The Kingdom and the Power (48 page)

He learned of it while traveling by car toward Geneva in 1959 with Sydney Gruson and C. L. Sulzberger, who were all good friends by then, and they were enjoying one another’s company and the scenery while on the way to cover a foreign ministers’ conference in Geneva. The conversation was animated and often interrupted by Rosenthal’s demands that Gruson not drive so fast. And then, rather suddenly and out of context, Cyrus Sulzberger switched the subject to a serious reflection of an incident that had involved Rosenthal in Paris in 1948. Rosenthal had gone to Paris during that year as part of
The Times
’ U.N. staff to help cover a United Nations General Assembly session. One afternoon, returning to his hotel room, Rosenthal had noticed that a twenty-dollar traveler’s check had been removed from his bureau drawer. He had angrily reported this to the concierge, hinting that if it were not returned he would deduct that amount from his bill. The concierge, equally angry, had telephoned
The Times
’ Paris office and had reported young Rosenthal’s assertiveness to Cyrus Sulzberger.

Sulzberger had not forgotten this, and now, in 1959, driving with his two colleagues to Geneva, he seemed to want to relieve from his mind one aspect that was bothersome, and finally he did: he admitted to Rosenthal that Rosenthal had been kept on the U.N. staff in New York all those years because he, Sulzberger, had wanted it that way. He explained that Rosenthal in those early days in Paris had seemed the sort who would cause problems abroad. Sulzberger conceded, casually, that his judgment had been harsh and obviously wrong, and now he merely wished to tell his friend Rosenthal the aftermath of that hotel incident in 1948.

As Rosenthal listened he could feel the tension building within him, recalling quietly the many years of waiting in New York to get an overseas assignment, and thinking, too, that if Cyrus Sulzberger’s influence as an overseas duke had been continued through the Nineteen-fifties, he might never have gotten to be a correspondent. And the recollection of this silly little impulsive moment in a French hotel, and the realization of the consequences, caused Rosenthal to feel such a whirling sensation of both nausea and
fury that he could barely, just barely, contain himself until they had reached Geneva.

Turner Catledge arrived in Tokyo in the spring of 1962 and sought Rosenthal’s reaction to the proposal that he quit reporting and take over the New York staff. Rosenthal was flattered and, without committing himself, he expressed interest. He imagined himself as the city editor of
The Times
, a catalytic agent between the news, the staff, the spirit of New York; a much-involved man who would know the New York politicians and businessmen, the artists and writers; a man who would stimulate and inspire reporters on the most important newspaper in the most vital city in the world. Yes, he told Catledge, the idea had appeal.

Even the fact that he had not lived in New York City in years might be an advantage—he would see the city with fresh perspective, would not be influenced by the traditional methods of the newsroom. Rosenthal recognized that reporters in New York were restricted in ways that foreign correspondents were not—most New York reporters were either specialists or were told what to cover each day by the city desk; foreign correspondents generally selected their own subjects when not involved in covering a big story—and yet Rosenthal thought that the New York reporters placed unnecessary restrictions on themselves, and tried to justify their own lack of initiative and imagination by blaming the “system.” Perhaps Rosenthal could change this negative attitude, and could get the reporters to explore New York as foreign correspondents explore cities abroad. Rosenthal believed that what people were doing and thinking in Manhattan—or, alas, the Bronx—was as interesting as what people were doing and thinking in Rangoon or Accra. It would not be a simple matter to change the “system” in the newsroom, or the staff’s attitude toward it, but it would be a challenge to try to do so, and Rosenthal seemed optimistic to Catledge, and Catledge was hopeful.

During their hours together Catledge was impressed with all of Rosenthal’s ideas except one, and that was Rosenthal’s view that if he became the New York editor he would wish to not only control the various general-assignment reporters and specialists in the newsroom but would also want jurisdiction over the critics
and cultural-news reporters that had recently been established as a separate unit behind a wall to the west of the newsroom on the third floor. This section was mockingly referred to within the newsroom as “the culture gulch,” and its residents included such people as the theater critic Howard Taubman, the music critic Harold Schonberg, the art critic John Canaday, the television critic Jack Gould, the movie critic Bosley Crowther, and such reporters as Sam Zolotow, Richard Shepard, Louis Calta, and dozens of others. For years these staff members had been under the aegis of the city desk; but early in 1962, Turner Catledge, in an effort to break up the vast New York bureaucracy as well as to improve cultural reporting, removed them from the city desk’s jurisdiction and put them under a subordinate editor who was answerable to the managing editor. Now Rosenthal was suggesting that if he were put in charge of the New York staff, he hoped that he would also be in charge of “the culture gulch.” The cultural and ethnic and political life of New York were all part of the integrated coverage that he envisioned, and to remove the cultural personnel from the scope of the New York editor, Rosenthal believed, would diminish the significance and possibilities of the job that he was being asked to contemplate. Rosenthal knew that his viewpoint sounded like empire building. However, when it came to empires, he told Catledge, he was perfectly happy to remain in Tokyo and run the bureau that consisted of one reporter—himself. But if he were expected to take a big job in New York, then he would expect to be given the necessary tools and the scope to accomplish his aims in that job.

What Rosenthal was not revealing to Catledge at this time was his reluctance to give up writing—or more specifically, his secret ambition to write a column someday for the editorial page. Reston and Krock were writing columns from Washington; Cyrus Sulzberger was writing the column from Europe; and Rosenthal had already discussed with John Oakes, informally and unofficially, the idea of writing a column entitled “Asia.” But if Rosenthal were to become the New York editor, his dreams of writing a column would be over.

Catledge left Rosenthal in Tokyo without offering the New York job and without Rosenthal’s assurance that he would accept it if it were offered. Catledge planned to go on to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Manila, Saigon, Singapore, Bangkok, and then Delhi. He asked Rosenthal to give more thought to the New York job and
asked that he rejoin him in Delhi so that they could discuss it further.

Weeks later, Rosenthal flew to Delhi and suggested, tentatively, that he would give the New York job a try. Catledge was delighted, and it was obvious that the job was his. While Rosenthal did not insist on having the cultural staff under his control at the outset (he could press that later), he did reveal his secret ambition of becoming a columnist, an admission that Catledge accepted with an expression of pain and disgust. Catledge hated columns, referring to them as the “malignancy” of the newspaper business. He preferred a newspaper with just news, well-written and properly interpreted news—and no columns that permitted reporters to sound off on days when they often had nothing to say, and were wasting valuable space. If Rosenthal would pour his whole heart and identity into the editor’s job, Catledge said, selling it hard now, Rosenthal each day would have not just
one
by-line—he’d have
forty
by-lines,
fifty
by-lines: each story by one of Rosenthal’s men would represent part of him,
Rosenthal
, and the gratification each night, the challenge each morning, would be something Rosenthal could never imagine until he had experienced it. Catledge concluded the talk by emphasizing how eagerly he awaited Rosenthal’s completing the Tokyo tour and beginning his new career in New York.

Later, before Catledge had left for New York, he discussed other things with Rosenthal—among them the fact that there would be a new column in
The Times
after all—one by Reston’s colleague in Washington, Russell Baker. Catledge tried not to look too deeply into Rosenthal’s face when he said this, but he knew that, had he hurled a bucket of cow dung into it, Rosenthal’s expression would have been about the same.

Back in New York, Catledge occupied himself with a new venture—
The Times
’ Western edition. This edition, which was to begin publishing in Los Angeles on October 1, 1962, represented
The Times
’ most ambitious attempt to become the first truly national
general newspaper in the United States. Most of the larger newspapers along the West Coast were insubstantial, it was believed in New York, and after years of contemplation
The New York Times
now had the confidence and the electronic equipment to invade California journalism in a big way. Its major weapons would be high-speed transmission machines that would carry stories already edited in New York into the Los Angeles newsroom at the rate of 1,000 words a minute. In Los Angeles, a team of ninety
Times
-men—executives and technicians, advertising and circulation crews—would put the paper together and would distribute it up and down the Coast. Within a few months, the Western edition would attract 100,000 new readers to
The Times
, or so it was hoped by
The Times
’ forty-eight-year-old publisher, Orvil Dryfoos.

This would be Dryfoos’ first major undertaking since he had succeeded Arthur Hays Sulzberger in the spring of 1961. Dryfoos was not a driving executive. He was patient and reserved, a broad-shouldered, somewhat stocky man with a strong friendly face and bushy eyebrows. He had been hesitant about joining
The Times
after his marriage to Marian Sulzberger in July of 1941. He had been doing well on Wall Street, had bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Anyone who ascends at
The Times
through marriage must anticipate, along with the sense of grandeur and soaring integrity, an occasional feeling of clipped wings and emasculation—it was the son-in-law syndrome in the House of Ochs. Marriage could not be easy with Ochs’s heirs of that generation—the grandchildren who had played at Hillandale and had been loved and spoiled and made rich by Ochs. Dryfoos wanted to marry Marian Sulzberger but he was not sure whether he wanted all that went with the marriage—the commitment to
The Times
, the iron sweetness of Iphigene Sulzberger, the cautious curator’s eye of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the whole cast of in-laws and institutional duennas and will-watchers.

Dryfoos managed to resist
The Times
for six months; and it was not until he had been married and on
The Times
almost eight years that he finally decided to sell his seat on the Exchange. By then he was Sulzberger’s assistant, and, consciously or unconsciously, he had adopted Sulzberger’s style—or, more likely, they were innately similar in style. They were reliable men, quietly firm, the properly reared New York sons of prosperous German-Jewish families in the textile trade; they had both gone from the Horace Mann School to the Ivy League, where both had been good
students and fine swimmers, tasteful in their dress and graceful in manner. After Dryfoos had joined
The Times
, it was obvious that he would fit easily into the Sulzberger pattern. Dryfoos was handsome (Sulzberger could barely have tolerated a son-in-law who was not handsome—particularly in the case of his beautiful daughter, Marian), and Dryfoos was neither boisterous, aggressive, nor immodest. Once, when asked to list the factors that determined his career, Dryfoos wrote: “Marriage to the daughter of the publisher of
The New York Times
.” Sulzberger liked him; and, like Sulzberger, Dryfoos was dedicated to expanding Ochs’s paper without distorting its fiber. As Sulzberger had extended
The Times
’ word across the Atlantic with the publication of a European edition in 1949, so now did Dryfoos hope to spread it westward to the Pacific. The surveys and tests prior to 1962 all had been encouraging, and Dryfoos was optimistic that
The Times
’ Western edition would become a crowning achievement. He called it Project Westward Ho.

Dryfoos’ chief executive on the fourteenth floor during the planning of the Western edition was Amory Howe Bradford,
The Times
’ vice-president and general manager. Bradford had joined the paper in 1947 as an assistant to Sulzberger, having been introduced to the publisher by Iphigene Sulzberger, who had learned of Bradford’s qualifications from Bradford’s in-laws, the Rothschilds. Bradford was a tall, blondish, wavy-haired man with an air of self-assurance that could be offensive to some but impressive to others. Dryfoos was impressed with him, as the Sulzberger family had been from the beginning. There was nothing tentative about Bradford; he seemed to be on top of everything. Prior to joining
The Times
, he had practiced law in New York with Davis Polk Wardwell Sunderland & Kiendl. Before that he had worked within the State Department in Washington, to which he had gone shortly after his discharge as a captain in military intelligence, having entered the Army as a private in 1943. A graduate of Yale and Phillips Academy at Andover, Bradford’s rise on
The Times
had been quick: secretary of the corporation in 1954; membership on the board in 1955; business manager in 1957; general manager in 1960. He was also a kind of house Protestant in
The Times
’ hierarchy, one who could
represent the paper very well in those tight social circles where Jewish executives might not feel entirely welcome.

Though his dealings within
The Times
were on the highest corporate level, he was occasionally seen on the third floor entering or leaving Catledge’s office. He seemed so tall that his head would graze the portal, but it never did, nor did he slouch in the way of some tall men: Amory Bradford’s exits and entrances were always perfect, he walking very erect while puffing his pipe, very impressive in a dark pin-striped suit. One day a young man entered the newsroom with a similar walk: it was Bradford’s son, a very tall Choate student who entered Theodore Bernstein’s office to complain about a particular story in
The Times
. There had been a somewhat condescending reference to Choate in a feature story written by one of
The Times
’ sportswriters, and young Bradford wished to know why Choate had been described in that manner. Bernstein, who could offer no explanation, had the sportswriter summoned by the city desk’s microphone. Within a few moments the sportswriter appeared, looking up as the spindly teen-ager in a tweed jacket stepped forward and was introduced and asked his question. The sportswriter quickly replied that there had been no disrespect toward Choate intended. Silence ensued. Bernstein smiled reassuringly at Bradford, and then thanked the sportswriter, who returned to his desk. Young Bradford’s right to question was already taken for granted.