The Kingdom and the Power Read Free

filtering into the newsroom on that night in 1961 when
The Times
decided not to publish all it knew about the Bay of Pigs invasion. The decision had been debated, accepted in one corner of the newsroom, damned in another, but it had finally prevailed. Orvil Dryfoos,
The Times
’ publisher and husband of Ochs’s first and prettiest granddaughter, and James Reston,
The Times
’ bureau chief in Washington and star of the staff, had teamed up to tone down the story, and in so doing they had reaffirmed once again the bond between them, a personal and philosophical compatibility that was Reston’s main source of power in the New York office.
    It was not surprising that Dryfoos would be so fond of Reston personally and so respectful of Reston’s judgment. Even before he had known Reston well he had admired Reston’s writing style, which was bright and informal, different from
The Times
’ and yet complementary to it. And not long after Dryfoos had left Wall Street in 1942, six months after his fortunate marriage, to begin his career on
The Times
, Reston had left reporting temporarily toserve as an executive assistant to Dryfoos’ father-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the handsome man who in 1917 had married Ochs’s daughter and only child—and upon Ochs’s death in 1935 Sulzberger had assumed command of
The Times
, ruling it for the next twenty-six years, until stepping aside for Dryfoos in 1961, with a particular modesty and self-consciousness that comes from marrying into the Ochs dynasty and moving among senior
Times
men who had made it the hard way. But
The Times
prospered under Sulzberger, as it would under Dryfoos, because both men had the wisdom to guide
The Times
gently and the money to resist impropriety, and both men maintained enough of the Ochsian atmosphere to attract and keep employees who were dedicated and talented, and none was more dedicated and talented than James Reston.
    A short, dark-haired man with a spry step and an air of self-assurance that was never graceless, Reston had been born in 1909 to poor and pious parents in Clydebank, Scotland. When he was eleven his parents immigrated to the United States, settling in Ohio, and Reston attended public schools but was undistinguished as a student, neglecting his books for the golf course. Soon he was scoring in the seventies and winning tournaments and he could have become a professional; but his mother, who greatly influenced him, was opposed—“Make something of yourself!” she cried—and with some financial assistance from a rich man for whom he had caddied, Reston got through the University of Illinois. Though he was a slow starter, his dream unfocused, he possessed tremendous energy and ambition, and when he finally concentrated on journalism he shot up through the system more swiftly and smoothly than any young man of his generation. But despite the success that would enable him to meet the great thinkers of his time, and would eventually make them as eager to meet him, Reston never forgot his impoverished past and the circumstances that allowed him to be where he was. He was a poor boy to whom America had indeed been a land of opportunity, and out of this grew a gratitude, a patriotism that made him a better convert than a critic. He was clearly an American advocate and, even as he matured, he would never achieve the universal scope of a Walter Lippmann. Columns by Reston on national or foreign affairs often reflected the pardonable prejudice of the sportswriter he had once been. He was reluctant to condemn the home side, even when it made the errors, or to concede that the local heroes also played dirty sometimes whenthey had to win. Occasionally he seemed almost naive, seeing only righteousness and never greed in American ambition, and somehow suggesting that there were probably more good guys in the CIA than in the spy ranks of the enemy. But he was at least never cynical and always readable, and this made him just right for
The New York