The Kingdom and the Power (10 page)

Daniel could also have gotten the nomination for the presidency later but he declined because he had the notion—“somewhat presumptuous,” he later conceded—that he was a newspaperman, and he believed that newsmen, in the interest of objectivity, should stay out of party politics and never become irretrievably committed to any one cause or person, a policy shared by nearly all journalists, although at a cost. For this detachment from the world they observe robs them of a deeper experience that springs from involvement, and they sometimes become merely voyeurs who see much, feel little. They take death and disaster as casually as a dock strike, and they take for granted their right to publicize the weakness in others but they never have to lay it on thé line themselves. Of course if journalists become identified with a cause or a great figure they may become apologists or propagandists, flunkies for the famous. Clifton Daniel would know some journalists to whom this would happen, but it would never happen to him. He was always too cautious, too sure of what he wanted, and he was possibly assisted by a natural aloofness, perhaps even lack of passion. If he ever made a compromise in his professional or private life, few people would know it, there would be no scandal, he would cover his tracks well.

After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1933, and after a year on a small newspaper downstate, Daniel joined the
Raleigh News and Observer
. There between 1934 and 1937 he covered politics and crime, a variety of assignments, meeting many interesting people, among them Katharine Cornell, the first famous actress he ever interviewed, and Thomas Wolfe, whose novel
Look Homeward, Angel
had been published a few years before. By 1941, Daniel had left Raleigh and was working for the Associated Press. He had come up to New York in the spring of 1937 but had been turned down by nearly all the dailies, including
The New York Times
. The one paper that offered him a job was the
World-Telegram
, and he turned it down when the offer was only $35 a week, $10 less than he had been making in Raleigh.

His interview at the
New York Times
building had been short. He had visited the newsroom but had not gotten in to see the managing editor’s office that he would one day occupy, nor did he meet the man himself, Edwin James. He had seen one of James’s subordinates, a night city editor named Bruce Rae, a small, self-possessed man who had been a first-rate crime reporter in the Twenties and now aspired to become in time James’s successor, not suspecting that James quietly abhorred him. The exact reasons were vague but easily understood—James was a cocky little man and what James least desired nearby was another cocky little man. Rae would get as high as assistant managing editor but then, as Catledge was brought into the home office as James’s assistant, Rae was sent to Guam and put in charge of the Pacific correspondents during World War II. When Daniel succeeded Catledge as the managing editor, Rae was still on
The Times
in a lesser editorial position, mellowed by time and quite pleasant, and if he remembered having not hired Daniel in 1937, he never mentioned it, nor did Daniel, who did remember it. But it had been only a routine meeting, the usual institutional once-over, a mild mixture of politeness and noncommitment, and Daniel was not really disappointed when he was rejected. As a newsman in Carolina, Daniel had been very conscious of
The Times
but not awed by it. His father’s drugstore in Zebulon did not sell
The Times
, and it still does not. Daniel had recognized the dignity and importance of being employed by
The Times
, but he did not regard it as a place where he would particularly want to work. The journalists whose work he knew best in those days were either working on the afternoon papers or on the
Herald Tribune
, such writers as H. Allen Smith and Joseph Mitchell, the latter a 1929 graduate of the University of North Carolina who would become the great reporter on
The New Yorker. The Times
had, as always, many fine reporters but almost no fine writers. Its one notable exception, Meyer Berger, whose descriptive coverage of Al Capone’s tax trial in Chicago in 1932 had quickly established his credentials, had quit
The Times
in 1937 for
The New Yorker
, although he would return a year later, discovering that he worked best when surrounded by noise, distractions, and the constant pressure of a newsroom and a daily deadline.

The New York Times
, when Clifton Daniel applied to it in 1937, was a paper in slow transition. Adolph Ochs had been dead for two years, and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, though introducing changes.
was making them gradually and quietly, wishing to avoid any impression that
The Times
was shifting from its Ochsian course. The daily edition was selling for two cents a copy in 1937 and was about to go up a penny. Its circulation had gone over 500,000 for the first time in its history, and the Sunday edition was almost 770,000. The appearance of the newspaper, its front-page makeup and design, was not radically different in those days from what it would be when Daniel would become its managing editor twenty-seven years later, although photographs were still a rarity on page one. Ochs had preferred it that way, relenting only when a very special news event seemed to demand a photograph of the principal, such as a two-column front-page photograph of Lindbergh after his flight in 1927; a two-column photograph of Roosevelt after his Presidential victory in 1932 and a one-column photograph of New York’s newly elected Governor Herbert H. Lehman; a two-column picture of the German President Paul von Hindenburg upon his death in 1934, and no picture of his successor, Adolf Hitler; a four-column photograph of Adolph Ochs upon his death in 1935.

Sulzberger liked pictures, as future editions of the paper would show, but he infused his taste with such a subtle sense of timing that few readers would notice the transition from the era of Ochs to Sulzberger. One of the more startling moves that Sulzberger did make by 1937, one that would undoubtedly have been rejected by Ochs had he been alive, was the appointment of a woman, Anne O’Hare McCormick, as a foreign-affairs columnist. Perhaps nothing would have appealed to Ochs less than the authoritative tone of a lady columnist in
The Times
. Still, Mrs. McCormick had been getting articles published in
The Times
on a free-lance basis from Europe since 1921, and the clarity of her reporting, the depth of her perception, had impressed not only Sulzberger but also the three editors who presided during these years, Van Anda and Birchall and James. They were all aware of the fact that she had been one of the first journalists in Europe to note the rise of fascism in Italy and to write about its new young spokesman, then referred to in
The Times
as “Professor Mussolini”; and so Sulzberger, with absolutely no resistance from his advisers or from his wife, Iphigene, who had politely deplored many of her father’s Victorian reservations about lady pundits, assigned Mrs. McCormick in 1937 to the important job in Europe—as
The New York Times
continued to build up its foreign staff for the great war that seemed inevitable.

This was the big news of 1937—not what
had
happened, but what
was
going
to happen. And
The Times
, unlike much of the nation, was getting ready. Hanson Baldwin, then beginning his career as the paper’s military specialist, was sent to Europe in 1937 to learn all he could about European military establishments while he still could. Herbert Matthews, covering the Spanish Civil War in 1937, was already writing in
The Times
and in a book that this was just a warm-up for the larger conflict to follow, and in one appraisal from Spain he warned: “You who stroll along the Great White Way, thinking complacently how far away it all is from peaceful America—you, too, will feel a tap on your shoulder one of these days, and will hear the call.… War has a long, long arm and it is reaching out for all of us.”

Matthews was thirty-six years old when he wrote this. He was a tall, very thin, solemn, and scholarly man, a student of Dante, and he had a lean ascetic face and dark sad eyes and a romantic fatalism about the world and his place in it. He was both quietly fascinated by the heroics of war and deeply concerned about its victims, and this concern, together with his sense of history and hypocrisy, brought a dimension and edge to his reporting that was involving and memorable. He was not a reporter’s reporter, he was a
writer’s
reporter, and during the Spanish Civil War, covering it from the Loyalist side, he was greatly admired by the literary left and others in Europe and America who despised Franco. Hemingway, a friend of Matthews’, called him the “straightest, the ablest and the bravest correspondent, a gaunt lighthouse of honesty,” but Matthews at the same time was being called a Communist along the Catholic front in New York and elsewhere. A year earlier, in 1936, when Matthews had been the only correspondent to serve throughout the Ethiopian campaign on the Italian side, he had been called a fascist by many
Times
readers. There was something in the chemistry of Herbert Matthews that could activate readers, provoking them to extravagant praise or scorn. Matthews did not, like so many correspondents, play it safe with the official version of things, and perhaps only
The New York Times
could absorb within its ranks for so long such an endlessly controversial figure; but by the Nineteen-sixties, during Clifton Daniel’s years as the managing editor, after Matthews’ reporting on Castro’s Cuba had again hit the raw nerve of the nation, there was some question as to how much even
The Times
could take. It was not that
The Times
hierarchy would ever dismiss Matthews. He was too much a part of them for that. There were other ways. But in 1937 Herbert Matthews was one of the exciting
young men on
The Times
, an inspiration to his juniors if a trial to his seniors, and his reporting from Spain was dramatic, his insight into its consequences prophetic.

Also reporting from Europe in those days, though he was sixty-five years
old
, was the former managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, crossing and recrossing Europe as energetically as he had ever since replacing Edwin James as the chief correspondent five years before. In the process Birchall became as familiar with Cracow as Paris, Dublin as Geneva or Berlin, and from these places he cabled stories that at times focused on the visible signs of a tense Europe—such as when German customs officers held him up at an airport and forced him to strip to the skin while searching for a nonexistent supply of money they believed he was trying to smuggle out of the country. At other times Birchall’s stories caught the quiet eerie hours of Europe waiting for war. In one story from London Birchall described how, while walking through the park that after-noon, he had suddenly become aware of a strange new change in the city. At first he could not perceive what it was. He knew that it was not the result of the obvious preparations for war that he saw all around him—the sandbag craters, the wheel tracks, the balloon barrages, the shelter trenches. Then, he wrote, it began to occur to him as he walked “that in the whole park, formerly at this hour filled with laughing children playing ball, chasing each other and making merry in all sorts of ways, there was not a child in sight. Thinking back,” he went on, “it was also certain that throughout this week one had not seen anywhere a boy or girl below the age of 16. This was a childless city.”

Frederick Birchall’s reporting in the Thirties, particularly from Paris, was so often denigrating to the Germans that one night a
Times
editor in New York, anticipating the harm that might come to Birchall from the German agents in Paris, did something that
Times
men are warned never to do. The editor falsified a dateline. He scratched out “Paris” and wrote in “London” at the top of Birchall’s story preceding the date, thereby violating what was perhaps Sulzberger’s pet rule. A dateline on a
Times
story was sacred, Sulzberger had often said, adding that readers were always entitled to know precisely from where and when a dispatch had originated. Had Sulzberger known of the editor’s act, the editor would have been severely reprimanded or fired, which is what had happened, and would happen, to other transgressors. But Sulzberger never learned of it. Nor did the editor, a large and resolute man named
Neil MacNeil, reveal it to his colleagues. This was possible because during the Thirties MacNeil was a senior editor answerable to few others in the newsroom; he also worked the night shift, arriving in the newsroom at 6 p.m. just as Edwin James was leaving, and James, anxious to get out, was pleased that he had such experienced subordinates as MacNeil to hold the fort through the night.

MacNeil worked in a section of the newsroom known, for no apparent reason, as the “bullpen.” It consisted of three or four desks arranged to form a right angle in the southeast corner of the newsroom, and these desks were occupied by senior editors who read the news as it came in and then determined how much of it would be printed and where it would appear in the paper. Technically the bullpen editors were under the managing editor, but during Edwin James’s era their judgment went unquestioned. It was not until Turner Catledge succeeded James in 1951 and established the daily news conference in the managing editor’s office, on the opposite side of the newsroom, that the bullpen editors lost their exclusivity as receivers and appraisers of news, desk dons
sans reproche
; and when this happened Neil MacNeil, who had been on
The New York Times
for thirty-three years, asked to be retired, and he was.

But during the Thirties the paper was governed at night by the bullpen editors—men who, through the years, had slowly and patiently worked their way up through what was probably the most tedious and unheralded craft in the newsroom. Copyreading. Copyreaders were a special breed of journalists. They were indoor creatures, retainers of rules, anonymous men. Many had come to New York from all over America seeking some greater fulfillment, and when this did not materialize they ended up, through circuitous and often bizarre circumstances, on a copydesk at
The New York Times
. Educated men, well-read travelers, they were ideally suited for the work, though few would admit it. They had not planned on becoming copyreaders.
Nobody
planned on that. And they often spoke of quitting or getting an outside job as a reporter, which a few of them had once been in smaller cities. But most of them remained for years on the copydesk, and secretly they liked the sedentary life, this almost monastic existence of measured words and precise routines and quiet rewards. Here, within the insular atmosphere of
The Times
, they had security and isolation from uncertainty. They spent their nights reading bulletins and editing stories about the world’s latest calamity and chaos, threats and failures, but their only contact with this reality was with the point of a pencil. They
did not seem to mind working late at night, the most miserable hours in the newspaper business, missing the theater and dinner parties, arriving in the newsroom at a time when most of the staff was preparing to leave, and leaving when the charwomen arrived. The charwomen and the prostitutes in Times Square were usually the only females who crossed their path, but they did not mind this either, seeming perfectly contented within the male circle of deskmen when away from the daytime distractions of wives and children. After work, copyreaders joined other copyreaders for a few drinks in taverns around Times Square or Broadway, savoring a special intimacy about New York at this hour, and mingling with an interesting crowd around the bar, actors and musicians, rogues and hustlers and tipsters, and these people considered it a privilege of sorts to meet
Times
men, and thus the copyreaders felt themselves a part of a rather gamy night scene in New York; but they felt it from a distance. They remained copyreaders, introspective men, careful men, dreamers not doers. Which is not to degrade them. They were more valued on newspapers than most reporters, and they made more money at the start. Many copyreaders were scholarly men, and nearly all possessed a wealth of information and knowledge of law that helped the newspaper avoid errors and libel. Still, the copyreader could not go very far. If he was diligent, he might during a decade move from one end of the curved copydesk, where he began his career, to the middle of the desk, becoming slotman, and this permitted him to distribute stories as they came in to other copyreaders for editing and headlines. If he was diligent and lucky, he might someday be promoted to the head of the desk and be given a title. And if he was
very
diligent and lucky, he might finally end up one night sitting in the bullpen. This is what had happened to Neil MacNeil. And it was understandable, once he had worked his way through the maze and reached the top in the Thirties, that he would appear to be a man of great certainty, pride, and confidence.