Hard News (3 page)

Ochs was intensely dedicated to two things in his life: his family and
The New York Times.
He passed on those values to three successive generations, and since 1896, the paper has had only five publishers, all of them family members. After Ochs retired in 1935, the husband of his only child, Iphigene, inherited the position. Arthur Hays Sulzberger led the paper from 1935 until 1961, when Orvil Dryfoos, the husband of Arthur and Iphigene Sulzberger’s oldest daughter, Marian, was named publisher. When Dryfoos died unexpectedly in 1963, Arthur “Punch” Ochs Sulzberger, the thirty-seven-year-old only son of Arthur and Iphigene Sulzberger, rose to the top of the
Times
’s masthead. And in 1992, Punch’s son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., took over. “They’re a monarchy,” Max Frankel said in 1994. “I thank God for that monarchy because every other newspaper that has lost its family control has gone to seed.”

Understanding the
Times
means, to some extent, understanding the Sulzberger clan. For most of the
Times
’s existence, the family has run the paper more or less the same way: by pouring money back into the paper’s editorial operation and then getting out of the way. And the family has remained remarkably united—the
Times,
it has always agreed, outweighs any individual agendas or concerns. In 1996, on the occasion of the Sulzbergers’ one hundredth anniversary of owning the
Times,
Harold Evans, the former editor of London’s
Sunday Times,
wrote in
The New Yorker,
“Great newspapers and great families rise (and fall) together—for a family, unlike a standard corporation, can take editorial and financial risks without incurring the wrath of stockholders bent upon maximizing return. Under the Sulzbergers, the
Times
has evolved into something more than a newspaper; it has become, over its century, nothing less than an ontological authority.”

In order to recognize just how unique the
Times
’s situation is, it’s useful to remember that most family-owned newspaper dynasties, like those of the Binghams in Kentucky, the Chandlers in Los Angeles, and the Taylors in Boston, have been either driven apart by internal squabbles or sold to corporate entities.
^*6
Once-great papers like
The Miami Herald
and
The Philadelphia Inquirer
have been bought by conglomerates like Knight Ridder and bled mercilessly in search of ever higher profit margins. But the Sulzbergers have remained resolutely committed to maintaining the
Times
’s excellence and its unique position in American society. Indeed, for some people, the Sulzbergers are the
Times
. Nearly forty years after leaving the paper, Gay Talese is still awed by the Sulzberger clan. “We don’t have trust in government,” Talese said. “The Wall Street world? Forget it. Where can people [go] who have values and a sense of right and wrong, of standards? . . . I think today the Sulzberger family and
The New York Times
[are] our only hope. And if they weren’t there, I don’t know where you would look.”
^*7

More than a decade after stepping down as publisher, Punch Sulzberger remains the current embodiment of this legacy. The last of four children, he was born in 1926, following Judith (1923), Ruth (1921), and Marian (1918).
^*8
Since Iphigene was the only child of Adolph Ochs and Effie Wise, her children provided the only direct blood ties to the family’s patriarch, and Punch, as the only male child, faced no real competition from his sisters when it came time for someone from his generation to lead the paper.

Along with Punch’s ascension came the birth of the modern-day
New York Times.
The paper, since Ochs’s purchase more than half a century earlier, had been run as if “profit be considered desirable but somewhat beside the point,” as Susan Tifft and Alex Jones wrote in
The Trust,
the definitive history of the Sulzbergers and the
Times.
But in the mid-1960s, crippling labor strikes and union unrest convinced Punch that for the paper to survive, it had to be more mindful of the bottom line. He began a path of haphazard diversification that would have been anathema to his father or grandfather, for the culture of the
Times
had always been predicated on focusing all of its attention on its core product. But the world had changed since 1896, and Punch wasn’t able to carry out the sleight-of-hand machinations Adolph Ochs had performed to get the mysterious line of credit he used to gain control of the
Times.
If he wanted to diversify, he needed capital, and if he wanted capital, the only real option was to take his family’s company public. So on January 14, 1969, New York Times Class A stock was made available on the American Stock Exchange for $42 a share.

Most public companies are governed by a board of directors that is answerable to shareholders. The directors, in turn, sign off on the major executive appointments—in the Times Company’s case, the chairman of the board, the chief executive officer, and the publisher of the
Times.
The chairman’s main responsibility is running the board meetings, the CEO oversees the actual day-to-day operations of the company, and the publisher dictates the budget and manages the newspaper. In 1969, Punch Sulzberger held all three roles. By taking the company public, he could have risked family control of the
Times:
If the shareholders elected directors who had plans for the company that differed from his, those directors could, in theory, oust Sulzberger from his role at the top of the company. Sulzberger may have wanted to modernize the paper, but not at the risk of losing family control.

The company solved this problem by creating a structure whereby the Sulzbergers would always retain ultimate authority. Class A stockholders would get to appoint three out of nine directors. The owners of the Class B stock—which was exclusively in the hands of the Sulzberger family—would appoint the remaining six members of the board. (Over time, that calculus became proportional, with Class A stockholders electing 30 percent of the board.) And Punch Sulzberger would remain publisher, chairman, and CEO.
^*9

Ensuring family control, however, did not mean the
Times
could continue to rely on anachronistic business practices. The joke within the
Times
was that “God [was] our personnel manager” because people were never fired and positions were never left unfilled. The business side of the paper was sadly disorganized. “We didn’t have a planning process, we didn’t have any goals, we didn’t have any of the things public companies usually [have],” James Goodale, a former
Times
in-house counsel and executive vice president, told Tifft and Jones. Amazingly, until 1964, the paper had never even been required to work within a predetermined budget.

Wall Street quickly became aware of the company’s woefully out-of-date business practices. Between January 1969 and early 1971,
Times
stock dropped from $42 to $16 a share. The fortuitously timed 1971 acquisition of Cowles Communication, which owned
Family Circle
magazine, some newspapers in Florida, a CBS station in Memphis, and Cambridge Books, helped the earnings situation, but it would be years before the Times Company instituted anything close to the rigor and accountability financial analysts looked for when rating companies worthy of investment. But while the progress toward modernization might have been slow, it was successful, and under Punch’s stewardship the
Times
not only survived what might have been crippling financial downturns, it emerged stronger than ever.

Punch also dramatically changed the scope of the newspaper during his time as publisher. When he took over, the
Times
was a two-section daily, short on pictures and long on tedious official pronouncements and rote coverage of press conferences. In a move typical of his tenure, Punch decided during the financial crises of the 1970s that he would bulk up the paper instead of paring it back. “My father, Walter Mattson, Abe Rosenthal—that was the generation that said, ‘One, our readers are leaving the city. They’re moving to the suburbs. And two, our paper needs to be rejuvenated,’ ” says Arthur Sulzberger. The
Times
responded to its financial difficulties by adding the Living and Home sections and later by transforming itself to a four-section daily. Purists roundly criticized the new sections, but they increased both the newspaper’s reach and ad revenues while also boosting circulation. “Instead of putting more water in the soup,” A. M. Rosenthal said of the decision to add heft to the paper during a difficult period, “we put in more tomatoes.” Also in the 1970s, the
Times
invented something called the Op-Ed page,
^*10
a section in the paper in which
Times
columnists and outside writers would have a venue to make their voices heard. Today, daily newspapers around the country almost universally include both those specialty sections and an Op-Ed page.

Punch made another lasting contribution to the culture of the
Times
by creating the post of executive editor. It was a job his father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, had liked to perform himself, but Punch had neither the inclination nor the temperament to resolve editorial disputes or make snap news judgments. Like Orvil Dryfoos before him, Punch wanted to find a way to unite the Sunday and daily papers, thereby replacing the existing system in which news decisions on Mondays through Saturdays were made by the
Times
’s managing editor but on the seventh day by Lester Markel, the increasingly intractable Sunday editor. In 1964, Punch appointed managing editor Turner Catledge to the newly created executive-editor position. In 1967, when Catledge retired, James “Scotty” Reston, the paper’s longtime Washington bureau chief and columnist, took over on a temporary basis. From 1969 to 1976, the post remained unfilled: A. M. Rosenthal was the paper’s managing editor
^*11
but was deemed unready to rise to the top spot. In 1976, Rosenthal finally assumed the role and served until 1986, when Max Frankel was installed; he in turn remained until Joe Lelyveld took over in 1994.

Catledge, Rosenthal, and Frankel all had close personal relationships with Punch, and all three men were careful to court the publisher’s affections. They were given great authority but always were expected to remember that it was the Sulzbergers, and not any individual editor, who made
The New York Times
special. In turn, the executive editors were treated as more than simply the editorial stewards of the newspaper: Punch consulted with them about strategic decisions involving the
Times
’s future and relied upon them to help steer the company.

While Punch was a forceful leader, he was not an overbearing one.

He preferred to operate behind the scenes and only rarely exercised his prerogative to overrule the paper’s editorial-page editor.
^*12
(More commonly, he voiced disagreement by writing letters to the paper, which he signed A. Sock, a play on his nickname.)
^*13
“Unpretentiousness is his greatest gift,” said Max Frankel, who served as editorial-page editor and was the executive editor when Punch stepped down as publisher. “He was remarkably serene about letting his subordinates do their work. His interventions were extremely polite.”

In 1971, in what would become one of the defining moments of his career—and a defining moment for American journalism—Punch authorized the
Times
’s publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War. After the paper’s outside law firm, Lord, Day & Lord, said it wouldn’t defend the
Times
if it published the report, Punch retained new lawyers. The
Times
’s decision to publish, and the Nixon administration’s efforts to halt that publication, led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling that upheld the right of a newspaper to publish free of government’s “prior restraint.”

—————

B
Y THE EARLY
1990
S,
Punch, who would turn seventy in 1996, began preparations to cede his title to the next generation of the family. His only son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., was the obvious leading candidate, although Michael Golden, the second son of Punch’s sister Ruth, was also ambitious and active in the company. Arthur Sulzberger had undergone an apprenticeship that went far beyond that of any of the previous publishers at the paper—he had served as a reporter and editor, worked in the paper’s ad department, done nights in the production department, and helped his father as the assistant and deputy publisher. Punch had known he wanted his son to succeed him since the mid-1980s, and in 1986, when he appointed Max Frankel executive editor, Punch told Frankel he had three requests. As Frankel recounted in his 1999 memoir,
The Times of My Life and My Life at
The Times, Punch told him: “Make a great paper even greater. Help to break in my son Arthur as the next publisher. Make the newsroom a happy place again.” Also, in the mid-1980s, Punch had formed what was termed the Futures Committee, a group that Arthur Sulzberger sat on with Frankel and Lance Primis, the paper’s new general manager. “It was . . . a vehicle to force Arthur Jr. to confront the competing demands of news and business from a management point of view,” wrote Tifft and Jones.

In late 1991, Punch floated the idea of naming Arthur publisher. The company’s board of directors was surprisingly tepid to the idea and asked for more time to learn about the younger Sulzberger. One of the board’s concerns, they told Punch, was that Arthur Sulzberger’s appointment would be seen as a de facto coronation and that it would only be a matter of time before he became the company’s CEO as well.

By January 1992, after more face time with Arthur—and after being assured by Punch that just because Arthur was taking one of his titles didn’t mean he’d eventually get all three—the board was placated, and the forty-year-old Sulzberger became the fifth member of his family to run the newspaper. But Arthur Sulzberger’s ascension was far more complicated than his father’s had been. At the same time that he was charting his rise within the
Times,
the twelve other sons and daughters (known as the cousins) of the four children of Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Iphigene Ochs (known as the siblings) were struggling with their own roles in the future of the Times Company. The same year Arthur Sulzberger Jr. became publisher, the cousins, five of whom were actively involved in the
Times
’s operations in one way or another, invited the siblings to dinner and said they wanted to formalize how the company, and the family, would be run in the future. When the four children of Iphigene Sulzberger passed on, there would be a much larger group of family members who could claim the
Times
as part of their inheritance. The family hired Craig Aronoff, the head of Kennesaw State University’s Family Enterprise Center, to serve as a moderator and facilitator. The result of Aronoff’s work with the cousins was a fifty-page bound volume titled
Proposals for the Future: To the Third Generation of the Ochs-Sulzberger Family from the Fourth and Fifth Generations.
The preamble stated two goals: to maintain stewardship of the
Times
and to preserve the unity of the family. These were precisely the goals that had made the Sulzbergers such strong owners, and in the report, Adolph Ochs’s great-grandchildren made it clear that they were just as intent on nurturing that philosophy as Ochs himself had been a hundred years earlier.