SPRINT’s current-situation desk routed the incoming cars into position as they neared the area, slotting them into it block by block so that it was gradually sealed off like a water tap being twisted shut. Two or four cars were assigned to each intersection depending on its size. They parked abreast of each lane of traffic, lights flashing. One officer leaped out to reroute the traffic. The other rushed to the sidewalks to start checking the pedestrian flow. In commandeered taxicabs and police trucks, other policemen descended on the area from around Manhattan. Ten minutes after Bannion’s orders had been issued Police Department trucks were dropping off at each intersection the gray wooden sawhorses marked “POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS” that the NYPD used for traffic control.
The resulting traffic jams were monstrous; so, too, were the outraged protests of people being screened before they were allowed into their neighborhood. And, at 5:17, for the first time, the story went public.
WABC-TV interrupted a rerun of Batman with a flash from its newsroom.
Unmade-up and clearly rushed before the cameras, Bill Beutel, the anchorman of the station’s Eyewitness News Team, told his city, “A police emergency is in progress in the Greenwich Village area, where,” he reported, “Palestinian terrorists are alleged to have hidden a barrel of deadly chlorine gas.”
Ten minutes later, Patricia McGuire appeared before the media’s cameras at Police Plaza, announcing the cordon in the Village area and the hunt for the gas, and assuring the public that the city’s police authorities had the matter well in hand.
Arthur Sulzbetger, the publisher of The New York Times, stood by the window of his office on the fourteenth floor of the Times Building and pondered, horrified, the President’s words. From the canyon of Forty-third Street below came the snarl of traffic, tailgates clanging shut, the rasp of impatient taxis’ horns, a few distant roars of anger; the vibrant cacophony of the city, his city, the city that his family and his family’s paper had served for over a century.
He ran a nervous hand through his curly black hair, as closely cut almost as it had been when he served in the Marine Corps. There was an awesome responsibility to his office as publisher of the paper that considered itself the conscience of America: a responsibility Sulzberger felt every bit as intensely as the President of the United States felt the burden of his office. What were his responsibilities now, he asked himself, what were the obligations of the Times to the city, to the nation now?
He turned from the window back to his massive walnut desk and his surprisingly modest office, its walls decorated with Times artifacts, historic front pages and stern and sober oils of the father and grandfather who had preceded him in this room.
The door opened. “They’re here, Mr. Sulzberger,” his secretary announced, and she showed Abe Rosenthal, Art Gelb, Grace Knowland and Myron Pick, an assistant managing editor, into the room.
Rosenthal was still seething with anger at the Police Commissioner for having dared to lie to The New York Times, for concealing from the citizens of the city the terrible threat that menaced them.
“Can you imagine, Punch,” he said, referring to the publisher by the nickname that had followed him from childhood, “an atomic bomb in this city that could kill ten, twenty thousand people and they don’t say a word to anybody?”
Sulzberger was seated now, his hands folded before him as though in prayer, his lips pressed against the knuckle of his left index finger. His head moved slowly back and forth as he listened to his senior editor. “It’s not an atomic bomb, Abe. And it’s not ten thousand people. It’s the whole city.”
As they listened in growing horror, he recounted the details of the pleading telephone call he had just received from the President. “Needless to say, he begged us not to use this information.”
He looked at each of his employees. Despite the vastness of his enterprise, he knew them all personally. “That’s not all he asked us, I’m afraid.” His remote, melancholy eyes looked at each face in turn. “He’s also asked us to restrict this information to those of us who already know about it. To tell absolutely no one else. No one.”
Grace Knowland’s hand went instinctively to her mouth to stifle the gasp forming there. Tommy, she thought, where is he?
“My God, I can’t believe it!” It was Myron Pick. “He expects us to just sit here and wait to be thermonuclearized? Not even to warn our families?”
“Precisely.” Sulzberger, whose own wife and child were only a few blocks away, reiterated Qaddafi’s injunction to secrecy and his warning that he would detonate his device instantly if an evacuation was begun.
“Why the hell should we?” Pick demanded. “Just because the President tells us to? How do we know he’s telling the truth? Presidents have lied to us.
And why the hell should his judgment on what to do in this situation be any better than ours just because seventy million people voted for him in an election?”
“Myron.” The publisher studied his agitated editor. “Forget about the President. Forget about Qaddafi. Forget about everything except one thing: what is the responsibility of The New York Times to the people of this city?”
“Well, I think it’s clear. Publish just as fast as we can. Warn the people that this city is threatened with destruction and tell them to save themselves any way they can.”
“Jesus, Myron, you can’t possibly mean thatt” Grace Knowland said.
“I certainly do. We’ve got it. Our obligation is to publish it. Doesn’t experience teach us that nothing is gained when we hold back the truth?
Look at the Bay of Pigs.”
The Times had had the story of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the CIA’s involvement in it but had effectively squelched it on the urging of President Kennedy. Later, both the paper and the President regretted the decision, realizing that the story’s publication might have prevented a national disaster.
“For Christ’s sake, Myron, this isn’t the Bay of Pigs. We’re talking about doing something that might cost millions of lives. Yours and mine included.”
Both Grace and Pick were on their feet shouting furiously at each other.
“We’re talking about the rights and obligations of this paper,” Pick roared. “I say it’s our right and duty to warn the people of this city what’s about to happen to them.”
“Who the bell do you think you are to put yourself over the President? Why do you have some God-given right to do whatever you see fit just because you’re a newspaper editor? To risk people’s lives for some principle?”
Grace was beginning to sob in anguish and concern. “Like those horrible people out there in Wisconsin who published the secret of the hydrogen bomb. Now a million people in this city, including my son, may die just because they had to make a point about their goddamn freedom of the press.”
“We have no proof Qaddafi got his hydrogen-bomb secrets from those papers,”
Pick shouted back at her.
“Well, he damn well didn’t get it sitting out in the desert meditatingl”
“Quiet, both of you. Sit down.” Sulzberger was on his feet. Usually his voice retained, despite the authority that was his, a kind of youthful timidity, but there were no traces of it present at the moment. “Neither one of you is addressing the problem. Art,” he said, turning to Gelb, “what do you think?”
“It seems to me that the U.S. government has no convincing plan that can save this city beyond some vague hope for a miracle of some sort. I mean the only response the government seems to have been able to put together is flooding the Village with FBI agents and detectives.”