The Kingdom and the Power (23 page)

Bill Lawrence, born in Nebraska, had won a scholarship to Swarthmore in 1933 but lacked the money to cover the incidentals and so he took a job on the
Lincoln Star
at night and entered the University of Nebraska. Expelled eleven weeks later for cutting classes, he became a full-time reporter; and in 1936, at the age of nineteen, he was covering local politics for the Associated Press. During one of his first big assignments, a convention of the Young Democrats of Nebraska, Lawrence’s passions were suddenly and angrily aroused when the Young Democrats were about to endorse Senator Edward R. Burke, a Democrat who had opposed most of Roosevelt’s programs. Shouting from the floor, waving his arms, Lawrence threatened to offer a resolution commending a Republican, George W. Norris, who
was
sympathetic to Roosevelt. Lawrence’s challenge was accepted and, though not a delegate, Lawrence offered the resolution—and, to his amazement, it passed. This made a bulletin on the AP wire, which Lawrence wrote, somehow ignoring the name of the resolution’s sponsor. A few days later, Lawrence received word from the AP bureau chief in Nebraska that he was through.

Lawrence next got a job in Chicago with the United Press as a labor reporter, and in 1938 he was transferred to the UP bureau in Washington, one of his colleagues there being Harrison Salisbury, who had also come out of the Chicago bureau. Lawrence covered the Presidential campaign of 1940, gaining the attention and friendship of Wendell Willkie, who proceeded to recommend Lawrence to some editors on
The Times
, which had backed Willkie against Roosevelt in 1940. Although Willkie’s recommendation did not get Lawrence hired at that time, it was indirectly through Wendell Willkie that Bill Lawrence came to be a
Times
man.

One night at a gathering of the White House Correspondents Association, after Roosevelt’s reelection, Lawrence noticed that as Roosevelt was being wheeled out of the room he had been approached briefly by Willkie and that the two had exchanged a few words. Anxious to know what had been said, Lawrence began to push through the crowd toward Willkie. He did not get there in time, but learning that Willkie was scheduled to be at Arthur Krock’s home later in the evening, Lawrence waited and then called him there, announcing over the telephone in his forthright
manner, “This is Bill Lawrence of the United Press and I’d like to speak with Wendell Willkie.”

“I’m sorry,” said a gentle voice on the other end, “but Mr.
Willkie
is engaged at this moment with guests and cannot be interrupted.”

“
Look
,” said Lawrence, “you tell Mr. Willkie that this is Bill Lawrence of the United Press. And if he doesn’t have time to talk to me, that’s all right.
But deliver that message
.”

There was silence for a few moments. Then Wendell Willkie came to the telephone and told Lawrence what had been said, which, as it turned out, was not all that important.

The next day Lawrence met Turner Catledge, whom he knew casually, and Catledge exclaimed, “Boy, what did you say last night to Mr. Krock?”

“I didn’t say anything to Mr. Krock.”

“You didn’t call him up?”

“I called his home but I spoke to the butler.”

“That wasn’t any butler,” Catledge said. “That was Mr. Krock.”

Catledge that afternoon reminded Krock of his recently expressed wish to hire a young, hard-working man for the bureau, and Catledge proposed Lawrence. Krock thought it over for a few moments and agreed.

Bill Lawrence was hired at $80 a week, five dollars more than he had been making at the United Press, and within the next two decades Lawrence became one of the most industrious, highest-paid reporters on the paper. His by-line—“W. H. Lawrence”—appeared over important stories in Washington and Okinawa, London and Moscow. He toured South America and was the correspondent in the Balkans until he was thrown out for reporting them pro-Soviet. He helped to organize
The Times
’ United Nations bureau in 1946, rejecting as incompetent some of the veteran correspondents assigned to him; he concentrated instead on developing the talents of younger men that he thought were potentially first rate, particularly one skinny newcomer named Abe Rosenthal.

But no matter where Lawrence worked for
The Times
, whether at the United Nations or Europe or Korea, he remained “on loan” from the Washington bureau, and this was as Lawrence preferred it. He was fearful of the bureaucracy of the New York office, the layers of editors and formality in the big newsroom, and the only time that he lingered there was on the night of national elections when he was writing one of the political leads, or was analyzing the
election results with other
Times
men over the newspaper’s radio station, WQXR. Inevitably, Lawrence was accompanied to the newsroom on these occasions by a very pretty young woman who dolefully sat in a corner waiting for him to finish so that they could go off to Sardi’s or “21.” And then he would be back in Washington, another story, another pretty girl, another round of drinks, his manner seeming more reverential toward bartenders or copyboys than Congressmen or editors. One day in Washington, Lawrence called the bureau desk and asked in a loud voice, “Is that little jackass of a Napoleon still there?” to which James Reston, who had picked up the extension, replied with resignation, “Yes, Bill, I’m here.”

Reston liked Lawrence for reasons that often escaped both of them. Lawrence
was
hard-working and did have a certain boyish charm. As for Lawrence’s other side—the carousing, the two divorces, the impetuosity and apparent lack of guilt—this did grate on Reston’s Calvinism, but in every family there was room for an erring son, and in the Washington bureau this role was Lawrence’s. And he might have maintained it indefinitely had the knowledge of his growing friendship with Kennedy during the 1960 campaign not magnified his every move, causing the New York editors to scrutinize his stories with heightened intensity, to speculate on whether his reportorial objectivity was being compromised as he covered a Kennedy speech in one town, then played golf with Kennedy in another town, then attended a New Year’s Eve party with Kennedy in Palm Beach, then flew back with other reporters in the Kennedy airplane with a very lovely Kennedy aide on his arm.

The romance that developed between the girl and Lawrence along the whistle stops and plane hops of the campaign at first amused John Kennedy, then it seemed to delight him to a point where he tried to encourage it by his attention. At crowded airports, while posing for pictures, Kennedy would sometimes scan the room until he had spotted the couple standing together, and he would smile and remark, “
There
they are.”

The full extent of this never reached the editors in New York, but they already had sufficient misgivings about Lawrence. They had felt that Lawrence’s coverage of the West Virginia primary had made Kennedy’s battle seem much more difficult than it really was, and consequently when Kennedy triumphed his victory seemed all the more spectacular. After Kennedy’s election, when Bill Lawrence produced a number of exclusive stories about the new administration,
The Times
published them but within the office there was editorial grumbling about
The Times
’ news columns being used for John Kennedy’s “trial balloons,” and when this comment was made after Lawrence’s exclusive that identified Robert Kennedy as possibly the next Attorney General, Lawrence became infuriated. Although Lawrence was unaware of it, even some of his friends in the bureau were now becoming a bit disenchanted with him. One morning after Lawrence’s story had named Kennedy’s new Secretary of Commerce, but had not beaten the
Washington Post
to Dean Rusk’s appointment as the Secretary of State—an exclusive obtained by the
Post’s
late publisher, Philip Graham—Arthur Krock walked into the office, paused in the aisle, and said to another reporter, “Well, I’d give three Secretaries of Commerce for one Secretary of State, wouldn’t you?”

Reston and his deputy, Wallace Carroll, were also down on Lawrence, but they did not make an issue of it, nor did they have to: there was enough pressure coming from New York, most of it from Clifton Daniel, and when Lawrence learned of this he was resentful, but not really surprised. He had never been impressed with Daniel personally or professionally, and he had assumed that the feeling was mutual. He had first met Daniel twenty years before in Washington when Daniel was working for the Associated Press, and when Daniel began his executive rise on
The New York Times
, Lawrence was not ecstatic. Lawrence felt that Daniel resented, among other things, Lawrence’s breezy first-name acquaintanceship with most of the leading politicians, including Daniel’s father-in-law, and while Daniel did not openly restrain Lawrence at first, he gave Lawrence the impression that he was watching him closely, waiting for a slip. Then Lawrence was removed from a few important out-of-town political assignments, these being covered by
The Times
’ regional correspondents. And finally, in the spring of 1961, came the crushing blow: Lawrence, though he was
The Times
’ White House correspondent, was told that he would not accompany President Kennedy and the White House press to Europe for the big visits with de Gaulle in Paris, Khrushchev in Vienna, and Macmillan in London. Reston approached Lawrence one day and informed him bluntly, and to his amazement, that he was not going—Reston himself would make the trip. Lawrence at first could not believe it. He had already arranged through Kennedy to be the “pool” reporter on the trip, and he had anticipated the reunion with the girl from the campaign days, she now being employed in
one of the American embassies. It was a dream assignment for so many reasons, and to be abruptly cut in this manner was more than Lawrence could tolerate. He urged Reston to reconsider. Reston said he would, and then he left for Europe without saying anything further to Lawrence about it.

Lawrence, who had received job offers from the three major television networks in the past, now called his friend James Hagerty at ABC. Hagerty offered him a position as a news commentator, adding that he could begin by helping to cover the President’s European trip. Lawrence pondered the ABC offer for about a half-hour. During this time he received a call from President Kennedy, who had heard what had happened.

“Take it,” Kennedy said. “That’ll show the bastards.”

Lawrence thought about it for a few moments more, then called Wallace Carroll at the bureau and said he was quitting
The Times
. Lawrence said he needed a quick release because his new employers wanted him to leave almost immediately for Europe. Carroll called New York, interrupting Daniel during the daily news conference, which angered Daniel. Carroll was told to call back later, which he did, and Daniel said that Lawrence’s resignation was accepted. Catledge was in New Orleans, Dryfoos was unreachable, and so Daniel, who was then an assistant managing editor, was making the decision in their absence.

A few days later, Lawrence received a letter forwarded to him from Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

“Dear Bill,” it began. “I have just been told that you are leaving and I write to express my very real regret. You and
The Times
just seemed to go together and it won’t quite be the same place without you.”

Lawrence reread the letter a few times, and then he began to cry.

I
n a moment it would be 4 p.m. in New York, 9 p.m. in London, and 11 p.m. in Cairo; 5 a.m. in Saigon, 6 a.m. in Tokyo, and 8 a.m. in the Solomon Islands—and
Times
correspondents around the world are in various states of anxiety, sobriety, propriety, and sleep; and in the New York newsroom the secretaries, untouched by the exotica and erotica of distant lands, are contemplating a coffee break; and the copyreaders, sedentary scriveners, are calmly writing headlines:
Chinese-Romanian Rift Indicated in Rally Delay … Mississippi Police Use Gas to Rout Rights Campers
. The editors are about to stand and walk across the newsroom into Daniel’s emporium, and Clifton Daniel is waiting for them, sitting behind his desk reading over some notes that he had written earlier to remind himself that he had not been entirely happy this morning as he rode the train in from Bedford reading
The New York Times
.

This morning’s edition had been up to standard in most ways, but there nevertheless were things in it that had appalled him—a lack of clarity, a bit of conjecture, reportorial sloppiness—and he intended to tell this to his editors once they assembled in his office. For example, on page seven, there was a story from the London correspondent about Britain’s flourishing illegal radio stations, and a House of Commons bill that would silence them, that was so badly presented that Daniel was forced to read the story two or three
times in order to understand it. Also, on page forty-eight, there was a most unfortunate error in the headline over a political story from California:
Reagan Rules Out Help by Goldstein in California Race
. Goldstein? Who was Goldstein? Daniel read the story and discovered that Goldstein was really Goldwater,
Barry Goldwater
, and while this might have been a printer’s error, Daniel was astonished that no copyreader had noticed it and corrected it after the first edition.