View from the Heights

Just off Times Square, at the southwest corner of the cavernous third-floor newsroom, in an office with the door usually open, sits the managing editor of The New York Times. Turner Catledge's office is as functional and unpretentious as its tenant, a tall Mississippian of 63 whose courtly manner cannot entirely conceal a natural gregariousness. There, every afternoon at 4, Catledge musters his department heads around a big oval table to set the course of the next day's editions. And there, at such a conference one day last week, Managing Editor Catledge took a larger title and command: executive editor of one of the world's most important newspapers.

Unprecedented Changes. As executive editor Catledge assumes direct editorial charge of both the Sunday and the daily Times. The consolidation is as unprecedented as the title. Until last week, responsibility for the Sunday paper rested largely in the experienced hands of Sunday Editor Lester Markel, 70, who in 41 years at the job polished a product that some readers considered superior to the daily Times. Markel became a somewhat emeritus associate editor.

To replace Catledge as managing editor, Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger named Assistant Managing Editor Clifton Daniel, 51, who is better known outside journalism as Margaret Truman's husband than as the competent Timesman he has been for 21 years. Named Markel's successor as Sunday editor was Assistant Sunday Editor Daniel Schwarz, 56, who is accountable to Catledge.

Sulzberger also appointed White House Correspondent Tom Wicker, 38, as the Times's Washington bureau chief, succeeding James Reston, who asked to be relieved of this duty to devote more time to his column and to developing front-page news. Reston's new title: associate editor. Unaffected by Sulzberger's "structural changes": John B. Oakes's 'supervision of the Times's editorial page.

Comparative Reading. However lofty, Turner Catledge's new assignment is not likely to change materially the work patterns fixed by 13 years as managing editor. "More often than not, I get up in the morning about 7:30 or 8," he says. "I spend about two hours on the New York morning papers, all of them, including the Wall Street Journal--two hours of comparative reading, often talking into a Dictaphone.

"I generally go to the office about 11:30. In good weather I walk--it's two miles. First thing, I have my notes transcribed, call in the assistant managing editor, Mr. Daniel, and go over these things with him, leaving him with the responsibility of seeing that they get done: mistakes in the paper, this story is not developed properly, this story was a honey--that sort of thing. When they're good things, I give the publisher credit. If they're bad, I take the blame.

"At 1 every afternoon we have an executives' luncheon in a private dining room up on the eleventh floor. There are six or seven regulars: the Sunday editor, Mr. Oakes, Mr. Bancroft [Executive Vice President Harding Bancroft], the publisher, the chairman of the board if he's around, and myself. Everything's very free and easy. Everybody talks, especially about what the other man is doing.

"At 4, there's the news conference in my office of all the desk heads. They present what's coming up in the way of news, make suggestions for future stories, and the like. Summaries of their reports are sent to the news editor's bullpen, and from these the front page, the split page,* the sports page are laid out, so on down the line. The publisher drops by every day before going home, and we sit down and chew the fat. Shop talk. There's a very intimate and continuing contact with the publisher, so much so that when the publisher isn't there, the contact is there in spirit just the same.

"I usually stay till 6:30 or 7 to see a dummy of the front page. But two or three times a week I'll stay down till the first edition comes out--about 9:30. That means I get out about 10 o'clock. I always stay Wednesday night because my wife goes to bridge club, and usually Monday night too. On the nights that I don't stay I always try to check the first edition before I go to bed. It's delivered to my home about 11 o'clock."

News-Gathering Army. If it all sounds very much like a general surveying the battleground from a distance, it is because Catledge's way may well be the only practical approach to editorial leadership of the Times. On smaller dailies, down-in-the-trenches control by the managing editor is both common and feasible. On the Times, it is virtually impossible. Catledge commands a news-gathering army of 850 far-flung hands. Some denizens of the Times's newsroom sit so far from the boss that when Catledge became managing editor his staff whimsically presented him with binoculars. This crew, with help from wire services, generates some million words of copy each day--of which the daily Times, for all its bulkiness, can find room for only 170,000. No one on the paper, including Turner Catledge, reads all 170,000 words.

High Recommendation. "I don't see any of the copy unless I ask for it," says Catledge. "But any time there's a big development, they'll come and tell me. One of the chief functions of the managing editor, of course, is to spark ideas, and this will continue, both for the managing editor and the executive editor. In my new job I'm the publisher's agent, to spark and manage an interesting paper. But anyone can have a good time with this staff. They would make anyone look good."

Catledge joined the staff in 1929, a young Southerner whose professional qualifications had preceded him to New York by two years. His entree was accomplished by none other than Herbert Hoover, who had gone South to inspect damage done by the great Mississippi flood of 1927. Impressed by Catledge's flood stories in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Hoover mentioned them to his friend Adolph Ochs, then Times publisher. Ochs acted, and Catledge was on his way to Manhattan.

Except for one brief and unhappy stint as editor of the Chicago Sun in 1941-43, Catledge has been a Timesman ever since. "I was the most miserable man on earth," he says of that Chicago experience. "I discovered that I was more a part of the Times and the Times was more a part of me than I realized." To his mind, that part involves the shirtsleeve aspect of journalism, for which Catledge feels so strong an affinity that it has survived his steady climb to executive rank.

"I was a reporter," he says. "I think reporters make excellent news executives." It is a theory that Catledge successfully tested last spring when he called in Foreign Correspondent Abe Rosenthal and made him metropolitan editor, in charge of the Times's 160 local newsmen. "This man is now doing vicariously what he did personally," says Catledge. "He's not just one man now, he's 160 men."

From a rather higher altitude, Turner Catledge has sought to adopt the same approach. "I don't even consider myself much of an executive, in the Harvard Business School sense," he said last week as he began his new duties. "In my job, you have to be a combination of coach and cheerleader."

*The front page of the second section.

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