters I invented in 1960 after being reprimanded for billing the paper for the price of a first-class hotel during a trip to New York.
Bob Garst, an assistant managing editor, wrote a detailed letter deploring my expense account, scolding me for “spending at too free a rate,” and explaining how things stood.
“One item is connected with your recent visit to New York during which you and your wife stayed at the Dorset Hotel at a cost of $28 a day. You followed the proper practise of deducting one-third for your wife, but even so the cost to the Times ran around $20, which is much too high for hotel accommodations. It should run nearer $10 or $12 normally…
“Please understand that in such matters as your staying at the Dorset, the Times is not trying to tell you where to stop when you are in town. But we are saying that there is a limit to the amount the Times will contribute.”
I took this as official notice that the Times considered me small beans, fit for second-rate hotels. It was doubly galling because the assignments I’d been getting had given me an inflated sense of grandeur.
My by-line had been constantly on the front page for six years. I had covered the White House, the State Department, the Senate, the political conventions, and the presidential candidates on campaign. I had covered Eisenhower felled by coronary thrombosis and triumphally on tour to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, Morocco, France, and Spain. I had been there when Kennedy went to the ballet with de Gaulle at Versailles and was bullied by Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna.
The Times had supplied material for a lifetime of name-dropping and droning on about places from the Hindu Kush to the Sistine Chapel. The Times had broadcast my name and encouraged me to strut when I thought of my excellences, only to strike me low with this crushing notice. No, not a great star of Bill Lawrence magnitude at all, I was only a second-rate-hotel man.
A second-rate-hotel man. That was a terrible thing to have to admit to Mother.
After telling Price I would accept the Sun job, I went to Scotty’s office next afternoon to tell him I was leaving the Times and why. I expected some friendly expressions of regret: It would be a pity to lose me, too bad things hadn’t worked out, that sort of thing, but nothing like the vehemence of the reply Scotty made when I finished:
“That’s a kick in the balls to me.”
This was a stunner. I’d never seen him upset before. Was I letting him down? Impossible. He had been a good friend to me, pushing me ahead, making the breaks for me, but the Times surely didn’t need me. In that huge pool of talent, I was one among many.
Still, Scotty’s tone made me defensive. I tried to explain about the fatigue with reporting, the sense of not learning anything new, the need to do something challenging.
This isn’t final yet, is it? he asked.
Well, I had told the Sun people yes, I would take their job.
Hold off and don’t do anything more until I get back to you, he said as I left the office.
I’d been home only a few minutes when the telephone rang.
I said hello and the man on the other end said, “This is Orvil Dryfoos.”
Orvil Dryfoos was the publisher of the Times.
“Scotty tells me you’re going to quit the Times,” Dryfoos said.
Flabbergasted though I was to find the publisher on the telephone, I was sure enough about my decision to tell him, quite calmly, yes, it had been wonderful working for the Times, but I had this offer, an offer nobody could refuse.
“We’re not going to let you quit,” Dryfoos said.
Next day I went to New York at Dryfoos’s insistence. He and Scotty were close friends, and the friendship gave Scotty great power in the company. In New York I saw how great his power could be when he wanted something very much. The baffling question was why he wanted to keep me from quitting. That I never understood.
What happened in New York was crazy and wonderful. I talked with Orvil and he took me to talk with Clifton Daniel, who was presiding in Cousin Edwin’s old office since Turner Catledge was out of the country. The Times needed a new chief of bureau in Rome. I could have the job.
Rome was nice, but it was still reporting, I said. The Sun column was what I needed.
Orvil asked about London. Plans called for a new bureau chief in London. Would that interest me?
It almost did. I’d been in London, I said, and loved it. Still, it was another reporting job, so I couldn’t be sure…
Clifton intervened. London had already been promised to Sydney Gruson, he said. India was available, though.
Now that I didn’t want anything from the Times but permission to quit, they were offering me the world. It was childhood’s dream of glory come true at last. Not of course with Cousin Edwin saluting my excellence, as I had fantasized long ago, but nothing was ever perfect. And Orvil Dryfoos was a greater figure than Cousin Edwin. Edwin had been a mere managing editor. As publisher, Orvil had power to hire and retire managing editors.
Flying back to Washington, I got home in time for dinner and titillated Mimi with an account of the Arabian Nights quality of the day:
Rome? No thank you.
Unfortunately, London has been promised.
But India is available.
I never kidded myself that either Orvil or Clifton, given their druthers, wouldn’t have said, “So long and good luck at the Sun.” It was Reston who was directing events.
And, as I told Mimi over dinner, Orvil had finally offered a prize beyond anything we could have expected: a column on the editorial page of the Times.
This was one of the gaudiest prizes in American journalism. The page had only three regular columnists: Reston and Arthur Krock from Washington and C. L. Sulzberger from Paris. Reston had devised a way of wedging me in as the fourth, and suggested it to Orvil, who wanted to know if I was interested.
There was an ancient and tired editorial-page column headed “Topics,” which was filled by contributions from staff people and copy boys writing casual pieces that read like journalism for going to sleep by. “Topics” ran right down the middle of the editorial page just like Reston, Krock, and Sulzberger.
If I wanted, I could have the space three times a week with my name in modest-size type at the bottom.
Of course I wanted it. It was a column in The New York Times. Not so important-looking as the other three, to be sure, but that could be made an asset, and if the thing worked they’d have to put my name at the top eventually.
I had one last condition. It had to have a new name. I didn’t care what it was. Anything but “Topics.” Nobody, I judged, had read anything under the title “Topics” for a generation. Unless the column had a new title, it would be like shouting down a rain barrel.
John Oakes, who ran the editorial page and hated columns for, among other things, using up his valuable space, graciously agreed to a new title and suggested “Observer.”
I telephoned Price Day and told him about the furor Buck’s offer had created, admitted I’d been too weak to resist the chance to have a column in the Times, and asked him to convey my sorrow and my love to Buck.
I hadn’t the courage to phone Buck, and justified cowardice by assuring myself he wanted the entire matter handled by Price. A few days later Price wrote:
“I must say that under the same circumstances I would have done the same.
“I hope to see you soon.
“With every best wish,”
I took this as absolution, though I never heard from Zeus about the matter, nor saw him again. He had been my constant protector and author of my good fortune and someone very like a father, I suppose, though I would never have dared tell him so.