In September 1968, after spending a week sitting at the Foreign Desk near Sy Topping, meeting the various editors with whom I would be working, Top (that’s his nickname, and in 2017 he is still a very alive retiree) asked me to go back to Washington and help out in coverage there until I left for Moscow in February, 1969.. At that time the bureau was located in an office building on Connecticut Avenue, in the heart of the downtown area. I knew Max Frankel, the bureau chief then, who had been a Moscow correspondent earlier in his career, and several of the correspondents. My first front page byline appeared in a Sunday edition of September 29. 1968, but it had nothing to do with foreign affairs. I had wandered into the bureau on that Saturday, and the bureau was informed that President Johnson was going to make a political speech in Kentucky for Senator Humphrey, and since I still had a Washington Star White House pass, I was kind of pushed onto the press plane and wrote my first front page story for The TImes: “Johnson Decries Politics of Fear,” dateline: Fort Mitchell, Ky., Sept. 28–By Bernard Gwertzman, Special to The New York Times.”
The major story at that time in Washington was whether the United States would again stop the bombing of North Vietnam to encourage the peace talks in Paris to proceed, as demanded by Hanoi. Johnson finally spoke to the nation on the evening of October 31 to announce a bombing halt on that day and negotiations to resume on November 6. I wrote a sidebar to the main story, saying that officials in Washington expected the negotiations to be long and difficult.The real story, as it turned out, was that South Vietnam never sent a delegation to the peace talks. We now know of course that the Nixon campaign had sent Anna Chenault to Saigon to persuade the government there that the Nixon administration would do a better job of representing its interests. And just before Christmas, the North Koreans decided to free the crew of the USS Pueblo, the intelligence ship that had been captured in January 1968, a story that I covered for The Star in January.
Since it was Christmastime, The Times volunteered me because I was Jewish to fly to San Diego to cover the story. The story was straight forward: “San Diego, Dec. 24—The crew of the intelligence ship Pueblo returned to the United States today in time for Christmas with many of their families. Led by Comdr Lloyd M. Butcher, the 82 survivors arrived at the Miaramar Naval Air Station outside the city and were met immediately by emotional, sometimes hysterical greetings and embraces of wives, mothers, fathers and children.”
I have one anecdote from that period I have to pass on. In the middle of December, the Times buro moved to an office on L Street in downtown Washington. And to celebrate the occasion, a housewarming party was scheduled on a Saturday night. I was in the bureau that afternoon working on a story. Virtually no one else was there and i had spread lots of clippings on a couple of desks. In walked Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the newspaper, who was known everywhere as “Punch.” and Turner Catledge, who was in his last year as executive editor of the paper, with their wives. Punch walked over to my desk, and I was introduced to him, and I quipped, pointing to my clippings laid out in front of me: “I’m trying to make the office look like a newsroom.” What I did not know at that time was that Punch had a fetish for keeping desks clean. He did not say anything to me that I remember.
But on Monday morning, Max Frankel called me into his office to tell me that Punch was “shocked” by my statements about keeping a messy desk. He informed me of the publisher’s “clean desk” policy. Marie-Jeanne Marcouyeux, a State Department French interpreter, was my date the evening of the party. And shortly before I shoved off for Moscow, I proposed marriage to her on her birthday, January 26, We got married on April 19, 1969 in Washington.
