by Gay Talese
Praise for
The Kingdom and the Power
“A landmark in the field of writing and journalism.”
—The Nation
“Beguilingly gossipy, intimately anecdotal … a grand epic that personalizes the impersonal and turns monolith to flesh.”
—The New York Times
“An epic work … rich in anecdote, intimate in detail … a fascinating parade of personalities … a superb study of people and power and a profoundly influential institution.”
—Women’s Wear Daily
“Superbly triumphant.”
—New York Post
“Seldom has anyone been so successful in making a newspaper come alive as a human institution.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Far and away the best book about an American newspaper ever published and possibly the best ever written about any newspaper.”
—Saturday Review Syndicate
2007 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by Gay Talese
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks or Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by The New American Library, Inc., in association with The World Publishing Company.
Some of the material in this book was previously published in a different form, some in the same exact form, in Esquire and Harper’s magazines, between 1966 and 1969.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Talese, Gay.
The kingdom and the power : behind the scenes at The New York times : the institution that influences the world / by Gay Talese.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York, World Pub. Co., 1969.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64473-6
1. New York times. I. Title.
PN4899.N42T574 2007
071’.47—dc22
2006047953
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Author’s Note
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
1
Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places. The sane scene that is much of life, the great portion of the planet unmarked by madness, does not lure them like riots and raids, crumbling countries and sinking ships, bankers banished to Rio and burning Buddhist nuns—gloom is their game, the spectacle their passion, normality their nemesis.
Journalists travel in packs with transferable tension and they can only guess to what extent their presence in large numbers ignites an incident, turns people on. For press conferences and cameras and microphones have become such an integral part of the happenings of our time that nobody today knows whether people make news or news makes people—General Ky in Vietnam, feeling no doubt more potent after his sixth magazine-cover story, challenges Red China; after police in New York raided the headquarters of young hoodlums, it was discovered that some gang leaders keep scrapbooks; in Baltimore, a day after the Huntley-Brinkley Report mentioned that the city had survived the summer without a race riot, there was a race riot. When the press is absent, politicans have been known to cancel their speeches, civil rights marchers to postpone their parades, alarmists to withhold their dire predictions. The troops at the Berlin Wall, largely ignored since Vietnam stole the headlines, coexist casually, watching the girls go by.
News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all. Thus the journalist is the important ally of the ambitious, he is a lamplighter for stars. He is invited to parties, is courted and complimented, has easy access to unlisted telephone numbers and to many levels of life. He may send to America a provocative story of poverty in Africa, of tribal threats and turmoil—and then he may go for a swim in the ambassador’s pool. A journalist will sometimes mistakenly assume that it is his charm, not his usefulness, that gains such privilege; but most journalists are realistic men not fooled by the game. They use as well as they are used. Still they are restless. Their work, instantly published, is almost instantly forgotten, and they must endlessly search for something new, must stay alive with by-lines and not be scooped, must nurture the insatiable appetites of newspapers and networks, the commercial cravings for new faces, fashions, fads, feuds; they must not worry when news seems to be happening because they are there, nor must they ponder the possibility that everything they have witnessed and written in their lifetime may someday occupy only a few lines in the plastic textbooks of the twenty-first century.
And so each day, unhaunted by history, plugged into the instant, journalists of every creed, quality, and quirk report the news of the world as they see it, hear it, believe it, understand it. Then much of it is relayed through America, millions of words a minute, some thousands of which penetrate a large fourteen-floor fact factory on Forty-third Street off Broadway, the New York Times building, where each weekday afternoon at four o’clock—before it is fit to print, before it can influence the State Department and perplex the President and irritate David Merrick and get the ball rolling on Wall Street and heads rolling in the Congo—it is presented by Times editors seated around a conference table to one man, the managing editor, Clifton Daniel.
He is a most interesting-looking man but difficult to describe because the words that quickly catch him best, initially, seem entirely inappropriate for any man who is a man. But the impression persists. Clifton Daniel is almost lovely. It is his face, which is long and pale and soft and dominated by large dark eyes and very long lashes, and his exquisitely groomed, wavy gray hair that makes him seem almost lovely. His suits are very Savile Row, his hands and nails immaculate, his voice a soft, smooth blend of North Carolina, where he was born in a tiny tobacco town, and England, where he came of age as a journalist and squire of fashionable women and was sometimes referred to as the Sheik of Fleet Street. London in those days, during and just after World War II, was a great city for young American journalists. There was a feeling of warmth and common purpose with the British, a romantic bond built during the blackout and bombing raids; British society was democratic at every level, and if an American journalist, particularly a well-tailored bachelor, also possessed, as did Clifton Daniel, a certain formality and reserve and understated charm—Tory manners that in Daniel’s case were partly cultivated out of a small-town Southern boy’s shyness—then London could be an even more responsive city, and for Daniel it was. He was sought out by London hostesses, was often seen escorting distinguished women to the theater and ballet, and he generally avoided the men’s clubs for the drawing-room scene where, sometimes in the company of Bea Lillie and Noel Coward, Margot Fonteyn and Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, who later married Anthony Eden, he could listen to the latest gossip about politics and people as he had many years before when he worked behind the fountain of his father’s d
rugstore in Zebulon, North Carolina.
Today it is difficult to imagine Clifton Daniel, even as a boy, in a drugstore setting. His style of cool elegance, the courtly way in which he conducts corporate matters at The New York Times, the ease with which he occasionally rejects a bottle of vintage wine at the Oak Room of the Plaza, all suggest that he is a man bred from the very beginning into a world of privilege and power. And this impression, this outer layer of Daniel, his London layer, is all that is seen by most of his subordinate editors and colleagues on The New York Times. They rarely socialize with him outside the office, and so their closest personal contact with him is at the news conference held in his office each weekday afternoon at four o’clock, and not a moment later.
It is now 3:40. It is a sunny afternoon in early summer and Daniel sits in his large office off the busy newsroom on the third floor of the Times building. He had arrived at The Times in the morning feeling relaxed and looking well, the beginnings of a deep suntan obscuring the circles under his eyes and accentuating the silver in his long wavy hair. He and his wife, the former Margaret Truman, had rented a summer home with a pool near Bedford Village, a somewhat exclusive and quiet community in New York State with plenty of trees and space and unpaved country roads for horsemen and with none of the frantic entertaining that Margaret and Clifton Daniel try to avoid in Manhattan but not always can. They had married relatively late—she was thirty-two, he forty-three—and by that time they had both enjoyed the full fling of freedom and were ready to settle down. Margaret especially wanted privacy, having had little of it as a girl in Washington, and later she had to contend with rumors of her engagement to almost every man she dated more than a few times. The report that she had been a summer houseguest in 1955 of the bachelor Governor of New Jersey, Robert Meyner, was news that even The Times could not resist, but later that year she met Clifton Daniel.
She had been out to a dinner party, and afterward at the urging of her escort they stopped in at another party at the home of Mrs. George Backer, a friend of Daniel’s from the war years in London. Daniel had recently returned from a foreign assignment in Moscow, but at this point in 1955 he had given up reporting and had begun to move up the executive ladder of The Times. He had been introduced to Margaret by Mrs. Backer that night, and to this day he can remember very sharply the smallest details. He can remember the way Margaret wore her hair, her shoes, her wonderful complexion, never suggested in her photographs, and the dark blue Fontana dress with the plunging neckline, he not resisting the temptation of looking downward and being impressed with what he saw. They conversed in the corner for a good while that night, Daniel telling Margaret that if she, the daughter of a prominent political figure, had been reared in Russia she would be practically unknown because the politicians there shun publicity for their families. This interested her, and he continued to talk in his worldly way, and before she left he had made a date for lunch. Five months later, in the spring of 1956, in an Episcopal church in Independence, Missouri, where Margaret had once sung in the choir, they were married.
Now, ten years and four sons later, Margaret and Clifton Daniel were enjoying the summer in Bedford, and Daniel was enjoying a new sense of being somebody other than Harry Truman’s son-in-law. Daniel was finally getting singular recognition as an important figure in journalism. Magazine articles had recently featured him, he had just made the new edition of Current Biography, and a speech he had delivered a month ago to the World Press Institute, a speech about a tense scene within the Times building prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, received nearly a full page of coverage in The Times itself. It had been a remarkable speech. It told of Times editors fuming and disagreeing with one another over how the preinvasion story should be played on the front page on that particular evening in 1961. Originally, Daniel recalled, the story had been scheduled for the lead position on page one. But then the publisher of The Times, Orvil Dryfoos, following the advice of his close friend James Reston, ordered the story toned down, moved to a less prominent place on the page, its headline minimized, and any reference to the imminence of the invasion eliminated. It was in the national interest to withhold certain vital facts from the American people, including the CIA involvement, Dryfoos and Reston felt, but other Times editors strongly disagreed. One of them, according to Daniel’s speech, became so infuriated that he quivered with emotion and turned “dead white” and demanded that Dryfoos himself come down from the publisher’s office and personally order The Times’ self-censorship. Dryfoos did, justifying it on grounds of national security and concern for the safety of the men preparing to offer their lives on the beaches of Cuba. But after the invasion had failed, Daniel said in his speech, even President Kennedy conceded that perhaps The Times had been overly protective of American interests; if The Times had printed all it knew about the Cuban venture beforehand, Kennedy suggested, the invasion might have been canceled and the bloody fiasco avoided.
What was most interesting about Daniel’s speech was not the presumption that the mere printing of words in The Times could stop a military invasion, a notion acceptable to many people who respect The Times’ persuasive power in Washington; rather it was that The Times, in publishing the full text of Daniel’s speech, had inadvertently given new insight into itself. It had thus admitted for the first time the existence of discord among its editors, of fuming and fretting in the newsroom, and this undoubtedly was a startling revelation to many readers who had never before conceived of The New York Times’ offices in quite this way. They had probably imagined the interior of The Times to be closer to its prevailing image, a cathedral of quiet dignity, the home of the Good Gray Lady, and perhaps years ago The Times was more like this. But now, in the Nineteen-sixties, it was not.
On the surface things seemed fine—circulation was higher than ever, advertising linage was up, money was pouring in, the newspaper was expanding in prestige and power. But as the paper had grown it had become less manageable, office empires had flourished, and during the last few years a quiet revolution had been going on within The Times, a revolution distinguished for its tactics and intrigue, and Daniel’s speech had hinted at only part of it. It was more than diversity of opinion, the vanity and taste of men at the top; there were also philosophical differences dividing older Timesmen who feared that the paper was losing touch with its tradition and younger men who felt trapped by tradition, and there was reappraisal and doubt even among members of the family that owned The Times, the heirs of the great patriarch, Adolph Ochs, who had come up to New York from Chattanooga before the turn of the century and had purchased the declining Times and revived it. When Ochs bought the paper in 1896 its daily paid circulation was down to 9,000, less than The Times had when it was ten days old in 1851. At Ochs’s death, in 1935, the daily circulation was 465,000. This figure now has nearly doubled, and there have been several changes for the better since the death of Adolph Ochs. But in many ways The Times remains Ochs’s paper, his shrine, his words of wisdom being reechoed by old sages still under his influence.
A photograph of Ochs, white-haired and imperious, hangs on Daniel’s office wall, as it does in the offices of all other top editors. A bronze statue of Ochs stands in the lobby and also up on the fourteenth floor where the stockholders and directors meet, and Ochs’s credo—“To Give the News Impartially, Without Fear or Favor”—is on display in various places around the building and in Times bureaus around the nation and world. Until relatively recent years the editors who had risen within the institution had been those most reverential toward Ochs fundamentalism, and the highest-paid reporters were those who were the most objective and accurate, aware of the weight of each word in The Times. This awareness often stifled their writing style. They might have written with lucidity and freedom on other publications but on The Times they felt the weight and became overly cautious, rigid, and dull. Dullness had been no sin during the Ochs era. Better to be a little dull than to dazzle and distort, the thinking went, and as long as they remained
faithful to the principles of Ochs, a sense of responsibility and caution, the old morality, they need not worry. They were secure on The Times. They were paid well, treated fairly, protected from the sham and uncertainties of the outside world. Economic recessions and depressions did not cut off their income, and threats to world survival seemed not to disturb the inner peace of the Times building. The Times stood apart, solid and unshakable. If it sometimes seemed a bit crusty and out of touch with popular trends, this was not so bad. It was, like Ochs, never frivolous. It was almost never caught out on a limb.The New York Times was a timeless blend of past and present, a medieval modern kingdom within the nation with its own private laws and values and with leaders who felt responsibility for the nation’s welfare but were less likely to lie than the nation’s statesmen and generals. The Times was the bible, emerging each morning with a view of life that thousands of readers accepted as reality. They accepted it on the simple theory that what appeared in The Times must be true, and this blind faith made monks of many men on The Times. Many. Not all. There had been Timesmen who were less than truthful, or truthful in their fashion, or not truthful in the journalistic sense, which is a truth that is limited but verifiable. Or they had perhaps been too truthful, so controversial as not to be in the national interest or the newspaper’s interest, which was often the same thing. The New York Times, after all, grew with the nation during the two great wars, prospered with it, and The Times and the nation were equally committed to capitalism and democracy, and what was bad for the nation was often just as bad for The Times.
And it was this thinking, Ochs’s ghost of caution, that had come filtering into the newsroom on that night in 1961 when The Times decided not to publish all it knew about the Bay of Pigs invasion. The decision had been debated, accepted in one corner of the newsroom, damned in another, but it had finally prevailed. Orvil Dryfoos, The Times’ publisher and husband of Ochs’s first and prettiest granddaughter, and James Reston, The Times’ bureau chief in Washington and star of the staff, had teamed up to tone down the story, and in so doing they had reaffirmed once again the bond between them, a personal and philosophical compatibility that was Reston’s main source of power in the New York office.
