The Kingdom and the Power (56 page)

The chain of command under Bancroft, as Punch Sulzberger took over
The Times
, included many corporate administrators who had been there for years, had their names printed atop the editorial page every day, yet were practically unknown outside the
Times
building—in fact, with few exceptions, these executives were unknown to most
Times
reporters and subordinate editors
in
the building. Monroe Green, the head of advertising, was an exception because his office was on the second floor, and he was often seen there by employees who were collecting their weekly paychecks at the cashier’s window, which was not far from Green’s office. But Francis A. Cox,
The Times
’ secretary-treasurer, who had been on the paper since 1951, was recognizable to very few
Times
employees. Each day Cox came and went at
The Times
, a quiet former CPA with a softly pleasant undistinguished face, and of the more than five thousand
Times
employees perhaps a few dozen knew who he was. Andrew Fisher, Sulzberger’s newly appointed business manager for production, was known in certain mechanical areas but not generally in the
Times
building; although this was beginning to change with his appointment to head
The Times
’ Western edition, an assignment that brought him into contact with a number of editors and his photograph into the pages of the paper’s house organ,
Times Talk
.

Another key administrator on the new publisher’s executive staff was a smallish, bow-tied, dark, very capable man named Ivan Veit. Veit was in charge of
Times
promotion, personnel and industrial relations, and also radio station WQXR. He joined
The Times
on his twentieth birthday in 1928, having graduated from Columbia, where he earned the Phi Beta Kappa key that always dangled from his vest. Veit was born in the upstate hamlet of Hornell, New York, as was
The Times
’ former business manager, Louis Wiley, a close friend of Adolph Ochs’s; and it was through meeting Wiley during one of Wiley’s hometown visits that Ivan Veit was invited to apply for a job at
The Times
. Veit’s first assignment on the paper in 1928 was that of a classified-ad taker, at eighteen dollars a week, but he moved up through the system quickly. One reason for his swift ascent was his compatibility with Wiley’s brother, a large cauliflowered wrestler named Max Wiley. Louis Wiley was rather embarrassed by the sight of his burly brother, who toured as a wrestler at county fairs, and who visited
The Times
whenever he was in the vicinity of New York. When Max Wiley would appear, Louis Wiley would employ his young protégé Ivan Veit to get Max out of the office
fast
—to take Max to the movies, to the Bronx Zoo, to Coney Island,
anywhere
, so long as it was far from
The Times
. Veit managed to do this with such esprit and speed that Louis Wiley was ever grateful, and Veit’s early career was off to a good start. He became the promotion chief of
The Times
in 1934, and not long after World War II his department grew to a staff of eighty and a budget of more than a million a year. This staff included copywriters, artists, researchers, statisticians, production men; and they worked on newspaper and magazine advertisements, radio and television spot announcements, window displays, book fairs, suburban and subway posters—and one of their most successful subway campaigns, stressing the influence of classified advertising in
The Times
, featured the smiling faces of people announcing, “I Got My Job Through
The New York Times
.” (This campaign was parodied by rightwing political groups, who often waved posters in parades that quoted the slogan under the smiling bearded face of Fidel Castro.)

Although it was stated in
The Times
on the day of Punch Sulzberger’s take-over that no executive changes were planned other
than the promotions of Harding Bancroft and Andrew Fisher—Catledge was to continue as managing editor, Lester Markel as Sunday editor, Oakes as editorial-page editor—there would shortly transpire a series of changes more dramatic than any in
Times
history. Punch Sulzberger, who had previously revealed so little of his inner character, who had done almost nothing that he did not
have
to do, now suddenly began to demonstrate an initiative and decisiveness that was surprising and startling.

The first thing that he did, in January of 1964, was to fold
The Times
’ Western edition. It had been operating for only sixteen months, but it had failed to attract sufficient advertising and it was losing tremendous amounts of money when the home office could least afford it. The 114-day newspaper strike had cut deeply into
The Times
’ financial reserves, and while Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger was one of the wealthiest women in America—
Fortune
magazine would claim in 1968 that she was worth between $150 million and $200 million—Punch Sulzberger did not like losing thousands of dollars each week in supporting a force of ninety men in California and the costly electronic equipment that relayed the news from the
Times
building on Forty-third Street to the regional headquarters in Los Angeles. While the prepublication surveys had indicated that Pacific Coast readers wanted a regional edition of
The Times
, a paper that they could buy each morning on the newsstands in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and dozens of other Western cities, Sulzberger felt that the circulation figures had not fulfilled that promise, and he did not believe that things would get much better. When the edition had begun in October of 1962, its circulation had been 120,000, but it had dropped to 87,000 in March of 1963, and to 71,000 in June of 1963. Equally discouraging was the fact that this circulation was spread over thirteen Western states—too widespread a readership to appeal to an advertiser in Los Angeles. The owner of a specialty shop in Beverly Hills saw no advantage in buying an ad in
The Times
’ Western edition if its readers were thinly sprinkled from the Mexican border up the California coast to Seattle and back to the Rocky Mountains and the desert of Las Vegas. Another problem was that the Western edition was not tailored for Westerners. It had been almost assumed by Dryfoos and his advisers in New York that
The Times
’ success formula on the East Coast would work equally well on the West Coast. So the Western edition was really a thin version of the New York edition, featuring a
heavy diet of foreign and national news, the mood of distant jungles and capitals, but lacking the fashion advertising that women like to read, lacking the “feel” and the news of the region west of the Rockies. It was a newspaper run by remote control—the very method that had been mocked by Arthur Hays Sulzberger and James Reston after they had been to Moscow in 1943 and had visited the offices of
Pravda
, where they were astonished to discover that while
Pravda
’s printing facilities were on the premises, the news came over wires from government offices elsewhere. “The ‘reporters’ were technicians,” Reston would recall in one of his books more than twenty years later, “processing what officials elsewhere decided should go in the paper.” This is exactly what
The Times
tried to do in 1962—its California staff members were mostly “technicians”: electronic experts, admen, circulation crews, only a minimum of copyreaders and editors, and no special staff of Western reporters. Consequently
The Times
could not compete in advertising or local reporting with the suddenly aroused
Los Angeles Times
. If
The New York Times
did nothing else in California, it helped to make the
Los Angeles Times
into a better newspaper. The latter not only launched its own news service in partnership with the
Washington Post
, but it sharpened its coverage around the nation and overseas and especially at home. When the riots occurred in the Watts section of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, the
Los Angeles Times
sent dozens of reporters and photographers in to cover the incidents and the aftermath, a performance that would win the 1966 Pulitzer for general local reporting.

Sulzberger’s decision to close down the Western edition greatly disappointed some
Times
men who were affiliated with the project. They believed that sixteen months had not provided them with enough time to properly test the edition and make adjustments. Other
Times
men wondered aloud about how the failure would affect
The Times
’ image. “You can’t close down the edition, Punch,” one said, “we must save face.”

“We’re loaded with face,” Sulzberger replied quickly. “It’s a bad paper. Let’s get rid of it.”

So in late January of 1964, Sulzberger made the announcement, and the California contingent was disbanded. Some people remained with the
Times
organization, others found jobs elsewhere. No
Times
man was more disheartened than Andrew Fisher. Though the Western project had been Dryfoos’ “baby,” Dryfoos was now gone, and so was Bradford, and the executive most closely associated
with the regional edition was Fisher. When Fisher returned to New York he wondered if he would now be gradually eased out. He knew that to some older
Times
men he symbolized the new technology that had long stirred their doubts and suspicions. Furthermore, the technology had failed in California; the scientific surveys had misjudged the people, and
The Times
had lost a big battle because of faulty intelligence; and if a scapegoat was to be sought it would most likely be Andrew Fisher. As he reestablished himself on the fourteenth floor, sitting in his office adorned by a two-faced clock simultaneously ticking the time of California and New York, and as he moved through the corridors of the building and rode the elevators that had now become automated, Fisher sensed that it was difficult for some executives to look him straight in the eye. A delicate distance was being maintained, he thought, and he asked himself more than once,
Why don’t they fire me? Why are they keeping me here?

With Punch Sulzberger, however, Fisher did not feel this way, and the discovery was wonderful and reassuring. Sulzberger seemed no different than before, no less friendly, no less confiding than when Fisher had been promoted to head the production department seven months previously on the occasion of Sulzberger’s own elevation to publisher. Fisher and Sulzberger had gotten along very well when Dryfoos was alive. Fisher had been the only executive close to Sulzberger’s age on the fourteenth floor, and they quickly discovered that they had much in common. They were both informal and frank, yet possessing a military passion for orderliness, a respect for charts, training aids, systemization, and brevity in the arrangement of details; they were both enamored of the gadgets and tools of science, and they believed that when certain tools proved inadequate for a job, that these tools should be unsentimentally replaced by newer, better tools. And it was precisely this clear and practical reasoning that had caused Fisher to wonder after the California fiasco if he might be finished at
The Times
. It not finished in the sense of being fired, then insofar as his future career was concerned. As a tool of the institution he had in a sense failed; and yet this was apparently not the value judgment that Punch Sulzberger had placed on the West Coast venture.

There had been a major mistake, it was true, but no one individual or group was to blame, nor did Sulzberger’s manner indicate that he was greatly distressed or discouraged by the failure. Failure was nothing new to Punch Sulzberger. While he could
not now casually condone it, not with the stakes so high, he also did not believe in overreacting to it. The West Coast reversal represented to him a single setback in a large forward-moving operation. He saw no reason to become suddenly defensive, or to shy away from experimenting with the modern techniques that might help run
The Times
more effectively and economically in the future. On the contrary, Sulzberger now more than ever wanted to experiment with modern systems and to learn more about them; his newspaper could not merely follow the formulas of his father or grandfather.
The Times
would have to preserve what was inviolable in its tradition, yet adjust to changing trends and new tools.
The Times
had to make more money than was the custom, Sulzberger believed: the economics of newspaper ownership was never more precarious than at present—the recent newspaper strike had shown how vulnerable some New York newspapers were to the whims of labor, how quickly old institutions can decline and crumble. While
The Times
had had the cash reserves to withstand strikes, a greater income was essential not only to meet the rising costs of production and higher salaries, but also for the paper to remain unpanicked during future labor threats. One way to make more money was to sell more newspapers and to charge higher advertising rates, to diversify and to gamble on such expansionistic ventures as the Western edition and to try something else if these failed; another way was to operate
The Times
more economically—
not
by skimping on the news coverage or the hiring of top talent, but rather by modernizing the plant, by retiring aging veterans (God could no longer be
The Times
’ personnel director), and by cutting down on the employment of more bookkeepers and clerks to handle the mounting paperwork.
The Times
would have to accept the computer. The computer was still a rather controversial subject at
The Times
, but now in Sulzberger’s first year as publisher he began to prepare the institution for its introduction.
Times
men would have to overcome their aversions and romantic notions about the newspaper business: while it was true that
The Times
was the most influential paper in the nation, it could not relax, because there were other papers outside New York that were advancing fast. The
Washington Post
and the
Wall Street Journal
were better than ever, matching and occasionally beating
The Times
in the coverage of politics and economics. And the
Los Angeles Times
, while still primarily a regional paper with limited influence around the
nation, had a daily circulation in excess of eight hundred thousand. It was about to overtake the second-place
Chicago Tribune
, and it was clearly topped only by the tabloid New York
Daily News
, whose two-million weekday circulation was more than double that of any other metropolitan newspaper in the nation. The
Wall Street Journal
, being in a specialists’ market, was often not classified with general newspapers; but its four regional editions each day gave it a total national circulation of more than eight hundred thousand.) Among the other big-city dailies,
The New York Times
ranked number seven in 1964, averaging a weekday sale of about six hundred and fifty thousand, although this figure would suddenly climb as other New York newspapers went bankrupt in the wake of labor difficulties; and
The Times
within a few years would exceed eight hundred thousand and surpass the
Philadelphia Bulletin
, the
Detroit News
, the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
, and even the
Chicago Tribune
. But it would still follow the second-place
Los Angeles Times
. While circulation figures are not necessarily indicative of the economic strength of a newspaper (the
New York Mirror
, for example, folded in 1963 with a daily circulation of more than nine hundred thousand), there was no question of the
Los Angeles Times
’ wealth. For nearly a decade the
Los Angeles Times
had led the nation’s dailies in advertising linage, and if it had great ambitions east of the Rockies it could now afford to gamble on them, being backed by the Chandler family’s Times-Mirror Company, which had diversified and profited tremendously in recent years with the purchase of several new companies publishing everything from telephone books and Bibles to aeronautical charts for pilots. The
Los Angeles Times
’ newspaper plant was a model of modernism. As the only major daily without unions, being militantly antilabor during much of its history, the
Los Angeles Times
had been free to automate as it wished—to have computers to make up the payroll, to set type, to analyze circulation trends, to pinpoint people who owed money for ads.
The New York Times
, centered in a tight city of organized labor and rooted in different traditions, could not compete electronically with the
Los Angeles Times
even if it wished to do so, but Sulzberger wanted to modernize as much as prudently possible, and he began by arranging for the rental—at eight thousand dollars a month—of a Honeywell H.200 computer to do the accounting paperwork of twenty-five employees. While the employees were being retrained to do other work, the
computer would be moved into a white-walled windowless room, dehumidified and dust free, on the seventh floor of the
Times
building. The room, twenty-five feet by thirty-two feet, was to be off limits to all
Times
employees except those who worked in conjunction with or fed the computer. The computer was under the supervision of a newly appointed systems manager at
The Times
, a former New York University professor from Georgia named Carl Osteen. Osteen and the computer were both answerable to Andrew Fisher.