The Kingdom and the Power Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a land in which the citizens seemed not so disenchanted, the police not so brutal, the United States’ bombing of Vietnam not entirely unjustified, the politicians in Washington not so self-serving, the age of Jefferson not so long ago or lost in essence. The fraternity houses on college campuses, as Reston saw them, were not perpetuators of prejudice but were places where poor young men such as he had been could learn to use the proper fork, and his attitude toward women was, like Ochs’s, both romantic and puritanical. Reston thought that a woman’s place was in the home, and when one of the best reporters in the country, Mary McGrory, appeared for a job on his Washington staff he said she could have it if she would workpart time on the telephone switchboard, which she refused to do. The heroines in Reston’s world did not work in offices—they were mothers and wives who excelled in their roles, who inspired their husbands as his wife had always inspired him, and he was deeply saddened when, as he first began to work in Washington, it occurred to him that the women of that city, the wives of newly arrived Congressmen, would now have to lie to protect their husbands. He could not condemn them for it, for this was their duty as wives, but he was saddened by the thought.
    There was much in Reston’s lofty outlook that quietly piqued some of his fellow journalists, but both Iphigene Sulzberger and her husband were very proud of him and that was what mattered. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, to be sure, liked Reston in a somewhat different way than his wife. He was awed by Reston’s talent and admired him personally, having gotten to know him quite well in the Nineteen-forties during Reston’s days as his young administrative assistant and occasional traveling companion, although there
were
times when Reston’s early-to-bed habits and rigidly moral character palled on Sulzberger a bit, the latter being an extremely sophisticated man who drank well and had an eye for an ankle, and who, away from his work, knew the art of relaxation. But Reston’s shortcomings, such as they were, could not detract from his overwhelming assets. Sulzberger recognized that he had a preacher on the payroll who could pack the church, and he also knew that Reston was much harder on himself than he was on others. For example, during Reston’s first year on
The Times
, in 1939, he and a fellow
Times
man in the London office committed an indiscretion that most journalists would have soon forgotten, or would have laughed off or bragged about, but the incident remained on Reston’s conscience for the next twenty-five years.
    It happened in the late fall of 1939 when, after a Nazi submarine had penetrated the British sea defense around the Firth of Forth and damaged a British cruiser, Reston and a colleague contrived a way to get the news past British censorship. They accomplished this by cabling a series of seemingly harmless sentences to
The Times
’ editors in New York after having first sent a message instructing the editors to regard only the last word of each sentence. Thus they were able to convey enough words to spell out the story. The fact that the news of the submarine attack was printed in New York before it had appeared in the British press sparked a big controversy that led to an investigation by Scotland Yard and the BritishMilitary Intelligence. But it took the investigators eight weeks to decipher
The Times
’ reporters’ code, an embarrassingly slow bit of detective work, and when it was finally solved the incident had died and little was done about it.
The Times
’ editors in New York, though they had given the story very prominent play, later expressed dismay that the reporters had risked so much for so little; and the incident left Reston deeply distressed. It was so out of character for him to become involved in such a thing. The tactics were questionable and, though the United States was not yet in the war, Britain was