A Rebel's Look at the Kingdom

In 1965, Gay Talese quit his job as a general news reporter on the New York Times. His byline was appearing with increasing frequency, and "I liked working there," he says. "But I felt stifled by the dullness of the writing they demanded in those years." He switched to magazine writing and quickly made a name for himself as a practitioner of the so-called "new journalism" -- highly interpretive reporting enlivened with plenty of descriptive personal detail. His gossipy profile of Times Managing Editor Clifton Daniel in Esquire became the talk of the publishing world. And thus began his backbreaking task of researching and writing the new-journalism version of the history of the Times.

Talese is now correcting galley proofs of the 200,000-word result, entitled The Kingdom and the Power and scheduled for spring publication by World-New American Library. In the book, Talese examines every aspect of the Times, measures its influence, analyzes its right to be called one of the world's greatest newspapers -- if not the greatest. Whether he has succeeded remains to be seen when his book appears. In the January and February issues of Harper's magazine, he publishes advance excerpts running to 40,000 words, dealing mostly with the newspaper's power structure.

Talese traces the control of the Times from Adolph Ochs, who bought the failing paper in 1896, to Ochs' grandson, Arthur Ochs ("Punch") Sulzberger, who at 42 is now publisher.

As seen by Talese, the Times is "a medieval modern kingdom within the nation, with its own private laws and values." The paper is "the Bible, emerging each morning with a view of life that thousands of readers accept as reality." Within the sprawling kingdom, several dukes jealously protect their own fiefdoms and young knights strive to develop their own. It is a kingdom filled with tension. "During the last few years a quiet revolution has been going on within the Times," writes Talese. "Older Timesmen feared that the paper was losing touch with its tradition and younger men felt trapped by tradition."

Greater Glory. Perhaps most startling is Talese's unflattering portrait of Executive Editor James ("Scotty") Reston, one of the best-liked and most respected journalists in the U.S., who is depicted as a master of corporate tactics and intrigue. Talese calls him a "Times-man in the old sense, a man emotionally committed to the institution as a way of life, a religion, a cult." As Washington bureau chief in the early '60s, Reston developed a first-class staff and a close friendship with the publisher, the late Orvil Dryfoos (husband of an Ochs granddaughter). It was virtually impossible for editors in New York to over rule Reston, even though some out ranked him. "His artistry as an administrator could not be measured simply by the fact that he usually got his own way," writes Talese. "What was more interesting was that Reston's way, as he presented it, seemed solely designed for the greater glory of the New York Times."

Punch Sulzberger became publisher in 1963. A year later, he put a New York editor in control of the Washington bureau. Reston told Sulzberger that he could not remain bureau chief under these circumstances; Sulzberger responded by making Reston an associate editor, but allowed him to choose Tom Wicker as his successor. With an "awareness of corporate whimsy, his knowledge of how executive wives can sometimes build the bridges that can more tightly bind their husbands," Reston suggested that the Wickers accompany the Sulzbergers on a month's visit to Europe. According to Talese's rather far-fetched account, Reston was betting that the trip would lay the foundation for a friendship that would eventually enable Wicker to maintain most of the bureau's autonomy.

Talese portrays Sulzberger as a competent young man anxious to centralize and modernize the Times to make it more manageable. Being "born to the title, he had grown up within the Times, had skipped through its corridors as a child. He was never awed by the great editors that he met there, for they had always smiled at him, seemed happy to see him, treated him like a little prince in a palace and he developed early in life a sunny, amiable disposition." According to Talese, Sulzberger lacks the ambition and anxieties that Talese dislikes in others.

Throughout the narrative, Talese analyzes the ambitions and anxieties of figures high and low in the Times hierarchy. Managing Editor Clifton Daniel's fortunes have declined under Punch, Talese figures, but the publisher's cousin, John Oakes, editor of the editorial page, remains in favor, "attacking issues with an aggressiveness that Adolph Ochs would have never tolerated, and sniping at important people once regarded within the Times as 'sacred cows.'" Oakes, says Talese, enjoys controversy and has "what amounts to total freedom" to provoke it.

Fascinating News. Times critics, says Talese, have similar freedom. When the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center opened in 1966, the Times' architecture, music, dance and art critics all took it to task. This pained many Times executives, anxious to promote New York City whenever possible. "My God, couldn't they find anything good to write about?" said the anguished Punch Sulzberger. Still, Talese emphasizes that Sulzberger "expressed his feelings to a few executives, but there was no hint of restraining the critics."

Though he is in a sense a rebel against the old Times, Talese emphatically says that he is not trying to "get" the newspaper for any past grudges. "I was trained by the Times and when I left the paper I cried." He devoted nearly three years to the book not to even any scores but because "I consider the New York Times news. Fascinating news. It has been sitting in judgment of America for more than a century and it, too, should be looked at in detail with the same objectivity."

Talese's objectivity is certainly not objectivity in the old-fashioned Times sense. Highly sensitive to office politics and deeply suspicious of "tactics and intrigue," he sometimes overinterprets minor and innocent situations. His dramatic writing style, which makes the book fascinating reading, also gives it a tone too conspiratorial and Machiavellian to be really convincing.

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