The Kingdom and the Power (3 page)

Sulzberger was then, in 1942, in the prime of his life—fifty years old, a lean and well-tailored man with gray hair, alert blue eyes, wrinkles in the right places, and finally in a position to make big decisions without having to first clear everything with his father-in-law. Ochs had now been dead for seven years, and Sulzberger was the boss, although he could never be the boss that Ochs had been. Nor would he wish to be. Sulzberger was by nature a modest man, not a monument builder, and he preferred making decisions quietly, taking into account the counsel of his colleagues, and then remaining in the background with the other shrine-keepers and paying homage to the memory of the departed patriarch. Except for the fact that Sulzberger was of Jewish ancestry, as Ochs had been, the two men had little in common. Adolph Ochs’s climb had been a continuous struggle against great odds, he quitting school at fifteen to begin at the bottom—a printer’s apprentice and floor-sweeper in the composing room of a small newspaper in Tennessee.
Sulzberger had been privileged from the start. He had been born of a prominent New York family that had settled in Colonial America in 1695—one of his mother’s relatives, Jacob Hays, had been New York’s first police chief—and Sulzberger had been educated in good schools, and had been permitted to indulge a taste for expensive things. He wrote verse, had some talent as a painter, and he thought seriously of someday becoming an architect. But after graduation from college he became, like his father, a textile importer, and was on a buying trip in Peking, China, when the United States entered World War I. He quickly returned for training as an artillery officer, and while in the army he met again some of his New York friends, one being a nephew of Ochs’s. And it was through the latter that Sulzberger became reacquainted with Ochs’s daughter, Iphigene, whom he had known casually a few years before when they both had attended classes on the campus of Columbia University.

When the courtship began, Ochs had been displeased. Ochs had fashioned his daughter to his Victorian taste, and thought there was no great need for her to marry, all her needs being satisfied at home; but if she were ever to seriously contemplate marriage, as she obviously was with Sulzberger, Ochs had hoped that she would at least select someone with a journalistic background who could make a useful contribution to
The Times
and perhaps one day help run it. But his daughter was set on Sulzberger, and Ochs finally consented on the condition that the young man, after his discharge from the army, join
The Times
and learn the newspaper business. If he had any ability, he would rise within the hierarch—meanwhile, Ochs could keep an eye on him.

In 1918, a year after the wedding, Arthur Hays Sulzberger appeared at
The Times
. He was given an office and a secretary and very little to do. His presence naturally caused curiosity throughout the building, particularly among some of the women who found him extremely attractive, and few details about him eluded their gossip. He loved flowers in his office and was fond of miniature animals, there being some samples on his desk and atop the bookshelves. He was forever moving furniture around the room, and emptying the ash trays, and rolling a stand that held a large atlas globe back and forth along the floor until finding a spot where the north light hit it at an interesting angle. He was absorbed by music and poetry, color and fabric, and could properly have worked in some cultural department on the newspaper, which he would have preferred. But Ochs kept him away from the more glamorous
aspects of the business. After he had been assigned to work for a while on
The Times
’ annual charity drive, The Hundred Neediest Cases, he was sent for half of each day to
The Times
’ paper mill in the Bush Terminal building in Brooklyn, where he was to familiarize himself with the logistics of newsprint. Soon he became more knowledgeable about this than anybody on
The Times
, and within a few years it was obvious that Sulzberger possessed a great willingness for work and was learning fast. He seemed constantly busy, remaining late at his office studying the complicated tabulated reports of the various departments within the building, always appearing at
The Times
on Sundays and holidays if for no other reason than to walk around the place, to talk to people, and, as he once put it, “to register the fact that I wasn’t playing polo with the boss’s money.”

By the late Twenties, with Adolph Ochs slowing down as he approached seventy, Sulzberger’s authority increased, although never to a point of presumption. Once when Sulzberger went a bit far Ochs reminded him, “I’m not dead yet.” And Ochs became irritated on another occasion when he learned that Sulzberger, whose taxicab had been delayed by Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, had suggested to an editor that
The Times
might print a paragraph or two about the congestion. While Ochs would never alter news to accommodate advertisers, he was nonetheless a practical man, and he saw no reason to risk offending Macy’s just because his son-in-law had gotten into a traffic jam. There were other things about Sulzberger, too, that grated on Ochs in the beginning, small things that were not the result of any disaffection but were inspired rather by their difference in style and by Ochs’s desire to have
The Times
run as he wished not only until his death, but long after it.

This was one reason why, in his final years, Ochs became almost obsessed by his last will and testament, consulting endlessly with his lawyer lest there be confusion about his ultimate dream:
The New York Times
must, upon his death, be controlled only by his immediate family, and in turn by their families, and it would be the responsibility of them all to govern during their lifetime with the same dedication that he had during his. But he knew also that this was the predictable dying wish of many men who had established dynasties, it having possibly been the same with Joseph Pulitzer, the great publisher of the
World
, who died in 1911. But by 1931 Pulitzer’s heirs had sold the
World
to Scripps-Howard. This fact,
occurring so shortly before Ochs’s own death, had caused him particular despondency. For the
World
had been a remarkable combination of writing and reporting, urbanity and intelligence, and what hurt it was not so much an editorial decline as the mismanagement of its business side. Ochs knew that a talented and idealistic staff alone could not guide
The Times
through future decades. The paper also had to make money. Ochs’s genius had been not only in the type of newspaper he created but in the fact that he had made such a newspaper pay. Of course Ochs had worked hard, being an indomitable little man with no interests outside his newspaper and with no doubt that news, as he presented it, was a durable and salable commodity. But with his business acumen Ochs had an instinct for avoiding the temptations of business, and he hoped his heirs would also inherit some of this. During Ochs’s earliest days in New York, for example, he was so short of money that, to save a few pennies, he would sometimes wander through
The Times
shutting off the lights over desks not in use—and
yet
, when a prominent New Yorker, a trusted friend, offered him a contract for $150,000 worth of municipal advertising with no strings attached, Ochs refused. He did so on the theory that he needed the revenue so desperately that he might adjust his operation to the windfall and he was unwilling to trust himself as to what he might do if, after that had happened, he was threatened with a cancellation of the contract. Ochs was a very human man with his share of human frailties and, knowing this, he was wary of the slightest twitch of temptation in himself. As for his heirs, he could only hope that they too would possess the wisdom to resist, and would run
The Times
not merely for profit but somewhat along the business lines of a great church, gilding the wealth with virtue, and in such a place Adolph Ochs, after death, could live long in the liturgy.

How long he could live, of course, depended largely on how well his heirs got along in the decades ahead. Nothing would crumble his foundation faster than family squabbles, selfish ambition, or shortsighted goals. His successors would have to make money but not be enticed by it, would have to keep up with trends but not be carried away by them, would have to hire talented people but not people so talented or egocentric that they could become too special as writers or indispensable as editors. Nobody could be indispensable on
The New York Times
, including Ochs.
The Times
would go on indefinitely, he hoped, towering over all individuals and groups in its employ, and his family would work together, repressing
any personal animosity for the greater good, and, if possible, choose mates in marriage who would also be wed to
The Times
.

This was part of Ochs’s dream, and when he died in 1935 during a nostalgic visit to the place in Tennessee where it all began, the fulfillment of his wishes became the responsibility of Sulzberger, the son-in-law, and of Ochs’s daughter, Iphigene.

Iphigene Sulzberger was a serious, somber-eyed brunette, no great beauty but pleasant to look at, and, beneath a seemingly soft surface, of very firm fiber. As a girl she had been Ochs’s little princess, and as a young woman at Barnard, from which she graduated in 1914, she had been alert and bright, making her father, who had always been impressed by education and envious of it, extremely proud. Her mother, the unconventional member of the family, was a marvelously strange tiny woman with raven hair who wore long dark dresses and walked around the house alone at night, sleeping by day, and who seemed more charmed by the animals around the Ochs household, including the mice, for which she sometimes left bread crumbs in the fireplace, than by the important men who so often came to dinner. She was the daughter of the distinguished Rabbi Isaac Wise of Cincinnati, founder of Hebrew Union College, and Adolph Ochs had met her while visiting the rabbi’s home one day in 1882. They were married a year later, spending their honeymoon in Washington, where they had tea with President Chester Arthur, and Ochs then returned with his bride to Chattanooga, where he was the precocious publisher of the
Chattanooga Times
, gaining experience for his future venture in New York. His wife’s interest in journalism was limited almost entirely to the literary supplement, for which she wrote book reviews, and she had little inclination for cooking or running a home. But this was no problem in Chattanooga because Adolph Ochs’s female relatives there, including his mother, happily occupied and helped run the big house, thus remaining close to Adolph, their pride and joy, and the young Mrs. Ochs, a guest in her own home, was free for such things as riding the new horse that her husband had bought for her soon after their marriage. Far from being displeased with her ethereal quality, Ochs was actually attracted by it, finding it a congenial contrast with his more bourgeois background. The only thing lacking in the early years of their marriage was children, two having died, but nine years after their marriage, in 1892, a baby girl was born and survived, and the ecstatic Ochs named her Iphigene in honor of his wife.

Young Iphigene shared her mother’s great interest in literature but little of her mother’s romantic detachment. She was her father’s child. Had he permitted it she might have become a journalist, a crusading sort urging reform. As a schoolgirl she had been keenly aware of the slums of New York, and during her family’s many trips to Europe she saw more of the same. At Barnard College, where she majored in economics, she developed what was then considered a socialistic point of view. She joined with other students in advocating a better welfare program in New York and also worked as a volunteer in some of the city’s settlement houses. Her father admired her idealism but he was sometimes startled by the assertive manner in which she expressed her opinions. One day he introduced her to a passage in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography in which Poor Richard, discussing the futility of trying to win arguments by dogmatic force alone, advocated instead the use of such softer phrases as “it appears to me at present” or “I imagine” or “I apprehend”—and this approach in conversation, reinforced by Ochs’s own example of never raising his voice and his tolerant way in correcting Iphigene (“perhaps you had better look into that a little more”), gradually influenced her girlhood and it grew as she got older to a point where people were impressed by her reasonable nature, mistaking it sometimes for timidity.

No perceptive editor on
The Times
, however, made this mistake, particularly after Ochs’s death. It was not that Iphigene Sulzberger was ever intrusive. In fact she was hardly ever seen in the newsroom and her visits to the
Times
building were usually limited to social calls to her husband’s office or to meetings of
The Times
’ board of directors. And yet the impression was shared by nearly all senior
Times
men that Iphigene, in her gentle way, her friendly hints and reminders, in her very existence as Ochs’s only offspring and the direct heir to his fortune, exerted a tremendous influence on the character of
The Times
and on the three men who had followed her father to the top—her husband Arthur Hays Sulzberger, her son-in-law Orvil Dryfoos, and finally, in 1964, her son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. She was the living link in their lives with the spirit of Ochs, and during the century she had grown from Ochs’s little princess into the grande dame of
The Times
, its good gray lady, and the editors and executives were courtly in her presence and mindful in her absence, and some of them would quote from her favorite stories or observations when they made speeches in public. One of her favorite stories that they used was the medieval tale about a
traveler who meets three stonecutters along a road one day and asks each of them what he is doing. The first stonecutter says, “I am cutting stone.” The second stonecutter, when the question is repeated, replies, “I am making a corner stone.” But when the question is asked of the third stonecutter, he answers, “I am building a cathedral.” The strength of
The New York Times
, Iphigene Sulzberger always said, lies in the fact that most of its staff are cathedral-builders, not stonecutters. And of all the cathedral-builders to join
The Times
in the last twenty-five years, perhaps her favorite was James Reston.