The Kingdom and the Power (76 page)

Among other things, Sulzberger was pondering the possibility of starting an afternoon newspaper in New York, which, with the
disappearance of the
World Journal Tribune
, had only one afternoon daily—the
New York Post
. At certain moments Sulzberger felt that New York City both needed and would support a second afternoon paper; at other moments he was not so sure, his romanticism and desire for public service being balanced by the fact that the short-lived
World Journal Tribune
had cost its owners about $17 million. And the issue was not merely financial—it was also a question of how The New York Times Company’s involvement with a second newspaper, perhaps a newly named, sophisticated journal featuring entertainment, the arts, political essays, and social commentary, would influence the reputation and character of the morning newspaper. Could Sulzberger, Catledge, or Bernstein insist on reportorial restraint in the morning and then relax the rules in the afternoon? If the new paper was to be completely divorced from the tone and strictures of the morning
Times
, if the new editors were to be given autonomy, would it not reintroduce the old problem of dukedoms within the organization? And there was finally the question of whether Punch Sulzberger had sufficient time to devote to a second newspaper, a situation similar to one that Adolph Ochs had faced a half-century ago when he had contemplated buying an afternoon paper in New York, the
Evening Post
. Ochs had eventually discarded the idea, believing that owning the
Post
would have divided his energies. And yet Ochs, a conservative man, had often underestimated his own capacity and the growth of his company: after completing the Times Tower building on Forty-second Street in 1904 (now the Allied Chemical building), he had been forced to vacate it nine years later because his paper had outgrown it. Thus he built
The Times’
present headquarters on Forty-third Street, which Arthur Hays Sulzberger had subsequently expanded with wings and an annex.

Now in 1967 this, too, was becoming inadequate for the rapidly growing
Times
, whose roster of employees had increased in about two years from 5,307 to 6,354, and whose lack of storage space for the rolls of newsprint had required the renting of space in the adjoining Paramount building’s basement, to be followed by the renting of additional space on the Paramount’s upper floors for more editorial room.
The Times’
West Side plant, built in 1959 and used mainly for supplementary printing of the Sunday edition—which in 1967 had a circulation of 1,600,000 and was averaging 558 pages per issue, varying in seasonal weight between four and seven pounds—had become so overcrowded that its lobby was
scheduled to be eliminated and its 27-foot lobby ceiling was to be lowered by about twelve feet.
The Times
under Sulzberger was suddenly becoming a very fat, rich operation, having $21 million in cash at the end of 1966, and diversifying and expanding in 1966-67 as never before in its history. Sulzberger paid $500,000 for a 51 percent interest in the Teaching Systems Corporation of Boston, which specialized in programmed learning material for schools and industry; and Sulzberger also bought, for an unannounced sum, the Microfilming Corporation of America, in Hawthorne, New Jersey, to supply the demands of the more than two thousand libraries, colleges, and businesses that subscribe to
The Times’
microfilm edition.
The Times
started a tabloid-sized weekly paper in very large type for people with poor sight, and it also introduced a tabloid version of
The Times
for school and college students. It licensed Parker Brothers of Boston to use historical front pages of
The Times
in jigsaw puzzles, and it also began selling facsimiles of its famous front pages as novelty gifts.
The Times’
Book Division, in collaboration with outside publishing houses, had produced more than fifty books between 1963 and 1967, ranging in subject from cooking to communism, and
The Times
also gained the serialization rights to the book by Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, after she had defected from the Soviet Union.

The transaction with Mrs. Alliluyeva, completed in April of 1967, demonstrated once again
The Times’
revered position within the Establishment, its role as a responsible spokesman for the system, and it also revealed something of the interesting personal relationships that link top
Times
men with other influential figures within the circles of government, communications, law, and literature—it was almost a little club that emerged during the odyssey that brought Mrs. Alliluyeva safely to Democracy; they all seemed to know one another, and they worked smoothly together with a tacit understanding of the rules by which they would be of service to Stalin’s daughter and to themselves.

Mrs. Alliluyeva’s lawyer and literary representative, a onetime general in the Pentagon named Edward S. Greenbaum, was an old and dear friend of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and he had been the Sulzberger family lawyer for more than forty years, a fact that
The Times
somehow neglected to mention in its “Man in the News” profile on Greenbaum on the day of Mrs. Alliluyeva’s arrival in the United States. Mrs. Alliluyeva’s other chief comforter during
her escape was the former American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, George F. Kennan, a friend of
The Times
and a neighbor of Greenbaum in Princeton, New Jersey. Greenbaum not only arranged for
The Times’
serialization, but he also arranged for the book to be published by Harper & Row, another client of his law firm (Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst), which had fought Harper’s battle during the previous year’s Kennedy suit against William Manchester’s book. Mrs. Alliluyeva’s editor at Harper & Row, Evan Thomas (son of the famed Socialist Norman Thomas), had been William Manchester’s editor, John F. Kennedy’s editor, Robert Kennedy’s and Theodore Sorensen’s editor, as well as the editor of Harper books written by Harrison Salisbury, John Oakes, Tom Wicker, C. L. Sulzberger, and other
Times
men.

The magazine rights to Svetlana Alliluyeva’s book went to
Life
, whose board chairman, Andrew Heiskell, was married to Punch Sulzberger’s sister, Marian, the widow of Orvil Dryfoos. The inside story of Mrs. Alliluyeva’s escape was written for
The Times
by Harrison Salisbury, who had gotten most of his information from his friend, former Ambassador Kennan; but Salisbury had kept his by-line off the story because he did not wish to offend his sources in the Soviet Union at a time when he was traveling regularly through Russia, which was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its revolution. The translator of Mrs. Alliluyeva’s book was Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a quietly wealthy, well-connected woman who had worked in the Senate office of John F. Kennedy, had met Punch Sulzberger and Clifton Daniel overseas, had known both Svetlana and Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia during her days there as a correspondent, and after the assassination was helping the assassin’s widow, Marina Oswald, write a book for Harper & Row.

A magazine piece by Svetlana Alliluyeva that appeared a few months before her book, and had been inspired by her reading of Boris Pasternak’s
Dr. Zhivago
, was printed in the
Atlantic Monthly
, whose publisher had published former Ambassador Kennan, and whose editor-in-chief, Robert Manning, had most recently worked in the State Department and knew all the right people in politics and journalism. In an issue of
Book Week
in April of 1967, Manning had written a very favorable review of James Reston’s book
The Artillery of the Press
, and a month later Reston wrote a very favorable review in
The Times
on page one about Mrs. Alliluyeva’s article in the
Atlantic Monthly
.

When Mrs. Alliluyeva’s book, entitled
Twenty Letters to a Friend
,
was distributed by Harper & Row in the fall of 1967,
The Times’
Sunday “Book Review” editor, Francis Brown, searching for an appropriate reviewer, selected Olga Carlisle, an American of distinguished Russian ancestry—she was the granddaughter of the playwright and short-story writer Leonid Andreyev, and her parents had been friends of Pasternak. Mrs. Carlisle’s review was very favorable, and it was positioned on page one.
The Times’
daily book critic, Eliot Fremont-Smith, a keen student of office affairs—he had praised Reston’s
Artillery of the Press
as “one of the important documents of our time”—was profoundly moved by the Svetlana book, calling it “the rarest of events.”

And so it had all worked out very well—Punch Sulzberger dwelled in the center of a rather tidy world. He had paid an estimated $250,000 for the serialization rights to the memoirs, had helped to launch Mrs. Alliluyeva’s best seller, had pleased his many clients in
The Times’
News Service, and had somewhat restored
The Times
into the good graces of those patriots in the nation who had been offended by Salisbury’s reporting from Hanoi, and by Oakes’s aggressive dovishness on the editorial page. It was one of the remarkable qualities of
The Times
that it could be, almost simultaneously, so many things to so many people—it was a deep-rooted flexible tree that moved from left to right, right to left, making its quiet adjustments as it dropped its tired old leaves and rebloomed through a century of seasons.

In the winter of 1967, Herbert L. Matthews sat rather forlornly in Room 1048 along a corridor of editorial writers on the tenth floor. Nothing would please him less than to be described as forlorn, a man doing penance in an ivory tower because he had embarrassed
The Times
years ago in Cuba. Matthews was vain and valorous; at sixty-seven he was thin, tall, only slightly less energetic, and no less alert, than when he had first joined the paper in 1922, beginning a career that would find him in Peking in 1929 observing a triumphant Chiang Kai-shek; in Addis Ababa in 1936 riding with an invading Italian army; in Perpignan in 1939 writing his last dispatch from the Spanish Civil War; in Italy and India and North Africa during World War II, in London after the war,
and in the Cuban hills in 1957 interviewing a bearded revolutionary that most people thought was dead.

Because of these articles about Castro and subsequent ones about Cuba,
The Times
would eventually be charged with Communizing that island, and many editors in the newsroom would become chary of Matthews. In 1963, as a member of John Oakes’s Editorial department, Matthews revisited Cuba and Castro, and upon his return to New York he offered to write articles for the News department, but his offer was refused. In 1966, again representing the Editorial Board, Matthews reacquainted himself with Castro and Cuba. No other
Times
man could get into Cuba in 1966, and Matthews had amassed twenty-five thousand words of notes, but the News department again declined his offer to write for it; consequently,
The Times
went through the year with no information from Cuba from a member of the staff.

When readers wrote letters to
The Times
inquiring about Matthews’ status, they received replies from Clifton Daniel’s office explaining that Matthews was no longer writing for the News department because he was no longer, strictly speaking, a newsman, but rather a member of the Editorial Board, implying that editorial writers did not write for the News department. This was not true. Harry Schwartz, Murray Rossant, and numbers of other editorialists wrote frequently for the News department, and so had Matthews in years past. Now, however, he was a sensitive issue. While his by-line appeared from time to time over an essay or article on the editorial page, or perhaps in the Sunday edition, it rarely appeared more than once every few months. During 1966 it appeared a total of six times. But as an anonymous editorial-writer he was extremely productive. He wrote about Latin American affairs (being sometimes critical of Castro), about the Middle East and Vietnam, and other subjects that John Oakes thought worthy of comment. Oakes was very respectful of Matthews’ talent and was fond of him personally, and he had never forgotten his first sight of Matthews in Paris forty years ago: Oakes, a schoolboy visiting the Paris bureau, saw Matthews walk in wearing a gray fedora, beige gloves and matching spats, and carrying a malacca walking stick.

The next time Oakes saw him was two decades later, in 1949, when both were writing editorials on the tenth floor under Charles Merz. Matthews was then a favorite son of the institution, enjoying a warm relationship with the owners of
The Times
; Iphigene Sulzberger was the godmother to Matthews’ only son. But now, in
1967, after forty-five years, he was preparing to leave
The Times
, planning to devote himself to his books and to his belief that history will finally absolve him. Even now he believed that Castro was not a Communist when the revolution began, and in Matthews’ final article on the editorial page—the last of four by-line reminiscences on the four continents that had been his beat—he wrote: