The Kingdom and the Power (63 page)

If the young
Times
correspondent who had been assigned to cover the City College story, and to compile the list of awards, had been guilty of deliberately inserting false information into
The Times
, there was no recourse, Rosenthal thought, but to fire him. Many years ago, A. J. Liebling, then employed as a copy-reader in
The Times’
sports department, had done something like this: instead of listing the correct name of the basketball referee in the agate box score, as was required, Liebling—who always experienced difficulty in getting the reporters to remember to get the referee’s name—would merely write, in place of the name, the Italian word
ignoto
—“unknown.” Mr.
Ignoto
would sometimes be listed in
The Times
as the referee of two or three or even four basketball games a night, in various cities—far too energetic and rambling a referee to go undiscovered indefinitely. When the prank became known, Liebling was fired, and he went on to use his imagination more wisely on
The New Yorker
.

The difficulty in the City College incident was that the correspondent who
might
have been guilty—Rosenthal had not yet called him—was Clyde Haberman, one of Rosenthal’s favorites, a young man of twenty-one who reminded Rosenthal very much of himself. Haberman was skinny and driving, as Rosenthal had been twenty years ago when
he
was the City College correspondent for
The Times
, and Haberman had quickly demonstrated an ability to sense a story, then to write it well. In the eight months he had been the City College correspondent, Clyde Haberman had produced more than sixty pieces, a remarkable achievement for an individual whose beat was limited to one campus. Haberman had made one slip, in an article about college tuition, but he had otherwise been reliable, had seemed very dedicated to journalism, and he had impressed Rosenthal as an excellent candidate for the reportorial staff of
The Times
.

Rosenthal hoped that Haberman had not inserted the “Brett Award.” There was no chance of supporting a young man in this situation as Rosenthal had supported another man two years before, a Negro named Junius Griffin, who had written a frontpage piece for
The Times
about the existence of a “Blood Brother” gang in Harlem, a militant band of men who were trained in karate and would soon invade white Manhattan if conditions in the ghetto were not quickly improved. The Blood Brother story was immediately picked up by the networks and other newspapers, spreading minor panic in some quarters, provoking angry denials
elsewhere, including in Harlem, where the story was challenged as an exaggeration and even an outright hoax. Rosenthal had checked into the story, and had claimed that his reporter was not writing fiction. But
The Times
was nonetheless doubted and criticized in other newspapers and periodicals—an opportunity they never miss when they think
The Times
has overstepped its traditional caution. They could find no such organization, and even in
The Times’
newsroom there were older staffmen who smiled cynically, saying that this sort of thing was bound to happen when inexperienced reporters were given wider range, and when the New York staff felt the pressure of having to make a fine showing each day in the paper. Some reporters began to refer to the Blood Brother story as Rosenthal’s Bay of Pigs.

Clyde Haberman was in bed when Rosenthal called his home in the Bronx. Haberman had been awakened fifteen minutes before by a call from the City College publicity department saying that it had been receiving inquiries about the “Brett Award.” It was then, and only then, that Haberman remembered that he had forgotten to remove the humorous award, as he had intended, or as he had perhaps intended, from the long list before turning it into the desk the afternoon before. He remembered how bored and drowsy he had then been in the newsroom, having spent hours behind the typewriter copying the interminable list of names and awards that were to be presented at the college’s commencement ceremony two nights hence—hundreds of names and awards whose publication in
The Times
was a waste of space, he thought, was an annoyance to his eyesight, was giving him a headache—he could understand that
The Times
, a paper of record, would devote space to a Congressional roll call, or would print long texts of speeches … but to fill
three
columns with City College student awards seemed absolutely preposterous to Haberman: and the more he typed, the more frustrated he became …

It had just popped into Haberman’s head, his fingers reproduced it quickly on paper, he had laughed, he had thought it very funny, he had decided to take it out,
not
to take it out, he continued to type … and later he had become busy with something else, forgetting about Barnes and Lady Brett as he had turned the story, and the long list, into the desk. And it had taken the morning phone calls to remind him, first from the City College press agent, and then from Rosenthal.

“Clyde,” Rosenthal began softly, “did you see the City College prize list this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see a Brett Award?”

“Yes.”

“How did that get there?”

“I, uh, guess I put it in,” Clyde Haberman said timidly, “in a moment of silliness.”

“You did,” Rosenthal said slowly, his voice getting hard. “Well, that moment finished you in newspapers.”

Haberman could not believe the words. He was stunned.
Finished with newspapers
, Haberman thought,
he must be kidding! It isn’t possible over an inane thing like this!

Haberman got dressed, having been told by Rosenthal to appear in the newsroom immediately, but even as he rode the subway to Times Square, Haberman could not believe that he was finished at
The Times
. Haberman had sensed that Rosenthal was an extremely sensitive man, a feeling that Haberman had first gotten from reading
Rosenthal’s classic on the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. It was so revealingly sentimental, Haberman had thought, reading the piece a second time, that he wondered how Rosenthal could have exposed such tender emotion. Now in the subway Haberman thought that Rosenthal was merely upset by the joke in
The Times
; Haberman knew him well enough to sense that Rosenthal regarded a joke on
The Times
to be a joke on him. Yet he was confident, once the lack of malicious intent had been explained, that the mistake would pass and be forgotten.

It was noon when Haberman entered the newsroom. Nearly everybody was out to lunch. He walked up to the big desk where Rosenthal sits, and he addressed a broad-shouldered gray-haired clerk named Charles Bevilacqua, who had been there for years.

“Is Mr. Rosenthal in?” Haberman asked.

“Out to lunch,” Bevilacqua said.

Haberman walked away, but Bevilacqua called after him harshly, “You’d better stick around. He wants to talk to you.”

Haberman wanted to whirl around and say.
No kidding, you idiot, why didn’t somebody tell me?
but being in no position to act offensively, he retreated meekly into the newsroom’s rows and rows of empty desks, occupied only by the obituary writer, Alden Whitman, a reporter, Bernard Weinraub, and a young man on tryout, Steve Conn, a friend of Haberman’s.

“Hey, Clyde,” Conn said, laughing, “did you see that Brett Award in the paper today?”

Haberman said he had. Then he admitted writing it, and Conn smacked a hand gently against his forehead and groaned, “Oh,
God
.”

Haberman took a seat in the middle of the newsroom to await Rosenthal’s return. He focused on the silver microphone up ahead—a most intimidating gadget, he always thought, for most young men on the paper: they feared, after having turned in their story, the sight of an editor picking up the microphone and booming out their names, paging them to the New York editor’s desk to explain their ambiguities or errors. Just from the sound from the microphone, Haberman knew, a young reporter could usually tell the mood of the editor: if the editor paged the reporter in a snappy, peremptory tone—
Mr. Haberman
! very quick—it meant that there was only a small question, one that the editor wished to discuss hastily so he could get on to other matters elsewhere. But if the editor languished on the sound of a young man’s
name—
M r  H a b e r m a n
—then the editor’s patience was thin, and the matter was very serious indeed.

Twenty-five minutes later Haberman saw Rosenthal walk into the room, then stride toward his desk. Haberman lowered his head as he heard the microphone being picked up. It was the voice of Charles Bevilacqua, a low sad note of finality,
M r  H a b e r m a n
.

Haberman got up and began the long walk up the aisle, passing the rows of empty desks, thinking suddenly of a course he had taken under Paddy Chayefsky in screenplay-writing, and wishing he had a camera panning the room to capture permanently the starkness of the scene.

He saw Rosenthal standing before him. “Sit down,” Rosenthal said. Then, as he sat, Haberman heard Rosenthal begin, “You will never be able to write for this newspaper again.”

Haberman now accepted the reality of it, and yet made one final attempt at reminding Rosenthal of the work he had done from City College, the many exclusives and features, and Rosenthal cut him off: “ ’Yes, and that’s why you acted like a fool—I had backed you, and written memos about you, and you could have been on staff in a year or two.… You made me look like a jackass. You made
The Times
look like a jackass …”

There was silence. Then, his voice softening and becoming sad, Rosenthal explained that the most inviolate thing
The Times
had was its news columns: people should be able to believe every word, and there would never be tolerance for tampering. Further, Rosenthal said, if Haberman were pardoned, the discipline of the entire staff, the younger men and the established reporters, would suffer—any one of them could err and then say, “Well, Haberman got away with it.”

There was a pause, and in this time Rosenthal’s voice shifted to yet another mood—optimism for Haberman, not on
The Times
but somewhere else. Haberman had talent, Rosenthal said, and now it was a question of accepting the fact that it was all over with the Gray Lady and moving on determinedly to make the grade somewhere else.

Rosenthal talked with him for another five minutes, warmly and enthusiastically; then the two men stood up, and shook hands. Haberman walked back, shaken, to a desk to type out his resignation. Rosenthal had given him the option of doing this so that he would not have officially been fired. Rosenthal had discussed this point an hour before with Clifton Daniel, and also with Emanuel
Freedman, an assistant managing editor, and Richard D. Burritt, the personnel specialist, and they all agreed to accept the resignation as soon as Haberman could type it out.

Having done so, and after handing it in, Haberman was aware that other people in the newsroom were now watching him; he felt a strange sensation of being in a warm spotlight. He did not linger. He quickly collected some papers in a manila folder, tucked it under his arm, and walked out of the newsroom and through the lobby toward the elevators. He stood there momentarily, then heard his name being called by Arthur Gelb, who had come running, saying, “Clyde, wait.”

Haberman had never particularly liked Gelb, having been influenced by the Old Guard’s view; but now Gelb was deeply concerned about Haberman, and he reassured the young man that the world was not over, that there were brighter days ahead. Haberman thanked him and was very moved by Gelb’s concern.

Then Haberman rode the elevator down to the first floor, not pausing as he passed the stern statue of Adolph Ochs in the lobby, nor stopping to talk with the few friends he met coming through the revolving door. He would return to City College for his final session in the fall, and then after graduation worry about what would happen next. He might work briefly for another newspaper, and then he would probably have to serve for two years in the Army.

The next day there was a “correction” in
The Times
, only a single paragraph. Yet it reaffirmed that there were a few things that had not changed in the slightest at
The Times
. The paragraph, written by Clifton Daniel, read:

Despite the occasional tension and shifting, the revitalization that Catledge had wanted in the newsroom was being supplied by
Rosenthal and Gelb, and one result of all the chasing, writing, and rewriting was the disappearance of the late-afternoon card game. Another was the traditional “good-night,” inasmuch as Rosenthal did not care when his reporters came and went, so long as they got the story. A third result was that the national and foreign staffs, once so superior to New York’s, were now beginning to feel intensified pressure and competition for space on page one. On some mornings,
The Times’
front page would carry five or six stories that had been produced by the New York staff, while the national and foreign staffs would each have three or four. During the early evenings, after the stories had been turned in and were being edited or set in type, Rosenthal and Gelb would wait for the layout sheets that would show which stories had been selected by the bullpen for page one, and if there were five or more by the New York staff, Rosenthal and Gelb would leave the office in a triumphant mood. Once when Rosenthal had left the office before seeing the layouts, he telephoned a subordinate editor and was told that five stories had made it. But moments after Rosenthal had hung up, the subordinate editor received a revised layout showing that two New York stories had been replaced by late-breaking stories from out of town. The editor, upset, walked over to the bullpen carrying the revised layout and said, “Look, I already told Abe we had
five
stories on page one.”