Behind the Times by Edwin Diamond Page B

descend on Columbia student-demonstrators occupying university buildings, the police commissioner, Howard Leary, called his good friend Goldstein to tip off the
Times
that the police bust was set for 1:00 A.M. (Goldstein asked Leary tomove up the action to 11:00 P.M. , so the
Times
could make its second edition with the story; Leary turned him down.)
    Meanwhile, the
Times
advertising department was learning how to keep its best customers happy. The paper hit upon a way to give sizable advertising discounts to the big retail department stores—by getting the manufacturers of the advertised goods to contribute part or all of the cost of the ads. One architect of this cooperative arrangement, known as vendor-paid advertising, was Monroe Green, a University of Pennsylvania graduate (Wharton, class of 1927). Green also pushed the
Times
to make the
Times Magazine
a major display space for fashion coverage—and the full-page apparel advertising that accompanied such news coverage. Green began his career at Macy’s; in 1935 he joined the
Herald Tribune
as an advertising space salesman. He did well; but when Helen Reid turned aside his request for a raise—“Oh, Mr. Green, you’re just too impatient,” she told him—he left the paper after just six months. Green spent the next six years in the advertising department at Hearst’s
Journal-American
, and then went to work for Arthur Hays Sulzberger at the
Times.
Green said he later learned, from“friends whose credibility I could not doubt,” that Helen Reid had vowed, “I will not hire another Jew as long as I live.”
    Thus, the familiar description of the high-minded, principled
Times
put forward by friendly critics covered only half the story. That
Times
did exist, presided over by courtly Southern editors and quiet, Reform proprietors. But so did the other
Times
, of aggressive salesmen and street-wise circulation people. While the owners and editors were visible Upstairs, among the crème de la crème, the proles sweated anonymously Downstairs. The clichéd “good gray
Times
” must be, at the very least, colored with touches of Green and Goldstein.
    By the 1950s, at the zenith of AHS’s rule, the
Times’
reputation as one of the leading American newspapers was secure. Few readers turned to the
Times
expecting fine writing or pleasing graphics. The paper was known mainly for its thorough reporting, and its aura of serious purpose.
Times
reporters and editors were among the best-paid newspaper people in America. There were layers of editors, a deliberate work pace, a sense of tasteful superiority: The reporters from the papers and the gentleman from the
Times
are here, madam! In 1954, a young journalist from Baltimore named Russell Baker joined the
Times.
Later, he remembered the place as being “comically overstaffed.” Baker was in his late twenties; he had been hired away from the
Baltimore Sun
by Scotty Reston to work in the
Times’
Washington bureau. Reston informed Baker that before joining the bureau, he would have to spend three months in New York in order to know “his way around the home office.”
    Baker arrived on a Sunday in November; no one gave him anything to do on his first day, and he passed the time writing a letter to his wife back in Baltimore. He described for Mimi Baker the “vast” and “bleak” newsroom, stretching from 43rd to 44th streets, where desks were “aligned in rows as neatly as stones in a military graveyard.” Halfway down the block shirtsleeved men were playing bridge, while others were working on crossword puzzles or browsing through newspapers. At the
Sun
a half dozen reporters had covered the whole of Baltimore for the night desk; at the
Times
swarms of people in the newsroom had nothing to do for days at a time—a “sea of tedium,” Baker remembered. He eventually came upon an explanation for the paper’s leisurely ways. Meyer Berger, the revered city side reporter who later wrote an official history of