The Kingdom and the Power (51 page)

The national-news editor handles not only the stories that are sent in from Washington, but also those from
Times
men in other bureaus around the nation—Philadelphia and Boston, Chicago and Detroit, Kansas City and Houston; the men in the Deep South covering the Civil Rights movement; the men on the West Coast—Gladwin Hill in Los Angeles, Lawrence Davies in San Francisco. Salisbury had been appointed by Catledge, with strong support from Clifton Daniel, to bolster the national coverage; Salisbury had very definite ideas on how to achieve this, and he did not care if he became very unpopular in the process. Salisbury was not an office politician. He was sharp and direct, a tall man with a long stride, a lean catlike face with quick eyes and a little moustache that seemed somehow to be working for him. He had a sense of humor, but it was subtle, so subtle that few perceived it. This did not bother him. His primary concern was to improve the national reporting. He wanted more imagination, more mobility and drive from his correspondents, more jet journalism and less waiting for events to occur in their own backyards; and if his regional correspondents did not respond to his wishes, he would invade their territory with eager young journalists borrowed from the New York staff. Salisbury had made dozens of recent trips around the country as a lecturer and reporter, and he knew what news was there, what new trends and reactions were changing America, and he wanted his correspondents to report these fully and to write them well. To guarantee that the writing would not be disjointed by the copyreaders, Salisbury hovered over them,
overruled them when necessary, and was unconcerned about the sensitivities of the deskmen’s demagogue, Theodore Bernstein.

Salisbury also had definite feelings about Washington; he had worked there for the United Press, and he had also worked in
The Times
’ bureau during the summers of 1955 and 1956, covering the State Department. Reston had suggested that he might remain in Washington, but Salisbury, very much his own man, was not interested. Reston and he would soon be at loggerheads, he thought, and after completing his summer tour in Washington he returned to New York and worked on special assignments. When Catledge offered him the job of education editor, Salisbury saw it as too limiting; but when he was offered the nationalnews editorship in 1962, he accepted it.

Soon Reston’s men began to feel Salisbury’s presence and to resent it. They were unaccustomed to such scrutiny and they complained to Reston, who interceded. But Salisbury was not easily discouraged. Every few days, it seemed, he would pepper the bureau with more memos, calls, tips on some new government plan or conspiracy, and if the bureau did not produce the story that he believed was there, he was dissatisfied. It was implied somehow that they had not checked with enough people; or they were buying all that was told them; or there “had to be more to it” than that. Some members of the bureau were astounded by Salisbury’s suspicious nature, and they attributed it to his years in Russia during the dark days of Stalin. Other bureau men resented Salisbury’s comparing them unfavorably with certain Washinton reporters on the
Herald Tribune
, or the
Washington Post
, or the
Wall Street Journal
. The lively reporting that he seemed to like in the
Herald Tribune
, they said, merely represented a desperate last attempt by a dying newspaper to call attention to itself, and they were surprised by his decision to publish President Kennedy’s s.o.b. remark in
The Times
during the Administration’s confrontation with the steel industry in April of 1962. Wallace Carroll, Reston’s deputy, had written in his story that President Kennedy had been enraged at the steelmen’s decision to raise prices across the board and had spoken unflatteringly of them, but Carroll did not attribute to Kennedy the direct quotation that would later appear in his story (“My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches but I never believed it till now!”); it was Salisbury who identified these words as the President’s, getting the information from
sources whom he trusted. Salisbury then called Carroll and asked him to write an insertion that would include this quotation. Carroll objected, saying that
he
had not heard the President use such language. When Salisbury persisted, Carroll snapped back, “The hell with it—you write it in yourself!”

If Reston had not been so busy at this time writing his column and running his bureau, fortifying its future with such younger men as Wicker and Baker, Max Frankel and Anthony Lewis; and if Reston’s time and interests were not also involved with keeping up with the nation, the world, and his own family, which included three sons whom he rarely saw enough of, Reston could have devoted his entire career to fighting the editors in New York. Reston had more worthy ambitions than that. Salisbury’s intrusions could be annoying, but Reston recognized Salisbury as a good newsman whose instincts were often right if his personal approach was often wrong; and if things became intolerable Reston could always go to the publisher. Dryfoos, in fact, had recently discussed the possibility of Reston’s coming to New York at some future date to serve as “Editor” of
The Times
, which was a title that did not now exist, but from Dryfoos’ vague description it would seem to give Reston more power than the managing editor. Reston, however, made it clear that he preferred living in Washington, and under no circumstances would Reston want to relinquish his column. For the column was both Reston’s joy and his special base of power within the organization. Because of the column, and what he had done with it, Reston had become a national figure, a confidant of presidents, an individual that other publishers would quickly hire away from
The Times
if they could. If he gave up the column, he would not carry the weight that he did with world leaders, and soon his position within the paper would be less than it had been—he would be more identified with his
Times
title, less with his own name, and there was no advantage to that.

And so as long as he had his column and had such valuable subordinates as Wallace Carroll to relieve him of many administrative burdens, Reston was resigned to an attitude of give-and-take with New York (with the ageless Arthur Krock muttering in the background that when
he
was bureau chief he took nothing from
New York). Reston was now approaching his middle fifties; he had books to write, sons to think about, little time for bickering with fellow editors. He had achieved his goals and, more important, he was a happy man.

The Sulzberger family was proud to call him their own—and never more proud than in December of 1962, when during a New York newspaper strike, Reston read his Sunday column on television, communicating to millions his affection for
The Times
and his sadness that it was now being struck by the labor unions.

The strike, which began on December 8 in 1962, lasted for 114 days. It affected not only
The Times
but also the
Daily News
, the
Journal-American
, the
World-Telegram and Sun
; and also three other New York dailies and two on Long Island that had
not
been struck by the printers’ union but whose owners, as a sign of ownership solidarity, had either suspended or curtailed the publication of their papers. The strike, coming in the middle of the big pre-Christmas advertising campaigns, deprived the publishers of millions of dollars, thus weakening some publications to a point of no return—indeed, the
Mirror
would fold not long after the strike had ended; and within a few years, the
merged edition of the
Herald Tribune
, the
World-Telegram and Sun
, and the
Journal-American
would also disappear after another strike. During the 1962–63 strike it had been predicted by Bertram A. Powers, president of the printers’ union, that the number of New York dailies would eventually dwindle to three, and he was right. Only
The Times
and two tabloids, the morning
News
and the evening
Post
, would remain in a city that in 1900 had sixteen dailies, and that in 1930 had a dozen.

The disappearance of newspapers in New York is attributed to many causes, and is interpreted differently by the spokesmen of management or labor; but from either view it is a history of failure, of mismanagement, miscalculation, and mistrust. The publishers were beset by the rising costs of newspaper production, by the higher wage demands of workers and the intrusion of television for the advertising dollar, and they scrambled and experimented to keep pace with economic trends and a changing society, often taking wrong turns and going astray. The workers feared the new automatic machinery that the publishers saw as tools of survival; despite the vague promises and euphemisms of the new technologists, the workers knew that automation would ultimately destroy their craft and their security, and so they drove harder bargains—too hard, the publishers thought, but publishers thought as publishers, as profiteers, not as philanthropists. The publishers lived off Fifth Avenue or in other fashionable neighborhoods, and they had weekend homes; while they championed the cause of equality, they sent their children to private schools and dwelled behind tall fences and doormen. The publishers made many speeches about freedom of the press, but they said “no comment” to reporters covering strike negotiations and often barred the press from their business meetings. In any economic crisis, the publishers of various editorial opinions would stand as rich men always stood, together.

The workers were different. They were unnoticed men with soiled fingers whose work was recognized only when they had made a mistake, had dropped a line of type, had hit the wrong key. They lived in small row houses or apartments in what remained of ethnic neighborhoods, and they worried not about China or the Common Market but about encroaching slums, and their small investments, and the neighborhood school. If they worried about distant wars it was because their sons would be among the first to go. Their loyalty was not to their newspaper but to their
union, within which they practiced a basic nepotism similar to the publishers’; but otherwise they had next to nothing in common with a publisher.

During a long strike, publishers could seek and receive the support of the President of the United States—politicians being always anxious to do favors for publishers; but the workers looked only to their union, and in 1962 their attention was focused on a hardened realist named Bertram A. Powers. At forty-one, Powers was head of the New York printers’ union. He was a tall man with a sharp angular face, blondish hair fading into white, a man of singular vision and no gift for small talk. He had left high school after two years and become a printer, and he recognized unionism as a necessity; if employers had been fair with their employees, if they had not exploited them, there would never have been unions, Powers thought. But generosity had not been the employers’ traditional trait, and Powers knew from his own experience as a printer that publishers made few concessions voluntarily. Even such printers’ functions as washing their hands and urinating were provided for within a contract—in fact, one of the items in the 1962 discussions with the publishers was the printers’ willingness to surrender fifteen minutes a day of “toilet time” so that their work week could be reduced from thirty-six and one-quarter hours to thirty-five hours. But the publishers resisted on the assumption that the printers would indulge in toilet time whether or not it was contractually sanctioned, adding that a reduction of the work week would drive up production costs.

There were many other points of disagreement between Powers and the publishers. Powers wanted more money for his printers, more than the current wage of $141; he wanted an increase in paid sick leave from one day a year to five; higher employer contributions to the union’s pension and welfare funds; a share in the money saved by the publishers’ installation of automatic equipment. These and other things that Powers wanted were not always specifically spelled out—he wanted the publishers to propose, the union to decide—and he also wanted something that was not in the contract. Identity. It was not strictly a personal identity that he sought, although this would be the charge of many who opposed him; it was rather an identity for his union, which for many years had remained in the background during the biennial negotiations between the publishers and the other unions—the
photoengravers’ union, which had inspired the strike in 1953; the stereotypers’ union, the pressmen’s union, the deliverers’ union, the electricians and mailers and the whole cast of other workers necessary to large daily newspapers. The printers’ union had gone along with the others, and it had especially gone along with the New York Newspaper Guild, the union that represents reporters and copyreaders, clerks and copyboys, elevator operators and cleaning ladies and cafeteria cooks and anyone else not affiliated with one of the nine craft unions. When the Guild had called a strike against the
New York World-Telegram
in 1951, the strike had succeeded because the craft unions had supported it; and since then the Guild had assumed a kind of leadership among the unions that it had not previously enjoyed. Every two years, before its contract expired on October 31, the Guild’s representatives would confer with the publishers; and after they had come to terms it was assumed that these terms would be acceptable to the craft unions, whose contract expiration date always occurred on December 7. Bertram A. Powers now wanted an end to these assumptions and procedures.