Behind the Times (9 page)

Whatever other burdens Arthur inherited when he took charge of the
Times
, one aspect of “the Jewish paper” issue had at last been put to rest. The
Times
of the 1990s was being run by an Episcopalian. Perhaps the
Times
, starting at the top with the family and moving down through the reporting ranks, had been overly sensitive. But Adolph Ochs, his son-in-law AHS, and his grandson Punch were hardly guilty of reflexively imagining the worst, or of sensing slights where none existed (another supposed “Jewish trait”). The family, try as it might to be private and low profile, occupied a prominent position in a keenly competitive field. The
Times
attracted attention; as it grew and flourished, the scrutiny of its “Jewish roots” also increased, sometimes for purely commercial reasons.

The
Times’
major rival as the quality morning paper in the middle third of the century was the
New York Herald Tribune.
The
Herald Tribune
had a noble history—Horace Greeley was a cofounder, and by tradition it was the paper of the Republican upper classes in the city. Its owners in the years between the wars were
the Reids, a family that seemingly wandered out of the Social Register and into a daytime soap opera. The scion, the handsome Ogden Reid, became an alcoholic; his ambitious wife, Helen Reid, was a former secretary who married the boss’s son; in her later years, she balanced running the paper, caring for her ailing husband, and raising their two sons to succeed their father. After Ogden Reid’s death in 1947, the brothers, Whitelaw and Ogden (known respectively to
Herald Trib
people as the White Prince and the Dark Prince), engaged in a fratricidal struggle for control of the paper, only to see a third party supplant them both.

These private dramas didn’t stop Helen Reid from patronizing the family that owned the
Times.
She tried to hire away Turner Catledge, the
Times’
editor, by promising him a chance to move “in a different social circle … from those Jews on Forty-third Street.” (The genial Catledge later suggested her words might have been just “a slip of the tongue.”)

It wasn’t hard to figure out what Helen Reid thought of that “social circle.” Ochs’s
Times
ran a regular column listing the arrival of all
out-of-town buyers in the city clothing industry, a practice that continued for two decades after his death. The
Herald Tribune
disdained the “rag trade.” William Robinson, the Reids’ business manager in the late 1940s, once explained that almost half of the
Times’
readership (around 500,000 at the time) consisted of what he called “transient” readers. As Robinson broke down the figures, 75,000 readers bought the
Times
solely for its classified ads; a second group of about the same size bought the
Times
for its “business service in the apparel trades,” and a third group of some 50,000 Jews read the
Times
obituary columns “to be sure they will know of the passing of relatives and friends.” Pulled out of thin air, the figures supported Robinson’s preordained conclusion: 200,000 copies were bought for “a reason other than the news and editorial content of the
Times.
” Because the
Herald Tribune
’s own circulation was around 300,000 at the time, Robinson’s fanciful arithmetic made it seem that, qualitatively speaking, the audiences for the two papers was roughly the same size. The whole sniffish exercise was made worse by Robinson’s patronizing judgment that the
Times’
Jewish readers were mostly garment workers, and narrow-minded as well, interested only in the deaths of “their own kind.”

Robinson was soon gone from the newspaper business; the Reids eventually followed, first selling a share of the
Herald Tribune
in 1958 to another member of the WASP Republican establishment, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, sportsman, horse breeder and Eisenhower’s ambassador to Great Britain (as well as a man of personal dignity and good character). After returning to New York in 1961, Whitney pumped millions of his own money into the paper, but the
Herald Tribune
continued to slip behind the
Times.
By 1964 the
Herald Tribune
’s losses had reached an estimated $15 million. While Whitney’s
Herald Trib
faltered, Sulzberger’s
Times
flourished.

In retrospective accounts, the
Times
unfailingly attributed its success to the superiority of its news coverage in the years during and right after the war—a claim that has largely gone unchallenged. The official story requires considerable qualification.

Through the 1930s and early 1940s, the two papers were in a rough kind of equilibrium. By the end of World War II, however, the
Times
began to gain steadily relative to the
Herald Tribune
in both the number of its readers and its advertising revenues. The record of those years judged so critical to the fortunes of the two papers was analyzed by the
Times
in a special report published in 1945. The document was not strictly speaking a communication to shareholders in the contemporary fashion: the Times Company stock was held in private hands, almost all in the name of the Ochs trust. But the 1945 document had the same public relations thrust of an annual report, reviewing as it did “what the
New York Times
accomplished” in the war years. The War Production Board, the report noted, had taken 1941, the year America went to war, as its base line for the rationing of newsprint. In that year, the
Times
had a weekday circulation of 455,000 and consumed 100,000 tons of newsprint (in 1990, with a daily circulation of over 1 million and a Sunday circulation of 1.6 million, the
Times
consumed 100,000 tons of newsprint every three months). The Board reduced this ration allotment each successive year; at the war’s end in 1945, the
Times
was receiving 75,000 tons of newsprint. “Alone among major New York newspapers,” the
Times
1945 report noted, the
Times
never requested or received any supply above its quota.

Yet, good soldier that it was, the
Times
pointed out, it published 8,800 columns of war coverage and other news stories—more than any other American newspaper. Translating those news columns into advertising lineage, the paper calculated that it had passed up the chance to earn over $2 million in additional income. Nor did it stop soldiering on in the service of its readers after the war ended. In the three-month period following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the
Times
boasted, readers could rely on their paper for such important documents as the “Army and Navy Pearl Harbor Reports,” a document running over 117 columns; General George C. Marshall’s Biennial Report (92 columns), and the verbatim texts of the indictments of major Nazi war criminals (32 columns).

The theme of the wartime paper devoted to expanded news—coverage so thorough that the competition was left behind, in the dust of history—has been taken up regularly in the years since 1945 by historians of the
Times.
For example, Gay Talese, in his tribute to the power and glory of the
Times
, concluded that the decision to increase the size of the paper’s staff and “spare no expense covering the war” may have been the wisest move Arthur Hays Sulzberger ever made as publisher. Talese argues, plausibly enough, that the
Times
produced a superior newspaper as a result of that decision and began luring readers away from the
Herald Tribune
; these readers stayed with the
Times
after the war and into the 1950s and 1960s, while the
Herald Tribune
continued to lose circulation. In this accounting, the
Times’
farsightedness extended to the paper’s relations with advertisers: The paper rationed advertising space so that its customers among the smaller stores would not be crowded out of the tighter papers, while the
Herald Tribune
“fattened up” on the big retail-store ads that couldn’t be accommodated in the
Times.

Such tales of the
Times’
selfless wartime service were neatly debunked by Richard Kluger, in his memoir of the
Herald Tribune.
Kluger showed that the
Herald Tribune
never carried a higher proportion of advertising than the
Times
during the war. Nor did the
Herald Tribune
profit from opportunistic policies; during those years its earnings remained less than half of the
Times’
earnings. Most important of all, the evidence of the defection of
Herald Tribune
readers to the
Times
during and after the war seems, at best, ambiguous. The papers’ relative fortunes did shift, in 1947, well after the war and the end of newsprint rationing. In the immediate postwar period, the
Herald Tribune
’s daily and Sunday circulation was about two-thirds that of the
Times.
The numbers were: for the daily papers,
Herald Tribune
, 348,000,
Times
, 538,000; for Sunday,
Herald Tribune
708,000,
Times
, 1 million.

These figures did change, and dramatically, but for a much more mundane reason than the rewards and punishments of wartime duty. At the end of 1946, the
Herald Tribune
raised its newsstand price from three cents to five cents. The
Times
, with more ads and more news, stayed at three cents for three more years. The
Herald Tribune
suffered a 30,000 loss in circulation immediately after the price hike. The price rise was a “major blunder” on the part of the Reids, Kluger concluded; at three cents, the bigger, newsier
Times
was a better bargain.

The decision to raise its prices was only one of the many business mistakes the
Herald Tribune
made. The paper’s moderate Republicanism and thoughtful news coverage between the wars found a natural constituency in the leafy, upper-middle-class towns outside New York. But when the great postwar migration from the city began to swell, the paper failed to move fast enough to engage the new residents of tract-house suburbia. When the
Herald Tribune
dropped its practice of including free introductory copies of the paper in the Welcome Wagons that greeted families newly arrived in Roslyn or Englewood or White Plains, the
Times
took its rival’s place on the Wagon. The
Times’
circulation department also grasped the idea that home delivery
was the most efficient long-term way to build readership: Regular subscribers took much of the guesswork out of determining the size of nightly press runs (and helped avoid costly returns from dealers).

No one contributed more to this postwar strategy than Nathan W. Goldstein, the
Times’
circulation manager from 1948 to 1974. Nat Goldstein knew the city and suburban delivery routes as well as the back of his hand. He developed close working relations with the forces that controlled the nighttime streets: the police, wherein nominal legal authority resided, and the newspaper drivers and deliverers union (its unsavory leadership tied to organized crime, usually just one step ahead of the antiracketeering laws).

Goldstein’s connections benefited the
Times
in a number of ways. Papers delivered at 3:00
A.M.
to still-shut newsstands did not “disappear” the way the deliveries of the other papers sometimes did, especially in those periods when managements were not on the best of terms with their union drivers. Friendly police officials shared helpful information with Goldstein. In 1968, when New York City police were about to descend on Columbia student-demonstrators occupying university buildings, the police commissioner, Howard Leary, called his good friend Goldstein to tip off the
Times
that the police bust was set for 1:00
A.M.
(Goldstein asked Leary to
move up the action to 11:00
P.M.
, so the
Times
could make its second edition with the story; Leary turned him down.)

Meanwhile, the
Times
advertising department was learning how to keep its best customers happy. The paper hit upon a way to give sizable advertising discounts to the big retail department stores—by getting the manufacturers of the advertised goods to contribute part or all of the cost of the ads. One architect of this cooperative arrangement, known as vendor-paid advertising, was Monroe Green, a University of Pennsylvania graduate (Wharton, class of 1927). Green also pushed the
Times
to make the
Times Magazine
a major display space for fashion coverage—and the full-page apparel advertising that accompanied such news coverage. Green began his career at Macy’s; in 1935 he joined the
Herald Tribune
as an advertising space salesman. He did well; but when Helen Reid turned aside his request for a raise—“Oh, Mr. Green, you’re just too impatient,” she told him—he left the paper after just six months. Green spent the next six years in the advertising department at Hearst’s
Journal-American
, and then went to work for Arthur Hays Sulzberger at the
Times.
Green said he later learned, from
“friends whose credibility I could not doubt,” that Helen Reid had vowed, “I will not hire another Jew as long as I live.”

Thus, the familiar description of the high-minded, principled
Times
put forward by friendly critics covered only half the story. That
Times
did exist, presided over by courtly Southern editors and quiet, Reform proprietors. But so did the other
Times
, of aggressive salesmen and street-wise circulation people. While the owners and editors were visible Upstairs, among the crème de la crème, the proles sweated anonymously Downstairs. The clichéd “good gray
Times
” must be, at the very least, colored with touches of Green and Goldstein.

By the 1950s, at the zenith of AHS’s rule, the
Times’
reputation as one of the leading American newspapers was secure. Few readers turned to the
Times
expecting fine writing or pleasing graphics. The paper was known mainly for its thorough reporting, and its aura of serious purpose.
Times
reporters and editors were among the best-paid newspaper people in America. There were layers of editors, a deliberate work pace, a sense of tasteful superiority: The reporters from the papers and the gentleman from the
Times
are here, madam! In 1954, a young journalist from Baltimore named Russell Baker joined the
Times.
Later, he remembered the place as being “
comically overstaffed.” Baker was in his late twenties; he had been hired away from the
Baltimore Sun
by Scotty Reston to work in the
Times’
Washington bureau. Reston informed Baker that before joining the bureau, he would have to spend three months in New York in order to know “his way around the home office.”