Paper Politics

The Kingdom and the Power.
by Gay Talese.
World. 555 pp. $10.00.

The New York Times is far and away America's greatest newspaper. Its owners, executives, and upper-echelon editors know this and exult in the fact. They do not appear to know that the distinction is rather a dubious one, for to be America's greatest newspaper these days is a little like being the best high-jumper in a school for paraplegics. The country's newspapers are onto lean days, and a sure sign of this is that they are no longer able to attract the brighter young men into working for them, as they did in Dreiser's and Stephen Crane's or in Hemingway's day. At the moment it is safe to say that no American newspaper is harboring a young James Thurber, an A. J. Liebling, or a Joseph Mitchell, let alone a Dreiser, Crane, or Hemingway. The New York Times could not even accommodate the talents of David Halberstam, its most exceptional reporter of recent years, who, feeling his reportorial talents restricted, left the paper to write for magazines.

A number of factors have conspired to bring this about, but chief among them is that newspapers no longer seem as indispensable, and hence as exciting, as they once did. Most people in the normal course of events can keep reasonably well-informed without regularly consulting the daily press. By reading the mass-circulation and intellectual weeklies and monthlies, by watching television news, interviews, and documentaries, one probably has available to him as full a sense of the whole confused human enterprise as is required. To ask for more, indeed, seems almost to show a streak of masochism. Moreover, it is by no means clear that the general run of American newspapers provides more. Prose ineptly composed under the duress of daily deadlines and lavished on events ill-understood is far from a certain gain. Newspapers, in fact, no longer seem in any way above the clatter, but merely a part of it.

Do these strictures apply as well to the New York Times, the good gray lady of American journalism? They apply down the line, or so one is prepared to conclude from a reading of Gay Talese's The Kingdom and the Power. One of the central points to emerge from Talese's book, though it is by no means certain that the author himself would agree about this, is that the Times today is permeated by a strong stench of the second-rate. But then no one ever said the New York Times's prestige derived from its superior quality. Not long ago in these pages,¹ George Lichtheim compared the paper's foreign reporting with that of Europe's leading newspapers and—to put the matter more softly than Mr. Lichtheim chose to—found the Times wanting. The paper's national and city desks tend to produce more in the way of amplitude than of excellence, and though on occasion they turn in distinguished performances—A. H. Raskin's coverage of the 1963 New York newspaper strike, say, or Tom Wicker's reporting of the Dallas assassination—more often than not one reads down long columns of print increasingly certain that there is a good deal less here than meets the eye. The Times's cultural coverage has improved with the acquisition of Hilton Kramer and Clive Barnes, but the Times Book Review is still a very slack job. The strength of the Times lies finally not so much in its excellence as in its bulk; it is not that it is a particularly good newspaper but simply that is is more newspaper than anyone else cares to produce.

The Times outweighs the rest of the nation's press in another, more important respect—its influence, which is practically boundless. This is the real legacy of Adolph Ochs, whose family's control of the Times now reaches into the third generation. Ochs's approach to the news was earnest and completely humorless; he wanted the Times to be “the paper of record,” he wanted the news reported in its pages without partiality, and he wanted all the news. Ochs got what he wanted, and in so doing achieved great power for the Times. He never used this power arrogantly, and indeed rarely overextended himself either financially or editorially. A prudent man by nature, he rocked no boats, made no waves,. As Talese notes: “Ochs had not made a fortune out of the newspaper business by offending the mighty, crusading for reforms, espousing the causes of the have-nots against the haves.” Although Ochs seldom interferred with his editors, he didn't really have to, so clearly did he make his will known on all matters of editorial policy. Nearly three-and-a-half decades after his death in 1935, the New York Times's virtues are still Ochs's, as are its limitations.

The prestige Adolph Ochs earned for his newspaper even now continues to be spread around to all its employees, like some giant profit-sharing plan set up in perpetuity. If you are a Times man, aisles everywhere clear, doors fling open, the State Department calls you—“the world,” as Talese writes, “seems easier.” The lure of these perquisites can scarcely be overestimated; in the great majority of instances, it is sufficient to dim any radical vision a reporter might have and stem any impulse toward irony in his reporting of the news.

Ochs built well. Thorny, idiosyncratic, or otherwise exceptional personalities have never flourished on the Times. Now as always, the Times, as Talese puts it, has “many fine reporters but almost no fine writers.” If not as it should be, this is probably as Ochs intended. If every bureau chief and all the principal editors were to resign tomorrow, it is doubtful that the character of the paper would be radically altered. The New York Times is one of those rare institutions that create the men who work for it, not the other way around.

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The kingdom and the power is about an attempt to change the Times—specifically, about an attempt on the part of certain of the New York editors to divest the paper's Washington bureau of its long-held independent status as the most powerful of the Times's many dukedoms. Great institutions, however, are changed only by stealth or revolution. In this instance, the method was stealth; the effort, abortive; the reverberations within the Times, catacylsmic; the net effect, some shifting of personnel and responsibilities, some changes in title—and business pretty much as usual. But on the single piece of intrigue which is the occasion for this book, Talese has hung an extremely readable history of the Times, an account of its mechanics and machinations, and a virtual glory-hole of gossip about its owners, editors, and reporters.

The last is not the least of the book's attractions. Thus we learn that as chief of the Times bureau in Mexico, Sydney Gruson owned and raced thoroughbreds; Craig Claiborne, the paper's food editor, keeps his weight down by never finishing everything on his plate; upon the death of an employee, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Ochs's son-in-law and the most worldly of the Times's publishers to date, sent a note of condolence both to the man's wife and to his mistress. The Kingdom and the Power is crammed with such stuff. Much of it is amusing, much is merely tedious. Its overall effect is twofold: first, the sheer density of anecdote and detail that Talese has dug up does make life at the Times palpably real; second, the whole business seems vastly overdone because Talese's cast of characters, the owners and employees of the Times, ultimately seems unworthy of such elaborate attention. Who, finally, cares about Punch Sulzberger's first marriage or that on a particular day at the Century Club Tom Wicker felt “the soft warm waves of martinis flowing within him as he ordered lunch”? Although in no sense can Talese be said to be an admirer of the men now at the Times—with the possible exception of Adolph Ochs, his book has no heroes, only antagonists—the principal effect of his extensive accounts of their lives is to corroborate their own excessive sense of self-importance.

Indeed, a sense of self-importance has never been in short supply on the Times. Among the scores of anecdotes Talese provides, one illustrates this very nicely. It has to do with a young reporter named John Corry who felt despondent after weeks of covering the Manchester-Kennedy affair, one of the really dreary non-events of recent years. Learning of Corry's despondence, Clifton Daniel, the managing editor, called him in to ask what he would like to do on the paper. When Corry said there was nothing he wanted to do, Daniel advised that he see the company psychiatrist. Now, it should be made clear that in doing this Daniel was being truly solicitous. But the real point of the story—a point Talese fails to draw—is to be found in Daniel's assumption that if a young journalist doesn't want to work on the New York Times he must be mentally disturbed.

Along with a strong sense of self-importance goes an atmosphere heavy with conspiracy. As described by Talese, the paper's offices have something of the quality of a little Kremlin—plots and power struggles are everywhere. Perhaps this is inevitable. In a situation like that at the Times, where the institution is more important than the people who work for it, and where everyone is therefore eminently dispensable, prerogatives are guarded like harem girls, men in positions of power mark off their small or large pieces of turf and are ready to fight to the death to hold them. Under such circumstances the instincts of a mafioso, though not written into the job description, are far from superfluous equipment. In this regard the Times is of course no worse than the majority of American corporations; what comes as news, however, is that neither is it much better. For years the New York Times has reflected the state of the world in its columns; now in its organization it reflects the society in which it has flourished.

The same might be said of its principal editors. Talese has put a great deal of energy into his portraits of the Times editors—to individuate them one from the other, to show what drives each of them, to get them all down on the page just right. He succeeds, and often brilliantly, or so at least other people who work for the Times confirm. And yet after all this careful portraiture, how interchangeable these men seem—are—with other common corporate types. It takes only the slightest effort of imagination to envision Turner Catledge at Ford or the Pentagon, Clifton Daniel as vice-president in charge of public relations at Revlon, A. M. Rosenthal as one of those clever young men on their way up at J. Walter Thompson.

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In Talese's long, involuted account of the struggles of these men for power, what is dismaying is how little those struggles have to do with any serious intellectual issues or questions of journalistic quality. What is at stake above all else is power, simple and naked. Strange things happen to a man when he becomes an editor of the Times. In agreeing to accept an editorship a man has also to agree in his own mind to swap the satisfactions of the by-line and the freedom of the reporter's life for the anonymous power of the executive. In so doing a man gives up his trade while retaining his ambition; where that ambition formerly might have driven him toward excellence in his craft, it now drives him toward power in his job, which at the Times means greater and greater control over larger and larger segments of the paper. This, of course, was what the effort of the New York editors to curtail the independence of the Times's Washington bureau was really all about. Such issues as existed, if not invented in the first place, quickly receded to the background, and in the final analysis the outcome was decided on the basis of one man's having more clout with the publisher than another. As everyone now knows, the winner of this round was James Reston, who prevented the New York editors from installing their own man as head of the Washington bureau, and who himself became executive editor of the Times.

But it is hard to believe that other rounds will not follow. Under Adolph Ochs, the fight would probably not have begun at all, for Ochs had a very clear idea of what he wanted his newspaper to be, and this idea was translated in unmistakable terms to his editors. His grandson, the current publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, enjoys no such clarity. Search The Kingdom and the Power's 555 pages and you will still find no hint of the direction Mr. Sulzberger would like the Times to take in the future. Under the editorship (now vice-presidency) of James Reston, Talese reports, the paper is to become increasingly interested in “the news of the mind.” But with Reston heading into his sixties and eventual retirement, the question of “whose mind” will soon be a pressing one. Already in Talese's last pages one can hear the rumblings of the next round of the struggle for power at the Times. Let us hope that whoever writes the story of this one has the energy and thoroughness of Gay Talese and, in addition, a quality the subject really deserves—more of the eye and touch of Evelyn Waugh.

¹ “All the News That's Fit to Print,” September 1965.