Behind the Times (12 page)

Steve Roberts had just finished his tour of duty as a
Times
correspondent in the Reagan White House. The
Times
, by way
of reward, offered him a next step forward in his career—the job of supervising the “Washington Talk” page. Roberts upset the script, and turned down the promotion. He preferred the high-profile exposure of television punditry to bureau-desk work that was both anonymous and subservient to other, anonymous editors in New York. Frankel and his associates—collectively known in the bureau as “New York”—were angered. When Roberts went to his bureau chief, Howell Raines, to plead for a waiver of the free-lance rule, to continue his TV work, it was the turn of New York to say no. Then, in the manner of the military—“request permission to speak to the Captain, sir!”—Roberts sought Raines’s permission to talk to Frankel. He was told that “New York” had nothing to say to him. A quarter-century career at the
Times
ended. A few months later, the “Washington Talk” page was discontinued by Frankel. Some bureau people thought the feature was a casualty of the continuing low-intensity warfare between Washington and New York. Others concluded that the cutback on Washington political news was part of Frankel’s efforts to make the
Times
livelier, and more reader friendly.

Karl Meyer took the elevator to the tenth floor of the Times Building, where the editorial board and the columnists work in a university-like setting. The ceiling-high book stacks and card files of the
Times’
library form a central core; around it are the modest private offices of the “faculty” of writers and editors. Meyer, a member of the editorial board, was preoccupied. He had been involved intermittently with a book project since 1984—an anthology of the American newspaper column starting with Benjamin Franklin. Oxford University Press had scheduled it for publication in the fall, and Meyer was late with his manuscript. He closed the office door, spread out manila folders, and worked on the end notes for his free-lance project.

Life at the
Times
has exacted a toll on the family owners. Each of the four men who preceded Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., as publishers became seriously ill on the job. In the years between 1921 and 1933, the patriarch Adolph S. Ochs suffered two incapacitating “nervous breakdowns,” as they were described. Ochs’s son-in-law and successor, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, suffered a series of strokes beginning in the late 1950s and was an invalid for the last eleven years of his life. Orvil Dryfoos, AHS’s son-in-law and successor, suffered a fatal heart attack two months after the settlement of the devastating New York City newspaper strike of 1962–63. The dispute closed down the
Times
for 114 days as Dryfoos took the lead in
Times
management’s negotiations with its unions; he was fifty and had been the
Times
publisher for just two years at the time of his death. Barbara Tuchman, the historian and a family friend, offered a diagnosis of
“professional stress.”

The fourth man, Arthur’s father,
Punch Sulzberger, in middle age became a convert to an exercise and diet program in midtown Manhattan (the Cardio-Fitness Center, which promised in full-page ads in the
Times
: “Now you can lose your flab and save your heart in a personalized program”). Sulzberger’s regular sessions of aerobics and stretches, which he usually scheduled at 6:30 in the morning, before arriving at his
Times
office, helped trim him down. In 1988 an abscess
in his jaw under a wisdom tooth put him in the hospital. Two years later, the condition returned, so severely that he was unable for a time to speak or to eat solid foods. A year after that, he experienced an excruciating inflammation of the hip joints, the pain so intense that the act of putting on or taking off his suit jacket became a test of stamina. Fortunately, the condition was treatable with medication. He was still recovering when his son, Arthur Jr., became publisher in January 1992.

The wrenching demands of keeping the
Times
the
Times
was to some extent a self-imposed burden. The
Times
existed in a special category, and not just in the minds of the owner-family. The worker ranks also saw themselves as part of a great institution. “We have a commitment to excellence that trickles down to the lowest levels of the newsroom,” Warren Hoge, an assistant managing editor of the
Times
, declared grandly. “It’s quite
heady.” Hoge was explaining to an interviewer why some of the
Times’
best journalists spurn the “lure of more money” from other publications. “They don’t get the sense elsewhere of being driven to perform, of being among the most admired journalists. It’s our professional atmosphere, the feeling that we are the best.” According to Hoge, “those who do leave wish to come back after a year away because they miss that spirit.” Hoge’s grasp of the facts may be somewhat shaky: The number of departees from the
Times
over the years suggests that not everyone found the
Times
newsroom atmosphere so bracing. But the mind-set is authentic; many
Times
people do regard the paper as an enterprise on another plane, far beyond the daily journalistic calling.

The burden of ownership wasn’t a topic the family wanted aired in the news columns of the paper. A group of midlevel
Times
editors learned this at first hand. In 1979 Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger completed her memoirs, a 296-page book, written with the help of her granddaughter, Susan Dryfoos, Orvil Dryfoos’s daughter. Iphigene, Ochs’s only child, the eleven-year-old in high-button shoes and bulky tights who helped lay the cornerstone of the Times Building in 1904, embodied the history of the modern
Times.
She was an eyewitness to all the changes at the paper, and Susan Dryfoos had shaped her grandmother’s informal recollections into an endearing story. Their publisher, Dodd, Mead & Co., was sure the
Times Magazine
would be interested in running an excerpt. Galleys were sent over to the
Times
; the magazine’s top editors, knowing the procedure when the family
was involved, passed on the proposal to the publisher’s office. The protocols observed, the magazine staff expected automatic clearance. The fourteenth-floor startled the editors by vetoing publication, with no explanation. One editor belatedly concluded that “the memoir brought up too much about the medical history of the family,” and that Punch Sulzberger didn’t want “to give any unnecessary attention to his own mother’s book.”

The
Times Magazine
missed out on an intimate narrative of the
Times’
ruling family. It turned out, for example, that Adolph Ochs’s first breakdown was in part the consequence of the stresses created by the labyrinthine financial dealings which finally insured his control of the
Times.
Ochs didn’t own the
Times
outright until 1916, twenty years after his initial “purchase.” That appears to be the case, at any rate; the record is murky, in part because of Ochs’s breakdown.
Iphigene Sulzberger told Harrison Salisbury that her father destroyed the accounting books detailing the relevant loans, interest payments, and stock investments during the severe “fit of depression” that gripped him through the years 1921 and 1922. Similarly, Ochs’s second collapse in 1933 grew out of anxieties about the
Times’
business. The country was in the depths of the Great Depression and, according to Iphigene Sulzberger, her father “agonized” over the potentially shattering threat the economy posed to his newspaper properties. Ochs also became obsessed with the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and worried for the safety of his own grandchildren. To assuage her father, Iphigene took her children to Europe in the summer of 1934, to get them out of harm’s way. Punch Sulzberger was eight years old at the time of the trip.

When Ochs died in 1935, his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, inherited another potential threat to continued family control. Ochs held all the shares of the
New York Times
and the
Chattanooga Times
in his own name, even though his lawyers had urged him, for estate tax purposes, to put some share of these holdings in his wife’s or daughter’s name. He stubbornly refused (“He was a self-made man, proud of being the family provider,” Iphigene Sulzberger explained). He did, however, provide that the estate, upon his death, would go to the Ochs Trust. In that way, the normally large inheritance taxes levied on private fortunes could be avoided, and the estate passed on, tax free, to the children of Iphigene and Arthur. The children’s children would eventually have to pay taxes on their inheritance, but as Iphigene
Sulzberger pointed out, with the estate split thirteen ways, their tax bracket would not be as high.

There were still the taxes that would be due at the time of Ochs’s death, a sum amounting to $6 million including the lawyers’ fees, according to Iphigene Sulzberger. Arthur Hays Sulzberger conceived of an ingenious way to deal with these taxes. Upon the death of Adolph Ochs, the son-in-law arranged for the New York Times Company, with its strong cash flow, to purchase from the
Ochs Trust a bloc of its preferred stock amounting to $6 million. In that way, the Trust could pay off the taxes due. The alternative would have been to raise the cash by selling off shares of the family’s
Times
stock or by borrowing from the banks. Either of these alternatives, Arthur Hays Sulzberger later said, would have compromised the family’s control of the
Times
, and “we were prepared to make any sacrifice to avoid that.”

The plan was perfectly legal and prudent—except for one rather large miscalculation. The president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had campaigned against the “malefactors of great wealth” in 1932 and 1936 (in both elections, with the endorsement of the
Times
). One of FDR’s proposed New Deals involved using the federal tax code to prevent the inheritance of large fortunes. Roosevelt eventually pushed through legislation forbidding managements from selling stock back to their own companies, but not before the Ochs deal was completed. Arthur Sulzberger later heard from several sources he regarded as reliable that Roosevelt had privately characterized the Ochs stock-purchase plan as “a dirty Jewish trick” to avoid taxes. When Roosevelt invited Arthur Sulzberger to lunch at the White House on December 28, 1939, the “dirty trick” allegation didn’t come up directly; Sulzberger was perhaps too polite. But the conversation did touch on the episode in general. According to minutes of the meeting prepared by Sulzberger and placed in the
Times’
archives, the president told the publisher that while “the Ochs settlement was too large,” it was perfectly legal. Furthermore, “I would have done the same thing myself.”

The news columns of the
Times
eventually treated the family’s protracted, multigenerational efforts to insure continued control of the
Times’
properties. In the days after Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger’s death on February 26, 1990, at the age of ninety-seven, the paper gave meticulous coverage to the terms of the Ochs Trust. A page-one story on February 27 concentrated on the biographical details of Mrs. Sulzberger’s life, noting that she had passed on to her family “the
traditions of the
Times
and its dedication to serious journalism, to good taste and to progressive values,” while a related story on the obituary page dealt with the stock shares her father had left her. The Adolph Ochs Trust, the paper reported, held 83.7 percent of the Times’ controlling class-B stock. The class-A stock, publicly traded on the American Stock Exchange, was effectively nonvoting stock. The arrangement was intended to insure that outsider holders of Times stock could not gain control of the paper. It had been developed by the family’s lawyers when the
Times
became a public company in the 1960s, and the arrangement was widely imitated since by other newspaper families, including—Punch Sulzberger likes to point out—the Grahams of the
Washington Post.
“
They copied us,” he says. “We call the voting shares the class-B stock, they call it the class-A stock. Otherwise it’s identical.”

Upon Iphigene Sulzberger’s death, the Ochs Trust was dissolved and reconstituted in the form of four new trusts, one for each of her children—Punch and his sisters Marian, Judith, and Ruth. The four were designated as trustees for each trust, to be held in their names for their thirteen children and twenty-four grandchildren who were alive on August 5, 1986. According to the new terms, the trusts are to last twenty-one years beyond the lifetime of the last surviving grandchild. The new agreement also strictly prevents any family member from selling any part of the class-B stock to outsiders.

There were good reasons the Sulzbergers put their lawyers to work on the new trust arrangements in 1986. Iphigene Sulzberger was in her nineties, but an updated agreement with detailed provisions about the resale of class-B stock had little to do with the actuarial tables. The specific form of the new trust arrangement was framed with the experience of another publishing dynasty in mind, the Barry Bingham family of Louisville, Kentucky. The travails of Barry Bingham, Sr., his wife, Mary, and their three adult children were chronicled in the pages of the
Times
all through 1985. No one followed the story more closely than the Sulzberger family.