The Kingdom and the Power (49 page)

Nobody in the newsroom wanted to be in conflict with anyone named Bradford during these years at
The Times
, and this included Turner Catledge. One day after Catledge had received from a subordinate editor an estimate of what the news budget should be regarding the Western edition, Catledge accompanied the editor up to Amory Bradford’s office for an approval of the figures. The editor had seemed uneasy about showing the figures to Bradford, but Catledge had said, “Look, if this is what you absolutely think we’ll need, then let’s go up and get it.” After Bradford had studied the budget sheet, however, he shook his head and said that it could be reduced by $25,000. Catledge said that he had seen the figures, had checked them, and thought that the figures were about right.

Bradford suddenly lost his temper.

“I’m very busy,” he snapped, and he would not discuss the matter further.

Catledge turned and left Bradford’s office.

“Well,” the editor said in the corridor, walking with Catledge toward the elevator, “what do I do now?”

Catledge’s face was red with anger and humiliation, and he glared at the editor, saying, “
Do what he says
!”

Dryfoos’ delegate to supervise the Western edition directly was not Amory Bradford but another executive who was on a slightly lower management level on the fourteenth floor. His name was Andrew Fisher, and, unlike Bradford, he had no reputation on the third floor—neither bad nor good; he was virtually unknown to all but a few, and those few who knew him said he was virtually indefinable. This was not meant with derision—they honestly could not comprehend him. Having never known a newspaper executive such as Andrew Fisher before, and therefore lacking standards of comparison, they were forced to fasten onto one of Fisher’s obvious delights, his fascination with computers, and to try to reveal him in vague scientific terms. He was a futuristic figure, they hinted, a portender of a species of spaceage administrators who might one day convert the
Times
building into a fourteen-story robot. Within this facetiousness, however, there was a serious and growing concern among older
Times
men about the modern trends of the paper—the tendency toward impersonal efficiency; the reliance on costly computers instead of experienced political reporters for election-night prediction; the electronic printers that would be used in the Western edition. And emerging somehow as a symbol of all this, deservedly or undeservedly, was Andrew Fisher, about whom they knew so little even though he had been on
The Times
for fifteen years. He had worked most of that time in areas remote from the newsroom. He had begun in 1947, at the age of twenty-seven—after graduating from the Harvard business school and Amherst, and after rising from private to captain in the Army—in
The Times
’ business department under Julius Ochs Adler. He had been involved with the problems of labor in a modern technology, and with corporate projects of the distant future. During the Nineteen-fifties, Fisher spent considerable time in the
paper’s newly constructed plant on the West Side of Manhattan behind Lincoln Center—a plant in which some printing was done but which presumably was built as the foundation for the skyscraper headquarters of
The Times
in the twenty-first century
if
the Forty-second Street area ever succumbs to the total decadence that has long been predicted by resident clergymen and social reformers.

In 1960 Andrew Fisher became the assistant to Amory Bradford, who since the death of General Adler in 1955 had become increasingly powerful on the fourteenth floor. Fisher and Bradford were compatible although very dissimilar. Bradford was a man of emotion and decisiveness, while Fisher was an individual of quiet control, and yet he was also friendly and approachable. He had the wholesome all-American looks of a preserved astronaut—a lean strong face, blue eyes, neatly trimmed graying hair, and, when he smiled, a perfect set of white teeth. A native of Richmond, the only son of a Virginia woman who proudly ponders her ancestral link with George Washington, Andrew Fisher speaks the language of the new technology—he mentions the “optimum way of doing things” and the “fright quotient” of certain people, and he expresses enthusiasm over the paper’s “press replacement program” and its “information retrieval” and its “pricing philosophy.” While some traditionalists on
The Times
see Fisher as part of a depersonalization process, Fisher sees himself as a preserver of
Times
tradition: if the Ochsian foundation is to be carried into the twenty-first century,
The Times
must keep pace with the changing world, must adjust and expand—and when discussing this expansion Fisher speaks of “satellite plants.”

And so the vision of Andrew Fisher, projected through electric eyes and wireless circuits, was about to focus upon the California coast in the fall of 1962-Project Westward Ho. It represented a tremendous investment in money and risk in reputation, but Dryfoos and Bradford and the Sulzbergers had endorsed the plan, and that is what mattered.

As for Turner Catledge in 1962, he was trying to preserve the present. He was getting along with Orvil Dryfoos well enough, although he found the new publisher quite distant at times, and Catledge was aware that when Dryfoos had important matters to
discuss, it was Reston who was often consulted. Iphigene Sulzberger considered Reston a member of the family, an imaginary son-in-law, and Dryfoos would go to almost any length to keep Reston happy. When the very talented Russell Baker was becoming bored with reporting and was seriously thinking of quitting
The Times
to become a columnist on the
Baltimore Sun
, Reston refused to hear of it; he contacted Dryfoos, who invited Baker to New York and began to offer him a series of important overseas assignments. He offered him the bureau in India, but Baker was not interested, nor was he interested in the bureau in Rome. When the London bureau was suggested, Baker was interested—but Clifton Daniel informed Dryfoos that the London bureau had been promised to Sydney Gruson, who was then in Bonn. Finally it became the issue of a column on
The Times
’ editorial page, which John Oakes did not want. But Dryfoos prevailed upon Oakes to give Baker a chance as a columnist, occupying the space that had for a half-century been reserved for “Topics of The Times.” Reluctantly, Oakes acquiesced, and Russell Baker’s column, beginning in 1962, was called “Observer.” When it first appeared, however, it did not carry Baker’s by-line at the top. Instead, Oakes put Baker’s name at the bottom, in small type, where its removal would be as inconspicuous as possible should Baker fail or should Oakes otherwise wish to alternate him with various contributors. But after several months of high-quality writing and satire by Baker, Oakes finally accorded him the full recognition as a columnist and moved his name to the top.

Unlike Reston, Catledge could not, or would not, become so personally engaged in the singular affairs of individual staff members. Reston, with his smaller force in Washington, could be the
paterfamilias
, the champion of individualism, but Catledge’s problems were too large, the men under him too numerous, for him to devote himself to the cause of an individual unless that individual were part of a larger plan that Catledge was trying to master. He was still trying to centralize the power in New York, and now, in the fall of 1962, he issued an announcement that was intended to disfranchise the last outposts of dukedoms in
Times
bureaus abroad. He decided to rotate three bureau chiefs who had become established in European capitals: Drew
Middleton would be moved from London to Paris; Robert Doty from Paris to Rome; and Sydney Gruson from Bonn to London.

Drew Middleton was unhappy about the announcement. He had been the London bureau chief for nine years; he was an Anglophile, a club man, and within newspaper circles he was known as “Sir Drew.” He had worked in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere, but London was his spiritual home, he having gone there as a young American correspondent in 1939—a twenty-five-year-old sportswriter for the Associated Press who, like Reston, would make the transition from covering the heroics of sports to the heroics of war. Middleton’s front-line dispatches during World War II had not only won press awards but also a decoration from the British government. Partly through his friendship with Arthur Hays Sulzberger, whose favorite city was also London, Middleton had managed to return there as the bureau chief in 1953, edging out Clifton Daniel, who had wanted the London job but had been sent instead to Bonn. Now Middleton was being ordered to Paris—a pleasant assignment for most correspondents, but Middleton was neither fluent in French nor fond of Frenchmen. He would go, of course, but not happily.

Robert C. Doty, who was being transferred after five years in Paris to Rome, would
not
go. This was immediately apparent in a series of sizzling cables between himself and New York that had become the talk of the newsroom. Doty, a superior man who wrote very well,
too
well to remain contentedly and endlessly a reporter, refused to go to Rome as a replacement for one of the aging dukes—the sixty-seven-year-old Arnaldo Cortesi, who, against
his
will, was being retired. Doty’s reasons were personal. He had been on
The Times
since 1950, and years before taking over the Paris bureau he had worked as a reporter in North Africa, the Middle East, and France, willingly and tirelessly chasing the headlines between Cairo and Damascus, Baghdad and Teheran, Syria and Libya and Somaliland. Catledge could now fire Doty for refusing Rome, or he could wonder how anybody could refuse Rome, or he could make life miserable for Doty on
The Times
. But no matter what Catledge did, it was obvious that he was not going to get Doty into Rome at this time. So Catledge recalled him and assigned him to the New York staff, sending Milton Bracker to Rome to replace Cortesi.

The third man involved in the bureau-chief switch, Sydney
Gruson, was pleased to be going to London, for which Catledge was grateful. This assignment would reunite Gruson with the city where he, like so many of his colleagues, had begun as a correspondent. He had first gone to London in 1943 for the Canadian Press—a Dublin-born frisky young reporter who had gotten into a fist fight with a superior one night at a party that resulted the next day in his resignation from the Canadian Press. Gruson then approached his friend on
The Times
, Clifton Daniel, whom he had met while Daniel was working for the Associated Press, which had its London office on the same floor as the Canadian Press in the Reuters Building; Daniel spoke to
The Times
’ bureau chief, and in June of 1944 Gruson joined the London bureau at $75 a week.

Now, in 1962, earning five times that amount, and knowing that he would earn more, Gruson anticipated his return to a city that suited his sophisticated taste far more than had Bonn during the last four years. Gruson was one who not only liked to cover the world—he liked to live in it, to enjoy it, to luxuriate whenever possible in fashionable places with fashionable people. But this attitude of apparent frivolity, the legend of his race horses in Mexico, his penchant for good wine, his reply to the lady who had inquired about his secret ambition (“I’d like to become the Perfect Weekend Guest”), had obscured the fact that Gruson was a first-rate reporter, and that he also had another ambition. Gruson in 1962 wanted very much to become a United States citizen. A special bill had been introduced in the House by Francis Walter and in the Senate by Kenneth Keating to waive Gruson’s residential requirements, the effect of which would have been to enable him to be sworn in as a citizen immediately after the bill had passed. But the bill was being blocked. He did not know who was blocking it, but he had certain suspicions—thoughts that he kept largely to himself because to express them might leave him open to charges of paranoiac grandeur. But he sometimes truly believed that the bill was being blocked on orders from President Kennedy himself.

This would seem absurd only to those who underestimated Kennedy’s interest in the press, and the lengths that he would sometimes go to demonstrate his displeasure with certain critical journalists; and there was good reason to believe in 1962 that President Kennedy was very displeased with Gruson’s reporting from Bonn. In the spring of 1961, after Gruson had described the
new Administration’s policy toward Germany as undiplomatic—defining the policy as an attempt not to become too dependent on Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Germans, and adding that this policy might have serious repercussions in Germany if it succeeded—Kennedy became infuriated, complaining to another correspondent in Washington that he could “not understand a Jew being a spokesman for the Germans.” There were other stories, too, that disconcerted the President, and when Robert F. Kennedy, visiting Paris, had been introduced to
The Times
’ Robert Doty, Kennedy was overheard to remark, “I hope he’s not like that bastard Gruson.”

And so when the White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger, was in Bonn, and when Gruson and the other American correspondents were invited by a United States Embassy official to join Salinger for drinks, Gruson refused, revealing to his host his suspicions about the Kennedys’ role in withholding his citizenship—half doubting it as he admitted it, yet reassuring himself that the Kennedy people were indeed capable of doing such a thing.

On the evening of Salinger’s arrival, Gruson received a call at home from a friend in the Embassy saying that Salinger wanted to come to Gruson’s home and discuss the matter; which he did. Salinger ridiculed the notion that President Kennedy had done anything to delay the bill’s passage, but he promised to discuss it with the President when he telephoned him the following day. Salinger did this at great length, according to what Gruson heard later from his friends in the Embassy, and soon the matter was receiving close attention in Washington from Kennedy’s aides. They discovered that the bill was not being blocked by anyone influenced by the White House but possibly by forces under Senator James O. Eastland, the Mississippian who had shown interest in
The Times
during the subcommittee investigation of communism and the press in 1955 and 1956. To draw any relationship between Eastland’s feud with
The Times
in the Fifties and Eastland-Gruson in 1962 would be pure conjecture. Nor could it be proven that Eastland had the slightest interest in slowing down the Gruson bill—or even knew who Gruson was. But in any event, the Gruson bill was soon pried loose, and, in September of 1962, it quickly passed both Houses, and Sydney Gruson became a citizen.