Books: Behind the By-Lines

THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER by Gay Talese. 555 pages. World. $10.

Inside this fat and often sassy non-fiction portrait of a great American institution, a slightly thinner work of factualized near-fiction struggles to be born.

The institution is the New York Times, where Gay Talese worked as a reporter for ten years. The newspaper's serious beginnings, by his accounting, stretch back well before 1896, when the paper (circ. 9,000) was bought by Adolph Ochs for $75,000. Times tradition includes Ochs' historic dictum about the news: "I want it all." Trying to get it all has raised the Time's circulation to 1,000,000, made it the world's greatest newspaper—with a not entirely justified reputation for being the world's most accurate newspaper as well.

Talese's nonfiction novel is a dramatic incident comprising about a fourth of the book. It combines the documentary quality of Arthur Hailey's institutional epics Airport and Hotel (for which Hailey, like Talese, did a monumental amount of research) with the ambitious maneuvering of Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite. The subject: horrendous infighting which occurred in 1968, when forces aligned with pipe-smoking, politely pious James ("Scotty") Reston, brilliant columnist and former head of the Times's Washington bureau, confronted elements led by genteel, manicured E. Clifton Daniel, then (as now) managing editor of the Times. The civil war turned region against region, for it was nourished (by a longstanding feud between the New York office and the Washington bureau, for years run as a separate fiefdom. Example: Once, working a steel strike story, Timesman A. H. Raskin, probably the best labor reporter in America, was unable to cover it when negotiations reached the White House. After turning up at the Times's Washington office, he was firmly told that the story would be handled by the Washington staff.

Machiavellian Maneuver. Reston won. He successfully withstood a New York effort to put a New York man in charge of Washington, and he is now executive editor of the Times. That outcome, of great moment inside the Times, is of less than secondary interest to the outside world. Accordingly, to curry reader excitement, Talese has had to transform the newsroom on the third floor of the Times building into a fortress of Machiavellian maneuver. (One wonders, sometimes, how the paper ever got put out at all.) Timesmen, in the book, tingle with preternatural sensitivity to the subtle shifts of desk assignments that mark shades of advancement or demotion. They count the entrances and exits into editors' offices that signal a power crisis, with the intensity of a lawyer reading his own will. They are astoundingly skillful at deducing mood from an editor's voice as he summons writers for comments on their copy. "If the editor paged the reporter in a snappy, peremptory tone—Mr. Haberman! very quick—it meant that there was only a small question . . ." Talese explains. "But if the editor languished on the sound of a young man's name—Mr. Haberman—then the editor's patience was thin, and the matter was very serious indeed."