The Kingdom and the Power (14 page)

While this is true, Green nonetheless quietly resents the cavalier attitude of a few of his
Times
colleagues on the floors above, suspecting that their approach to the business side of the paper might also be a reflection of the way they secretly feel about him. He is as aware as they of
The Times
’ magnetic appeal, but he also
believes that it is not this magnetism alone that attracts more than $100 million a year in advertising revenue—
Green
had something to do with this, his drive, his determination, and that of his staff. It is
they
who bring in the money that permits piety to reign among the ten wisemen who write editorials on the tenth floor, and it is this money too that permits reporters on the third floor to place a telephone call to Cambodia if necessary to check a single fact. Green also feels that the advertising, though it is paid for by partisans, still provides legitimate news to
Times
readers. It not only tells what is selling and where, but it also gives a daily portrait of the nation’s economy, an insight into contemporary taste. The ads offer a second perspective on the day, proof that the world is not entirely preoccupied with poverty and threats, bombs and ashes. The pretty girl in the ad wearing a Peck & Peck dress, the man inhaling a mild luxury-length Pall Mall, both offer
Times
readers an indulgent pause between the gray columns of gravity. And the historians fifty years from now, Green suspects, when they want to know how people lived and dreamed in the Nineteen-sixties, will get as many clues from reading the ads as reading the news. Of course the advertising will stress the positive, the news the negative. The truth will be somewhere in between.

The news of this day in June focused on the “long hot summer,” the race riots in Mississippi; the ads highlighted the summer bargains—Macy’s mink stoles, regularly $299, were down to $236. The news singled out the vast problem of unemployment; the help-wanted ads were jammed with job offers for the skilled and unskilled. The news stressed the shortage of housing; the ads emphasized the availability of housing at all prices around New York, praising the neighborhoods without hinting at the discrimination that exists in these neighborhoods. The news was concentrated on fame and power, grand success and grand failure; the ads catered to the everyday dreams of Everyman, the attainable sweet life, the gadgets and vehicles of escape.

The ads recorded the average man’s tragedies, too, but only in the smallest print in the back of the newspaper, back between the stock-market listings and the bland photographs of executives on the rise—here, buried near the bottom, one could read in tiny type the names of those who had gone bankrupt, those who had been abandoned, those who had lost something including dreams and sought recovery, and they told this to
The Times. The Times
would publish this, charging a few dollars a line, within its classified-advertising
pages—a special department on the sixth floor of the
Times
building largely staffed by middle-aged women who sit within glass-partitioned cubicles, telephones to their ears, jotting down the forlorn facts of daily life, and then they relay these facts, if they are not too vulgar or vengeful, to the composing room on the fourth floor, where they are methodically set into type for the Public Notices column of the next edition of
The Times
.

Today
The Times
would announce the fact that Jean Pompilio, sales girl, 89-01 Shore Road, Brooklyn, had gone bankrupt, her liabilities being $15,251, her assets $1,275. Today Edward Dougherty, 89-36 207th Street, Queens, would declare in
The Times
that his wife, Florence, “having left my bed and board several months ago,” was now completely responsible for her own debts; he would pay no longer. Today the wife of a runaway husband would plead in
The Times
: “Len W.—Elizabeth and I are alone and lost. We know you feel our pain and tears. We have nothing without you. Please hurry home.” A Manhattan woman on the East Side, upset because she had misplaced her favorite watch, called
The Times
and announced: “1 Patek Philippe square shaped gold watch, white & yellow gold band. Liberal reward. RH 4-2765.”

The watch was never returned, so the East Side lady soon purchased another one, and
not
another Patek Philippe, but this was not news for
The Times
. The whereabouts of Len W. and Florence Dougherty would not be followed up in
The Times
either, nor would
Times
readers ever know the precise circumstances that caused Jean Pompilio, sales girl, to fall $14,000 into debt. If asked to discuss her financial plight she will not do so, it is nobody’s business, she will say. It is not news. News, to
The Times
’ editors on the third floor, is composed of
significant
current events that you did not know and should know. News, in the world of Monroe Green, is the drumbeat of business with an emphasis on the upbeat, success, comfort, enchantment. It is news to Green that B. Altman & Co.’s shoe salon has an “exciting op-art pump” for $41, that J. Press Inc. has jackets of weightless Vycron Polyester Cotton Collie Cloth with patch and flap lower pockets, hook vent, washable, dryfast; that Eastern Airlines has nonstop jet service to San Antonio. It is news to Green that “Coppertone gives you a better tan!” and illustrating this point in the ad is a big tawny photograph of Raquel Welch in a bikini, a
Playboy
pose that raised the eyebrows but not the objections of
The Times
’ Advertising Acceptability department, which has become more liberal in recent years. These men, who work with
Green but not under him, reject advertisements dealing with fortune-telling and horoscopes, miracle medicines, and speculative investments in mines, and they generally tone down the wording in ads to avoid overstatement—“the best buy in town” becomes “one of the best buys,” and “the finest coat we have ever seen” “the finest coat we have ever sold.” They will not permit advertisements in a foreign language unless the English translation is included, and they are quick to turn down advertising copy that is too sexually suggestive or tasteless. They disallow nudes in ads except in the case of children, but they will permit the scantiest of bikinis in ads for tropical islands and suntan lotions and soap—
The Times
, one executive explained, now accepts the fact that women have navels. Which is good news to Green, and he has since made a fortune for
The Times
from the ads of ladies’ panties and bras, particularly in the Sunday
Times Magazine
, which has been called the “Girdle Gazette.” It was rare insight on Green’s part to recognize the commercial possibilities of selling ladies’ clothing within a magazine noted for its weighty content, its articles on the Common Market, famine in India, dilemmas in Washington; but Green knew that the Sunday
Times
, with its circulation of more than 1.4 million, was browsed through by as many women as men, and the improved color process for advertising gave him an added incentive for turning part of the
Magazine
into a flamboyant leaping ladies’ locker room which, while it sometimes stole scenes from the foreign ministers photographed on the facing pages, actually gave bounce to the product, a recurring stimulant that seemed to unite within the pages these men who were ideologically different.

Monroe Green and
The New York Times
—the combination can sell almost anything, and it was quite natural that Green, hearing of Tishman’s skyscraper apartments along the Hudson, would approach his friend Alan Tishman and suggest that he purchase advertising space that would call attention to the construction and would lure tenants. Tishman agreed, and the $50,000 advertising supplement was put together. Then came
The Times
’ editorial condemning the Tishman construction, and now Monroe Green sat in his office awaiting Alan Tishman’s call. There was little that Green could do. It had been a most unfortunate editorial but it was too late to do anything about it. Personally, Green did not believe, as the editorial writer did, that the skyscrapers marred the natural beauty of the New Jersey cliffs along the Hudson River. The land
used by the Tishmans was not a historical landmark or sanctified preserve, Green reasoned, it was almost the opposite—grim acres of weeds and shanties and untrimmed trees, and the construction of apartment houses there, Green thought, was more an improvement than anything else. But Green had no influence with editorial writers. He was not even sure who had written about the site, each editorial being written anonymously by one of the ten-man Editorial Board, but Green knew who was responsible for having it written. He was John Oakes, the editor of the editorial page, an individual widely known throughout the building and beyond as a zealous conservationist, one almost obsessed with the defense of trees and streams and mountains against the intrusion of land developers. Oakes was a high-minded person with almost an abhorrence of money and the profit motive, and once he even denounced the gold-tinted aluminum telephone booths along Fifth Avenue, declaring in an editorial that “the bogus opulence of golden phone booths and golden trash cans … merely detracts from the integrity of the avenue.”

Of the men with power on
The Times
, perhaps no two have less in common than Monroe Green and John Oakes. Oakes is a tweedy man in his fifties with tight curly white hair, pale blue eyes, a very youthful but serious face; he is a Princeton graduate who became a Rhodes scholar. Oakes has strong opinions on almost everything and, more important, his opinions dominate the editorial page of the paper. While it is true that he does not expect his editorial writers to espouse causes with which they do not agree, it is also true that he does not expect them to espouse causes with which
he
does not agree. If their views conflict with his, they are not published. If they are consistently in disagreement with him on the major political, social, or economic issues of the day, they are wise to consider transferring to another part of the paper because Oakes insists, as any editorial-page editor must, on a consistent and unified policy harmonious with his own views and with those of the publisher, to whom Oakes is responsible.

The editorial page, Oakes believes, is the “soul” of a newspaper, a reflection of its inner character and philosophy, and since he took over the page at
The Times
in 1961 that character and philosophy has been more vividly revealed than ever before. It has been condemning of the war in Vietnam, staunch in its support of the Civil Rights movement. It has been generally pro-Labor but critical of such leaders as James Hoffa and the late Michael Quill, a supporter
of Israel in wars with the Arabs but critical of some Israeli territorial ambitions and actions following the victories. Though endorsing John F. Kennedy for President, it became disenchanted later when Kennedy did not, in Oakes’s opinion, fulfill his promise with the Federal Aid to Education Bill, and as the editorial sniping continued on this and other issues during the Kennedy years many family members and friends of the President came to detest John Oakes more and more, charging that the negativism was really a manifestation of a deep personal disaffection that Oakes had cultivated during Kennedy’s earlier years in the Senate.

It was Oakes, a few of them suspected, who helped spread the rumor in late 1957 that Kennedy was not the sole author of
Profiles in Courage
. Oakes actually played no part in the spreading of this rumor. The man most responsible was probably Drew Pearson, who made the charge on an ABC television show, causing the network to follow up with an investigation that could not produce sufficient evidence to justify the charge, and ABC later publicly apologized to Kennedy. All that Oakes did was to inquire of an editor whom he met at a social gathering, a Harper editor who had worked with Kennedy on the book, if there was any substance to the rumor that Theodore Sorensen, or some other Kennedy associate, had helped with the writing. The editor denied it, and that was the end of it as far as Oakes was concerned. But some weeks later, while John Oakes was in Washington on one of his regular visits to various Congressmen, he was greeted in Kennedy’s office with a long hard look from the Senator: then Kennedy lifted from his desk a letter and handed it to John Oakes, saying, “I’ll give this to you now rather than send it to you.” The letter began, “Dear John: It recently came to my attention that you had been quoted as stating that the rumors concerning my authorship of
Profiles in Courage
were true.” The letter, 300 words in length, went on to state unequivocally that no other author had collaborated on the work, and after Oakes had finished reading the letter Kennedy wanted to further prove the point by having Oakes examine stacks of notes in Kennedy’s own handwriting that formed the book. Oakes assured Kennedy that this was unnecessary and soon they were discussing other things, but Oakes was most impressed with the time and effort that Kennedy was devoting to the refutation of the rumor, and Oakes concluded on this January day in 1958 that Kennedy now had serious plans for the Presidency. Later, in New York, Oakes received a copy of
Profiles in Courage
from Kennedy; it was inscribed: “To John
Oakes—with high esteem and very best wishes from his friend—the author—John Kennedy.”

The deferential treatment accorded John Oakes by ambitious men outside the
Times
building as well as within is not based entirely on his position as editor of the editorial page, as prestigious as this may be; also involved is the fact that Oakes is a member of
The Times
’ ruling family. His father, who altered his surname in 1917, was a brother of Adolph Ochs. The name change by George Ochs to George “Ochs-Oakes,” with the stipulation that his sons be known as “Oakes,” was inspired by an intense anti-German feeling during World War I and by a belief that a decidedly German name such as Ochs would be considered repellent by Americans for many years to come. This opinion was certainly not shared by other members of the Ochs family in Chattanooga or New York. They were in fact insulted by George’s presumption, but on second thought they were not altogether surprised. They had always looked upon George Ochs as something of a maverick within the family, an unpredictable and complex person who sought his own identity and fulfillment beyond the pale of indebtedness and yet he could not or would not permanently leave the guaranteed grandeur provided by his older brother Adolph.