Authors: Edwin Diamond
There was never any doubt about what he had to do after the Marines. His father arranged a job for him at the
Milwaukee Journal
, a prosperous and well-run paper known for its serious journalism; like the
Times
, the
Journal
of that era invariably won a place on the lists of “ten best” newspapers in the country. It was 1953; at the age of twenty-seven, with a wife and young child, Punch Sulzberger had at last begun his newspaper career.
Punch Sulzberger joined the
Times
itself the next year, and in a matter of months was sent abroad, to Europe, for further “seasoning.” He was stationed for a time in the
Times’
Paris bureau, and did nothing to dispell his reputation as an amiable nonentity. One weekend he was in Le Mans for the auto races when one of the cars swerved off the roadway, plowed into the crowd, and killed eighty-three people. Eyewitness Sulzberger relayed not one word of the horrific accident to the bureau, not even an alerting phone call. Perhaps he wasn’t really a news hound; perhaps he was too distracted by personal matters. His marriage, to the former Barbara Grant of the Bendel’s department store family, fell apart in his Paris days, despite the efforts of the couple’s parents to act as mediators. His wife won custody of their only son, Arthur Jr. Eventually, Punch married again, to the former Carol Fox Fuhrman. The first Mrs. Sulzberger also remarried, and divorced and remarried again. She settled in Topeka, Kansas, with her new husband, who worked at the Karl E. Menninger clinic.
Punch Sulzberger was marking time in Paris. Punch’s father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, had succeeded his father-in-law as publisher of the
Times
when Adolph Ochs died in 1935. Ochs had kept the title of publisher until his last days, well into his seventy-seventh year. The elder Sulzberger had resolved not to make his designated successor twist slowly in the wind while waiting for the publisher’s chair to vacate. But the son was not the family’s choice for the job in 1961 when AHS, as he signed his
Times
memos, was incapacitated by a stroke. Punch Sulzberger would be publisher, someday. He and his three sisters were to share equally the controlling Ochs trust upon the death of their mother, but until then Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger had the decisive vote. In the early 1960s, a woman with an independent turn of mind still was not likely to consider a woman for the job of publisher of the
Times
, even one of her own daughters.
Still, that didn’t guarantee the job to Punch Sulzberger. He was thirty-five when AHS was stricken, and his family judged him too young to be put in charge of the paper. (In 1960, one year before, the
Times
had supported John F. Kennedy for president; at forty-three, Kennedy was not considered too young to run the country.) Instead the publisher’s post went to Sulzberger’s brother-in-law, his senior by thirteen years, Orvil Dryfoos, who was married to Punch’s oldest sister, Marian. Once again Sulzberger had been defined by birth order. The family plan called for Dryfoos to run the paper for a decade or so, until his sixties. Then, sometime in the 1970s perhaps, it would be his brother-in-law’s turn. Outwardly, Punch Sulzberger seemed to shrug off the decision; he remained a person of pleasant disposition, as well as a good son and brother. He was given the title of deputy publisher.
Turner Catledge, the paper’s executive editor at the time, remembered Sulzberger then as a good-natured colleague who spent his time “wandering around the building inspecting things”—peering, for example, at the building pipes as if studying the ventilation system. He was a hobbyist and a tinkerer, happy when playing fix-it on the family’s estate in Stamford, Connecticut. Sulzberger later said that at the
Times
he was “the
executive in charge of nothing.… Nobody wanted to give me anything to do—no honest-to-God job.” When Dryfoos died of a heart attack in 1963, Sulzberger became publisher, in effect, by default. His parents—his father was by then confined to a wheelchair—deliberated what to do for three weeks, scanning what was for all practical purposes a nonexistent field of candidates. For a time the Sulzbergers had thought of asking James
Reston to take the job, but Reston cherished his Washington insider’s role. A politic man, he also had the good sense to be an advocate of Punch, the dynastic choice. There was one other possibility from outside the family. Amory Bradford, a Yale graduate and former Wall Street lawyer, was the general manager of the
Times
in 1963. But realistically Bradford could only be a candidate in his own mind. He was widely known as an arrogant administrator, and had alienated just about everyone who had to work with him. Bradford was also a highly troubled man, and after he left the
Times
he went through three marriages, as well as a long struggle with alcoholism and depression. By the mid-1970s, the former Skull and Bones man and Century Association member had embraced New Age thinking. He startled his fellow Centurions by appearing one day in the Club dining room with a full beard and shoulder-length hair.
Today, after three decades of consciousness-raising, one of the
daughters, Ruth Sulzberger Golden, might have been considered a possibility to head the
Times.
In 1963, she was publisher of the other family paper, the
Chattanooga Times.
But Golden also had some personal distractions, namely, a shaky marriage that eventually ended in divorce. And, in any event, a woman’s place in the early 1960s was still a step to the rear and to the side. Ruth Golden may have been considered capable of running one of Tennessee’s leading newspapers, but the
Times
of Chattanooga was not the
Times
of New York.
Finally, there was another family member, John Bertram Oakes, the editor of the
Times’
editorial page and a nephew of Adolph Ochs. John Oakes’s father, George Washington Ochs, had anglicized the family name during World War I, as a form of protest against Germany’s militaristic behavior, according to the son. Johnny
Oakes was thirteen years older than Punch Sulzberger and unlike his cousin in a number of ways. Oakes was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Princeton, voted “most likely to succeed” by his classmates in 1934. He had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, worked as a newspaper reporter in Trenton, New Jersey, and Washington, and risen from private to major in the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war, he joined the
Times
as editor of the Sunday Review of the Week. In 1949 he became a member of the editorial board. Arthur Hays Sulzberger appointed him editor of the editorial page in 1961. While cousin Punch wandered around looking at heating systems, Oakes toured Africa, to write about the former colonial nations and their “ordeal of independence” for the
Times Magazine.
On the editorial page, Oakes staked out generally centrist positions for the
Times.
He was an early conservationist and advocate for the national parks. He favored lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Over time, he became a supporter of reform of New York state’s abortion laws. At first, he argued that proposals to remove all restrictions to abortions except the concurrence of the woman’s physician were “quite extreme”; eventually, he said he was persuaded to change by the arguments put forward by his editorial board colleagues. To complete the picture of intelligence and grace, Oakes was a handsome, dignified-looking man, with a firm gaze and a full head of gray hair, brushed back straight from his forehead, military fashion. He also enjoyed a happy marriage, living with his family in a spacious upper Fifth Avenue apartment, spending his weekends horseback riding and bicycling with his three daughters in Central Park.
For all his admirable qualities and proven abilities, Oakes now says
he was an unlikely candidate to be publisher of the
Times.
“I had no business experience at all,” he explained. “I wasn’t inclined that way and I still am not.” While there were doubts about his cousin
Punch, he added, “I was never in doubt about the outcome or that it would go to the Sulzberger side of the family.”
With no real choice except their son, Iphigene and AHS nevertheless needed the encouragement of Scotty Reston in order to do the right family thing. Tom Wicker, then a young, sharp-eyed reporter in the Washington bureau, now says, emphatically, “Reston swung it.” Almost twenty years later, in her memoirs, Iphigene Sulzberger characterized the decision as “something of a gamble.” Punch, she remembered, was “still learning the newspaper business.”
The paper that Punch Sulzberger took over in 1963 seemed set in stone, the repository of centuries-long traditions. Actually Adolph S. Ochs acquired the paper in 1896: Ochs’s
Times
only acted as if it were an institution two hundred years old. Just eight years after he bought the
Times
, Ochs commissioned a grand structure for his paper, a Times Tower to rise twenty-four floors above the ground, the second highest building in the city. On the afternoon of January 18, 1904, Iphigene B. Ochs, Adolph Ochs’s eleven-year-old daughter, helped her father dedicate the building. The temperature hovered at three degrees above zero, and Iphigene’s mother, Mrs. Effie Ochs, insisted that her daughter wear bulky black tights over her high-button shoes. The child protested, but her mother won out. The ceremonies proceeded with just one slight hitch; Iphigene was to pat the
cornerstone with an ivory-handled trowel and say, “I declare this stone to be laid plumb, level and square.” She said “plump” instead.
The editor of the
Times
, Charles R. Miller, also spoke at the ceremonies. He noted the height of the Tower; “We affront physical nature and defy her laws,” Miller declared. Most of all, Ochs’s
Times
defied the natural newspaper order. On January 18, 1904, there were twelve dailies besides the
Times
being published in New York City. Copies of their editions for that day were sealed in a copper box, and the box placed inside the cornerstone troweled by Iphigene Ochs. (More than half a century later, the Allied Chemical Corporation bought Times Tower; by then, the
Times’
operations had been consolidated in a large Beaux Arts building a half block down the street). In March 1964, the cornerstone was removed and the copper box opened. Standing by was
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Sr., Iphigene’s only son and the new publisher of the
Times.
The old newspapers from January 18, 1904, were examined by Sulzberger and his sister, Marian. Ten of the thirteen papers had ceased publication or had been merged, and no longer existed in their turn-of-the-century form. The eleventh paper, the
New York Post
, had changed from a broadsheet to tabloid size in the interim. A twelfth paper, the
Morning Telegraph
, had been reconstituted as a thoroughbred-racing paper carrying entries and results from the major tracks. The thirteenth paper in the copper box was the
Times
, the only publication still publishing the news of the day under its own name and original format. Within two years of the unsealing of the box, the merged papers—including the
World-Telegram and Sun
, and the
Journal-American
—would also be gone, awkward titles and all.
Some of the departed papers were victims of changing economic conditions and shifts in popular tastes. Others died of self-inflicted wounds—their own myopia, outmoded business plans, or plain bad leadership. Their closings left New York City at the beginning of the 1970s with only three general-interest dailies: the
Times
, the afternoon
Post
, and the
News
, a morning tabloid that began publication in 1919 as the
Illustrated Daily News.
In the early years of the 1990s, the
Post
and
News
were money losers, and there was compelling evidence that one or both of them might go under.
A number of factors help explain why the
Times
managed to avoid the death march of American newspapers and survive as one of daily journalism’s great successes. Some of the reasons for success are directly traceable to decisions made by Adolph Ochs, by his son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and by his grandson Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. Other factors contributing to the
Times’
success had relatively little to do with the actions of either the family or the paper’s executives.
Adolph S. Ochs was the son of Julius Ochs, a German-born Jew who had emigrated from Bavaria to Tennessee in 1845. Julius Ochs first made his way in America as a peddler. His son Adolph entered journalism through a side door, as a printer’s devil, emptying the hell-boxes—the receptacles of used type—for the compositors on Tennessee country newspapers in the early 1870s. In 1878, just out of his teens, Adolph Ochs started the
Chattanooga Times
with $37.50 in borrowed funds. By the 1890s he believed he had sufficient experience, if not the necessary capital, to expand his newspaper holdings. In the summer of
1896, he set out to acquire the
Times
of New York, a well-regarded daily then facing bankruptcy. His daughter Iphigene later wrote that the
Times
was controlled at the time by a group of Wall Street bankers “who very much wanted a New York paper that backed gold.” The presidential elections were less than six months away, and the Democratic party candidate, the populist William Jennings Bryan, was running on the radical (in the bankers’ eyes) platform of free silver. Though he was, like most propertied Southerners, a Democrat, Ochs decided that his Chattanooga paper would back William McKinley, the Republican candidate. McKinley, along with Wall Street and the rest of the banking interests, stood firm on the gold standard.
Ochs may have been an untested quantity in New York, but he was reliable on the currency issue. He was able to borrow $75,000 to purchase controlling interest in the
Times
; then he set about persuading the remaining stockholders of the old
Times
company to reinvest in his new company. Ochs later told his daughter how his knees were knocking when he arrived to make his stock-transfer appeal to the fierce, formidable J. P. Morgan. After the two men exchanged greetings, banker Morgan quickly asked: “
Where do I sign?” Ochs had his deal in less than five minutes.