The Kingdom and the Power (13 page)

So Clifton Daniel returned to New York to study Russian at Columbia University. After class he lunched at Sardi’s, checking his Russian primer with the blonde in the cloakroom. He also took a trip down to Zebulon to see his parents and friends, and while in the Zebulon Post Office he was approached by the clerk, Whitley Chamblee, who leaned forward and whispered, “Did I hear you’re going to
Russia
?”

After Daniel confirmed it, Whitley Chamblee asked, “I wonder, when you’re there, if you would buy me one of those cuckoo clocks.”

“Whitley, I don’t believe they make cuckoo clocks in Russia,” Daniel said. “They make them in Germany and Switzerland. But, well, if I find one, I’ll send it to you.”

A year later Clifton Daniel was in Geneva for the Big Four Conference. He had flown there from Moscow to join a team of
Times
men reporting on the big story. While there he also bought a cuckoo clock and mailed it to the postman in Zebulon.

Clifton Daniel arrived in Moscow in the late summer of 1954, a vintage period in Russian news—Stalin only eighteen months dead, Khrushchev emerging with a new party line that would include vodka toasts and receptions in the Great Kremlin Palace; at one reception, Daniel reported to the readers of
The Times
, “I was as close to Mr. Malenkov as this paper is to your nose.” His reporting in
The New York Times
was remarkable in that it captured not only the political rumblings but also the mood of the people: the audience at the Bolshoi and the barber in Kharkov; the athletes preparing for the Olympics, and the fashion models wearing designs of “socialist realism” in this land where “bosoms are still bosoms, a waist is a waist, hips are hips, and there is no doubt about what they are and where they are situated.” He reported, too, how tipping—a “relic of the dark bourgeois past”—was a necessary reality despite government disapproval, and he also described the arrival of winter:

Since Daniel was then the only permanent correspondent of a Western non-Communist newspaper in the Russian capital, he was able to pick his themes at will and write them well and not have to contend with the editorial second-guessing that would have come from New York had there been rival papers’ men in Moscow focusing on government spokesmen with their endless pronouncements. And not being part of a pack, Daniel had to work harder than he ever had. He developed an ulcer and lost between thirty and forty pounds. In November of 1955, Turner Catledge, acting on orders from Arthur Hays Sulzberger—who had by this time received letters from
Times
men commenting on how Daniel looked at the Big Four Conference in Geneva—ordered Daniel home immediately.

He returned, emaciated, but was not long in recovering, and soon was working in the New York office. He had been named
an
assistant to the foreign-news editor, although nobody in the city room knew precisely what this meant, including possibly
the
foreign-news editor. But it seemed obvious from the way Daniel moved around the room, and from the way the room moved around him, that he was not going to remain an assistant to the foreign-news editor for very long. Daniel’s desk, which normally would have given a clue, was in a nondescript spot. It was on the south side of the room, where all the senior editors sit, but it was partially obscured by a post. It was also up a bit between two lady secretaries, equidistant from the foreign editor and the bullpen. He also rarely remained seated. Usually he walked slowly around the big room, his glasses sometimes tucked into the top of his silver hair. Sometimes he would stop, sit down, and chat with reporters or deskmen in the Science department, or in Sports, or Education, or Financial, or Society. Occasionally he would return to one of these departments for a whole week or two, sitting in various places, and conversing in a very casual, disarming way about
The New York Times
,
and asking occasionally what they liked about working there, or did not like. He was living at the Algonquin Hotel then, and was spotted at night also in Sardi’s after the theater, and was once seen at the opera with a tall, striking brunette.

After they had gone twice more to the opera they became a “twosome” in Walter Winchell’s column. The lady was mildly upset, partly because she felt that Daniel, a
Times
editor in a gossip column, might be very embarrassed, especially when their relationship had been so innocent: a drink, dinner, the opera, another drink perhaps, then home. Directly. A pleasant good-night in front of the doorman. That was it.

She had met Clifton Daniel at a New York party prior to his leaving for Moscow, had received one postcard from him, and was now pleased to be seeing him again. And, hoping that he would not be angered by the Winchell item, she telephoned Daniel at
The Times
.

He could not have been nicer. He only laughed when the Winchell subject was brought up, and hardly seemed sorry about the item appearing—which, she had to admit, surprised her. Shortly after that, in March of 1956, she read in the newspapers the engagement announcement of Margaret Truman and Clifton Daniel. She wrote a note of congratulations to Daniel, and received in turn a note thanking
her
“for being such a fine cover-up for myself and Margaret.”

The brunette was devastated by the note, and she neither spoke to nor saw Clifton Daniel again for two years. Now, looking back, she concedes that perhaps she was wrong to have reacted as she did. Perhaps this was his way of being light, she thought, or humorous.

T
he editors in the newsroom, having heard from their correspondents that the world today was in its usual state of greed and disorder, confusion and apathy, were now preparing to attend the news conference and relay the information to Daniel. Daniel would take it all very calmly, they knew, and within an hour the conference would be over, and within a few hours the news would be printed, and then most
Times
men would go home and forget about it, knowing that in the morning it would all come out neatly and tidily in
The Times
.

They regarded
The Times
as one of the few predictable things left in modern America and they accepted this fact with degrees of admiration and cynicism, seeing
The Times
with a varying vision: it was a daily miracle, it was a formula factory. But no matter. It was
The Times
. And each day, barring labor strikes or hydrogen bombs, it would appear in 11,464 cities around the nation and in all the capitals of the world, fifty copies going to the White House, thirty-nine copies to Moscow, a few smuggled into Peking, and a thick Sunday edition flown each weekend to a foreign minister in Taiwan, for which he would each time pay $16.40. He would pay this because, with thousands of other isolated men in all corners of the earth, he required
The Times
as necessary proof of the world’s existence, a barometer of its pressure, an assessor of its sanity. If the world did indeed still exist, he knew, it would be duly recorded
each day in
The Times
—as the world was in the process of being recorded on this particular afternoon in New York, June 23, 1966, at three minutes before four, in
The Times
’ massive Gothic gray-stone building off Broadway at Forty-third Street.

At this moment there were approximately four thousand employees working within the fourteen-story building. They were receptionists and telephone operators, printers and photoengravers, map makers, cafeteria cooks, nurses, editorial writers. Most of them had been in the building since 9 or 10 a.m., arriving as big trucks were backed into the curb unloading dozens of huge rolls of paper that went bumping, thumping down into
The Times
’ basement and into machines whose paper consumption each year devours more than five million trees.

Of
The Times
’ complete roster of 5,307 employees, only seven hundred work within the News department on the third floor. They are editors, reporters, copyreaders, critics, news assistants, and they tend to think of themselves as the totality of
The Times
, its embodiment and only spirit. If they do not completely ignore such other large departments within the building as Production, Promotion, and Advertising, they acknowledge them with a certain condescension. This is particularly true with regard to the Advertising department, which, after all, deals directly and constantly with that most contaminating of commodities, money. It hires hundreds of men to sell what in the News department cannot be bought. It exists as the mundane side of Ochs’s sanctuary.

In the beginning Adolph Ochs was fundamentally a businessman. Later he became much more than that, but without his uncanny business sense he could not have taken over the declining
Times
in 1896 and revived it, an achievement accomplished by such expedient if inglorious tactics as price-cutting. Ochs in 1898 reduced the price of
The Times
from three cents a copy, which is what most respectable journals were then charging, to one cent, which was the standard price of the more sensational sheets. Ochs’s associates thought that he was making a major mistake, cheapening
The Times
’ image without solving its financial problems. Ochs disagreed.
The New York Times
would not diminish in character, only in price, he said, adding that great numbers of bargain-conscious New Yorkers might switch from the cheaper papers to
The Times
if the price were the same.

That his assumption was correct was apparent within a year, when
The Times
’ circulation had tripled, advertising revenue poured in.
And by 1915 Ochs’s paper was rich and powerful enough to select and reject advertisers and to eliminate certain ads when more space was needed in the paper for late-breaking news. Such prerogatives, which would quite naturally breed pride and pretension within the News department, were highlights in the career of Adolph Ochs, allowing him to satisfy a duality of drives—he could, under one roof, run both a thriving business and a theocracy, but there must be no intermingling, he knew: they must function separately on different floors; the money changers must stay out of his temple. He meanwhile, financially solid and rising socially, responded to the higher call, never succumbing to such circulation gimmicks as comic strips in his newspaper (although comics were tolerated in his first newspaper, the
Chattanooga Times
, and still are); and following his death, history would not place Adolph Ochs with so many of his
landsmen
, those great businessmen, the merchant princes who became bankers—Ochs would be in the more stately company of noble servants.

Still, Ochs never left his store untended, and now in the summer of 1966 the man in charge of making money for
The Times
was an all-business, no-nonsense type named Monroe Green. Green, who is sixty, sits behind a busy desk in his big office on the second floor, directing the 350-man department that brings in more than $100 million a year by selling ads. A full-page advertisement costs roughly $5,500 in the weekday edition, and $7,000 on Sundays, and the revenue derived from advertising is three times what the paper earns from its circulation sale and its other business ventures combined.

Monroe Green is a big, dark, wavy-haired man who wears sharply tailored dark suits, gleaming cufflinks, white or silvery ties. He speaks quickly, forcefully into a red telephone that rings incessantly on his desk, and he keeps a thousand facts at his manicured, tapping fingertips. He has been on
The Times
for twenty-five years as an advertising man, before that was on the advertising staffs of the
Herald Tribune
and the
Journal-American
, and before that was advertising manager of Macy’s department store, to which he had gone after working his way through the University of Pennsylvania. The luxurious world that is portrayed each day in the advertisements of
The Times
, the romping happy people off to Europe on holiday, the slim mannequins wearing mink or Tiffany gems, resembles not in the least the world that Green knew most of his life. His father, who ran a small clothing store in South Amboy,
New Jersey, died when Green, an only child, was ten years old, and while he can be light-hearted and pleasant, he is more naturally a serious man, a hardened realist, one not easily affected by the airy dreams of his ads.

From his office window he can see the street and a wino sleeping on a stone step behind an old theater. Green can faintly hear the horns of a traffic jam that will inevitably attract a mounted policeman who will inevitably notice press cars or trucks parked illegally but will give out no tickets, knowing that he will park his horse in
The Times
’ enclosure behind the loading ramps later in the day. Green can feel the vibrations of the press machinery below and sense the power of
The Times
in ways quite different from Clifton Daniel on the floor above, and his view of life is certainly different from that of the editorial writers on the tenth floor who, within their quiet retreats, write of lofty expectations and ideals that sometimes irritate Green. He remembers one morning when he read a
Times
editorial critical of the new luxury-apartment skyscrapers being built along the Hudson River, on the New Jersey side a mile south of the George Washington Bridge; the buildings as seen by
The Times
’ editorial writer were a desecration to the natural beauty of that section of the Jersey cliffs. But Green did not agree—and besides, he had recently sold the builders and owners of the apartments, the Tishman Realty & Construction Company, a $50,000 advertising supplement that had just appeared in
The Times
praising the project. The Tishman family would be most unhappy about
that
editorial, Green knew, sitting at his desk expecting a call from them at any moment. They might even wish to withdraw future advertising, which is not an uncommon reaction among some big-business men when a
Times
article or editorial offends them. A cigarette manufacturer boycotted the Advertising department after a
Times
editorial dealt with smoking and lung cancer, and this cost the paper several thousand dollars. But with the possible exception of Green, no executive at
The Times
really cared. When
The New York Times
cares about what its advertisers think, a few executives have said, it will no longer be
The New York Times
.