The Kingdom And The Power – Gay Talese, 1969 ★★★★★

Gray Lady Meets Young Turks 

Journalism is an institution in constant flux. Its truths are relative, its practitioners come and go, its one constant is change. That temporal quality is front and center in this piercing, sardonic look of a moment in time at the most venerable newspaper in America, The New York Times.

The year was 1969. The Times found itself at a crossroads. Younger writers chafed at the strictures of a century-old tradition that prioritized basic information over vividness and flair. Older executives held the line to maintain the paper’s preeminent status, however sedate.

Something had to give. But what?

Gay Talese showcases a proven talent for sponging the tiniest details and deepest emotions from publishers, editors, and byline stars. The result is a riveting showcase for the very type of snarky, subjective journalism long discouraged at The Times.

“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,” Talese writes. “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 [early publisher Adolph] Ochs, a sense of responsibility and caution, the old morality, they need not worry.”

The scene inside the newsroom at The New York Times in the 1960s. Writes Talese: "There is a very agreeable sense of privilege about employment on The Times that can forever spoil an individual who identifies personally with corporate greatness and tradition."
Image from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/insider/the-desk-wants-to-know.html

As Talese explains it, an excess of caution was part of the problem. In 1961 the paper held back on a story that would have exposed a U.S.-backed military operation seeking to dispose Fidel Castro. When it failed, President Kennedy said he had wished The Times had gone public on the plan and forced its cancellation.

This emboldened many younger editors who had felt the same way. By the mid-1960s, Times staffers were divided between those who wanted to ask hard questions about U.S. policy in Vietnam, and those who worried about the fallout from compromising the country’s war effort.

Talese explains the dilemma this way:

…there is an understandable desire on the part of politicians to cooperate with the press, to flatter and possibly confuse with confidence those journalists who are the most important or critical – but one result of close cooperation between the press and the government is that they often end up protecting the interests of one another, and not of the public that they presume to represent.

The front page of The Times on August 5, 1965, the day after a much-disputed second Gulf of Tonkin incident that triggered deeper U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The headline suggests "retaliation" for an attack later revealed not to have taken place. (There had been an earlier attack on Aug. 2).
Image from https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-US/noartistknown/vietnam-war-1964-front-page-of-the-new-york-times-5-august-1964-reporting-on-u-s-aerial-attacks-on/print/asset/3389999

While the stylistic and political debates provide much of the book’s drama, The Kingdom And The Power presents a broader panorama of the business of running one of journalism’s longest-running success stories. Talese takes the reader inside The Times, going back to the early 20^th century when it scooped rival city tabloids on the sinking of the Titanic and blanketed reporters across Europe to cover every front in World War I.

All this and more was in pursuit of Ochs’s desire to run a paper of record, not just for a major city, but for an entire country. The Times succeeded quite well, but not without cost.

In the early 20^th century, conformity ruled. Even the use of bylines was frowned upon. “The Times is not running a reporters’ directory!” scoffed Carr Van Anda, its longtime managing editor. There was a decorum in the way The Times did things, bland but elegant. Iphigene Sulzberger, Ochs’s daughter and the wife of his successor, Arthur Sulzberger, often likened its staff to cathedral-builders, rather than mere stonecutters.

The irony of all this, Talese makes clear, is that the Times headquarters itself was never short of personalities. It was just good at hiding them.

The wedding of Iphigene Ochs and Arthur Sulzberger on November 17, 1917 set in motion a family dynasty that continues to run The Times to this day. On the far right is Adoph Ochs, Times publisher since 1896 who would bequeath the paper to Sulzberger 18 years later.
Image from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/insider/1917-the-ochses-and-sulzbergers-get-hyphenated.html

The Kingdom And The Power presents a rapid succession of vivid word portraits of people who made the newspaper what it was. The leader of the newsroom at the time of the book’s publication was Clifton Daniel, a dapper, quiet executive who had married Harry Truman’s daughter and represented a benevolent brand of institutional rectitude. Pushing against this was the longtime head of The Times’s Washington bureau, James Reston, a warmer sort who insisted even copyboys call him “Scotty.”

Talese’s power of depiction can have a cutting quality. See for example his take on Assistant Managing Editor Harrison Salisbury:

The mere sight of Salisbury, to those who do not know him, conveys a sense of severity, a chilling aloofness. He has an angular face with a slightly drooping gray mustache over thin lips that rarely smile, and his small pale blue eyes peer without expression through steel-rimmed glasses which, worn out of habit, do not appreciably improve his adequate eyesight.

The longtime editor of the Sunday Times, Lester Markel, is revealed to have a huge ego. “I do not wish to be treated as a New York Timesman,” Talese quotes him telling a White House receptionist. “I wish to be treated as an adviser to Presidents.”

Columnist Arthur Krock's tenure with The Times went back to 1927; by 1969 he was in his eighties, a "grand duke" with no intention of retiring. An often waspish fixture of placid tradition, he was seen as one of several obstacles to needed change.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Krock 

It is amazing to ponder so many of these leaders sitting down with Talese so unguardedly to recount their experiences at the paper. Even private files of the Ochs’s family were put at his disposal. The result is episodic but illuminating, revealing a place where much is in motion even as the placid surface of the famous “Gray Lady” remains undisturbed.

That the cast is nearly entirely male is unavoidable; only a handful of women were allowed to work at The New York Times beyond a secretarial capacity as late as the 1960s. Blacks, meanwhile, were still seen mostly at the building as uniformed attendants in elevators.

As far as ethnicity, Talese notes a little more variance: As was the case with a high percentage of editors in the newsroom in the Thirties, [Neil] MacNeil was a Roman Catholic, and it was often said of The Times during these years that it was a paper “owned by Jews and edited by Catholics for Protestants.”

As a Times reader in the 1980s and 1990s, I was surprised how many names I recognized as senior eminences on the masthead showing up here in much younger form. Tom Wicker, later a longtime Times columnist, is seen here as the new Washington bureau editor, struggling to keep the post he was gifted by his champion Reston. Pushing against the Reston-Wicker axis is another future columnist, A.M. Rosenthal.

The Times's international staffers enjoyed freedom unknown to their deskbound New York City colleagues. In cities like Tokyo, Moscow, and Damascus, Syria (above), reporters could choose their own stories and manage them without the same level of interference.
Image from https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-of-damascus-syria-from-1965-2014-12

Rosenthal, joined by Salisbury, saw Wicker and Reston as too comfy with the status quo. Reston saw Rosenthal as unduly ambitious. Their clash becomes a focus of the last quarter of the book, and the closest The Kingdom And The Power musters to real drama.

Before that, however, the book pulls the reader along pleasantly, filling out the culture and characters of The Times with colorful anecdotes that offer depth and color without ever dragging. Seating in the main Manhattan newsroom, he writes, is “never a casual matter”:

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 reporter becomes more seasoned and not so young, he is moved up closer to the front.

Back in the 1950s, one of those young reporters was Talese. He was on staff up until a newspaper strike in 1962 convinced him to go out on his own. Over the ensuing years, he emerged as a leading practitioner of so-called “New Journalism,” eschewing the discipline he learned at The Times. Instead, he stood out from the pack reporting on such things as Frank Sinatra not showing up for an interview because he had a cold, or how the remote personality of Joe DiMaggio exemplified the strain of being a faded sports legend.

Author Gay Talese, photographed by Baron Wolman for Esquire in 1971. Talese recalls the advice of Scotty Reston regarding how to get a story: "You should always look around for the guys who are unhappy."
Image from https://iconicimages.net/photo/bw-gt001-gay-talese/

You sense Talese’s pleasure taking this untethered approach back with him to the stolid Times to give them the same treatment.

While that tug-and-pull between Talese’s sardonic voice and the newspaper’s buttoned-down manner gives The Kingdom And The Power much of its pull and irresistible charm, another way it succeeds is how non-linearly it presents its narrative. Instead of beginning with Ochs and moving sequentially, Talese spends each chapter lighting upon a certain Times element, say its dining or drama critic, or its circulation. Then he pulls back to show how it connects to a core aspect of the Times.

A chapter on unions and newspaper strikes touches on class elitism and how it defined the newspaper’s higher brass:

When [New York Times General Manager Amory] Bradford mingled with unionists, it was like the rigid proctor of a proper boys’ school mingling with slum children. Bradford’s smile was reminiscent of the way the Duke of Edinburgh used to smile at native chieftains while touring the African colonies: a downward-tilting, royal-eyed, bonny look into the distance.

I can’t imagine such a description getting past a Times copy desk, then or now. Yet Talese masterfully keeps this going for over 500 pages.

The Canadian-based, Times-owned Spruce Falls Power & Paper Company, Ltd. was the source for the paper's newsprint, seen here in 1942 being readied for the presses. By 1969, Talese reports Spruce Falls was responsible for over half the paper's total profits.
Image from https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/preparing-printing-new-york-times-1942/

For all the first-hand observations fed to the reader through multiple viewpoints, and despite the fact it is about journalism, this is a book that uses few first-hand quotations. Instead Talese channels the thoughts of a bevy of subjects with next to no attribution, filtering them through a dizzying array of topics.

In normal hands, such an approach would be a disaster. Here it creates something wonderful, giving you a kaleidoscopic sense of often contrary human energies coming together to form something unique:

They regarded The Times as one of the few predictable things left in modern America and they accepted this fact with degrees of admiration and cynicism, seeing The Times with a varying vision: it was a daily miracle, it was a formula factory. But no matter. It was The Times.