The Kingdom and the Power (36 page)

Causing as little commotion as possible, Catledge now began his campaign to centralize the News department, to bring friendly
forces into his camp. He began by appointing two men to the rank of assistant managing editor, Robert E. Garst and Theodore M. Bernstein. Bernstein and Garst had filled vacancies caused by the resignation of Neil MacNeil, a large, proud man who had been on the paper for thirty-three years and had resented Catledge’s plan for centralization, and David H. Joseph, who had been on
The Times
for forty-four years and had been given so little to do in recent years that he finally took the hint and approached Catledge one day. He walked into Catledge’s office and said, “Do you know what I would do if I were in your place?”

When Catledge looked up almost listlessly, David Joseph became suddenly more intense, repeating
“Do you know what I would do if I were in your place?”

Catledge saw before him an elderly man, pale and partially bald and with deep sad eyes, trembling with an inner rage that was uncharacteristic of the man that Catledge had known for the past few years. Joseph had always seemed unemotional and methodical, too methodical by Catledge’s standards, an office antique from the Ochs era that Catledge could have done without, but would not have disposed of, certainly not during his first year as
The Times
’ managing editor. It would have been scandalous to attempt that. There were still many Ochs men on the staff, and it was said that during Ochs’s days
The Times
had only one personnel director-God. When a
Times
man became old and feeble and almost incompetent he was not fired or forced into retirement; he was instead kept on the staff until God had disposed of him. Ochs himself had hired David Joseph, being impressed with Joseph’s formality and shyness, and the fact that Joseph, like Ochs, had worked for the
Louisville Courier-Journal
.

“Are you a poet?” Ochs had asked, noting on Joseph’s application form the fact that he had briefly taught English after graduation from Columbia and had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key.

Joseph seemed too embarrassed to answer, and Ochs was elated and touched by the applicant’s apparent modesty, and Ochs announced, “Come to work Wednesday.” That was Wednesday, October 21, 1908. And David H. Joseph proved to be a fine reporter, reliable and objective in the tradition of Ochs and Van Anda. In 1927, Joseph was appointed the city editor, and in 1948 he became an assistant managing editor under James. Now, four years later, Joseph stood glaring at Catledge, demanding an answer to a question that confused Catledge.

“All right,”
Catledge
said finally, “what
would
you do if you were in my place?”

“I’ll tell you,” Joseph said, “but first let me be in your place.”

Catledge looked at Joseph again, more perplexed than before. But Joseph was obviously
not
kidding. He stood waiting for Catledge to stand up, walk to the front of the desk, and trade places, and there was such conviction in Joseph’s trembling manner that Catledge obliged, moving to the front while Joseph took Catledge’s place behind the desk.

“Now, if I were you,” David Joseph said, gaining composure, “I’d ask for my resignation.”

Catledge stood silently for a moment. Then he said, softly, “Well, Dave, you took the words right out of my mouth.”

And so it was done—Joseph’s retirement was official. It apparently had been so difficult for Joseph to sever his relationship with
The Times
after so many years that he had to stage an incident, a dramatic scene to accomplish what he could not otherwise bring himself to do. Catledge was moved by the gesture, and pleased by the result. He called the publisher’s office and informed Sulzberger of Joseph’s decision to retire. And in the next issue of the newspaper’s house organ,
Times Talk
, there was a long and kindly article about Joseph’s career, and a farewell party was arranged for him at the Essex House. It was attended by Iphigene and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, by Charles Merz, the editor of the editorial page, and by other senior
Times
men. Catledge delivered a few words of appreciation for Joseph’s many years of service and then he presented to Joseph a gift from the staff, a wallet, and finally everyone stood and sang “Auld Lang Syne.”

Turner Catledge was never so presumptuous or quixotic as to think that he himself could dominate
The New York Times’
News department. It now had become too large and unwieldy for that; and even if
The Times
were a coordinated force, which it was not, it would not respond most effectively to direct commands from a martinet. For all its size,
The Times
was a rather delicate and sensitive monstrosity. It had to be petted, cajoled, prodded gently. It was like an elephant, Catledge thought, a slow-moving, heavy creature that, if improperly led, could be made to look awfully foolish and could
also make a fool of its leader. It was a serious animal. If it wished to dance in public, it had better dance well.

Still,
The Times
had to move along, to keep pace with a faster life in the Fifties. Now the newspaper industry had a serious new threat, television, and Catledge knew that the formula that had worked so well for Van Anda, Birchall, and James would require some adjusting. A newspaper could not compete with the speed of television in covering spot news, nor could it match television’s dramatic presentation of a single news spectacle, such as a political convention or the coronation of a queen; but Catledge was confident that newspapers could bring readers more details and could explain the significance of these details more effectively than could television. Television reporters, with few exceptions, were really skimming the headlines, hitting the highlights of a few top stories. Newspaper reporters would now have to dig more deeply into more areas and to inform the public more thoroughly; they could no longer merely report all the facts, but they would often have to interpret the meaning behind these facts. The trick was to do this without editorializing. While there was a difference between interpreting and editorializing, Catledge knew that the line between the two was sometimes thin, and if
The Times
was to achieve the new goal and yet avoid making a mockery of Ochs’s motto about objectivity, it had to have a more vigilant copydesk, more unchallenged authority in New York—and here again arose the problem of power. Who was to decide what and where? Catledge had privately decided that the bureau chiefs could no longer stand between his senior editors and the reporters around the nation and overseas, but he also knew that it would now be unwise to push too hard or too fast. It would take time to whittle down the chiefs.
Everything
took time on
The Times
, and occasionally Catledge might have to rely on help from God. Catledge would have to remain patient, cautious. Already there had been complaints from a few old-timers to Iphigene Sulzberger that “things aren’t what they used to be,” and “your dear father would never put up with what’s going on around there now.” And Cyrus L. Sulzberger, too, was aware of slight changes in New York, and periodically he would fly in from Europe, would stride across the newsroom into the bullpen carrying a satchel full of complaints from his men with copies of their stories that had allegedly been butchered in New York. Then Theodore Bernstein, Catledge’s dean of grammar and enforcer of rules, would attempt to defend the editing, and once Bernstein threw
up his hands and cried, “Dammit, Cy, what do you want, an
un
edited paper?” Cyrus Sulzberger indicated that this was not a bad idea.

There was a time, twenty and thirty years earlier, when the paper had been almost unedited. But in those days the cost of newspaper production and labor was not so high, and
The Times
could afford to be more lenient with its space allotment for news. It was then also common at
The Times
for some reporters to work on “space,” meaning that they were paid on a measurement basis which, while it inspired some of them to cram more facts into their stories, also led to wordiness and padding in
Times
articles that persisted long after the space system was abandoned. But now, in the Fifties, it was imperative that
The Times
tighten its writing style. The paper could no longer financially afford to print lengthy stories about relatively minor news events. While the top executives did not wish to emphasize it, the paper was now actually printing fewer columns of news than it had been printing in the Nineteen-twenties and-thirties. And since the end of World War II, it also had greatly increased the volume of advertising to a point where it regularly carried more lines of advertising than lines of news; and it also was accepting the advertising of certain budget-boasting smaller department stores that
The Times
had once been too haughty to accept. The executives justified the increased advertising on the grounds that
The Times had
to make more money to meet the rising costs of producing a newspaper and paying higher salaries to a staff that had nearly doubled in size since Catledge had become a
Times
man in 1929. The only way that
The Times
could both cover the news and pay its bills was to get its reporters to say more in less space, as the tabloid men from the New York
Daily News
had been doing so well for years. But on a newspaper where things move slowly, this was not easily achieved. Older
Times
reporters, who for decades had worked in a system that had condoned long leads and pedestrian writing if all the important facts were in each story—“I want it
all
,” Ochs had said—could not be expected to adjust happily to a shorter, snappier style. Of course, Bernstein’s deskmen could rewrite the stories, but this would alienate the reportorial staff and would place excessive authority in the hands of copyreaders—and Bernstein himself. Catledge did not want that. Bernstein was an aspiring man who, with the slightest encouragement, would take over the newsroom. Bernstein
did
know more about newspaper editing and the English language than any other man on the staff—certainly more than Turner
Catledge—and he was never hesitant about flaunting his knowledge. While editing Winston Churchill’s memoirs for
The Times
, Bernstein wrote to Sir Winston suggesting places where the writing might be improved or cut out entirely. Churchill, annoyed, replied that he was then “fully engaged” in other matters and requested that Bernstein publish the memoirs as written, which was eventually done.

But Catledge was wise to keep things in delicate balance between the forces of Bernstein and the reportorial staff. Not all the reporters were in need of editing; indeed, there were some reporters with smooth and graceful styles that would probably be stifled under the heavy hand of a domineering desk, which usually contained its quota of frustrated writers and pedagogues; and Catledge was also mindful of the fact that
The New York Times
was an immensely successful enterprise, and that any changes that were introduced or permitted by him might adversely affect the winning combination.

Quite apart from what he might think of Cyrus Sulzberger’s position as an overseas viceroy, Sulzberger
was
a first-rate reporter; and the foreign staff, too, while having its intractable members, was probably as good as or better than any staff ever assembled overseas by
The Times
. Many of the correspondents were linguists and distinguished authors; a few were scholars, and nearly all of them had spent years as world travelers and had witnessed the war in Europe or Asia. And now, as Catledge cautiously assumed the duties of managing editor, the foreign staff was moving knowledgeably around the world reporting the political and economic trends of the postwar era and the eruption of new hostilities. Sulzberger and Anne O’Hare McCormick were in London analyzing the British elections, and other stories from England were being written by Clifton Daniel, Tania Long, and Benjamin Welles, son of the former Undersecretary of State. Raymond Daniell, chief of the London bureau, was in Glasgow traveling with Churchill. In Paris, a Rhodes scholar from Georgia, Thomas Jefferson Hamilton, was preparing to cover the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, being assisted by an alert young reporter named Abe Rosenthal. Also in Paris was the chief of the regular six-man bureau—Harold Calender, who had been on
The Times
since 1924, having traveled with Franco’s forces in the Spanish war and having worked in Germany before the World War and in Norway until the Germans entered Narvik. In Rome, the bureau chief was Arnaldo Cortesi (whose father had previously worked for the AP in Rome, having allegedly
used as character references the King of Italy and the Pope); Arnaldo followed his father into journalism after being trained as an engineer—and one day at
The Times
’ office in Rome, after it had been announced that half a million people had jammed St. Peter’s Square, Arnaldo Cortesi went down to calculate the surface of the entire piazza to the last square inch, determining finally that the half-million figure was slightly exaggerated.

In Teheran, Michael Clark was filing a story about the silent oil wells at Abadan, and Albion Ross was in Cairo writing about the British-Egyptian crisis. Sydney Gruson was in Tel Aviv describing the latest Middle East dispute, and Camille Cianfarra was with the United States Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. In Athens was the venerable A. C. Sedgwick, whose wife was an intimate of the Queen and was also an aunt of C. L. Sulzberger’s wife, a convenient arrangement all around. In Karachi, which was part of the so-called “prickly-heat beat,” Robert Trumbull was analyzing events following the assassination of Pakistan’s premier. Tillman Durdin was in Djakarta covering Indonesia’s campaign against the Communists. Henry R. Lieberman, who had previously traveled through most of China by every conceivable conveyance from a goatskin raft to a wooden Tsinghai saddle, was now China-watching in Hong Kong. Lindesay Parrott, a boisterous little man who had gone to Princeton and later became the villain in a romantic novel written by his former wife, was now the bureau chief in Tokyo, reporting the Korean truce negotiations together with another
Times
man, Greg Mac-Gregor, who had first visited the Orient as a Marine at Guadalcanal. In Korea with the troops were Murray Schumach and George Barrett, being invaded periodically by
Times
men from Markel’s Sunday department and Krock’s Washington bureau. Harrison Salisbury was in Moscow reporting the Cold War, while the reactions to it in Belgrade were being recorded by M. S. Handler, in Berlin by Farns-worth Fowle, in Bonn by Drew Middleton and Jack Raymond, in Geneva by Michael Hoffman, in Stockholm by George Axelsson, in Dublin by Hugh Smith, in Vienna by John MacCormac, at The Hague by Daniel Schorr, in Madrid by Sam Pope Brewer, and from General Eisenhower’s headquarters at SHAPE by Edward A. Morrow.
The Times
also had Foster Hailey reporting from Buenos Aires, R. Hart Phillips from Havana, Crede Calhoun from Panama, Ford Wilkins from Manila—and there were several other
Times
correspondents and stringers stretched from the sub-Sahara to Reykjavík; and if Catledge wished to find fault with them, or with
the way the foreign staff was run, he could—and would—but not now. He would concentrate on the foreign staff after he had had an opportunity to visit the overseas bureaus, but now he would remain at home and try to get his own office in order and see if anything could be done to improve the performance of the many men and women who worked in the New York newsroom.