The Code the Times Can't Crack
Salisbury, Harrison
The Code the Times Can't Crack Washington by Harrison Salisbury Max Frankel had taken over the Washington bureau of The New York Times at the time of the inauguration of Richard Nixon, January...
...In fact, as developments were to show, the Post's story was essentially correct, but the information had not been presented to the Watergate grand jury by Hugh Sloan, the former CREEP treasurer, as the story stated...
...Abe loved foreign reporting, and had become very good at it, had devoted his professional life to it, having been assigned in 1946 to the Times's United Nations bureau at Lake Success...
...He didn't have any sources on Watergate, he wasn't convinced the story was really there, and he had the impression Frankel wasn't convinced either...
...Wicker became associate editor and a columnist, and Frankel took over the Washington bureau...
...Reston was it Glasgow lad transplanted to Ohio, but he had a liking for button-down-collar reporters, a bit tweedy...
...why his efforts to improve the Times made little imprint...
...There was no way, I felt, in which Reston could regain command of the situation...
...He did not prize anonymity...
...For years after their 1943 trip to Moscow, Reston addressed Sulzberger as "Mr...
...Reston had never heard anything like this in his life, as he told me when we met at his desk at 8:30 a.m...
...but Dryfoos's tenure was cut short by his sudden death in June 1963...
...Before Watergate the Times had been first in Washington...
...The Gus came from gospodin ("Mr...
...Almost immediately Turner asked, "Are you happy here...
...Rosenthal told Catledge that he wanted to be columnist, but later when the two were together in India word came that Russell Baker had been named columnist, and Catledge said, "See, there isn't any spot there for you...
...Both had had broken marriages, both enjoyed a quiet drink...
...The elite corps (of course, Reston didn't use that word) would even-and this was startling in terms of the spare Times city room, where everyone sat together, row on row of reporters, platoons of editors, no insignia of rank or privilege-have small offices of their own, secretaries or shared secretarial services...
...it was a code that Rosenthal had not yet broken...
...Then there was a question of psychology...
...He would not have his staff working alongside Reston's chosen few...
...No one offered a comment...
...When Abe and his wife, Ann, arrived to meet them Abby wasn't dressed, so while Ann waited for Abby, Abe and Catledge went into the coffee bar...
...Pectoh" is the way Reston is written in Cyrillic...
...Finally Reston found himself trying to calm Rosenthal, trying to still the outpouring, trying somehow to help this man, whom he had hoped to make his partner in the new order, regain control over himself...
...Finally he burst out...
...It was a two-class society that Reston proposed and he would have no part of it...
...He was happy in Tokyo, almost as happy as he had ever been on a foreign assignment (not quite as happy as when he was in India-always to remain his most pleasant foreign memory), and he knew that Catledge hadn't asked because he was worried about Rosenthal's happiness but because he had some proposition in mind, and Rosenthal was not certain it would be something he would like...
...Reston had given a hostage to fortune...
...One of his closest friends felt that Rosenthal's greatest worry after becoming managing editor of the Times was the fear that he would be fired...
...And there was the Washington bureau...
...The answer was complex...
...Talese described Reston as clearly on top...
...The flow of words, the hyperbole, the rage boiling higher and higher...
...I don't want to see anything about the Times in public print for a year,' Sulzberger told Reston...
...His judgment was persuasive...
...But Sulzberger had him out to his house the weekend after the failed coup and said that he expected Rosenthal to stay with the paper and that his career was open-ended...
...But even in June of 1972 it was not quite complete...
...It would be on Reston's desk in the morning...
...or assign an art critic to the Republican Convention...
...This equilibrium began to be disturbed with the emergence of Orvil Dryfoos as publisher in 1961...
...quickly adding that the job actually would be that of "Metropolitan Editor...
...He had pledged to keep the Times out of the news coiumns for a year of rest and rehabilitation...
...And they told me something interesting...
...He held long discussions with his friends and, in fact, consulted very widely, talking, among others, with Teddy White, whom he then did not know at all well...
...Rosenthal was brought in by Catledge and given the rather grandiloquent title of "metropolitan editor...
...As Frankel put it later, "They were writing stuff that we couldn't have gotten in the Times...
...The two men maintained a wary, knowing, and often witty balance...
...So Reston gave another hostage to fate, a hostage which ensured that his tenure as executive editor would not be long and would not be successful...
...he didn't act Ivy League...
...He spent a lot of time with the police and Secret Service men on his job, and off-time he frequently joined them for a drink...
...Clifton Daniel, not yet managing editor of the Times, but clearly marked as Catledge's successor, said, "Take it...
...One member of Frankel's staff felt that the typical reaction in the bureau when Woodward and Bernstein broke a story was, "It can't be true...
...When Turner Catledge became managing editor and James Reston assumed the post of Washington bureau chief, the lines for further competition were laid...
...Only one could prevail and it seemed certain that it would be Rosenthal's...
...Catledge was great at coining new titles, titles which seemed to enhance or expand in some way the previous dimensions of the job...
...But Frankel had touched a critical point...
...Enough...
...It placed him in the number two news position, a post from which he might well be named executive editor (although at that moment the paper had no executive editor, Punch having sworn after his not entirely happy results with Catledge and Reston to scratch the position from his table of organization...
...It is in the nature of investigative reporting that the reporter often learns more than he is able to attribute to quotable sources...
...Greenfield was his friend, had been brought on the paper by him, was vetted by him for the Washington post (Greenfield, an extremely agreeable, socially presentable man, had been a Time magazine correspondent in India, where he and Abe became acquainted), and Abe thought he had blown his career with the Times...
...The Code the Times Can't Crack Washington by Harrison Salisbury Max Frankel had taken over the Washington bureau of The New York Times at the time of the inauguration of Richard Nixon, January 20, 1969, and his job had not been made easy by the antagonism of the President and his staff, an antagonism which had increased as a result of the Pentagon Papers...
...This was too much for any man...
...Not that he felt a sense of urgency but Washington lingered in his mind as an unresolved question, one with which eventually he would have to deal...
...Now he refused to give up his column, commuting a day or two to Washington each week in order to maintain it (inevitably the column went into a slump...
...Catledge and his wife, Abby, were staying at Frank Lloyd Wright's old Imperial Hotel...
...Hersh may have been right about Frankel's skepticism...
...Hedrick Smith had been named Washington bureau chief in 1976, coincident with the election of Jimmy Carter...
...Judged by what they printed, we couldn't feel they had a solid hold on the story, particularly when they broke the Haldeman story...
...Kissinger was Frankel's most valued source and his judgment would have been persuasive, but Max could not recall having heard anything from him in the early phase of Watergate...
...Frankel had been named to his post by Reston, the putative winner of the power struggle...
...let the dust settle...
...You are looking for someone else...
...Harrison Salisbury is the author of Without Fear or Favor, published by Times Books...
...It never was to be made clear exactly how Reston envisaged Rosenthal's role on the paper...
...Rosenthal was not one of "Scotty's boys" like Tom \Vicker, Tony Lewis or Max Frankel...
...But things hadn't quite worked out that way, and now Rosenthal, who had been an opponent of Reston in the 1960s quarrels, was very much to the fore, secure in his post as managing editor, and this could not between Frankel and Rosenthal...
...Rosenthal, on balance, was the tougher man...
...Somehow, the Washington bureau had eluded Rosenthal...
...When the chips were down he was prepared to put his body, his future on the line...
...Reston gave his word that the lid would stay on...
...They would have sabbatical years off for writing their books...
...Kissinger was Fr().nkel's most valued source...
...But Smith's tenure, to Rosenthal's mind, had not been satisfactory, and so in the spring of 1979, after thrashing about, public arguments between Smith and Rosenthal, rumors and snippety items in the press, Rosenthal announced a new setup for WashingtonSmith to be chief correspondent but the bureau functions, the news functions, the management side, to be taken over by Bill Kovach, the tough, straight-talking, nononsense editor whom many colleagues thought to be the most competent man on a desk and the most competent man on the street the Times had had for many years...
...seemed creative, Reston would take a top political man and send him to the World Series...
...Reston was 58 when he came into New York...
...He did not think Frankel's judgment differed...
...He had, after alI, played devil's assis tant in the scenario concocted by Catledge...
...He would not serve under a system in which he did not control his own men...
...This would enable the Times to meet the lure of any competition...
...why he did not display in New York his golden touch with young reporters and editors...
...in Russian...
...no rocking the boat...
...Each took long trips to war zones with the publisher, Reston to Russia,Catledge to the Pacific...
...Rosenthal not only won this seminal showdown with Reston bllt he went on and on, and by 1969 Reston had gracefully turned over direction of the paper to Rosenthal and gone back to Washington, to his column, to \lis vice presidency of the Times...
...Abe refused that...
...Greenfield said, "I'm glad you c~lled...
...Hits and Misses Perhaps, Sy Hersh said later, it was a sense of self-protection...
...As Reston talked, Rosenthal grew more and more silent...
...White urged Abe to take the job...
...The question of the city editorship was still open...
...His mind was filled with sugar-plum dreams, ideas for improving the Sunday edition, for reorganizing the famous News-of-theWeek- in-Review, hardly changed since Lester Markel invented it in the 1930s, and for giving a new look to the somewhat jaded New York Times Magazine...
...R. W. Apple remembered saying to Max at the time of the Republican National Convention in late July, "I guess I'll go and talk to Maurice Stans [the finance chairman of CREEP]" and Frankel replying, "You've got a fixation on Watergate...
...Kissinger was Fr().nkel's most valued source...
...he looked very much what he was: a bright and ambitious young man out of City College who had clawed his way up by smartness, energy and ambition ahd who now was going to defef).d his turf with every ability he had...
...the following morning...
...it was ever more important with the country so large, its functions so centralized...
...Rosenthal was boss of the daily paper but not of the Sunday paper, still an independent entity under Markel's long-time right-hand man and loyal assistant, Dan Schwartz...
...his style was not Reston's style...
...It's run by the Secret Service...
...Abe spilled his coffee...
...That year Abe's sister died of cancer and he flew back to New York, his leg in a cast...
...This problem had lain at the heart of the Times's agony over Watergate and it held the key to whether the Times was to regain that prestige (and readership) lost to the Post in Watergate days...
...I don't want to see anything about the Times in public print for a year," Punch told Reston...
...Of all the stories put together by the young reporters, this was the only one to misfire seriously, and it misfired on a technicality, not on its essential truth...
...The Tapes Something like a psychological block must have been at work at The New York Times...
...Now, with the emergence of Punch as publisher, the advantage went to Catledge...
...Thanks a lot," someone said, and then, the reporters and editors went back to their discussions, their plans, their strategies...
...But there was another factor...
...The two men seemed to work quite well together, but below the surface lay strong competitive influences-and these inevitably would playa role in the events just ahead...
...Catledge went back to the United States without getting Rosenthal's agreement, but he told Ted Bernstein, chief of the Times bullpen, an old friend and admirer of Abe and the one who had put the idea of Rosenthal's appointment into Catledge's mind, that he was going to talk Abe into the job...
...Coup And so, ultimately, Rosenthal had come back to New York in the summer of 1963, stirred up a whirlwind, stirred up excitement, made a great splash, a truly great splash, and then, finalIy, almost lost his job, or so he thought...
...Just before Catledge arrived in Tokyo, Oakes rejected Rosenthal's plea for a foreign affairs column and offered him a place on the editorial board...
...Rivalry As Clausewitz might have said, the struggle between the New York and Washington power bases was now going forward by other means...
...Whatever Reston's ultimate intentions, he came into total collision with Rosenthal within days of taking over in New York...
...How could they know that...
...no more page-one stories...
...Intolerable...
...The only way he could go forward with his ideas was, he thought, at the cost of Rosenthal's resignation, and he had given his pledge to Sulzberger of a year of quietude...
...they would be on call for service around the world...
...There were other components of Reston's plans-the free and easy movement of ~eporters from one staff to another, the ending of compartmentalization, which gave editors proprietorial control over their men...
...They would be based in New York...
...The print of those tensions lay near the surface of Rosenthal's consciousness...
...He was eager to make the most of this opportunity...
...Still, the memory cut harshly into Rosenthal's psyche, and years later his friends would remark that despite his enormous success he still seemed to fear inwardly that something might go wrong and, in a flash, he could lose it all and be out in the street...
...The effort failed spectacularly, disastrously, and publicly, because at the last moment, after Punch Sulzberger had given his blessing, Scotty Reston turned the publisher around with the argument that it would blow up the Washington bureau, the staff would leave en masse (possibly, although this was never to be confirmed, suggesting that even he, Reston, might find the Times no longer a comfortable place to work), that whatever the cost in public scandal of "reversing the verdict," as the . Chinese would say, it was small compared . to that which would come from going . ahead...
...Men might seem to work well together, but competition lurked beneath the surface...
...The repoJ;ters looked up from the long yellow legal pads on which they were jotting down their notes for the day, their shared impressions, their assignments, possible leads, checks on stories published by The Washington Post and other papers...
...The reporter can put two and two together, but he cannot spell out the arithmetic in his story...
...It should not have played a role...
...a bit Ivy League (they didn't have t6 be Ivy League but they had to look Ivy League...
...Of course, I'll come...
...What he wanted was a platform of his own...
...or anywhere in the country...
...His judgment was persuasive...
...The arrangement was that Frankel would take the Sunday job January 1. This meant that 1972 would be the last (as well as the first) occasion in which he would be the senior Times man on the national political conventions and the presidential campaign...
...He had torn his knee in a fall in a Japanese restaurant...
...He had been 42...
...Reston's mandate was to reestablish peace and quiet: no more scandals...
...These were not small affairs, and it was natural that they took precedence in Frankel's mind over a story about which he had many uncertainties...
...His ambition, as he was to recall many times, had been to write a column on foreign affairs, and, in fact, he had just been negotiating with John Oakes, editorial page director, to become a columnist at the time Turner Catledge arrived in Tokyo in late spring of 1962...
...Frankel, like his rival for power at the Times, Abe Rosenthal, had gotten onto the paper as campus correspondent: Abe from City College, Frankel, a bit later, from Columbia...
...Reston seemed austere to Punch...
...He was not going to preside over a second-class city room...
...And while by 1972 that struggle had long been over, its deep wounds and permutations continued to affect relationships among Times' editors and correspondents...
...There was a moment of silence...
...Gus" and Sulzberger called Reston "Pectoh...
...It was instantly denied by the White House...
...Or, rather, he persuaded Punch to telephone Greenfield and offer him the foreign editorship...
...Catledge continued, "How would you like to be city editor...
...He seemed to have the Times firmly under control, and ahead loomed an era of sweetness and light...
...He did not have to say more...
...If this was what Reston had come to New York to do, he, Rosenthal, would get out...
...why his tenure was marked neither by striking innovations nor by great scoops...
...Of course, no one on the Times would talk publicly in these blunt terms, but the fact was that Rosenthal had demonstrated he had more balls than Reston...
...no more hysterics...
...The struggle between the New York and Washington power bases was deceptive...
...Rosenthal knew he had won...
...Catledge and Reston possessed attractive personalities and formidable political skills: Catledge's honed in the hill country of Mississippi and back-office drinking rooms of the U.S...
...Reston Reston's prestige on the Times had never been higher than it was after he torpedoed the Washington coup...
...when he set Washington afire with his new bureau...
...why his program for internships, for sabbatical leaves, for special status and new concepts to keep the best of the younger reporters from being lured away to books, TV, magazines never happened...
...He purchased the Vineyard Gazette, the remarkable Martha's Vineyard weekly of Henry Beetle Hough, just before being named executive editor, and this presented him with piddling but endless problems...
...This was a critical career break for Frankel...
...Times editors and copyreaders worried about such stories, sometimes rejected them, often held them up for rechecking and rewriting...
...But even the Kovach appointment did not satisfy Rosenthal's restless psyche...
...So had Arthur Krock and Edwin L. James...
...Listening to Reston's troubled account that morning, 1 offered a few words of sympathy but inwardly made a note that the outcome of Reston's executive editorship had probably been determined by that single encounter...
...A Times photographer told a meeting of reporters and editors that the Secret Service was taping everything spoken in the Oval Office...
...Each understood what the other was about, and their rivalry was not destructive...
...I've given 16 of my last 18 years to foreign affairs...
...He, alone of the higher executives of the Times, had a warm and close association with Punch, one that went back a good many years...
...special arrangements whereby they would move in and out of Times assignments...
...Going to the scene, he thought, should narrow that geographical and psychological gap which he still thought constituted a handicap to the Times...
...the Times must be first and best from Washington as it had in the past but had not been during his editorship...
...Turner," Abe responded, "you've forgotten who I am...
...as, indeed, it had since the early days of the paper...
...This primitive analysis proved to be true...
...It's what you ought to do...
...One editor who worked at that time in both Washington and New York was convinced that "nobody really thought it was a story-just a cheap low-level crime of some kind...
...why the exciting promise he had brought to the job was not fulfilled...
...He was talking of still other moves, of possibly taking a small apartment in Washington himself, of dividing his time between New York and Washington, of trying for once in his life to get a feel of the capital, an experience which his reporting career had denied him...
...why he was unable to halt the hemorrhage of brilliant young writers like David Halberstam, Gay Talese, Anthony Lukas, leaving the paper...
...There was another factor which affected the Times...
...His resignation was available at any time...
...Catledge moved up to the post of executive editor and was succeeded by his long-time protege Clifton Daniel...
...He met with him one evening to outline his plans, his new concepts, his schemes for creating an elite corps of correspondents...
...from which this article is adapted...
...It would put the Times in a category by itself and keep it there...
...Well," said Lien, a little embarrassed, "it sounded kind of interesting, and I thought you might want to know...
...Reston was closer to Dryfoos and to his wife, Marian, than was Catledge...
...Arthur Ochs's great editor, Carr Van Anda, and the Times's bureau chief of those days, Richard V. Oulahan, had been competitors...
...Later there were many who tried to explain why Reston had not really done well as executive editor...
...As the Watergate story went on and on, the habit grew in the Times Washington bureau for the group working on it to assemble at I 0 or II every morning to review the prospects...
...They tape everything that goes on there...
...Rosenthal didn't look Ivy League...
...Haldeman to control of the CREEP fund for political espionage and sabotage, was published October 25, 1972, the eve of the election...
...Thanks,' someone said, and then they went back to what they'd been talking about...
...The melodrama of these events could not help but color relationships within the paper for years to come, and this continued to be true...
...They spent many evenings together...
...Ideas tumbled out of Reston's brain like wheat from a harvester...
...he brought back his friend Jimmy Greenfield from ajob with Westinghouse Broadcasting and installed him as a foreign editor...
...But it did...
...Frankel was able, ambitious, young, and he moved upward quickly and easily under the stewardship of his mentor and career idol, Scotty Reston...
...Rosenthal had not been eager to take the city desk...
...If it...
...They would have special privileges...
...now it was not...
...Nor did he abandon his role as an informal consultant to powerful men in Washington and elsewhere...
...a flushed look came over his face, the veins pounded at his temples...
...The Haldeman story, a WoodwardBernstein exclusive linking H.R...
...had never worked in Washington...
...Each was extraordinarily able, ambitious, close to and highly regarded by Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger, whose friendships with the men had been cemented during World War II...
...Later Kissinger told him that Watergate was not so important that it should be permitted to sap the President's energies and divert him from important foreign affairs matters...
...White got the impression that Abe thought the city desk was somehow demeaning, not consistent with his rank as foreign correspondent...
...This was in consequence of an attempt by Catledge, Daniel, and Rosenthal to install Abe's protege and dear friend James Greenfield as chief of the Washington bureau, replacing Tom Wicker...
...He stood for a while, listening to the discussion, then said he had something to report...
...Nor, perhaps, was Reston's soft-shoe, shirt-sleeves, antibureaucratic, no-chain-of-command style adapted to so large an enterprise...
...Reston, in Washington, turned over the bureau to his brilliant protege, Tom Wicker, and assumed the role of eminence grise...
...It was impossible...
...Times style and Times tradition did create difficulties...
...In 1979 Rosenthal was to try yet another approach...
...That story is dead...
...The Pentagon break-in occurred in the week that the proposal was made to Frankel by Punch Sulzberger that he take over the Sunday editorship...
...Reston had a strong affinity for men whom he himself had "discovered" and brought along, and he had a Ty Cobb nose for talent...
...Sulzberger, deeply troubled, had accepted Reston's arguments and called the deal off...
...He had spent little or no time as a street reporter, knew nothing of Washington, had never been an executive, and his only editing experience had been on the City College paper...
...Washington, he had concluded, was where so much of the news was...
...Senate and Reston's bred in his Scots ancestry and refined by the wisdom of his wife, Sally...
...He would want to assemble new personnel, to learn the Mycenaean cipher in which the affairs of this vast news machine were encoded, and devise means for putting his personal stamp on one of the most original and successful components of the Times...
...Kissinger told Max Frankel of the Times that Watergate Was unimportant...
...Frankel had become Washington bureau chief after the broiling intrigue and power struggle within the Times upper echelon during the 1960s, commemorated by Gay Talese in The Kingdom and the Power...
...Reston kept the lid on, but his I3-month tour as executive editor was a failure...
...For Reston was too wise not to know and Rosenthal was too sensitive not to understand that if Rosenthal could veto Reston's plans it was Rosenthal, pot Reston, who really held the reins of power...
...He said New York was the greatest story in the world and it just wasn't being covered...
...No other explanation fits some of the attitudes taken and conclusions drawn...
...He faced two ways, to New York and to Washington...
...It's a lot of poppycock...
...You know," he said, a little diffidently (there was a measurable difference in the Washington bureau between correspondents and photographers except for the senior Times photographer, George Tames, of whom it was said he had taken pictures of every president since Warren G. Harding), "I was talking with some of my Secret Service friends last night...
...There was no perception in either Washington or New York of what it added up to...
...People tell him things that they do not wish traced back...
...David Halberstam, who claimed credit for getting Kovach on the paper, and who was a frequent critic of Rosenthal's editorship, called it "the best appointment on the Times in 15 years...
...We were out drinking together...
...Maybe Kissinger told him there was nothing to the story," he mused later, "and I didn't know myself...
...1980 by Harrison Salisbury...
...It was for Rosenthal a sweet,"sweet victory...
...But th~ torrent did not halt until Reston said, well, of course, if thilt is the way you feel I will have to review my plans...
...It was clearly time for change...
...Nor did 1 feel that there was room on the Times for two visions of the future...
...Kissinger told Max Frankel of the Times that Watergate Was unimportant...
...One day in December 1972 a Times photographer named Mike Lien poked his head into the room...
...Rosenthal had become managing editor...
...Inevitably he came into New York in the spring of 1968, taking over Catledge's title of executive editor...
...They would be well paid...
...and Reston knew it too...
...Dreamjobs they would be, and Reston was certain that this, in the late 1960s, would enable the Times to create and maintain a staff superior to that possessed by any news medium, print or electronic, and it would enable him to replicate in New York the miracle of his 1950s Washington bureau...
...why he stayed only 13 months...
...They said the President has a whole taping apparatus in the Oval Office...
...Lester Markel, founder of the Times' Sunday edition and doyen of Times editors, was elevated to an advisory role and Catledge assumed responsibility for the Sunday paper as well as the daily...
...It would give it access to the very best of the talented generations emerging from Harvard and Radcliffe and Princeton and would ensure that the paper could handle the new challenges in reporting and analyzing complex social, political, and technological phenomena...
...The Code Abe Rosenthal was restlessly struggling in 1979 with the problem that had possessed him since the ill-fated coup of 1968, the problem of the Washington bureau...
Vol. 12 • July 1980 • No. 5
