Gray Lady Down (3 page)

For someone like Abe Rosenthal—an accomplished foreign correspondent, city editor and at this point the managing editor poised to take over the executive editorship in 1976—looking to these particular publications for guidance was distressing. In an interview, he had once described the
Voice
as “an urban ill, like dog shit in the street, to be stepped over.” He admitted to one interviewer that
New York
magazine “used to drive me out of my mind.” But eventually, Rosenthal’s resistance was overcome by pragmatic acceptance of the demographic facts. Still, if the
Times
was going to do “soft” journalism, it would be superior soft journalism, he proclaimed. Instead of “thinning the soup” by watering down its serious coverage, the paper would be “adding more tomatoes” to create a richer broth, which would enhance its appeal in places it had not had appeal before.

The “Sectional Revolution,” as this transformation came to be called, was managed by Rosenthal and Punch Sulzberger along with Walter Mattson, the senior financial manager. It basically saved the paper, restoring circulation and profits to the tune of $200 million in the late 1980s. But in terms of the paper’s overall credibility and gravitas, and its tradition of neutral reporting without ideological taint, the lifestyle revolution was insidious, providing a back door to the countercultural values, liberationist ideologies and special interests that Rosenthal had tried so hard to keep at bay.

Even as this door opened, there was someone coming in the front door who changed the paper in far more fundamental ways. It was Punch’s son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who sat somewhat distractedly in a front-row pew at Central Synagogue on the day that Rosenthal was being eulogized, along with the journalistic sensibility he both projected and protected at the
Times.
Just as Abe Rosenthal had epitomized the virtues of the paper’s
ancien régime,
“Young Arthur” would symbolize the postmodernism that lay athwart its future.

A
lthough he was a lifelong rock climber, it was the golden ropes of nepotism that hoisted young Sulzberger aloft. In their 1999 book about the Sulzberger family,
The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times,
Susan Tifft and Alex Jones relate how Arthur Jr., a child of divorce at five, grew up with a great deal of insecurity over his inheritance and felt a nagging coldness from his own father, who seemed to favor his cousin Stephen Golden, son of Punch’s sister. Sent away to boarding school after grammar school, young Sulzberger returned to New York pretty quickly and acted on a longstanding desire to go live with his father and stepmother, along with his half sister and stepsister. “I was
14 when I came to his [Punch’s] house,” Arthur Jr. told Tifft and Jones, indulging his penchant for off-tone phrasing. “So he had me for more than a year and a half before I became an asshole.”

The tenuousness of his relationship with his father, combined with a certain measure of confusion over his mixed Jewish and Episcopalian heritage, has been said to have left young Arthur with the need “to prove himself to so many people,” as his stepmother later put it. Very much a child of the sixties, he was suspended from Manhattan’s Browning School for trying to organize a shutdown of classes in protest of the shootings at Kent State University. Following a number of his cousins to Tufts University in Boston, Arthur Jr. continued the antiwar activism and earned two arrests for civil disobedience.

Such attitudes did not endear him with his ex-Marine father. Walking across Boston Commons one day discussing the war, Punch asked Arthur Jr. which he would like to see get shot if an American soldier came across a North Vietnamese soldier in battle. Arthur Jr. defiantly answered that he would like the American to get shot because it was the other guy’s country. For Punch, the remark bordered on treason, and the two began shouting. Sulzberger Jr. later said that his father’s inquiry was the dumbest question he had ever heard in his life.

Despite the generational and ideological strains between them, Punch made sure that Arthur Jr. was well taken care of early in his career, set up with internships at the
Boston Globe
and the
Daily Telegraph
of London. There he soaked up the mod air and the sartorial styles, and returned home sporting an affected Carnaby Street look, complete with a wide-brimmed hat, wire-framed glasses, loud ties and a cane. His stepmother thought the affectation was a bid for attention. She once spoofed him by dressing up in the same garb for a family cocktail party.

In May 1975, Sulzberger Jr. married his girlfriend, Gail Gregg, whom he had met through his mother in Kansas City. (They separated in 2008.) As Edwin Diamond describes it in
Behind the Times
, the wedding was certainly “a scene from a modern marriage.” Standing with Arthur were three fathers (his mother had remarried twice after leaving her marriage to Punch), two mothers,
one stepsister, three sisters, a half brother and “an assortment of long haired cousins.” For the rehearsal dinner the night before, according to Tifft and Jones, Arthur “had shown up in a long sleeved tee-shirt with a tuxedo design printed on it. In pictures from the wedding, the groom was wearing a headband, with white pants, white tuxedo shirt and a white belt, but with no tie. The bride, an avowed atheist and feminist, kept her maiden name.”

His father arranged for Arthur Jr. to work at the
Raleigh Times.
Despite his prestigious internships, Arthur came off to his supervisors as “absolutely, totally green.” Mike Yopp, the paper’s managing editor, told Tifft and Jones that working with him was “very much like dealing with a college intern.” His copy, mostly for light features, was riddled with basic spelling mistakes. In one unedited piece, Sulzberger had misspelled the word “hate” as “hait” not once, but several times. He was well liked, however, and though he drove a Porsche, he generally tried to be a man of the people, telling friends that the car actually had a Volkswagen engine.

Punch Sulzberger soon arranged a reporting job for Arthur at the AP in London, and another job for Gail at UPI. According to
The Trust,
Punch had originally written “we think she is smarter than he is” in his recommendation letter for Gail. His secretary drew Sulzberger Sr.’s attention to the slight, and it was excised from the final draft.

In 1978, Arthur Jr. went to work for the
Times
as a reporter in the Washington D.C. bureau. It was the staff there who gave him his unfortunate nickname, “Pinch,” a play on his father’s moniker. By all accounts, though, Arthur Jr. offset the connotations of the name and the baggage of his family influence through hard work and late-night socialization with other reporters, particularly the younger ones who carried themselves around town as a kind of Brat Pack. He often volunteered to work for other reporters if they needed time away and would work the phones as long as he could on a story, looking for yet one more source.

Undergoing another sartorial makeover, he adopted the Ben Bradlee “power look” of striped shirts with colorful suspenders and cigars. Some saw this as Arthur trying to look more serious and professional. Others saw it as a sign of immaturity, “like he
was trying to be a man, to have weight or something,” as a visiting friend from North Carolina described it.

During those D.C. years, Arthur Jr. did not generate a lot of story ideas and did not seem to have the managerial skills necessary to supervise other reporters. Nor did he have exceptional writing abilities. His political sympathies, however, seemed to leave a lasting impression. Michael Kramer recalled watching the presidential election returns in Houston with Sulzberger in 1980: “We sort of clung together in desperation as the Republicans won a major landslide and Reagan came in.” Richard Burt, a former Pentagon official who was then the
Times’
defense expert, remembers getting into heated debates with Sulzberger over arms control in the early 1980s. Sulzberger, he said, liked to think of himself as an anti-establishment liberal. “But how can you be anti-establishment when you are a Sulzberger?” Burt asked rhetorically.

Sulzberger Jr. left the D.C. bureau in 1982 and moved back to New York as a
Times
Metro reporter. Eventually he was shifted over to a position as an assignment editor on the news desk. As Tifft and Jones explain, “Given his workmanlike prose and creative spelling, which made him unfit to blue-pencil copy, the duties of an assignment editor—coming up with story ideas and motivating people to produce them—were more in keeping with his talents.”

It was fortunate for Sulzberger that he was arriving at the
Times
as the influence of Abe Rosenthal was beginning to ebb. Rosenthal was an up-by-the-bootstraps hardscrabbler who clawed his way to the top of the
Times.
Arthur Jr. was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and grew up as the presumed heir to one of the country’s most important and richest media families. Rosenthal was deeply patriotic and temperamentally, culturally and socioeconomically allergic to the Woodstock Generation. Sulzberger was proud to the point of vanity to be part of the sixties and its emancipatory spirit. Nor had his efforts to submerge his sense of entitlement, successful on some people, worked with Rosenthal. According to some reports, Rosenthal had little regard for Sulzberger’s talents and informal affectations. Once, barely containing his fury, Rosenthal grabbed a shoeless Sulzberger by the arm and told him never to come into an editorial meeting in
his office that way. At another point, Rosenthal’s secretary caught Arthur Jr. reading her boss’s messages outside his office. “Who do you think you are?” she snapped. Sulzberger contritely apologized. “I’m a reporter. I’ve got all the instincts. I can’t help it,” he supposedly replied.

Years later, in 1999, when he had been firmly established as publisher since 1991, Sulzberger finally got his delayed revenge on Rosenthal when he called the older man into his office to tell him that he would no longer be writing his op-ed column. “It’s time,” Sulzberger said, giving little other explanation. After having given his life to the paper, Rosenthal felt betrayed and heartbroken. “I didn’t expect it at all,” he reportedly told his good friend William F. Buckley.

Family control of the New York Times Company allowed the Sulzbergers to make news decisions free of the financial concerns and strictures that burden a publicly accountable company. The downside of family control is that it has not been able to guarantee that the best people rise to its topmost rungs. The all-pervasive climate of nepotism has also encouraged a kind of schizoid denial about the place that family members have in the hierarchy and how others—the several thousand employees—should treat them.

Punch Sulzberger, for instance, would say that family members would have to work harder than most people if they wanted to get to the top. Yet everyone knew this was not true. “The cousins,” as Arthur Jr. and his immediate relatives working for the paper were called, were objects of a solicitude that would undermine frank, open relations based on workplace equality. No matter what nods to merit were made publicly, almost everyone at the
Times
knew that a member of the Sulzberger clan was going to run the paper. With the coming of the 1980s, that person looked increasingly to be Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

In managing the succession, Punch Sulzberger put the grooming of his son into the hands of Walter Mattson, a top executive who felt strongly that Arthur Jr. needed to be seen as having
“earned his spurs” and that he would win respect for knowing what was going on at every level of the operation, from boiler room to bridge. Mattson structured the apprenticeship, of sorts, that would circulate Sulzberger Jr. through the production, advertising, finance and other key departments. This would expose him to almost every job in the organization and every kind of employee—pressmen, truckers, ad salespeople, night production workers. It was a democratizing experience. If he had felt serious self-consciousness over the nepotism that would propel him into one of the most important positions in American journalism, Arthur Jr. nevertheless grew comfortable with second- and third-generation pressmen who got their jobs from their fathers and grandfathers. “I never knew you could use fuck as an adjective, verb and noun, all in the same sentence,” he once quipped about what he had learned from his contact with the paper’s blue-collar workers.

During Sulzberger Jr.’s apprenticeship, Mattson and Sulzberger Sr. coined a new corporate title just for him, that of “assistant publisher,” although it was said that Mattson himself somewhat teasingly referred to Arthur Jr. as “Deputy Dawg.” In 1988, Arthur Jr. was named “deputy publisher,” at which point he began acting as a kind of “publisher-in-waiting,” sharing in major decisions. In fact, he made the final call on many of those decisions, except for those involved with the editorial page, although he is said to have sat frequently in on meetings there. He was still young, just thirty-five, and even younger looking. His own secretary referred to him as “the Kid.”