The Press: The Undesired Kiss

Carl Greenberg—he’s the only reporter on the [Los Angeles] Times that fits this thing, who wrote every word I said. He wrote it fairly. He wrote it objectively. Carl, despite whatever feelings he had, felt that he had an obligation to report the facts as he saw them.

—Richard Milhous Nixon

Thus, in his bitter political swan song, California’s defeated Republican candidate for Governor lifted to national attention a hitherto obscure political reporter for the Los Angeles Times. No man desired the distinction less. For all his 35 years at the game, Carl Greenberg, 54, has aspired to be no more than he is: a competent newsman, working diligently at his craft. Nixon’s accolade left him in the uncomfortable position of a man who has, for no good reason, been irreparably separated from his peers. “I feel like calling the Times and telling them to mail me my paycheck,” said Greenberg. “How can I go on working when Nixon has disparaged almost everybody else?”

No Business Judging. Why Nixon did not also disparage Carl Greenberg is perhaps partly explained by Greenberg’s approach to political reporting. “He covers politics,” says a colleague, “as if it were some sort of crime.” Greenberg was, in fact, a police reporter before turning to political coverage, and on the precinct beat he learned a valuable lesson: that a police reporter, like a cop, has no business playing judge. He brought this conviction to the political scene, first for Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner and since 1961 for the Times. “I feel,” says Greenberg, “that even if I hate a man. I have an honest responsibility to my readers to report what he said and did.”

Greenberg dutifully reported the derisive sneer of “carpetbagger” that Nixon directed at President Kennedy’s invasion of California last March. When Nixon disavowed his own words, Greenberg pinned them down in a dispassionate story observing that the candidate had used the epithet not only once, but three times.

Not one, but Two. The Times assigned two men to cover the gubernatorial campaign—Greenberg and the paper’s other political reporter, Richard Bergholz, 45. The two alternated on the trail of Nixon and incumbent Governor Pat Brown. Greenberg’s reporting was so neutral that he was met with equal cordiality by both camps.

The distinctions, if any, between Greenberg and Bergholz stories were extremely fine. Greenberg rarely evaluated what he saw and heard. But Bergholz occasionally did. After reporting a Nixon speech on the state’s failure to meet its own destiny, Bergholz added that the candidate “didn’t say what he would do if he became Governor.” The sensitive Nixon camp not only frowned on such embellishments but carefully noted that they never cropped up in Greenberg stories.

Any further explanation of Nixon’s curious endorsement of quiet, unobtrusive Carl Greenberg lies not in the Greenberg performance but in the Times itself. Until this year, the Republican Times had invariably and lopsidedly championed Nixon and every other Republican in sight. But as Times President Norman Chandler and his wife followed a campaign that they had both urged Nixon not to enter (they were convinced he would lose), their attitude changed from lukewarm to almost hostile. Their disenchantment with Nixon was translated into the Times, which for the first time gave Democrats an even break. Brown rated as much space as Nixon; the paper’s political coverage was meticulously impartial.

Having expected strong support, Nixon was deeply wounded by the Times’s cool passivity. And to his graceless valedictory to the press, the defeated candidate appended an equally graceless footnote.

Whatever his animus toward the press, Nixon had said, he would never follow the example of John F. Kennedy, who in a fit of pique had canceled his subscription to the anti-Kennedy New York Herald Tribune. Last week longtime Los Angeles Times Subscriber Richard M. Nixon notified the Times to stop delivery to his Beverly Hills home.