The Kingdom and the Power (32 page)

“What do you think you’ll have, Adolph?” Milton asked. When his brother did not answer, Milton looked up from the menu and saw Adolph’s color changing. Then he collapsed at the table, unconscious. He had had a cerebral hemorrhage. He never regained consciousness.

The death of Ochs on April 8, 1935, at seventy-seven, was marked by tributes from Franklin D. Roosevelt, among hundreds of other leaders, and the wires of the Associated Press were silenced for two
minutes around the world. Every business office and factory in Chattanooga closed for a day, and New York City’s flags were at half-mast. Iphigene and Arthur Sulzberger brought the body back to New York, and Ochs was buried on April 12 in Temple Israel Cemetery in Mount Hope, New York, not far from Hillandale.

O
ne month after Ochs’s death, Arthur Hays Sulzberger became the publisher of
The Times
. He was forty-four years old and he had been on the paper for eighteen years. On the day after his elevation he announced in
The Times
that he would never depart from the basic principles of Ochs, but privately he told his editors that there would be some changes in the paper within a year. The era of the patriarch was over.

Now organized labor, stronger than ever, was trying to recruit all
The Times’
reporters and copyreaders. Sulzberger objected to this, saying that while he did not oppose unionism he did not want his entire staff to be affiliated with any single group with a “smaller common denominator than its Americanism.” He agreed to testify before the National Labor Relations Board, and, wishing to present his position effectively, he kept as a reminder in his vest pocket a small piece of paper on which he had written: “Keep calm, smile, don’t be smart.” He smiled throughout the four-day hearings, never agreeing to the closed-shop ambitions of the Newspaper Guild but never antagonizing the labor leaders. His gentle manner was an undeniable asset.

At
The Times
, Sulzberger was mildly aloof without seeming directorial. Some of his senior editors would never let him forget that he had been Ochs’s son-in-law, but Sulzberger accepted this as graciously as he could, and a few of his speeches in public began:
“Perhaps you wonder how to get to be the publisher of a great newspaper. Let me tell you my own system. Get up early, work hard—and marry the boss’s daughter.”

He liked to present this side of himself, the lightly humorous and mildly self-deprecating side that, while ingratiating, revealed very little. In his home he also behaved at times like an entertaining guest, telling funny stories and making puns and surprising the family with clever little gifts or gimmicks. One night after dinner a servant placed on the table a cake that Sulzberger said marked the date on which Iphigene had turned down his initial proposal of marriage. The icing on the cake read: “For A.H.S. Only.” Sulzberger took a knife, sliced a piece for himself, and then passed the cake around the table. The rest of the cake was wooden.

On another occasion, after Sulzberger’s children were fully grown and had neglected his request to contribute some personal anecdotes and remembrances to be included in a privately published book on the Sulzberger-Ochs family, Sulzberger decided to do the book alone. When finished, he presented to each family member a handsome leather-bound volume entitled “An Anthology of Humorous Tales in the Sulzberger-Ochs Clan”; it began: “With my children’s assistance I have put together a collection of stories of both them and their children. As the years roll on you may find it amusing to glance over and recall the episodes.” The rest of the book’s pages were blank.

He rarely forgot a birthday or anniversary, and the cards that he sent usually contained one of his clever drawings or limericks. When he was absent from one of his children’s graduations, which was often, he invariably wrote them tender letters. He sometimes seemed closest to his children when he was farthest away. He was a complex man whose inner tension was evidenced by the occasional rash on his face, by his long silences and the way he drank at night, although he nearly always held his liquor well. He was an extremely handsome man, courtly and sophisticated, the center of romantic gossip, but he was also a totally dedicated publisher under whom
The Times
prospered beyond Ochs’s grandest dreams. But it would be part of Sulzberger’s burden to live a life of secret victories, private triumphs in the name of Ochs. Neither man would have had it any other way. Even when expressing a personal opinion in a letter to be published in
The Times
, Arthur Hays Sulzberger preferred to sign it with a pseudonym, “A. Aitchess.” He was relatively
unknown outside the world of politics and journalism; he blended into the institution and worked through his senior executives, and yet he was keenly aware of the staff and was more human in his feelings toward them than was his more formal father-in-law. When a certain staff member died, Sulzberger sent a note of sympathy not only to the man’s widow, but also to his mistress.

Sulzberger assumed command of
The Times
during a very delicate period in its growth. The paper was not only being challenged from within by the Newpaper Guild but it was also being condemned in public: by the Zionists because of the paper’s policy toward Jews, by the Catholics because of Herbert Matthews’ reporting from Spain, by the isolationists who charged that
The Times
was helping to push the nation into another world war. Every week, it seemed, there was a delegation representing one faction or other that visited the publisher’s office or issued a statement denouncing
The Times
. “I am not used to being called a son-of-a-bitch,” Sulzberger remarked to an editor after one unpleasant experience, “but I suppose I shall learn to like it.”

Sulzberger’s closest associate during these years was his chief editorial writer, Charles Merz, a tall, hefty, well-tailored man who wore a blue homburg, walked with the stride of a Prussian officer, and, partly because of a ruddy complexion that suggested high blood pressure, and partly because his small steel-rimmed glasses were so tightly drawn around his broad face and nose that his ears pressed forward, he seemed like a man about to explode. Actually Merz was an even-tempered, amiable gentleman. He had been educated at Yale, had served as a lieutenant in military intelligence during World War I, and he later wrote for
Harper’s Weekly, Collier’s
, and the
New Republic
. One of his contributions to the latter, in 1920, was a two-part series coauthored by Walter Lippmann in which
The New York Times’
coverage of the Russian Revolution between March of 1917 and March of 1920 was severely criticized. Merz and Lippmann wrote that
The Times’
reporting day after day was so slanted against the Soviet revolutionaries, was so eager to present the facts that were most digestible to the United States and its allies, that
Times
readers were lulled into thinking that the Bolsheviks could not win. The facts favorable to the Bolsheviks were made to seem like propaganda; the unfavorable facts were presented as irrefutable truths. And one of the major conclusions of the Merz-Lippmann analysis of
The Times’
reporting was that:

Charles Merz had worked closely with Lippmann on the New York
World
, and it was from Lippmann that he first heard about the secret negotiations concerning the sale of the
World
; and in 1931, a day before the
World
folded, Merz was hired by
The Times
, relieved that no
Times
editor had mentioned his criticism in the
New Republic
, causing him to wonder if
The Times
’ editors had even read it.

Almost immediately, Merz and Sulzberger, who were about the same age, were liberal politically, and had much in common, became good friends. They went on vacations together with their wives, spent weekends at Hillandale. Merz at one moment would be discussing
Times
policy with Sulzberger; a few moments later, he would be helping Sulzberger to complete
The Times’
crossword puzzle, a hobby that Sulzberger got into the paper only after Ochs’s death.

Sulzberger’s relationship with his other editors was not nearly so personal as it was with Merz. The managing editor, Edwin James, who replaced Birchall in 1932, was a bit too crusty for Sulzberger’s taste although the publisher did not find James intolerable. The Sunday editor, Lester Markel, who had come from the
Tribune
in 1923, was despotic and self-important but he was doing extremely well with the
Magazine
and the “Review” section, and Sulzberger did not interfere. The Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, did cause Sulzberger considerable uneasiness, however, and there were moments when Sulzberger could not believe that he had been among Krork’s enthusiastic admirers shortly after Krock had come
to
The Times
from the
World
in 1927. It had been Sulzberger, in fact, who had strongly supported Krock’s ambitions to write a political column from Washington in 1933 after Ochs had expressed reluctance, fearful that such a column would draw
The Times
into endless controversies with very important people. It was bad enough by Ochs’s standards that
The Times
had an editorial page and allowed its critics to express opinions on the arts and entertainment; but the idea of permitting a correspondent to pass judgment on the President of the United States and the Congress was, in Ochs’s opinion, highly injudicious. Ochs had proposed instead that Krock write a kind of “letter” from Washington to an imaginary “Aunt Hattie,” a suggestion that Krock had thought was terrible, and Sulzberger had agreed and finally prevailed upon Ochs to let Krock write the sort of column that he wished. But now, a few years after Ochs’s death, Sulzberger was beginning to appreciate Ochs’s circumspection.

Even when Krock’s prose was dignified and convoluted, which it most often was, there was an undercoating of acid between the lines, particularly when Krock was writing about the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt. While Sulzberger himself did not greatly admire Roosevelt, and while
The Times
’ editorials had condemned him for such maneuvers as attempting to pack the Supreme Court,
The Times
’ opposition had never been so personal as Krock’s, and Sulzberger could understand Roosevelt’s bitterness and his tendency to refer to Krock in public as “Li’l’ Arthur.”

“Li’l’ Arthur,” Roosevelt said, delivering a typical parable to a press gathering that did not include Krock, “once made a trip to Paris and wanted to see the sights. He asked for a guard of honor and was given the President of the Republic and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, for that is the way he likes to do things. By and by, they came to the Louvre Museum, and there they saw the Venus de Milo. ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Li’l’ Arthur, ‘what grace, what classic beauty, what form divine!’ But—approaching nearer—‘Alas, alas! She has halitosis!’ ”

Arthur Krock responded with satires in which Roosevelt was portrayed as a cunning “Professor” or “Br’er Fox,” and Krock charged that Roosevelt was guilty of “more ruthlessness, intelligence, and subtlety in trying to suppress legitimate unfavorable comment than any other figure I have known.” Krock, a conservative Southern Democrat, regarded the New Dealers as a menacing group who were destroying States’ Rights, were using the Federal
Treasury to perpetuate themselves in office, and were fostering legislation that could one day allow the country to succumb to a more virulent type of liberals, or “a species of fascists.”

Among Krock’s habitual targets within the Roosevelt circle was the Undersecretary of State, Sumner Welles, whose eventual resignation was partly the result of all the publicity that Krock gave to Welles’s disagreements with the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who was Krock’s friend. Another recipient of the Krock stiletto was Roosevelt’s close adviser Harry Hopkins, about whom Krock once wrote: “Mr. Hopkins may, at times, have thought that something the President said or did was not perfect. If so, he suppressed the unworthy thought with ease.”

Short of replacing Krock, there was little that Sulzberger could do except to hint that the columnist was going too far, a hint that Krock could and did ignore. Krock was one of the most powerful and best journalists in America. During his years as a political reporter he had established valuable news sources and he had produced countless exclusives for
The Times
throughout the Roosevelt era. In 1933, on a tip from Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, Krock revealed the outline of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act, a decision to abandon the conservatism within the 1932 platform in favor of a vast public-works program. Roosevelt quickly denied knowledge of any such plan, and a few reporters printed refutations of Krock’s story as a result, but not long afterwards the NRA was legislated by Congress at Roosevelt’s request.