The Kingdom and the Power (20 page)

Though Daniel would prefer to be identified with several of
The Times
’ recent changes for the better—the expanded coverage of cultural news, the more literate obituaries, the encouragement of flavor and mood in “hard-news” stories that formerly would have been done in a purely routine way, he is more quickly credited with, or blamed for, the women’s page. Bernstein and other critics say that the women’s page gets too much space, and they particularly oppose the publication of lengthy stories by the women’s-page editor, Charlotte Curtis, a five-foot fast-stepping Vassar alumna, describing the activities of wealthy wastrels from Palm Beach to New York at a time when most of America is moving toward the goals of a more egalitarian society. Although Miss Curtis is rarely flattering to her subjects, many of them lack the wit to realize this—but what is more important about Miss Curtis’ work is that Clifton Daniel likes to read it. Bernstein’s deskmen, therefore, rarely trim her stories, and she is extremely careful with her facts, knowing that should she make an error it will most likely be Daniel, and not Bernstein, who will catch her. A few years ago, in a story on Princess Radziwill, she mentioned the Prince’s nickname, “Stash,” only to receive the next day a memo from Daniel noting that while it was pronounced
Stash
, it was spelled
Stas
. Having previously checked the spelling with Pamela Turnure, then secretary to Prince Radzi-will’s sister-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy, Miss Curtis telephoned Daniel to inform him that he was wrong—it was spelled
Stash
.

“On what authority?” he asked

“The White House,” she quickly answered.

“Well, when I knew him,” Daniel said, “it was spelled S-t-a-s.”

Daniel hung up. She thought that was the end of it. But Daniel tracked the Prince down in Europe, and some months later Miss Curtis got another memo from Daniel—it was
Stas
.

But should Bernstein criticize Charlotte Curtis’ work, Daniel is usually quick to defend her, as he did in a lengthy memo after one of her stories had been challenged in
Winners & Sinners
. Bernstein, offended by a Curtis paragraph that read—“The McDonnells are like the Kennedys. They are rich Irish Catholics, and there are lots of them.”—reprinted this in
Winners & Sinners
with a warning to the staff: “Omit racial, religious or national designations unless they have some relevance to the news or are part of the biographical
aggregate, as in an obit or a Man in the News. Perhaps it is a tribute to the Irish that ‘Irish Catholic’ does not seem offensive, but would you write ‘rich Russian Jews’?”

Bernstein then received a note from Daniel: “I agree with you that it is a tribute to the Irish that ‘Irish Catholic’ does not seem offensive, and I also agree that ‘rich Russian Jew’ might be offensive. But it seems to me that the prejudice is more in the mind of the reader than it is in the words of the writer, and that we can certainly say that a family is rich, that it is Russian and that it is Jewish, if those things are relevant to the news. In fact, I myself have written about such families and nobody ever questioned the relevance of doing so. But the trick is not to put these facts together in one bunch so that they have a cumulative, pejorative aroma.” In a postscript, Daniel added: “Since this note was dictated, we have published an obituary of Sean O’Casey, calling him a poor Irish Protestant.”

Another point of contention between Bernstein and Daniel was centered around Harrison Salisbury, who, with Daniel’s strong support, had been elevated from the reporting ranks in 1962 and made an editor; by 1964 he had become an assistant managing editor. One of Salisbury’s duties was to read
The Times
each morning and then write a memo for Daniel about the strengths and weaknesses of the edition, not only comparing
The New York Times
’ reporting with the
New York Herald Tribune
’s and other newspapers’, but also commenting on the general appearance of the paper, its makeup and headlines and pictures and prose style—Salisbury was suddenly encroaching upon Bernstein’s
spécialité
, and Bernstein became very uneasy in the newsroom. Bernstein, the watchdog of
The Times
for so long, now felt that
he
was being watched. One evening, after Salisbury had invited himself into the bullpen to observe Bernstein and two subordinate editors laying out page one, Bernstein could contain himself no longer. He wrote a long memo to Daniel that night. He wrote it in his own hand, the secretary having gone, and it was just as well. It would be embarrassing to dictate this sort of note. In it he emphasized that Salisbury had no business watching the bullpen editors making up the front-page dummy, which is distributed to all the senior editors anyway, and he added that he would interpret a reappearance by Salisbury as a vote of “no confidence” from Daniel. Bernstein then described Salisbury in a way that he would never have done under ordinary circumstances: “It was almost as if he were a spy and we
[the bullpen editors] the ones being spied upon.” The reply from Daniel the next day dismissed the significance of the incident. There had apparently been a slight misunderstanding on Salisbury’s part, Daniel said, and he was sorry if it had caused uneasiness or resentment.

The Harrison Salisbury that Clifton Daniel knew was not the Salisbury that Bernstein knew. Daniel had first met Salisbury in London during World War II while Salisbury was working for the United Press. Salisbury was then a very shy, solitary figure separated from his wife, who was still in the United States, a man uncertain of himself and his future. After Salisbury had joined
The Times
, and particularly after Daniel had taken Salisbury’s place in Moscow—Salisbury had been
The Times
’ Moscow bureau chief for five very difficult years—the two men discovered that they had a good deal in common and much compatibility. Therefore it did not surprise Salisbury, although it surprised nearly everyone else on
The New York Times
’ staff, when Daniel began to pull Salisbury up the executive ladder as Daniel himself started to rise. And Daniel had not regretted it. Salisbury was an indefatigable working executive, possessing a creative mind bursting with new ideas and approaches. He had overcome the shyness that had once so dominated him; and, happily remarried and incredibly well organized, Salisbury was one of the most impressive journalists that Daniel had ever known. He had written many fine books, including a novel, and he was much sought after as a panelist on television shows and speechmaker on campuses; and there was nothing about Harrison Salisbury’s manner that was in the least conspiratorial, insofar as Daniel could see. And yet Bernstein was not alone in his feelings about Salisbury. The Washington bureau, not unexpectedly, was quick to condemn him, with one reporter nicknaming Salisbury “Rasputin,” and another explaining: “Salisbury spent so many years watching who was standing next to Stalin that now
he’s
standing next to Stalin!”

The mere sight of Salisbury, to those who do not know him, conveys a sense of severity, a chilling aloofness. He has an angular face with a slightly drooping gray moustache over thin lips that rarely smile, and his small pale blue eyes peer without expression through steel-rimmed glasses which, worn out of habit, do not appreciably improve his adequate eyesight. Six feet tall, Salisbury seems even taller because he has a lean, lanky body, broad shoulders, and a rather small head; his hair, once blondish, is now a silk-thread
gray parted high on the right and combed hard across his forehead, the longer strands usually hanging over his left eye when, head down, he sits at his desk reading or typing. He neither drinks nor smokes. He gave up drinking in 1949 while preparing himself, psychologically and physically, for The
New York Times
assignment in Moscow during the very worst years of the Cold War, days of denial and conspiracy. He gave up smoking a few years later in the interests of his health, and now, instead of cigarettes, he sucks Life-Savers, clicking and cracking them against his teeth as he sits behind his desk in
The Times
’ newsroom reading Soviet journals, or jotting tiny notes in his little black book, or looking with a glazed stare out across the rows and rows of heads bent over type-writers.

Though few knew him in the summer of 1966, nearly everyone in the newsroom seemed to have strong opinions about Salisbury, but by no means were they all negative. He was regarded by many as not only a superb reporter and writer, but also a highly effective editor, and his supervision of
The Times
’ coverage of the Kennedy assassination was regarded as extraordinary. Salisbury’s unpopularity, a few of them said, was undoubtedly the result of his having to carry out orders from Daniel, or from above. And yet Salisbury, others said, carried out orders with excessive enthusiasm. He seemed to
like
playing Rasputin. And fortifying this image, however unjustly, were several small interoffice tales of Salisbury’s suspecting schemes within the United States government and then chastising reporters for not detecting them, of his flying down to Washington to encourage the resignation of a veteran
Times
man who had fallen out of favor with the New York office, or of Salisbury’s sudden reply to the person who had just returned to him a piece of paper that he had let fall to the floor: “When I drop a piece of paper on the floor, that’s where I want it to stay!” One day Salisbury, angry, walked across the room after noting that
The Times
had not, in its late-edition story about Jacqueline Kennedy, included the fact that she had visited her husband’s grave unexpectedly the night before.

“Who was the late man last night?” he called out, as a curved desk of copyreaders all looked up.

“I was,” one man said, finally.

“Why didn’t you put a new lead on that Jackie story?”

“I didn’t believe it warranted a new lead.”

“Well, you guessed wrong.”

“I don’t agree with you, Mr. Salisbury. Jackie had done that before. That’s why I didn’t think the story warranted a new lead.”

“Did you check with the bullpen?”

“I did, and they agreed that it didn’t warrant a new lead.”

Salisbury’s lips tightened, and quickly he turned and walked away. A few days later one of the subordinate editors on the national desk showed the copyreader a memo that Salisbury had written charging the copyreader with bad judgment, and accusing him of having made similar errors in the past.

“That’s not true,” the copyreader said. “I’d like to answer this.”

“Oh,
no
,” the subordinate editor said, quietly, “don’t answer. Just watch your step. He’s keeping a dossier on a lot of guys.”

The two other assistant managing editors—one was named Robert Garst, the other Emanuel Freedman—were quiet, unprovocative men, and the newsroom gossip had never centered around them in the way that it had around Harrison Salisbury and Theodore Bernstein. Robert Garst was a thin, trimly tailored, sandy-haired, somewhat
chilly
Virginian. He had a lean, ruddy face and light horn-rimmed eyeglasses that made his cool, pale eyes seem even more distant. A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, Garst joined
The Times
in 1925 as a copyreader on the city desk, and was joined on that desk three months later by Theodore Bernstein, whom he had known on the Columbia campus. Shortly after their employment on
The Times
, Garst and Bernstein also got jobs teaching journalism at Columbia during their off hours, and in 1933 they collaborated on a book of instruction for copyreaders. A few years later Garst and Bernstein were promoted to subordinate editorships on the copydesk, beginning a somewhat parallel climb up through the desk complex that culminated in 1952 with Catledge’s announcement that they were now assistant managing editors. But at the same time, privately, Catledge told them that they would go no further. This was to be their final advancement on
The Times
, they would never succeed him. From now on, Catledge said, they should devote themselves to helping him run the expanding staff, blending their personal aims into the larger purpose of the paper, and assisting him in the selection and training of younger
Times
men who would one day be their successors.

Bernstein did this—it had been Bernstein, in fact, who had first alerted Catledge to Rosenthal’s possibilities as an editor—and if Bernstein lost any personal incentive as a result of being told at
the age of forty-eight that he would climb no higher, it was never perceivable. But in Garst’s case it might have been different. Perhaps Bernstein had been much more realistic about his limitations on
The Times
than Garst. If Arthur Hays Sulzberger did not want Felix Frankfurter sitting on the Supreme Court bench, he certainly did not want Theodore Bernstein sitting in the managing editor’s chair—a showcase position on
The Times
, one that should offer the ultimate in social mobility, a passport through all the prejudicial barriers of the American democratic system. And Theodore Bernstein, accepting the situation as it was, concentrated on his craft as an editor, gaining his confidence from this; and he was a free man, or at least he
seemed
unintimidated by a fear of going too far: he did as he pleased, said what he thought. It had been Bernstein, together with a bullpen subordinate editor named Lewis Jordan, who led the opposition within the office during that night in 1961 when Orvil Dryfoos ordered
The Times
to tone down Tad Szulc’s story about the Bay of Pigs invasion plan. The next day Bernstein was in Dryfoos’ office on the fourteenth floor arguing that there was a difference between matters of national interest and national security, and Bernstein said that Dryfoos had confused the two. When matters of national security arise in a war situation or a near-war situation, Bernstein told Dryfoos, there is not the slightest question about what course the press should follow—it should do nothing that would jeopardize the nation’s safety. But in matters of national interest, Bernstein went on, the press has not only a proper option but indeed a bounden duty to speak up.