Behind the Times (21 page)

The
Times
started out as supporter of the American intervention. Editorially, the paper took a firm anti-Communist stance, backing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution (which opened the way for the full-scale commitment of U.S. armed forces to the Saigon government) and backing the candidacy of Lyndon Johnson against the Republican Barry Goldwater. John B. Oakes had resolved when he took over the editorial page in 1961 that he would abolish the old habits of inoffensive, finely tuned writing—what he called “on the one hand, on the other hand” editorials. Relatively early in the war, Oakes’s editorials criticized the political corruption of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime.
Times
editorials began to oppose further escalation of American troop strength, mirroring the split in the American establishment. Members of the Senate and House, the faculties of prestige universities, and parts of the Wall Street financial community opposed the war, in many cases, well before the
Times
added its critical voice.

The
Times
moved to a more exposed position during the summer of 1971, when it took the lead in publishing the Pentagon Papers. Harrison Salisbury, in his semiauthorized history of the
Times
,
Without Fear or Favor
, regarded the Pentagon Papers case not just as a “great confrontation” between the press and the Nixon administration but also as a “metaphor” of the emergence of the
Times
into a new social role: the
Times
as nothing less than the fourth coequal branch of government. As Salisbury told it, the
Times
profoundly changed both the country and journalism with its courageous stand. With the passage of time, however, the whole episode has begun to shrink to a footnote in the narrative of the Nixon years.

The gray, ambiguous nature of the Papers may explain why the case wasn’t the Salisburian seminal political event of the 1970s. The Pentagon
Papers were documents written by a team of Department of Defense analysts, who had been assigned to assemble an historical archive of how the United States became committed to the Saigon government. The team produced a series of reports adding up to forty-seven volumes.
Times
reporter Neil Sheehan obtained a photocopied set of the documents from a military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg, a formerly gung-ho defense intellectual who had soured on the war. A protracted internal debate took place in Sulzberger’s offices at the
Times
, with the paper’s news editors in favor of publication, and the
Times’
outside law firm opposed on the grounds that the documents might compromise diplomatic secrets and military security. Punch Sulzberger sided with those who favored publication, after some sanitizing of the documents.

The first installment of the materials was published in the
Times
on Sunday, June 13, 1971, which meant that the edition was available to
Times
readers and competing news organizations on Saturday night. The
Times’
deliberately quiet “historical” presentation and the gray columns of text lulled many people. Gordon Manning, a network-news executive, remembered thinking, “This looks deep. I’ll just put it aside and perhaps read it later, when I have more time.” The two-line headline ran over four columns in the right upper half of page one. It read: “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.”

Most news organizations initially ignored the “archive” (the catchier title, “Pentagon Papers,” wasn’t used until later). The United Press International didn’t put a story summarizing the materials on its wires until Sunday afternoon; the Associated Press waited until Monday afternoon.
Time
and
Newsweek
both had the opportunity to incorporate the
Times’
materials into their next issues due out Monday, but chose not to do so. CBS News skipped the story on its Sunday night newscast, although NBC News played it prominently. The most attentive readers were the
Washington Post
and the
Boston Globe
; they obtained their own photocopied selections of the documents (
Post
and
Globe
reporters and Ellsberg managing to find each other quickly).

The archives did become a “big story” … when Richard Nixon and his attorney general John Mitchell foolishly precipitated a constitutional case. Instead of standing aside and letting the dry archival materials continue to slip down the national memory hole, Nixon’s Justice Department went to the courts and obtained an order of prior
restraint. Sulzberger and the
Times
resisted the attempt to proscribe publication. A legitimate first amendment confrontation began, and the case quickly went to the Supreme Court. By a vote of 6 to 3, the lower court’s restraining order was overturned: The
Times
and the
Post
could resume publishing without threat of civil or criminal penalties. Three members of the majority said there never could be a prior restraint, while three others said prior restraint would be appropriate in a proper case, but that these documents posed no real threat to national security.

On balance, the Pentagon Papers case strengthened the press’s constitutional freedoms, as well as stiffening the spines of media executives. If the Nixon administration had been thinking coolly, it would not have charged ahead at its “enemies” in the press. Instead Nixon could have welcomed publication, making one thing perfectly clear: The Vietnam morass had begun not on his watch but on his predecessors’, the Democrats Kennedy and Johnson. Even after the celebrated court case, few people ever bothered to read the papers. A book version of a set of the documents, made available by Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, was brought out by Beacon Press and quickly forgotten. According to Erwin Griswold, who as U.S. solicitor general argued the government’s brief before the Supreme Court, his boss John Mitchell had never seen the Papers and
had no idea what was in them even after the case went to the court. Griswold himself didn’t have time to read the Papers, relying instead on government briefers to point out what items the administration considered diplomatically or militarily sensitive. The team suggested about forty items; Griswold reduced the sensitive list to eleven. At most, only two or three of these actually appeared in newspapers once publication resumed.

Sulzberger doesn’t dwell much either on Salisbury’s grand themes. Twenty years later, he recalled the case as a threat to the
Times’
financial well-being. “
It was a very scary thing because we were charting unknown waters,” he remembered. “We had no idea of our liabilities. The courts could have found us guilty and fined us millions and millions of dollars, which we didn’t have in those days.” He adds, almost as an afterthought, “The company’s reputation was on the line.”

Nixon later explained rather lamely that he had moved against the
Times
because publication of the archive “was certain to hurt the whole Vietnam effort. Critics of the war could use [the Pentagon
Papers] to attack my goals and my policies.” The explanation overlooks the realities of the “effort”; by 1971, U.S. public opinion had turned against the war. “Vietnamization”—the departure of American troops—and the defeat of the South were both assured: There was nothing of strategic value left to hurt. More than a decade after the last shots were fired in Saigon, however, unreconstructed hawks such as General William Westmoreland and William Colby, the former CIA director, would continue to insist that Vietnam was the first war in American history “lost on the front page of the
New York Times.
” That thought was somehow more comforting than the reality of a war lost on the battlefield.

History was an abstraction; economic survival was a more immediate worry in the publisher’s suite of the
Times.
These were the same years during which the
Times
came to believe that its future was tied less to New York and more to a regional and national audience, a time when, as John Oakes says, “I kept hearing the phrase, ‘We must go after the suburban housewife.’ ” In addition to the big push away from the city, Punch Sulzberger also was being urged to revive publication of a national edition of the
Times
—“to do it right this time,” after the too-casual effort of the early 1960s. He was uncertain of its appeal: The rest of the country was not New York. One sales executive reported that among his industrial accounts beyond the Hudson, the
Times
was still considered “a Jewish paper.” Sulzberger was hearing also from some of his advertising managers that the
Times
was “still perceived to be to the left” and “antibusiness.” “The
Times
may be ready for the country,” Sulzberger wrote in a memorandum to his associates during one of the discussions about a national edition of the paper. “But is the country ready for us?”

And not just Out There. Punch Sulzberger heard complaints about the
Times’
editorial stands from the nonfamily members of his board of directors. The
Times
, these in-house critics insinuated, was taking the “left-liberal” position on such issues as environmental protection and governmental regulatory powers. According to Oakes, “Punch’s friends on Wall Street were angry at the paper. The editorial pages of the
Times
had antagonized ‘The Club’ ”—Oakes’s designation for the inner circle of the Wall Street investment bankers—“by advocating stricter federal controls of financial and corporate practices.” Bernard “Bunny” Lasker, the financier and consummate Wall Street insider,
“used to come to the publisher’s lunches and raise hell about me,” Oakes remembered. In the Reagan years, when government stood aside to let “the free market work,” the insiders in the financial community got the regulatory relief they sought. Oakes took some satisfaction in the predictable results. “Their chickens came home to roost in the late 1980s with Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, and friends.”

Well before the Reagan years, Punch Sulzberger moved to counteract criticisms about the liberal tilt of the
Times.
On the most visible level he added William Safire as an Op-Ed page columnist. A New Yorker, Safire had begun his career at the age of twenty, as a legman—part assistant, part ghostwriter—for the public relations man and radio personality Tex McCrary. Safire’s publicist’s background earned him a backseat in Richard Nixon’s entourage during the then vice president’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1959. There, on the eve of the American presidential primaries, Safire contrived to set up the “kitchen debate” between Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The Safire-inspired photo opportunity captured Nixon jowl to jowl with Khrushchev, wagging a finger in the Communist leader’s face: the Republican hopeful lecturing the enemy, our tough guy standing up to their tough guy. Safire later joined the Nixon administration as a speech writer in the White House, where he composed the alliterative line about the press’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” for Vice President Spiro Agnew. His speech-writing days ended after the president’s men put a wiretap on him (they tried, unsuccessfully, to catch him leaking information to the press). Sulzberger recruited Safire, after the
Washington Post
, another of the elitist papers on the administration’s enemies list, beat the
Times
out on its first choice for house conservative, the commentator George Will.

Safire started out rather slowly. The journalist Eric Alterman, in his study of Washington columnists,
Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics
, reported that Sulzberger was so unhappy with Safire’s contributions that the publisher told the columnist, “This isn’t working.” Safire was supposedly so devastated that he returned to his office and buried his head in his arms. Then, looking up, his eyes locked on his desk phone: salvation—he would rescue his career by using his extensive contacts to do a reporter’s column.
“That’s a good story but it never happened,” Safire said when he was asked about Alterman’s account. “It’s some third party’s version of what people imagined had happened.” The
closest he came to any “showdown,” Safire said, was during a lunch with Abe Rosenthal, whose news department had no jurisdiction at all over
Times
columnists. “Abe told me, strictly as friend to friend, that he thought some of my columns were too shrill—that I was too tough on some people. After all, a
Times
columnist wields the enormous power of the
Times.
Abe was right. So I developed a good rule—kick ’em while they’re up, not while they’re down.”

In 1978, five years after he was hired, Safire won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary; the Pulitzer judges were the same journalistic nabobs he had attacked a few years before.

The addition of a new columnist was a relatively quick way to achieve the appearance of “balance.” Safire rather slyly suggested when he joined the
Times
that he and Anthony Lewis, whose
Times
column alternated with Safire’s, were now paired: Like opposing U.S. senators, they canceled out each other’s vote.
But Sulzberger also had more fundamental changes in mind for the editorial pages. Beyond the adjustment of a sail here, and a rudder setting there, he steered the
Times’
editorials in new directions; some tacks were modest, others major, and all had the cumulative effect of moving the ship to starboard. Skipper Sulzberger didn’t bellow out orders or make public pronouncements. Rather, he took a “Hidden Hand” approach.

In the late fall of 1974, just three months after the national trauma of Watergate ended with presidential impeachment proceedings and the resignation of Richard Nixon, Sulzberger shared what he called his “concerns” about the alleged tilt of the
Times
with his two top editors, Abe Rosenthal and Max Frankel. Rosenthal was in charge of the news department, Max Frankel was the Sunday editor. Sulzberger asked them to submit essay answers to a two-part question about how the paper was edited. First, Sulzberger wanted their written thoughts on whether the
Times
was fair in its coverage: Did the paper have adequate checking systems in place to insure accuracy and balance in the news? Second, he wanted his editors’ reactions to corporate and business “perceptions” that the
Times
was “too left” or “anticapitalist.”