The Kingdom and the Power (9 page)

He rarely made enemies. He was well liked by the staff mostly because he greeted them warmly, knew all their first names; and sometimes he would stand outside his office door with a pair of binoculars raised to his eyes, bringing everybody in the vast newsroom into close, sharp focus. It was Catledge who initiated the four-o’clock conference in his office each afternoon, a maneuver toward bringing a large number of editors under his direct control, and this was one of his first acts toward centralization. Though Clifton Daniel removed Catledge’s big table when he became the managing editor, the conference itself has remained a part of the procedure, it now being conducted at a more sleek table of Daniel’s choosing.

With the elevation of Clifton Daniel, there was some doubt about Catledge’s future. Many members of the staff assumed that Catledge had been kicked upstairs, inheriting an impressive new title, and an opulent new office, signifying nothing. But later, as the subordinate editors watched Catledge watching Daniel at the conference each afternoon, and perceived the effect it was having on Daniel, the impression changed. But they could never be sure. Where Catledge was concerned, there was no certainty.

A
fter Clifton Daniel had finished his dictation, Miss Riffe stood up and, with that nice hip motion she has when she walks, left his office. Daniel sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes momentarily, his horn-rimmed glasses tucked up into his long hair like a tiara. He had almost ten minutes left before the four-o’clock news conference, so he busied himself with some of the papers that Miss Riffe had left on his desk. There were cables sent from the bureaus overseas, and memos sent from within the building. There was a tearsheet of an editorial in
The Nation
praising his Bay of Pigs speech, and there were a few letters from carping readers, one being from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that began, “Dear Clif.” There was also a letter from a lady in Fort Worth who had known Daniel almost forty years ago when he worked in his father’s drugstore in Zebulon, North Carolina. He remembered her, too. Hazel Perkins. She had been one of the belles of Zebulon in the Twenties, and for a town of its size, he had always thought, there had been a remarkably large number of very pretty young women. There had been Melba Chamblee, a blue-eyed redhead whom he had dated in high school and continued to date for a while after he had gone to the University at Chapel Hill. And there had been Sadie Root, who came later, and then had gotten into an automobile accident that had cost her an eye. And there was Betsy Anderson, the prettiest of them all, he thought, and he had often wondered what had
ever become of her. She and Hazel Perkins used to sit at the curbside tables and he would serve them, and he remembered this as one of the more pleasant parts of his job at the drugstore—the walking back and forth and meeting people, and talking to the girls who gathered in Daniel’s drugstore that then, much more than now, was a center of social life in Zebulon. The deputy sheriff and the police chief also used to hang out there, as did the farmers talking about the price of tobacco and cotton, and the visiting politicians would drop in to shake hands. There was a piano in the front of the place and when Tad Chavis, a Negro, was not grinding ice for drinks or delivering things on his bicycle, he was usually playing ragtime on it, although he was sometimes competing with a loud and scratchy rendition of “In a Little Spanish Town” blaring from the Edison phonograph that stood not far from the piano. There was no radio in the drugstore then, and so young Clifton Daniel would occasionally slip across the street to the rear of a feedstore to hear the radio news and baseball scores, and it was there, too, that he remembers hearing about Lindbergh’s flight. He never stayed away too long, however, for the drugstore was busy, and when he was not waiting on tables he was inside taking telephone calls for the doctors, or listening to the deputy sheriff’s account of some local brawl, and one night Daniel saw walking into the drugstore a man whose throat was cut from ear to ear. Daniel called a doctor. He also called the
Zebulon Record
.

He had been sending news items into the paper during the summer months of his high school years, earning five dollars a week; the drugstore, a great clearing house for local gossip and news, was a perfect place for a young reporter. When he returned to high school in the fall he continued to write for the
Zebulon Record
, covering student activities and sports. He was never an athlete himself. From the age of twelve he had been a little deaf in his left ear, and he also was built along frail lines, although for a while he did calisthenics in his bathroom at home. One morning, however, he leaned over too far and slipped and broke a front tooth against the bathtub. This ended his physical-culture program for a while, and he sought to satisfy his ego by describing the actions of others, by getting his stories published, seeing his name in the paper. Sometimes, when writing a story that was a collection of local news items, he would separate each item with a small design bearing his initials—
ECD
—for Elbert Clifton Daniel—and a few people in Zebulon thought this was a bit much.

There was something a little cute and fancy about young Daniel, they said, those few who were put off by his formality in this so informal town. They saw him developing, too early, a sense of self and a manner that seemed mildly patronizing. But the pretty girls whom he knew liked him very much, liked not only his fine clothes and politeness but also his respect for older people, especially his parents, and they liked the fact that he was the brightest boy in the class and voted the “best looking” in the Wakelon High School yearbook of 1929. But the girls sensed that they did not have a chance with him, not from anything he said or did but from what he did not say or do. He did not get involved. He seemed to have big plans in distant places, a smooth country boy’s sense of getting ahead, and many years later, after he had begun his rise at
The New York Times
and had married Margaret Truman, some people back in Zebulon smiled and nodded knowingly.

But Margaret Truman was also a small-town girl, and she and Daniel were more alike in their origin and attitude than most people realized. Margaret had been an only child, as had Daniel, and both had received a surfeit of attention and guidance from their parents, confidence in the values of the community, and little self-doubt, and they grew up in a rather prim setting in a fixed society with an awareness that their families were a bit better off than most of their neighbors. Both of their fathers had begun as small shopkeepers, sharing many provincial notions about life and the Negro, and the elder Daniel was once also active in politics. Twice he served as mayor of Zebulon, getting the city to put in running water in the early Twenties, then to replace the kerosene street lamps with electric lights, and Harry Truman once told him, “Hell, you did just as well as I did—you just stayed down in your little town helping the poor people, and I went up and mixed with those rich bastards.”

When Margaret was eleven her father, a newly elected Senator from Missouri, began taking his family to Washington for the first half of each year; but this experience, as well as her later years in the White House and her career in show business, did not remove from her the aura of her region. If anything, her local allegiance might have become even more pronounced as she got older and solidified her views. She moved to New York, but was not moved
by
New York. She occupies it as a kind of permanent tourist. She responds to New York’s cultural offerings and challenges but is quick to see signs of New York’s coarseness or the gaucherie of its people.
She is unimpressed by the sophisticated glitter that encircles her East Side address, and after her marriage and the birth of her children she has rarely invited to her home the social butterflies that her husband has long found so fascinating. A few have resented this, and they have spread unflattering stories—Margaret cannot keep her help, Daniel does most of the cooking—but she continues to do as she wishes and, in a gracious way, to protect her privacy and be very selective of those invitations she accepts: yes, with some hesitation, to the Capote ball; yes, without hesitation, to the supper-dance in New York honoring England’s Princess Margaret; no, with regret, to Bennett Cerf’s party for Frank Sinatra, the Daniels being otherwise occupied on that occasion. While Margaret Truman Daniel has a closet full of well-designed clothes, her simplicity dominates them. Like her father, she is forthright and opinionated; unlike her husband, she is open and casual, although in recent years her influence, coupled with his own success, may have led Daniel to reveal himself with greater ease.

He still is a formal man, however, and still is fascinated by people who are privileged and rich—a decisive factor in the exhaustive coverage
The New York Times
now gives to news of society—but he is also more at home with himself and his past. Occasionally, when in high spirits, he even refers to himself as a “country boy.” He was never really that in its fullest sense, although there is no telling what he might have become had his father, a proud man, not helped clear a path through the rustic tobacco tract of Carolina to the more lush land in the distance.

Elbert Clifton Daniel, Sr., is now in his eighties. His facial features, particularly his eyes, strongly resemble his son’s, although his gray wavy hair is shorter and his clothes far less conservative. He will sometimes appear at his drugstore wearing a pair of formal gray-striped morning trousers and over them a brown double-breasted jacket, and under it a blue-striped shirt and pale polka-dot bow tie, and also a brown hat, black shoes, a brown cane; all of which, on him, looks fine. He is thought of as the town’s most distinguished living landmark, being the first man in Zebulon to have a telephone, and nearly everyone is very fond of him, although there are a few, very few, who find him somewhat patronizing, a characteristic he may have passed on to his son. In addition to his ventures into politics, he had a brief fling at owning the Vakoo movie theater, and he once merchandised his own brand of liver pills and a diarrhea cure. Had it not been for an attack of appendicitis,
however, when he was about eighteen years old, he might never have escaped the rugged farm life of
his
father, his grandfather, and nearly all the other Daniel kin who had sailed during the previous century from England and settled in this area of the South; but the illness enabled him to meet a young doctor from Raleigh who befriended him and later encouraged him to go into the drug business. And in 1905, after borrowing some money from his grandfather, Zachariah G. Daniel, an illiterate but industrious tobacco farmer who sometimes peddled his product by horse wagon through Virginia, and after acquiring a drug “permit” from the doctor friend, Clifton Daniel, Sr., bought an interest in his first drugstore. He practiced pharmacy on his permit until 1911, when he supplemented his training with schooling at Greensboro; in the same year, in the drugstore one day, he saw seated at the counter with other girls, sipping a soda, Miss Elvah Jones. She was the daughter of a tobacco warehouseman, had attended junior college at Raleigh, having once been the May Queen, and she was very pretty. He quickly courted her and in December of that year, at her grandmother’s home in the next county, they were married and off to a honeymoon in Richmond and Baltimore, and during the following September was born their son, the future managing editor of
The New York Times
, Elbert Clifton Daniel, Jr.

He was an agreeable child, and he did most of the right things. He had his first tooth at nine months, was walking within a year, but carefully, revealing a caution that would always be with him, and he displayed a premature aversion to dirt. There was nothing of the farmer in him. He was like his mother in his quiet manner, neat about his clothing, clean and precise, and his father later worried about him when he preferred to remain near his mother, indoors, much of the time sprawled on a rug reading a book. But the boy was very bright in school and obedient at home, and after school he helped out in the drugstore and also sold
Grit
and other magazines around town, saving his pennies, and when it came time for college, in the fall of 1929, with money scarce and the
Zebulon Record
offering a year’s subscription for a fat hen or a bushel of potatoes, he was able to contribute sixty-five dollars from his side earnings toward his tuition.

Most of what he wanted out of college life, he got; and that which he did not get, he did not miss. He joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity, did well in class, wrote for the
Daily Tar Heel
. He would have liked to become editor of the
Tar Heel
but not long
after joining it he was fired for being too haughty with a senior editor, and by the time he was reinstated to the staff he was out of line for the editor’s job. He did become editor of the campus literary magazine,
The Carolina
, and, backed by the interfraternity political machine, he was elected vice-president of the student body over the clamorous objections of one independent candidate who went around telling everybody: “I don’t care if you don’t vote for me, but for
God’s
sake don’t vote for Clifton Daniel!”