A Writer's Life (33 page)

But this would not be the end of it. A memo describing my agitation with the editing would be placed by the director in the overnight box to be perused on the following morning by the city editor, who disliked hearing about the remonstrations of his reporters against what he assumed to be the emendations of the paper's standard-bearers on the desks, although such quibbling had become increasingly common among the younger reporters in the newsroom during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The top editor of the
Times
, the Mississippi-born Turner Catledge, had made it known that he hoped the newswriting would become livelier, saying that the era of just-the-facts journalism was insufficient now that
television was the first to reach the public with the text and pictures of late-breaking news. I had been transferred at Catledge's suggestion from sports to general news in 1958 to become part of his plan to emphasize writing as well as reporting in the main section. But changes occurred slowly at the
Times
, he once told me, adding that the paper often reminded him of an elephant. It was huge, reliable, and stubborn. It was slow to learn new tricks and was clumsy. If it was expected to dance, it had better dance well; otherwise, it could look mighty foolish in public. He therefore knew that a considerable amount of practice, patience, and time would be necessary to make an impression upon the tradition-bound mind-set existing within the paper's nerve center, which was its sprawling block-long newsroom occupying the third floor of the fourteen-story
Times
building on West Forty-third Street. Catledge would sometimes survey the newsroom through the pair of binoculars he held while standing outside the door of his corner office, and what he saw in front of him were endless rows of gray metal desks and multitudes of people seated or strolling about—dozens of senior editors and mid-level editors, and battalions of copyreaders flanked by desk clerks and other supernumeraries, and hundreds of reporters of varying ages and specialties, some of them newly appointed to the staff, like myself, others being senior citizens adhering to the rather fusty, formulaic style of reporting that had been in vogue when the publisher had been Adolph Ochs, who died in 1935. Although the present publisher—Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was married to Ochs's daughter and only child—was fond and supportive of Catledge, the old guard in the newsroom were stalwart shrine keepers who believed it might be perilous to tinker with the Ochsian formula (straight facts, no frills) and encourage instead a stylish flair that more properly belonged in the newsroom of the
Times
's near-bankrupt rival, the
New York Herald-Tribune
.

The latter was long known as a writers paper, led in the early 1960s by such stars as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. The
Times
had always been a
reporter's
paper, a
recorder's
paper, one that each day published a record of every fire in New York, the arrival time of every mail ship, the names of every official visitor to the White House, the precise moment the sun set and the moon rose; in its long history, the
Times
had never hired journalistic stars with a marquee status that made them indispensable to the paper in a box-office sense or any other. The
Times
was an ensemble. It was a gigantic gray institution of subdued luminosity. And the aging traditionalists, sharing few of Catledge's concerns about the future impact of television journalism upon the newspaper's readership, were certain that
the continued prosperity of the paper was secure as long as its top executives and its proprietors remained faithful to Mr. Ochs's dictums.

Allied with this conservative and cautious mode of thinking was my city editor, a stout, stern old-time reporter named Frank Adams, who did not welcome me to his staff with a handshake after Catledge had maneuvered my transfer, nor offer me a raise during the nearly four years I worked under him. But the main enforcer of tradition on the
Times
was one of its assistant managing editors and its premier deskman, a lean, fastidious, and deceptively ingratiating tyrant named Theodore M. Bernstein, who concealed his disesteem of Turner Catledge with a convincingly gleeful response to the banter and aphorisms that Catledge delivered during editorial meetings—typical Catledge sayings: “Never plow around stumps.” “Don't overrun more than you can overtake.” “The time to fire a man is when you hire him.” “There is only one indispensable man on this paper, and modesty prevents me from mentioning his name.”—and who revealed his indifference to Catledge's desires about newswriting by slicing and surgically removing from the paper any turn of phrase, indeed any article in its entirety, that did not conform to what
he
, Theodore M. Bernstein, believed was properly printable in the
Times
.

In all my years on the paper I had never once heard it said that Turner Catledge had arrived in the morning expressing any dissatisfaction with what Bernstein had done there the night before. Catledge never revealed himself openly, being characteristically circuitous. He was a tall, ruddy, carefully groomed, chubby southerner who favored dark pinstriped suits and preferred to communicate inferentially through hints, gestures, and what his friends called “Catledgisms.” On those occasions when he felt compelled to redress office misdeeds that he deemed intentional or otherwise an affront to his authority, his form of retribution was typically so subtle that his targets were often the last people to know that they had become his victims. He had risen through the ranks as a political correspondent in Washington, and he had learned at the feet of the capital's leading wheelers and dealers how to manipulate people, how to stroke and assuage and cajole and eventually achieve his objectives.

Before I left the paper in 1965, my frosty boss Frank Adams had been eased out as the city editor by Catledge, and Theodore Bernstein had been marginalized following the appointment of two newly elevated editors who outranked him and were answerable to Catledge. However, when I first joined the newsroom in 1958, such stratagems were a long way from reality; Catledge was operating slowly and patiently, as befitted the choreographer of an elephant. And young reporters like myself were
meanwhile left to fend for ourselves, to complain at our own risk to the copydesk, knowing that our grousing would sooner or later come to the attention of Frank Adams and might result in our not getting an assignment for a few days, or perhaps an entire week. This had sometimes happened to me and to others among my more querulous young colleagues—we were “benched,” as athletes often were by their discontented coaches; in our cases it meant that we sat at our desks for prolonged periods without hearing our names announced over the city editor's microphone, which was how we were summoned to learn the locale and the subject of our story
if
Adams had included us on the daily assignment sheet. There were always many more reporters on duty than there were stories to appear in the next day's paper (management believed it was better to be overstaffed than shorthanded when major incidents unexpectedly occurred) and so having one's name bellowed through the third-floor sound system was usually music to a reporter's ears—it signaled that one was chosen, one was in the day's starting lineup. And while it was considered bad form to ever exhibit an outburst of merriment, satisfaction, or relief, it was nonetheless a common sight in the newsroom for beckoned reporters to rise quickly from behind their typewriters and to stroll friskily up the aisle toward the big front desk, where the city editor stood waiting, sometimes holding the microphone in front of his chest, as if it were a trophy he was about to award to a worthy recipient. As I sat watching from a rear row in the newsroom, listening intently, hoping that the next name I heard would be my own, I was often reminded of televised scenes from Hollywood on Oscar night, and I also thought back to my boyhood days as an altar boy at High Mass on the Jersey shore, standing at the rail while a priest hoisted his aspergillum in my direction, sprinkling me with holy water ritualizing the renewal of my baptismal vows. Reporters could well believe that they were in a state of grace when facing Adams to receive their instructions; they were true and trusted
Times
men, and most of them had habitually subordinated themselves to the judgment of the copydesk and were therefore in his favor.

We who were not in his favor rarely reacted with inner feelings of gratitude on those occasions when we were called before him to receive an assignment; far more frequently than otherwise, we commiserated with one another in the back of the newsroom before dispersing ourselves to our appointed destinations, being collectively convinced that each of us had been assigned to cover a story that was uninteresting, inconsequential, and ultimately destined to be cut to shreds by the copydesk, if not killed entirely by Bernstein. When we were proved wrong—that is, when our assignments ended up as page-one stories, drawing letters of approval
from readers—then, of course, we took full credit. It had been our writing skills and creative approaches to these assignments that had transformed what had been ordinary to something extraordinary. On the other hand, if our assignments had proved to be as pointless and unpublishable as we had predicted, then all the blame belonged to our superiors. How could any reporter write about something so bereft of substance, so ill-conceived and banal?

In recounting my days under the aegis of Frank Adams, I do not mean to represent myself as an insubordinate, know-it-all newcomer to the newsroom. It is true I wanted to see my work published pretty much as I had written it; and I believed that newswriting could be both literary and factually reliable; I understood that my being transferred from the sports section to the main section at Turner Catledge's behest was rightly disturbing to Frank Adams, who had not been previously consulted. This I learned later from one of Adams's clerks. Still, it was hardly unprecedented for the newspaper's top editor to occasionally influence the placement and redeployment of personnel without always clearing it beforehand with mid-level management. What was the point in being at the top if it required getting permission from those below? Politesse had its place in maintaining harmonious intermanagement relationships, of course, and Catledge normally might have been expected to notify Frank Adams in advance about my transfer. But in this instance, he apparently had not. It might have been an oversight. Or maybe it was his way of indicating fatigue with Adams's intransigence and hinting that the latter's job was in jeopardy. Or perhaps Catledge was merely exercising his prerogative, as powerful people sometimes do to prove that they possess power, to shift an employee from one section of the paper to another. I was pleased by the move. I had been promoted from journalism's “toy department,” which is how the
New York Post
columnist Jimmy Cannon referred to sports, to the
Times
main section, populated by full-fledged reporters. I hoped and believed that I was worthy of Catledge's confidence.

Still, I knew that merit was not all that mattered. There were then about four thousand individuals working within the building in various white-collar and blue-collar capacities, and so autonomous were the various departments—including the advertising department, the circulation department, the promotion department, the news department, the typesetting department, and the Sunday department—that the heads of each department routinely indulged in nepotism, cronyism, and other forms of favoritism when it came to hiring or advancing people within their spheres of operation. The issue of merit
was
taken into account, but because there were always more applicants of merit as well as qualified
employees for every available opening or advancement within the organization, the final selection tended to be determined subjectively by those holding positions of influence.

The man at the very top of the
Times
, the publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, got his job because he was married to the late Adolph Ochs's daughter, Iphigene. When I joined the newsroom, I believe there were at least a dozen jobholders on the paper who were family relatives of the
Times
's first lady and her husband. Among the more prominent of these was Arthur Hays Sulzberger's cousin, who was the Paris-based chief foreign correspondent of the
Times
, and Iphigene's cousin, who headed the editorial page and presided over a staff of opinionated pontificators on the tenth floor. In other departments within the paper, and in the disjointed nooks and crannies of the Gothic building's cavernous interior, or within offices owned or leased by the
Times
outside the city or abroad, there were sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, brothers-in-law, uncles, and cousins galore who were collateral descendants or intermarried kinsmen of the Ochs-Sulzberger alliance. Not all of these relatives held important executive positions. Most, in fact, were mid-level bureaucrats. I am alleging, however, using one of journalism's favorite words, that
all
of these people—whether it was Iphigene Sulzberger's nephew, who assisted the advertising manager, or her niece, who clerked for the drama editor, or her other niece, who was an associate editor in the Sunday department, or her son-in-law, who would eventually succeed her husband as the publisher and who, in turn, would be succeeded by her son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and eventually by her grandson, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. (the latter in 1992)—
all
of these were on the
Times
payroll in part (if not
entirely
) because of their consanguinity or their conjugal affiliation with the Ochs patrilineage.

The
Times
was a family enterprise. No major decisions regarding the paper's policies and practices could be implemented without the imprimatur of the ruling faction of the Ochs-Sulzberger family. It alone decided which male heir would ascend to the title of publisher. And the publisher was thereafter open to the opinions and recommendations of the family, and to certain intimates of the family, and, more often than acknowledged, to the top public figures of the day. Ochs himself had been influenced in 1929 by President Herbert Hoover's efforts to have a reportorial job on the
Times
offered to young Turner Catledge.