Character Counts

There are many moments in the full flow of this rollicking tale of the Ochses and the Sulzbergers when one has to remind oneself that this is The New York Times, for heaven’s sake. “The Trust” is a serious history of the family that has owned and run The New York Times for a century, but the reporting is so juicily relentless that one feels guilty having one’s eye pressed unwaveringly at the keyhole of so many intimacies.

We are told that the family gave the authors “full cooperation” and unconditional access to the archives of the company, but did the Sulzbergers bargain for so many personal revelations--for the story, for instance, of the night Ruth Sulzberger’s drunken husband slashed a family portrait with a knife and threatened her with a gun; or the vignettes of the irreproachable Adolph Ochs pressing his flesh on female visitors; or Iphigene, Adolph’s daughter, coping with the knowledge that new women in the promotions department were the mistresses of her husband, Arthur Hays, the first Sulzberger to marry into the Ochs family? Had Iphigene been a man, she--not her unfaithful husband--would have been running the company.

Is this all the news that is fit to print?

Yes, it mainly is, for two reasons: We see time and again how much character counts. And the view is stereoscopic. One scabrous eye may take in the adulteries, the jealousies and petty betrayals, the wild conceits, the drinkers, the drug abusers, the chancers and the compulsive womanizers--all human life is here. But the other eye is refreshed by a grander landscape, the devotion of a family through four generations to a single ideal, that of their newspaper as a public trust dedicated to the highest standards of journalism. The New York Times became a great international institution because this lofty vision was married to a down-to-earth professionalism. The family listened to inspired editors like Abe Rosenthal and managers like Walter Mattson and James Goodale, and a reservoir of public trust was established. The knife may flash from behind the arras, but rivals and enemies embrace the institution as a living, breathing relative for whom all will fall on their swords. This is the central theme of the husband-and-wife authors, and it rings true. Alex S. Jones is a former Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winner, and Susan E. Tifft, a former Time magazine staffer. They know the world of print and they have spent 12 years in research.

“The Trust” is not “Dynasty” or “Dallas.” The family has not been in it for the money. Or personal power. Or glamour: Indeed, one pines occasionally for a taste of Hearst’s San Simeon grandiosity, for a whiff of sea breezes aboard jolly Malcolm Forbes’ yacht. Throughout the Ochs-Sulzberger saga, there has been a disdain for ostentation and a striking indifference to individual enrichment. Adolph Ochs (1858-1935), the son of poor Jewish immigrants who bought the bankrupt Times in 1896, took special pride on his 25th anniversary not so much that the paper had earned $100 million in his ownership but that only 3% had been distributed to the family shareholders. Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1891-1968) made the critical decision during World War II that the priority for the paper’s newsprint allocation should be news and circulation rather than filling pages with money-making ads. It turned out that his priority for news was not the financial sacrifice in a good cause he fancied it was. With an increase in ad rates and the gains in circulation revenue, virtue proved not to have to be its own reward. Readers stayed with the paper after the war, and the greedier Herald Tribune began to lose its advertisers and fail.

Then again, in the 20 years between 1937 and 1957, the after-tax profits were only 4.5% because so much was put back into the newspaper. When, in 1957, John Hay “Jock” Whitney remarked with bewilderment that more money could surely be made, he was reproached by the publisher, “[O]f course, it could, but that would spoil the quality.” The speaker was Orvil Dryfoos, who was not an Ochs or a Sulzberger. He had married into the family, but by this time the response went with the wedding vows.

Publisher Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, spectacularly maintained the tradition. In the economic crisis of 1987-1988, when advertising revenues collapsed, newspapers everywhere slashed editorial spending. Not the Times. Punch Sulzberger increased the massive news budget year after year. He had already shown his mettle. In 1971, he was warned that if he green-lighted publication of the Pentagon Papers, documenting the secret history of the Vietnam War, the paper might be sued and driven into financial ruin and that he himself might go to jail. It was not then or later his habit to get involved directly in stories and only rarely in editorials, but this was a decision he resolved to make himself.

Punch Sulzberger was made painfully aware of risks, and the authors emphasize his misgivings, but again it is notable that the publisher focused less on the costs of the action than on the morality of publishing material that might be against the national interest. Here, after all, was a man who wore his Marine tie clip every day to the office and who had hardly been tested in the fires of journalism or public affairs. When he did decide to publish, his vindication by the Supreme Court advanced simultaneously the cause of journalism, the prestige of the paper and the ideal of the republic, in a manner that neither Adolph Ochs nor his own father, Arthur Hays, would have dared.

It was not simple cowardice on their part. There was a good, if not always sufficient, reason for the diffidence of Ochs and the prudence of his son-in-law, the clever and charming Arthur. They were Jews. Dedication to objective journalism was their first religion, “to give the news impartially without fear or favor regardless of party, sect or interests involved,” but they had to practice it with the awareness that enemies and critics of the paper could always undermine their effectiveness by exploiting the virulent anti-Semitism of the period. The running joke inside the paper was that it was owned by Jews and edited by Catholics for Protestants.

Adolph Ochs was more craven than Arthur. He also had something important to hide: For years a secret controlling interest in the paper, as security for a loan, was held first by Equitable and then by Marcellus Hartley Dodge, the munitions heir. The authors are at their best in documenting the deceit and misrepresentation by which Adolph gained control of the paper. He did not have the money he said he did. When he sallied forth to New York, a bank in hometown Chattanooga agreed to show him as having a healthy deposit provided he never used it.

Arthur Hays, for his part, was so concerned about arousing resentment of Jewishness that he directed the paper to accept advertising that specifically discriminated against Jews. He had painful personal experiences with bigotry. He was shunned by the fraternities at Columbia University. At the same time, because he was not a Zionist, he was denounced and grossly misrepresented by various Jewish groups. Even more ominous was the latent anti-Semitism of President Franklin Roosevelt. FDR, already incensed by the hostile commentaries of the paper’s reactionary Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, fulminated that the stock scheme by which Arthur was able to pay the millions of Ochs death duties without losing control of the paper was a “dirty Jewish trick.” Sen. Pat Harrison reported that he had thundered, “When Iphigene dies, we’ll get the paper.”

The first duty of each publisher of the Times is to make sure he is not the last, but the authors are right in their conclusion that in the reign of Hitler and the horror of the Holocaust, Arthur Sulzberger missed a glorious opportunity to give the news impartially without fear or favor. The Times reported much but did not put its considerable power into focusing the full glare of publicity on the greatest crime of the 20th century.

Today the stakes do not seem as high as for Punch’s Gethsemane. We too easily forget the atmosphere of the time when the nation was so divided by the Vietnam War. Punch and Rosenthal had to recognize that publishing “national security” material might well have them perceived as traitors, and not just by Richard Nixon. Left to himself, Punch might conceivably have opted for suppression, but the publishers have always been ready to listen to their professional staffs. The nature of the understanding between family ownership and editorship is crucial. There is a delicate balance. Ownership that gives editors little freedom gets what it deserves: second-raters and poor newspapers. Ownership distanced from editorship, on the other hand, can never understand the imperatives of journalism and end up depriving the newspaper of the resources for success.

It is suggestive that the finest newspapers have been run by families (and have fallen from greatness with them). Of course, there are many patterns of family control. The Astors of the London Times and the Scotts of the Guardian relinquished the prerogatives of ownership to formal trusts that guaranteed editorial independence. So did the Canadian Roy Thomson when he bought the London Times in 1967. The Ochs-Sulzbergers, like the Grahams at the Washington Post, have never gone that far, but they have managed to attract the highest talents and produce papers of integrity and distinction. Just how they have done it is not altogether clear in the biographical approach of the authors. They refrain from any comparisons, and the day-to-day operations of editorship and ownership are less fully treated than they might have been. What they do make abundantly clear is that successful Times editors who thought they had established a bond of friendship with the family were doomed to disappointment. Nothing has been allowed to stand in the way of the family’s perceived interests of the paper and its traditions. One of the more painful episodes recounted in “The Trust” is the struggle of Rosenthal to stay on after he reached the compulsory retiring age of 65. His was a transforming brilliance, but Punch was adamant.

The story of the fall and rise of Punch is a fascinating part of the biography. It gives nepotism a good name, for the consensus about him, as about the Prince of Wales, was that he was a hapless loser. He had a poor academic record; a learning disability made concentration difficult. He had no head for figures nor a natural news sense. Sent to Paris in the ‘50s in the fourth-man slot, he went to the automobile races at Le Mans on his day off and witnessed a driver plowing into the crowd and killing 83 spectators, and it never occurred to him to phone the office. He was the last person in Paris to learn that his wife Barbara (the mother of the present publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.) was having an affair with Don Cook, a reporter for the Herald Tribune. He found out only when he came home earlier than expected and found them together. I recall, on being introduced as a visiting editor from London, how I put out my hand and found I was shaking the head of a rubber chicken Punch had thrust out. It was a joke that neatly fit the advertised character. Nobody, except perhaps his mother, Iphigene, would have predicted that this was the man who at 37 would have the nerve to tell his father he would rather leave the Times than share command with the brilliant but rigid general manager, Amory Bradford.

It was not arrogance. It was a correct perception that the system his father endured of dividing responsibilities with Och’s similarly autocratic nephew, Julius Ochs Adler (1852-1955) was not likely to serve the Times well in a more complex world.

There had to be one man to speak for the whole paper, not to run news or business day to day but to have the final voice. Punch, the youngest chief executive in the paper’s history, proved a superb leader and bridge builder. He maintained the framework of editorial independence, yet he was also far-sighted in his judgment that the Times would have to protect its future by diversification and going public. Those who knew the young Punch have looked on in astonishment. Those who now worry about the capacities of his very different flamboyant son and successor, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., (1951- ) should be comforted by the precedent. The authors are unsparing in describing his escapades and follies but conclude with something close to an endorsement.

*

“The Trust” is not invulnerable to criticism. It can be a bit bewildering to leave the mainstream of the family and explore the bracken tributaries populated by the in-laws, “the peripherals” in Punch’s phrase. Which second cousin is this? And is it deliberate mischief that they all have more or less the same name? One might also quibble at some of the incidental history. The secret assignment of a Times reporter to the Atomic Energy Commission was not, as implied, one of its finest hours but one of its worst. The suggestion that the Times was brave in backing the “unpopular” League of Nations is off the mark. The League was widely supported and the modified version a sensible Wilson would have accepted had near universal support.

But this is an excellent biography, thoroughly researched, important for an understanding of a great institution--and more entertaining than any soap.