Free The Kingdom and the Power by Gay Talese Page B

in March of 1933. Roosevelt suspected Krock of attempting to act as an intermediary between the outgoing President, Hoover, and Roosevelt on a future Presidential action Roosevelt was being pressed to make. Rooosevelt felt that Hoover did not have to go through Krock but could have come directly to the President-elect, and Roosevelt blamed Krock for agreeing to become a go-between in an effort to establish himself in an important role. So after the Democratic National Convention of 1936, possibly as a way of embarrassing Krock, President Roosevelt told Catledge to feel free to check out stories or acquire information directly from the President; in short, Roosevelt was offering a line of communication that Catledge should use on his own without going through Krock.
    Catledge immediately felt uncomfortable and he went to Krock and told him about it, and he also told a very close friend on the United Press, Lyle Wilson. Catledge wanted first to let Krock know that he was not available for such double-dealing and he wanted some intimate friend to know the story, too, and he was lucky that he did. For Krock got the episode mixed up, or at least Catledge felt that he did, and the word got around that Catledge had been intrigued by Roosevelt’s proposition. Catledge, backed by Lyle Wilson, was able to counter Krock’s suspicion and to reiterate that, far from being intrigued, he was actually offended by Roosevelt’s move, even frightened.
    Roosevelt’s antipathy toward Krock was actually aimed at others on
The Times
as well, including Arthur Hays Sulzberger after the latter became publisher in 1935. Roosevelt thought he had an opportunity to benefit by a less independent
Times
immediately after Ochs’s death during the settlement of Ochs’s estate tax. Roosevelt expected that the Ochs family would be forced to go into the money market or sell some of its stock in
The Times
in order to raise the necessary funds. But when the family got the money by the sale of some of its preferred stock, not its common stock, Roosevelt became very distressed, and he admitted as much to some of his confidants in the Senate. Some editors on the newspaper felt then, and feel now, that Roosevelt’s resentment of
The Times
was based on nothing more complicated than the fact that he could not control it. Few active Presidents actually believe in a free press—Truman did not, nor did Eisenhower nor Kennedy nor Johnson; nor do most newspaper publishers, including those at
The Times
,whenever their own personal stakes are involved, a fact soon discovered by any writer who has ever attempted to do a publisher’s biography.
    Turner Catledge, at any rate, never became the Washington bureau chief of
The New York Times
. Arthur Krock, who in 1936 was saying that he did not intend to spend his whole life in Washington, was still there thirty years later. In 1938, in fact, a year in which he had condemned the Roosevelt administration for “official favors surreptitiously extended to syndicated columnists who are sympathetic,” Krock strangely got an exclusive interview with Roosevelt, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Catledge at the same time felt his career had stalled, and in the winter of 1941, at the age of forty, Catledge quit
The New York Times
. He left for Chicago to become chief correspondent and later editor-in-chief of the
Chicago Sun
. But even before he left, Krock telephoned Sulzberger in New York and told the publisher to keep the door open—Catledge would probably be back.
    Looking at Catledge’s photograph in Clifton Daniel’s office today, one is impressed by the serenity of expression, the bright dark eyes and round face that is almost smiling, the neatly combed black hair graying at the temples. The nearby photographs of Van Anda and Birchall and James seem dated, there is a faded quality about their texture, a sense of the past in the faces and clothes of the men. But the picture of Catledge is sharp and contemporary,