by Gay Talese
The Times’ sports editor in those days was, like Skipper Williams, a wandering individualist, the sort of man rarely seen at The Times today but not uncommon then. His name was Bernard William St. Denis Thomson, and he was an elegant man mildly scented with perfume; he was known in the office as “Colonel” Thomson, even though he had never gotten higher than captain in the United States Army, a rank he attained during World War I in France as a trainer of pack animals. Born in Canada, he had a law degree from Harvard, had ridden burros prospecting for gold in the West, later became a rancher, still later a dabbler in gambling, and he twice broke the bank at Monte Carlo. Like his father, he finally settled into journalism, and during his twenty-one years as the sports editor of The Times he built up his staff from six to fifty, and he insisted, obeying Ochs, that The Times print more sports scores than any other newspaper—his clerks obliging on occasion by slipping in the scores of contests between small Negro colleges in the South, infuriating Thomson—and he greatly expanded the coverage of such fashionable minor sports as tennis, sailing, and rowing, especially rowing. He loved this sport, it being the only one he had ever mastered, and because of this The New York Times gave elaborate treatment to the Poughkeepsie and Thames regattas and other rowing events, establishing a policy that persists even now, decades after Colonel Thomson’s death.
Among the more autonomous editors on The Times in 1937, of course, were Lester Markel in the Sunday department and Arthur Krock in Washington, and one member of Krock’s staff, thinking big, was Turner Catledge. James Reston was still with the London bureau of the Associated Press in 1937, covering sports events in summer and the Foreign Office in winter, and Tom Wicker in that year was a boy of ten who, with his parents and sister, had recently taken an overnight train from Hamlet, North Carolina, into Washington for a first visit, a thrilling experience he would vividly remember in later years after he had succeeded Reston, remembering the walk from Union Station in the brilliant sunshine toward the Capitol and its dome against the sky, the most beautiful sight he had ever seen, and remembering the rooming house in which he and his family had stayed, the trolleys rolling past the door, and how his mother wept in front of Lincoln Memorial, and the marvelously strange sight of green money flowing from the presses at the Bureau of Engraving, and the sound of the Marine band playing on the very spot where Roosevelt had been sworn in as President; and Wicker remembered having dinner one night at the Occidental Restaurant, a place where the famous men of Washington ate, somebody had said, and many years later, when Wicker was as famous himself, he would sometimes have lunch at the Occidental Restaurant, it being as crowded and noisy in the Sixties as it was in the Thirties, and he would wonder what table he and his sister and parents had been given that night—“those two wide-eyed children, my father, my mother, spending money they could ill afford to make sure our trip was complete. If I thought it was a bad, out-of-the-way table I could never go there again.”
Clifton Daniel, unable to get a job on The New York Times in 1937, walked crosstown to the Associated Press. He had a friend working there, a rewrite man from North Carolina, and Daniel’s reception at the AP was more cordial than elsewhere; before he left that afternoon he had a job offer of $50 a week. He quickly accepted, went back to North Carolina to pack his things and sell his car, and then he returned to New York. He got an apartment off Gramercy Park with another reporter and worked on the AP desk until midnight. After work he explored the town, going to those places that most young people patronize during their early years in New York, and never again, doing more with less money than he ever could again. The parties he went to, the girls he dated were mainly connected somehow with newspaper circles or North Carolina, and one of the persons he got to know during these years was Thomas Wolfe. Daniel and a few others would sometimes go out drinking until dawn with Wolfe at bars in mid-Manhattan, later taking long walks on Broadway listening to the towering novelist sound off on a thousand subjects, monologues that went on and on through the street noise and passing crowds, under the bright theater marquees and tall buildings, and as Daniel strained to listen he realized that Thomas Wolfe talked as he wrote, the words streaming endlessly within a low tone of tension. While never a close friend, Daniel thought he knew Wolfe fairly well at this time, but then one night at a restaurant, after joining Wolfe at a table, Daniel could tell from the way the conversation went that Wolfe had no recollection of ever having seen him before. Wolfe was drinking heavily then, and later that year he was dead.
By 1939 Daniel had transferred to the AP bureau in Washington, meeting journalists who would later be met again, including Turner Catledge; and in November of 1940, at the age of twenty-eight, his dark wavy hair already turning gray, Clifton Daniel sailed to Switzerland for the AP on a ship whose passengers included Lady Jersey, a stunning blue-eyed blonde who had been married to the Earl of Jersey, and before that to a Chicago lawyer and to Cary Grant. She would later, after the war, marry a Polish R.A.F. pilot, but in London during the war—a year or so after meeting Daniel on the ship—she and Daniel would become sufficiently well acquainted to cause their friends to speculate that the two would someday marry. They underrated Daniel’s power of resistance. He was fascinated by her, there seemed little doubt of that, but he was fascinated as well by the whole glamorous setting of that time, the excitement of his first foreign assignment, the anticipation of reporting the war, the new situations in strange lands, and it had all begun propitiously on that winter day in 1940 when Daniel and Lady Jersey—née Virginia Cherrill of Carthage, Illinois, a onetime actress who had been Charlie Chaplin’s leading lady in City Lights—boarded a ship across the river from New York during a dock strike, the garbage piled high along the pier, the champagne flowing on deck and smiling crowds waving good-bye; and weary refugees arriving from Europe on another ship, relieved to be landing in an America free of Nazis; and spies and smugglers moving along the docks in the crowds, one of them even approaching Daniel with a proposition.
Shortly after Daniel had arrived in Switzerland and settled in the AP bureau in Bern, he began getting letters from her, and nine months later he arranged a transfer to London and he saw her again. He had arrived in London after a flight to Bristol with Walter Cronkite, then with the United Press, and at the London terminal Daniel was surprised when a cheerful little cockney woman stopped him and grabbed his luggage, the first lady porter he had ever seen. It was so dark that as he rode through the city he saw virtually nothing except the arch of Hyde Park, then he was through the swinging doors into the Savoy Hotel, and later he had a marvelous dinner in a quiet restaurant nearby that he could never find again.
To be an American journalist and a bachelor in London then was to be a most welcome addition to the city. The British were generally receptive to American contacts on all levels for a great variety of reasons, everything from obtaining PX provisions to pulling strings for friends or relatives in the joint U.S.-British military setup everybody knew was coming; and a presentable and charming American journalist could, through his contacts at the United States Embassy, easily gain entrée into London circles that were clustered with engaging women and short of available men. There was a not very visible British Establishment then, the war having turned everything upside down—parvenu industrialists throughout the country suddenly having become vitally important to the war effort, much of the oldline aristocracy away in the British army or navy, and London society marked by a sort of freeform socializing and some very spicy indiscretion. But Daniel, as always, was not careless in his relationships, and he and Lady Jersey conducted their lives with the utmost in decorum. She worked hard during the day for the Red Cross, and at night in her home she conducted a salon in an unpretentious way, convoking groups of active pleasant people—newsmen, actors, R.A.F. fliers—for no more than conversation and drinks or even tea. She was very intelligent and well informed, conservatively opulent in dress, had straight blonde hair and a sort of Dresden-doll face with a small Cupid’s-bow mouth and
perfect complexion, excellent wit, and a lilting, trilling, musical-scale laugh. She was one of the very desirable women of London then, and Daniel was much taken by her company; but it was also obvious that he was not to be distracted from his primary purpose, his work. Daniel was an ambitious man, more ambitious than he seemed. And he knew that if he wished to distinguish himself on the AP bureau in London it would require considerable effort on his part because the AP had working for it many talented young men. There was Drew Middleton and Gladwin Hill and William White, to name a few who would be hired away by The New York Times, following in the path of James Reston, who had already quit the AP for The Times, and Clifton Daniel worked hard and well for the Associated Press. By 1944 he, too, had attracted the attention of The Times, and when a job was offered in that winter he took it.
Daniel had been hired on the recommendation of The Times’ London bureau chief, Raymond Daniell, who is no relation. Raymond Daniell had been an outstanding Times reporter since 1928, reporting on the Scottsboro case and Huey Long’s rise to power, the sharecropper disputes in Arkansas and coal-miner troubles in Kentucky. He had been in Mexico City in 1939 but, as the European war spread, he was quickly reassigned to London, where in 1940, his quarters at Lincoln’s Inn were shattered by bombs and he and his colleagues moved The Times’ bureau into the Savoy Hotel, where they also lived. Since London time is five hours ahead of New York, the staff usually wrote until dawn while bombs shook the city; they slept through the afternoons, raids or no raids, and then after their customary round of martinis they were back at work on what were called “inraids” and “outraids”—the “inraids” being the German attacks on Great Britain, the “outraids” being the retaliation by the R.A.F.
When Raymond Daniell first became aware of the AP reporter with the similar name, he did not particularly like him, especially his looks. A little too smooth and suave. And this first impression was fortified by other reporters’ observations about Clifton Daniel: he seemed haughty, he never removed his jacket in the office, he was the only American newspaperman they had ever known who had lapels on his vests—and they made many other points about his clothes and hair, as reporters would continue to do for years, even speculating in 1956 that Clifton Daniel owned more suits than Harry Truman ever sold. But Raymond Daniell dug more deeply into the character of the man. And he learned that Clifton Daniel was not only a very fast and facile writer, but had often been put in charge of running the AP’s London bureau during its most hectic hours and had always functioned calmly and efficiently; furthermore Daniel was known for his loyalty to the AP bureau chief and was not the sort who would ever overstep his boundaries or attempt to take over.
So Raymond Daniell offered him a job and Daniel accepted. But first, taking some time off, he visited New York, where a rather unusual thing happened that nearly cost him his job on The New York Times. Daniel had been invited to deliver a short speech about wartime London to a luncheon gathering of The Dutch Treat Club and, noticing the servicemen in the audience, he proceeded with anecdotes that he thought the GI’s might enjoy. He gave one vivid description of an American colonel falling into a fountain during the blackout, and he also told the servicemen that if they got to London they need not worry about women; there were plenty of girls on the streets, Daniel said, and they were easy to pick up.
Seated in the audience, becoming very indignant and barely suppressing his rage, was General Julius Ochs Adler, a high executive on the business side of The Times and a nephew of Adolph Ochs. This profane and irreverent newspaperman was not Times material, General Adler declared later at The Times’ office. And it took a great deal of persuasion on the part of more tolerant Timesmen to get General Adler to withdraw his objection and give Daniel a chance.
Daniel did well for The Times in London. Night after night he sat among other Timesmen in the Savoy or in the field, writing stories that would carry his by-line the next day on page one. On a single day in November, riding in a jeep behind the advancing First Army, Clifton Daniel visited three countries and filed news stories from each—Eupen, Belgium; Aachen, Germany; and Vaals, the Netherlands. Then, in March of 1945, he was in Paris watching as “the big, dirty, green trucks speed along the Rue La Fayette, their heavy tires singing on the cobblestones and their canvas tops snapping in the winter wind. The men in the back,” Daniel wrote, “are tired and cramped after eleven hours on the road. The last wisecrack was made a hundred miles back. But one of them peers out, sees the name on the street and says, ‘La Fayette, we’re here.’ The trucks growl to a halt.… The men dismount, a little stiff at first, light up cigarettes and start looking. They inspect the cornices of the Opera House, watch the crowds swirling past the Galeries Lafayette and eye the passing girls—always the girls.”
By spring, Daniel was back in London describing the city as the blackout restrictions were lifted, but before he could become adjusted to the light and tranquillity he was sent to North Africa and back to the sound of gunfire and rioting; then from Egypt he went to Iran, arriving in Tabriz with two other journalists hours ahead of the Iranian army that was to take over the city from a collapsing Soviet-backed Azerbaijanian rebel regime. As Daniel and the two others rode into town they were greeted by thousands of villagers lined along the road, and several sheep were sacrificed in their honor. The ceremony, the highest honor that a Persian can pay, consisted of beheading a sheep on one side of the road as the traveler approaches and carrying the head to the other side of the road; the traveler then passes between the body and the head.
The exotic sights and sounds, the headline makers and headhunters from the Middle East to Great Britain—this was Daniel’s world for the next seven years, although now, in 1966, all those events and faces are, if not forgotten, rarely remembered by anyone except those who were there, like Daniel, watching twenty years ago in Dhahran as a fat roasted hump of young camel was set before King Ibn Saud; listening at midnight from his hotel in Jerusalem as the troops below with rifles shuffled through the sloping street near Zion Square; dancing and dining in Cairo at Shepheard’s with a pretty English girl when King Farouk arrived and asked Daniel and the girl to join him for a drink and a discussion about things that now mean little. Then Daniel was back in London observing “an elderly cherub with a cigar almost as big as the butt end of a billiard cue”—Winston Churchill, one of the few names that survives the momentary madness that makes headlines; the others quickly die or fade—Naguib, Mossadegh, Klaus Fuchs. Men like Daniel go off to new names, new places, never getting involved, although sometimes they worry about the impermanence of their work and wonder where it will lead them.
Daniel would have liked to have become chief of The Times’ London bureau, but Drew Middleton, suspected by a few New York editors of having a private line of communication with Sulzberger, got the job. Daniel was assigned to replace Middleton in Germany and, as an Anglophile, he could barely abide the Germans. His reporting was uninspired, sometimes noticeably disdainful: “BERLIN—In the cold, dirty slush of last night’s snow a few thousand of Berlin’s millions stood along Potsdamer Strasse today watching the custodians of Germany’s destiny roll by in a fleet of limousines. They were typical Berliners, seedy, cynical and slangy.”
In the New York office at this time, 1954, there was the major personnel problem of finding a replacement in Russia for Harrison Salisbury. Salisbury, a tall and remote individualist, had been the Timesman in Moscow since 1949. He had worked long and hard under the most adverse conditions—the Stalin era, censorship—and yet Turner Catledge had no other qualified Timesman who wished to go to Moscow. Then Clifton Daniel volunteered.
Catledge was delighted. It confirmed for him many of the things he had come to accept about Daniel: in fact, Catledge had for the last two years been thinking of Clifton Daniel as a future executive, a possible successor, being impressed with Daniel’s performance in the London bureau, as both an administrator and newsman, and Catledge also had been pleased with Daniel’s attitude in accepting
the Bonn assignment. Daniel was eleven years younger than Catledge, was an organization man who could operate within the corporate ego of The Times. And—he was a Southerner. Take away all that fancy English tailoring, that long wavy hair and courtly manner, and Daniel was what Catledge was—a country boy who said “sir” to his superiors, and had reverence for the Southern past and big-city dreams for the future.
