The Kingdom and the Power (11 page)

MacNeil had been born in Nova Scotia, a big muscular man with none of the bad posture and pallor of so many copyreaders. He had a deep commanding voice, and on his desk in the bullpen he had a little bell that he would ring with his thick forefinger when he wanted a copyboy. The copyboys, in deference to his position, were quick in responding, and because he had a gentle manner and did not address them in the peremptory tone used by some lesser editors of that time, they liked him and tried hard to please him and did
not resent it when he occasionally sent them out at midnight to a food shop on Eighth Avenue to buy him a small bag of apples.

As was the case with a high percentage of editors in the newsroom in the Thirties, MacNeil was a Roman Catholic, and it was often said of
The Times
during these years that it was a paper “owned by Jews and edited by Catholics for Protestants.” The bullpen was lightly styled the “Catholic bullpen” within the office and, though no one could prove it, Neil MacNeil, Raymond H. McCaw (the senior bullpen editor), and others were said to reflect a Catholic viewpoint when appraising the news, with the results ranging from the playing down of stories about birth control to the playing up of stories expressing alarm over communism. If a
Times
reporter was even rumored as leaning to the left, his stories were vigilantly read and reread by the bullpen editors, and they were no less scrupulous with the controversial dispatches from Spain by Herbert Matthews than with the less noticeable stories from New York by such younger men as A. H. Raskin, the latter having gotten onto the staff after having served, during his undergraduate days, as
The Times
’ campus correspondent at the City College of New York, the Berkeley of the Thirties.

In Matthews’ case, his difficulty with a large portion of the pro-Franco Catholic readership in America was no secret at
The Times
, there having been several organized campaigns and statements at tacking Matthews, and on one occasion the Catholic Press Association made an official protest to
The Times
’ publisher. It had “no confidence” in Matthews’ reporting from the Loyalist side, it said, and it was particularly annoyed, among other things, by Matthews’ repeated suggestions in his stories that the Fascists in Italy and even Germany were participating heavily on the side of Franco.
The New York Times
’ correspondent covering the war from Franco’s side, William P. Carney, had denied this, and one night a message went out to Matthews from the newsroom reading: “Why do you continue to say Italians are fighting in Spain when Carney claims there are no Italians in Spain?” Matthews’ subsequent dispatch repeated the claim—“These troops were Italians and nothing but Italians”—but this sentence in
The Times
was changed to read: “These troops were insurgents and nothing but insurgents.”

When A. H. Raskin, who had been an aggressive campus correspondent at City College, was promoted to
The Times
’ staff in 1934, an official from the college asked Neil MacNeil why
The Times
would tolerate such a political risk as Raskin. MacNeil said he had
no idea Raskin was a risk, and for several years afterwards MacNeil watched Raskin’s reporting very carefully, finding no justification for the inference. Still, for whatever reason, it took Abe Raskin a long time to get a by-line in
The New York Times
, even by the slow editorial procedures of that period.

One day in 1936 Raskin had five front-page stories in
The Times
, none of which carried his by-line. Then in 1939 there was a story by Raskin that was particularly well liked by Raymond McCaw in the bullpen, and McCaw walked over to the city desk to ask who had written it.

“Abe Raskin,” was the reply.

“Put a by-line on it,” McCaw said, and then, as an afterthought, he asked, “What’s Abe’s middle initial?”

“H.”

“Well,” McCaw said, “sign it ‘A. H. Raskin.’ ”

McCaw’s saying “sign it ‘A. H. Raskin,’ ” and not “sign it ‘Abraham Raskin’ ” or “ ‘Abraham H. Raskin’ ” was interesting, because it raised quietly a question that would not have been raised aloud in
The New York Times
’ newsroom. There was a feeling among some Jewish reporters in the Thirties, however reluctant they were to discuss it openly, that Ochs and Sulzberger, sensitive men, did not want
The Times
to appear “too Jewish” in public, and one small result of this was the tendency of editors to sign stories with initials in place of such names as Abraham; although, again, the reporters could not prove it and they were wise to keep this theory to themselves. To mention it to an editor might expose the reporter as an ungrateful paranoiac, one who was completely ignorant of
The Times
’ policy against discrimination of any kind, to say nothing of the fact that there were Christian staff members who used initials, it being quite customary in those days; and further, to make a Jewish issue of this trivial point might put a reporter in the same category with those cranks and special-interest groups who endlessly seek to embarrass
The Times
by doubting its purity, groups who charged consecutively through the Thirties into the Sixties that
The Times
was a tool of Wall Street, was pro-British, pro-German, anti-Labor, pro-Communist, anti-Zionist, an apologist for the American State Department.

In actual fact, a case could have been made against
The Times
on any of these charges, but a weak case, for it could easily be counterbalanced with evidence to offset it—but not always.
The Times
in principle tried to be objective in its news coverage, but in reality it
could not always be. It was run by humans, flawed figures, men who saw things as they
could
see them, or sometimes
wished
to see them; interpreting principles to suit contemporary pressures, they wanted it both ways; it was the oldest story of all. Ideally,
The Times
desired no opinions within its news columns, restricting opinion to its editorial page. Realistically, this was not possible. The editors’ opinions and tastes were imposed every day within the news—either by the space they allowed for a certain story, or the position they assigned to it, or the headline they ordered for it, and also by the stories they did not print, or printed for only one edition, or edited heavily, or held out for a few days and then printed in the back of the thick Sunday edition between girdle advertisements and dozens of Bachrach photographs of pretty girls just engaged. The reporter’s ego was also a factor in the news coverage—he wrote what he wrote best, he wrote what he understood, reflecting the total experience of his lifetime, shades of his pride and prejudice; he wrote sometimes to please the editor, at other times to call attention to his own style, reducing stories that did not suit his style, and at still other times he wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in
The Times
, a testimony to his being alive on that day, alive in
The Times
through that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm.

The Times
was a very human institution, large and vulnerable. Even by the Nineteen-thirties it was too big
not
to be vulnerable. Every working day hundreds of decisions were made within the
Times
building, each of which, if singled out, could lead to misconceptions—which was also the inherent problem of news coverage itself—but it was equally true that
The Times
nearly always tried to be fair, and sometimes without reason or design things just happened at
The Times
. There were no villainous editors behind the deeds. No acts of vanity.
Things just happened
. Or the happening was the result of one man acting unofficially—a Neil MacNeil changing a dateline from Paris to London. Or it might be a Raymond McCaw saying, without ulterior motive, “Sign it ‘A. H. Raskin’ ”—as other
Times
editors, years later, would sign the by-line of Abe Weiler, a movie critic, “A. H. Weiler,” and of Abe Rosenthal, a foreign correspondent, “A. M. Rosenthal.” It was perhaps pure coincidence, too, that since Ochs’s paper had become the bible of the American establishment, no Jew had been elevated to the position of managing editor, even as Jewish subordinate editors would begin to outnumber other ethnic and religious groups on the paper. Some
Times
men interpreted these things as more than mere coincidence
but no case could be made. Nothing could be proved. There was no policy, there was an almost conspicuous lack of policy on so many things within
The Times
, and this led to assumptions about the paper that were not true, causing some
Times
men to obey rules that did not exist—causing other
Times
men, the less inhibited ones, to operate freely and then suddenly discover rules
did
exist, hundreds of them, thousands. But there was nothing fixed within the institution despite all of its exterior commitment to tradition. Every generation of
Times
men was subject to the changing interpretations of the rules and values of the men at the top. And
The Times
in the Thirties was a paper in transition. There was an atmosphere of vagueness.

Sometimes Ochs seemed to be running the paper from his grave. At other times it seemed that the strings were being pulled by Arthur Hays Sulzberger and, not to be ignored, his wife, Iphigene. The great Van Anda was long retired by 1937, devoting himself to astronomy and cosmogony, living in Manhattan or in the country, spending hours at night squinting up at the sky through his telescope pondering, as he described it, “planetary parentage”; but his influence was still strong in the newsroom, and two of his apostles from the copydesk, now risen to the bullpen, were McCaw and MacNeil. The staff was quickly expanding, and there were more subeditors, specialists, critics. Bosley Crowther, who had joined
The Times
as a reporter in 1928, sharing a desk in the overcrowded newsroom with Hanson Baldwin, had moved into the movie department in 1937. Brooks Atkinson, a tweedy gentleman from New England, a scholar and bird watcher whose one extravagance was a lemon-colored roadster he raced wildly on weekends in the country, was the drama critic. The dour-looking Olin Downes, the world’s worst typist, was the music critic. The religious-news editor was a puritanical woman named Rachel McDowell, known within the office as “Lady Bishop.” A reporter in the Science department was William L. Laurence, a modest, shaggy-haired little man who would become the paper’s expert on the atom and journalism’s only witness to the destruction at Nagasaki.
The Times
’ ship-news editor was an old English sea captain, Walter “Skipper” Williams, the son of a lawyer who, rather than follow in that profession, had gone to sea, working as a boatman on the Nile, a gold hunter up the Orinoco, a lightning-rod installation man in Central America, a foreman during the Panama Canal digging, and finally a journalist for Hearst. In 1905, with an introduction from an English nobleman who
knew Ochs, Williams came to
The Times
, settling down, although on rare occasions he was again led astray by his imagination. One of his stories, a collector’s item that somehow slipped past the copy-desk, reported the sighting of a huge sea serpent in the Caribbean from the bridge of the liner
Mauretania
. The story was quickly questioned by several newspapers but Mr. Williams stuck to it, producing an excerpt from the ship’s log and a drawing of the monster done by the ship’s senior first officer.

The Times
’ sports editor in those days was, like Skipper Williams, a wandering individualist, the sort of man rarely seen at
The Times
today but not uncommon then. His name was Bernard William St. Denis Thomson, and he was an elegant man mildly scented with perfume; he was known in the office as “Colonel” Thomson, even though he had never gotten higher than captain in the United States Army, a rank he attained during World War I in France as a trainer of pack animals. Born in Canada, he had a law degree from Harvard, had ridden burros prospecting for gold in the West, later became a rancher, still later a dabbler in gambling, and he twice broke the bank at Monte Carlo. Like his father, he finally settled into journalism, and during his twenty-one years as the sports editor of
The Times
he built up his staff from six to fifty, and he insisted, obeying Ochs, that
The Times
print more sports scores than any other newspaper—his clerks obliging on occasion by slipping in the scores of contests between small Negro colleges in the South, infuriating Thomson—and he greatly expanded the coverage of such fashionable minor sports as tennis, sailing, and rowing,
especially
rowing. He loved this sport, it being the only one he had ever mastered, and because of this
The New York Times
gave elaborate treatment to the Poughkeepsie and Thames regattas and other rowing events, establishing a policy that persists even now, decades after Colonel Thomson’s death.

Among the more autonomous editors on
The Times
in 1937, of course, were Lester Markel in the Sunday department and Arthur Krock in Washington, and one member of Krock’s staff, thinking big, was Turner Catledge. James Reston was still with the London bureau of the Associated Press in 1937, covering sports events in summer and the Foreign Office in winter, and Tom Wicker in that year was a boy of ten who, with his parents and sister, had recently taken an overnight train from Hamlet, North Carolina, into Washington for a first visit, a thrilling experience he would vividly remember in later years after he had succeeded Reston, remembering
the walk from Union Station in the brilliant sunshine toward the Capitol and its dome against the sky, the most beautiful sight he had ever seen, and remembering the rooming house in which he and his family had stayed, the trolleys rolling past the door, and how his mother wept in front of Lincoln Memorial, and the marvelously strange sight of green money flowing from the presses at the Bureau of Engraving, and the sound of the Marine band playing on the very spot where Roosevelt had been sworn in as President; and Wicker remembered having dinner one night at the Occidental Restaurant, a place where the famous men of Washington ate, somebody had said, and many years later, when Wicker was as famous himself, he would sometimes have lunch at the Occidental Restaurant, it being as crowded and noisy in the Sixties as it was in the Thirties, and he would wonder what table he and his sister and parents had been given that night—“those two wide-eyed children, my father, my mother, spending money they could ill afford to make sure our trip was complete. If I thought it was a bad, out-of-the-way table I could never go there again.”