by Gay Talese
For example in 1959 when Moses became angered by a series of articles in The Times dealing with the city’s Title I slum-clearance program, which he headed, his letters of objection did not appear in the “Letters to the Editor” space, where they belonged; instead they were published on various days within the news columns as news, being prefaced by an explanatory paragraph, appearing under a news headline, and being given immediate and serious play. This not only raised readers’ doubts about the credibility of the series, but it also took some of the edge off the series, which the reporter had carefully researched for months—and which was accurate and objective, if not totally satisfactory to Moses in all of its detail and interpretation. When Moses wrote magazine articles in The Times for his friend Lester Markel, an editor known for the severity of his stylistic standards, there was rarely any tampering with Moses’ florid prose, cushioned as it was with barbs and pretension, and these articles were featured in the Sunday Times Magazine almost as prominently as those written by Markel himself. During these years, too, there was employed on The Times’ news staff a veteran reporter who was known among his colleagues as a “Moses man,” meaning that Moses had him as a confidant and friend, entrusting to him his private telephone numbers and his whereabouts on weekends so that should The Times wish to reach Moses to confirm or deny or comment on some news development, The Times’ editors could do so by contacting Moses’ man, who would contact Moses. This particular reporter’s status on the staff, his inner confidence and manner, and no doubt his courage in seeking merit raises, was fortified in part by his relationship with Robert Moses; and when Moses went into decline as an important newsmaker in the Nineteen-sixties, so did Moses’ man decline in The New York Times’ newsroom.
Robert Moses’ deterioration as a sacred cow on The Times was largely attributable to the newspaper’s great organizational shift during the Sixties, events prompted by the illness and incapacity of Sulzberger and then the unexpected death of his fifty-year-old successor, Orvil Dryfoos, in 1963. The quick exit of two publishers in three years, together with the reshuffling of the old guard under them, had a disruptive effect on many traditional habits and values at The Times. Suddenly there were new editors with new ideas making decisions on the third floor, and there was John Oakes running the editorial page on the tenth floor, and most of these men had little reverence for the sacred cows. Among the first to feel this change was Robert Moses; another was Francis Cardinal Spellman.
Moses began to feel it during the winter of 1963 when, as president of the forthcoming New York World’s Fair, he encountered a chilly press reception to so many of his plans and deeds—the mood of the media seemed against him, tired of him, not only The Times but the other newspapers as well, plus radio and television. It was not that they reported the news incompletely or inaccurately. If anything they were too complete, too accurate, they overlooked nothing. They quoted that one extra word or phrase that was too much, inserted that extra little detail that can sub-liminally convey skepticism to a reader. They had fun with Moses, this cranky old man trying to ballyhoo the Fair, and they picked it apart before its flimsy construction was complete, and then they continued to downgrade it through the next two summers.
The Times’ editorials criticized Moses’ financial handling of the Fair, his “penchant for invective,” and the reporters seemed to delight in recording his every frustration—his futile attempt to get the A & P to remove its big neon bread sign that peeked over the Fair grounds, his inability to get the Russians to participate in the Fair, his unfulfilled optimism about the number of people who would be visiting the Fair each day. The press, including The Times, overdramatized the Fair’s opening-day threat of racial disturbances, including an automobile “stall-in” by Negro militants along the highways—a threat that, while it never materialized, did not help attendance. No one seemed particularly interested in helping Moses at this point, and the press would display little of the blithe spirit, the indifference to minor flaws that had characterized its coverage of the previous Fair in Brussels, or would spark the reporting of the later Fair in Canada. Moses, the symbol of the New York Fair, had made too many enemies during his long career. He had written too many letters, pushed too many people. And he got what he deserved, even though, as is often the case, he did not get it when he deserved it. For the New York World’s Fair of 1964-65 was not really the ugly, dull, uninspired extravaganza that much of the press coverage indicated. Each day thousands of visitors greatly enjoyed the Fair, found the sights and sounds both marvelous and memorable, but they had no way of expressing this, no voice that could compete with a press that focused on the demonstrators at the gates, the problems of parking, the labor disputes, the flaws that can always be found if one looks for them—as one Timesman did when he reported in his column, “At the Fair,” that there were no paper towels in the men’s room of the Scott Towel Pavilion.
Francis Cardinal Spellman was one of those men who for decades in The New York Times was written about constantly, but never deeply. The Times from Adolph Ochs’s day was hypersensitive in its coverage of religion, ever fearful of offending one group or another, and in Cardinal Spellman’s case the editors’ job was even more precarious because he was not only an immensely powerful clergyman but he also sometimes said or did things that were controversial, putting the onus on the editors to somehow print the news and yet not offend the Cardinal or his many thousands of followers. The editors managed to do this for many years with great skill, blunting the reportorial edge, softening the headlines, emphasizing whenever possible his personal kindnesses, his charities, his simple manner, and the warm applause he received at parochial school graduations and police communion breakfasts, without ever stressing and sometimes totally ignoring Cardinal Spellman’s less glorious moments—his blessing of bombers, his affection for Senator Joseph McCarthy, his involvement in New York politics. And this polite press policy toward him would have undoubtedly continued indefinitely had he not so persistently paraded his patriotism during the Vietnamese war, a time of loosening restraint in America, of growing discord within his own Church—Spellman in the Sixties had, like Robert Moses, gone on too long, and the liberals were now becoming increasingly less liberal, including some on The New York Times John Oakes. One year before Spellman’s death an editorial in The Times attacked the Cardinal for saying, during his Christmas visit to American troops in Vietnam, that anything “less than victory is inconceivable,” a remark not only repulsive to many Catholic liberals in America but also to Pope Paul, who had been carrying on a campaign for a negotiated peace. Even in The Times’ news columns, in an analysis article by the recently hired religious-news editor, John Cogley, a liberal Catholic formerly of the Catholic magazine Commonweal, the Cardinal was chided for his words; Cogley also pointed out that the number of Catholics who traditionally express serious moral reservations about war is proportionately smaller than the number of Protestant and Jewish objectors—a statement that no Times journalist would probably have gotten into print a few years before, and a Timesman with a Jewish by-line might not have gotten into print even on this occasion.
Even more remarkable was the editorial on Cardinal Spellman that appeared in The Times on the day after his death, an appraisal that not only shocked many Catholics but surprised many other Times readers who had mistakenly assumed that The Times’ editorial page would now temper its views on the Cardinal and publish a kind of eulogy to him. Instead, describing him as a man of fixed convictions, strongly expressed, the editorial dredged up what it deemed to be his sins: “He backed the late Senator Joseph McCarthy in his demagogic excesses, and he made a dismaying attack on Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt when she upheld separation of church and state in education. In political affairs and in public debate he often tended to speak in a commanding tone and to don a mask of authoritarianism which, however appropriate in some other time and some other place, was ill-suited to a pluralist democracy. Whether he was trying to ban the motion picture ‘Baby Dol
l’ or block the reform of New York’s divorce law, Cardinal Spellman sometimes squandered his own and his church’s prestige on trivial issues and lost causes.”
Dozens of letters and calls of protest immediately followed, overwhelmingly opposing the editorial. Of the first seventy letters received, sixty-two condemned it, and a few of these were later published in the “Letters to the Editor” space on the editorial page. In the National Review, its editor, William F. Buckley, wrote an editorial about the editorial, rebuking The Times for not criticizing Spellman’s delinquencies at the time he committed them, charging that it had been editorially silent about Spellman when his friendship with McCarthy and his differences with Mrs. Roosevelt were newsworthy. The Cardinal had then terrorized The Times into restraint, Buckley wrote, and because of this, Buckley concluded, “We mourn the Cardinal’s passing even more.”
Buckley was incorrect in his assertion that The Times was silent over the Mrs. Roosevelt incident; in two editorials in 1949 it supported Mrs. Roosevelt’s position, although its rebuff of the Cardinal was most delicate.
John Oakes remained calm through the clamor following Spellman’s death. Oakes had been through this sort of thing many times before, and he would again, and he rather liked the excitement that such editorials can provoke. He had wanted to run a stimulating editorial page on The Times and that is what he was now doing, expressing opinions that are not always popular but are at least his own, and the publisher’s, and are not influenced by powerful people outside The Times nor by the advertisers who buy space in The Times from Monroe Green.
Monroe Green sat in his office waiting for the telephone call from Alan Tishman about the new luxury skyscraper apartments that The Times’ editorial page that day described as a desecration of the natural beauty of the New Jersey cliffs along the Hudson River. When Green’s secretary announced that Mr. Tishman was on the line, Green was not surprised by Tishman’s immediate tone of anger and confusion. It was terrible, Tishman said—terrible, cruel, stupid, unfair. The apartment buildings did not violate the skyline, as the editorial claimed; instead they brought elegance to that dreary plot of land, Tishman said. Why had The Times permitted such a diatribe to be published? What was gained by it? Who had done such a thing?
Monroe Green, who had been listening sympathetically, told Tishman that he was sorry, and that, while he agreed with Tishman, he had no control over the editorials. As to what recourse to take, Green said that Tishman had two alternatives. He could write a letter of protest to the editorial page, and it would be printed and might do some good—or it might do more harm. It might merely call attention to the editorial itself. Green strongly advised against sending the letter. The best thing to do, Green continued, his salesman’s voice becoming more reassuring, was to do nothing. Forget about it. Pretend it did not happen. The advertising supplement—and future advertising—would offset whatever damage the editorial had done, and personally, Green said, he did not think that the editorial had done any damage at all. Nobody reads the editorials, Green said.
Tishman gave it some thought, and he finally decided to follow Green’s advice. And later, after the luxury apartment houses had opened and were filled with tenants, Tishman decided that Green had probably been right. Nobody reads the editorials.
5
Clifton daniel sat at his desk enjoying the final few seconds of silence that remained before his office would be crowded with editors discussing the news. It was perhaps the most pleasant moment of the day. The late-afternoon sunlight streamed down between tall buildings in Times Square and filtered through the Venetian blinds and white draperies of Daniel’s office, heightening the many colors in the room and illuminating the faded photographs of Van Anda, Birchall, and James that hung on the wall. The big polished conference table, surrounded by chairs modeled after Adolph Ochs’s own chair, stood in the front of the office; beyond it was an open door revealing part of the newsroom. Daniel leaned back, way back, twirling his horn-rimmed glasses in his right hand, and looked out across his long office, through the door, and watched the people moving about within the newsroom. He could see a tall blond copyboy, a tweedy young man who probably felt as equal to his superiors as most copyboys do on The New York Times, walking toward the bullpen while reading a set of galley proofs—hoping, no doubt, to find an error. Daniel could see the bent-over heads of copyreaders on the foreign desk, supplicants at the altar of the wire god, pondering and scratching, and he could also see two photo clerks squinting up at the pictures that they had just torn from the telephoto machine. Though Daniel did not have a view of the dozens of reporters who were now assembled behind rows of desks, he could hear the muted tapping of their typewriters, the distant ring of telephones. He knew that the tension of the deadline was building, but he also knew that some reporters, unassigned on this day, were now sitting idly behind their keyboards reading a newspaper or a book, waiting for another Titanic to sink, or waiting for the coffee wagon, or waiting for the news conference to begin so that they could dial one of the secretaries and perhaps make a date later for a drink.
It had been a relatively easy day so far, and Daniel looked forward to getting home on time tonight and spending all of tomorrow and Sunday at his summer place in Bedford with Margaret and the children. There was no great international crisis today to keep him late at the office, and the inter-Times problems, the personality differences between certain senior editors, the painful personnel changes that were soon to be made, were such that they could not be dealt with this weekend. One of the individuals involved was Daniel’s friend Harrison Salisbury. During Salisbury’s long and distinguished career as a reporter, and during his more recent role as one of Daniel’s four assistant managing editors, he had made invaluable contributions to The Times and to Daniel’s position on The Times. Throughout the executive reorganization of the last few years, Harrison Salisbury, as Daniel’s troubleshooter, had performed many of the necessary, if ungracious, functions that were bound to make him unpopular and did. But Salisbury did not seem to mind. He saw himself as carrying out his duties and was unaware of the resentment he was causing, the enemies he was making not only in the Washington bureau, which was his primary target, but also in New York among a few of Daniel’s other editors. And now, in the summer of 1966, the rumors around the newsroom were that Salisbury was on his way out as an assistant managing editor; he was being kicked upstairs to head The Times’ Book Division, which was being expanded.
Clifton Daniel did not want to see Salisbury go, but the question was whether Daniel had enough singular power, or even the will, to do anything about it. Salisbury had rendered fine service during the struggle, but now the publisher and his executive editor, Turner Catledge, apparently wanted to see harmony restored at almost any price. Perhaps Salisbury’s mere presence in the newsroom would be a grim reminder of things best forgotten—Daniel would have to wait and see. Nothing could be done at this time. Anything done should appear to have Salisbury’s blessing and Salisbury was not even in the country now. He was on a special assignment traveling around the periphery of China hoping to get down into Hanoi or up into Peking. So far, he had been unable to get a visa into either place, and it looked as if he would return to the office later in the summer without the big story that he wanted and with only an outside chance of surviving as the devil’s advocate in the newsroom. Already, a younger man, A. M. Rosenthal, who was forty-four years old—Salisbury was fifty-seven—was assuming many of Salisbury’s duties, and Rosenthal had been assigned a desk against the south wall of the newsroom where the assistant managing editors sit. Rosenthal was ostensibly filling in during Salisbury’s absence. But nobody in the newsroom underestimated the significance of where Rosenthal was sitting. Where one sits in The Times’ newsroom is never a casual matter. It is a formal affair on the highest or lowest level. Young reporters of no special status are generally assigned to sit near the back of the room, close to the Sports department; and as the years go by and people die and the young report
er becomes more seasoned and not so young, he is moved up closer to the front. But he must never move on his own initiative. There was one bright reporter who, after being told that he would help cover the labor beat, cleaned out his desk near the back of the room and moved up five rows into an empty desk vacated by one of the labor reporters who had quit. The recognition of the new occupant a few days later by an assistant city editor resulted in a reappraisal of the younger reporter’s assets, and within a day he was back at his old desk, and within a year or so he was out of the newspaper business altogether. Editors, too, must respect the system, and the story is told that one day twenty years ago an assistant managing editor, Bruce Rae, made the mistake of sitting in Edwin James’s chair when the managing editor was out ill. When James heard about it, he was furious. Bruce Rae, regarded as a possible successor to James, got no further.
