The Kingdom and the Power (77 page)

Herbert Matthews’ kind of man, an individualist inspired by a touch of idealism and self-absorption, was out of style on
The Times
in 1967. The new foreign-news editor, Seymour Topping, did not want superegos on his staff, nor did Clifton Daniel. Both Topping and Daniel preferred correspondents such as they themselves had been—dispassionate men, reliable, cool. Topping now had Daniel’s permission to call home immediately any correspondent who was not functioning in accordance with New York’s directives. With swift modern communications and jet airplanes at his disposal, Topping could move his men around the globe like pawns; he did not need nor would he tolerate the old system that had produced such figures as Drew Middleton in London, Harold Callender in Paris, A. C. Sedgwick in Athens, Arnaldo Cortesi in Rome, and Thomas J. Hamilton at the United Nations; and had permitted wide latitude to such roving correspondents as Herbert Matthews.

Under the new system, Topping functioned as a one-man control tower, and it was significant that in 1967 the only dominant correspondents were, like Topping,
former
correspondents who had become editors—Daniel, Salisbury, Rosenthal. Not surprisingly, the overseas expertise was emanating from Forty-third Street. The overseas bureau chiefs had lost their traditional stature, and it was also more difficult in 1967 for a correspondent to get a story into
The Times
. Except for the staff in Vietnam, whose stories had top priority, the rest of the staff around the world had been instructed by Topping not to file dispatches each day unless absolutely necessary and to concentrate on “wrap-up” stories that condensed the events of several days. Space was limited, and there was no longer sufficient room for a daily spread of relatively minor government news from fifteen or twenty capitals. Even the Moscow bureau, whose stories had been so prominently played in
The Times
when the bureau chief had been Topping or Daniel or Salisbury, was now of secondary importance to Saigon’s and to the fact that Washington had emerged as the supreme capital of the Western world insofar as
The Times
was concerned. What Harold Wilson or de Gaulle or Aleksei Kosygin was thinking was not at this juncture so important as what Lyndon Johnson was doing or not doing. The big story was not in the major foreign capitals but at home—the American crisis over Vietnam and the Negro; the challenge to authority on the campus and in the street. And so unless a correspondent was in Vietnam—or in the Middle East during a periodic assault; or was, like Henry Tanner, in Paris during a student uprising, or, like Lloyd Garrison, in Biafra during a siege of starvation—unless the correspondent
was encircled by death, destruction, or revolution of some sort, he might as well return to the United States, where there was enough tension and violence for everyone.

Perhaps the first
Times
man to rebel against the tighter controls abroad and to recognize the more dramatic opportunities at home was thirty-three-year-old David Halberstam, a tall, dark, low-pressured but very aware journalist who had graduated from Harvard, had worked for a small country paper in Mississippi, and had then moved up to the
Nashville Tennessean
, also writing pieces for
The Reporter
. A few of these magazine pieces were read by Reston, who in 1960 hired him for
The Times’
Washington bureau. Halberstam was moderately happy in Washington, but his true reportorial talent was not fulfilled until he had gone to the Congo in 1961 to cover the fighting there. He worked best when free to follow his own instincts, to pursue his own ideas without the guidance or resistance of an editor. More than any other
Times
man of his generation, Halberstam was in the best tradition of Matthews and Salisbury—to borrow one of Salisbury’s self-descriptive phrases, Halberstam had “rats in the stomach.” He was a driven, totally involved reporter who was unencumbered by conventionalism or the official version of events, and, like Matthews and Salisbury, he was destined to become controversial, particularly after arriving in Vietnam in 1962.

Halberstam’s coverage of the war conveyed little of the optimism that the South Vietnamese leaders and their American “advisers” insistently proclaimed. As Halberstam saw it, the allied contingent was neither making friends, influencing people, nor winning the war in Vietnam. He was not the only reporter who felt this way—there were, among others, Neil Sheehan of the UPI and Malcolm Browne of the AP, both of whom would later join
The Times
—but Halberstam, whose reporting appeared consistently on page one of
The Times
, became the most conspicuous
běte noire
of the American State Department and the White House. Those skeptical of Halberstam’s reports began accusing him of exaggerations, and even some
Times
editors were privately worried during 1963 that the paper once again might be charged with abetting communism. The foreign desk questioned him with sharply worded cables, to which Halberstam responded even more sharply. After the overthrow of the Diem regime, and following the murder of her husband and her brother-in-law, Madame Nhu announced, “Halberstam
should be barbecued, and I would be glad to supply the fluid and the match.”

While Halberstam’s winning a Pulitzer in 1964 quieted much of the professional rankling, he continued to have his personality differences with members of the foreign desk. He had gone too far, too fast; and they missed few opportunities to question his judgment. Halberstam resented many of their cabled queries, and he also became angered when a promised raise was inexplicably held up.

During his next assignment, in Warsaw, he met and married a Polish actress, Elzbieta Tchizevska, further complicating his relationship with the foreign desk: it was now feared that he would write softly about the Communist regime to avoid expulsion from Poland and separation from his wife. Halberstam did the opposite, writing several critical articles about the economic life of the people and of anti-Semitism in Poland, and in December of 1965 he was expelled on charges of “slander.” When there seemed only mild concern in New York over his personal welfare, in fact when he had heard that a few editors thought that he had caused his own expulsion by his abrasiveness, Halberstam became even more embittered.

His next assignment was in Paris, where his wife later joined him, but the stories in Paris bored him, and there seemed no other foreign assignment with the reportorial challenge that existed in the United States. The glamorous era of the foreign correspondent seemed over, at least for him, and he spent much of his time in the Paris bureau writing a novel and occasionally composing a letter to friends in New York that revealed his frustrations under the present system:

Halberstam later returned to New York, but even under Rosenthal he could not gain the freedom to write and travel around the country as he wished, and as a result he resigned in 1967 to join the staff of
Harper’s
. The resignation of a young Pulitzer Prize winner was unsettling to some editors, and Halberstam’s departure may have made conditions more flexible for other correspondents returning to New York. One of them, J. Anthony Lukas, who had gone to Harvard with Halberstam and had followed him into the Congo, was rather gingerly treated upon his return, receiving top assignments commensurate with his talent. In October of 1967, Lukas was assigned to delve into the background of an eighteen-year-old girl from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had been found murdered in New York City with a hippie boyfriend in a boiler room in the East Village. The idea for the assignment had come from Rosenthal, who had a friend who knew the slain girl’s father, but the writing and approach to the story were uniquely constructed by Anthony Lukas.

After interviewing the girl’s parents in their thirty-room house in Greenwich, and after hearing her described as a wholesome, well-adjusted product of a privileged suburban upbringing, Lukas shifted his attention to Greenwich Village, where he spoke with
her hippie friends. They described her life in a dingy hotel, said that she lived with a number of young men, supported them on marijuana and LSD, and had herself been “freaked out on Methedrine.” Lukas’ portrait presented the two conflicting views of the girl, a story that
The Times
featured on page one and to which it devoted a full page inside. Even more unusual was the trouble that was taken in the layout of the story: the part dealing with the girl’s parents in Connecticut, their opinions and insight into her character, was set in regular type; the version of her as presented by her companions in Greenwich Village was set in italics.
The Times
had rarely in the past made such an artful presentation of a story within its regular news columns, and there was perhaps no feature all year that was more talked about by
Times
readers, particularly those with young daughters living in fashionable suburbs. The article, entitled “The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick,” would win a Pulitzer.

Lukas’ Prize was the thirty-fifth Pulitzer won by
The Times
, and it was the first won by a member of the New York staff since Meyer Berger had won it in 1950 for his story about the war veteran who had gone berserk in Camden, New Jersey, and shot thirteen people. The award to Lukas was particularly gratifying to Rosenthal and Gelb, who had been trying to win a Pulitzer for the New York staff since 1963, and had thought that they had previously qualified with such efforts as McCandlish Phillips’ profile on the Jewish Nazi, and the article about the thirty-eight people in Queens who had done nothing while a screaming girl was being murdered.

As an assistant managing editor, Rosenthal was now a step removed from the New York staff, but he and Gelb, continuing their close personal friendship, were still a team, consulting during and after working hours on story ideas and approaches to news. Since the cultural staff had recently been reunited with the New York staff, and had been made answerable to the New York editor, complying with Rosenthal’s view, there was no endeavor in the city that was off limits to Gelb’s reporters. They could explore the world of the Broadway actor, the Bronx politician, or the Bowery derelict, having only to clear their assignment in advance with one man, Arthur Gelb. Gelb had achieved great scope as an editor and, according to predictions in the newsroom, if Gelb and Rosenthal
continued in the future as they had in the past, did not overplay their hand, they would be running the entire News department within a few years. So far Gelb had demonstrated sound judgment as the New York editor, and Rosenthal had worked smoothly with the three other assistant managing editors, including Salisbury. Salisbury’s and Rosenthal’s duties were divided in such a way as to avoid conflict—Salisbury worked on special assignments for Daniel, helped Emanuel Freedman with recruiting, and assisted in the editing of special sections and supplements; Rosenthal was involved with the more routine day-to-day assignments of the staff at home and abroad, and when Daniel was absent Rosenthal took the managing editor’s place at the four o’clock conference. Salisbury was not offended by this: Salisbury did not really care who sat where in the newsroom, just as long as his own independence was not restrained.

Theodore Bernstein, however, did become a bit upset one day after Rosenthal, with Daniel’s approval if not encouragement, entered the bullpen to watch Bernstein and the subordinate editors performing their early-evening ritual of making up page one. Bernstein was extremely protective of this prerogative, and he did not want Rosenthal, whose executive potential he had recognized years ago, to now be placed in the position of a star pupil scrutinizing the teacher. When Bernstein confronted Daniel with this, Daniel assured him that there had been no change in policy—Rosenthal had just been observing, but the bullpen would continue to select for the managing editor which stories were worthy of page one. So Bernstein was placated, and he was otherwise generally satisfied with the way things were going in 1967. The same could be said of Salisbury and Rosenthal, Daniel and Catledge. The tension of recent months, the personnel changes and the difficult departure of senior
Times
men, was now fading from the scene and conscience of the institution. Only in Washington did there remain the massive problem of morale and coordination, the problem of Tom Wicker, a tenacious and symbolic standard bearer of one bureau’s independence from New York. Supporting Wicker was the redoubtable Reston, and standing in the background, a hoary figure of yesteryear, retired but unretiring, was Arthur Krock.