The Kingdom and the Power (54 page)

Now
The Times
was in the awkward position of having no family member of experience to step in as Dryfoos had stepped in for Sulzberger, or as Sulzberger had for Ochs. The selection of another son-in-law to replace Dryfoos was not possible: Richard N. Cohen, the second husband of Dr. Judith Sulzberger Cohen, the youngest of the three Sulzberger girls, was a successful insurance man; and while he served on
The Times
’ board of directors he had little interest in journalism as a career. The other son-in-law, Ben Hale Golden, husband of the Sulzbergers’ second daughter, Ruth, did have newspaper experience—he was publisher of the
Chattanooga Times
; but their marriage was going badly, and there would later be a divorce. Mrs. Golden, however, was herself mentioned in the newsroom as a possibility in New York. She was an extremely intelligent woman who wrote gracefully and had an executive background with the
Chattanooga Times
. There was also talk of John Oakes becoming the publisher, or of the publisher’s duties being shared somehow by two individuals—a family member might serve as an overseer of the business side of
The Times
, while the news side would be under an editor with close personal ties to the family. An obvious choice would be James Reston, who was a particular favorite of Iphigene Sulzberger’s.

Iphigene Sulzberger was now seventy-one, but she was as alert as ever. She was active on the board of directors—which included, in addition to the Sulzberger family, such nonfamily members as Bradford; Eugene R. Black, former head of the World Bank; and Paul Van Anda, son of Carr Van Anda. But of the directors, Iphigene Sulzberger seemed undoubtedly the most influential, especially now that her husband was in such poor health. She controlled about two-thirds of the voting stock of
The Times
. Upon her death, her father’s fortune would be divided within the family, but she was now very much alive, and while
The Times
’ official statements would continue to be made in the name of Arthur Hays
Sulzberger, the firm hand of Iphigene Sulzberger would be helping to form each word.

On June 20, a little more than three weeks after Dryfoos’ death, a statement from the office of Arthur Hays Sulzberger announced that his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, would be the publisher of
The Times
. The new publisher, at thirty-seven, was the youngest chief executive that the paper had ever had. His grandfather, Adolph Ochs, had been five months past his thirty-eighth birthday when he took over
The Times
in August of 1896.

“It can be truly said,” Arthur Hays Sulzberger stated, “that
The Times
is a family enterprise.”

T
he new publisher was a friendly, unostentatious, young man who had curly, dark hair, smoked a pipe, wore Paul Stuart suits, and always said hello to whoever was in the elevator. If he bore any physical resemblance to his distinguished-looking father, it was not obvious to those in the newsroom: he seemed more an Ochs than a Sulzberger. He had his mother’s dark penetrating eyes, and he had Adolph Ochs’s large-lobed ears that turned up at the bottom. He was of average height, square-shouldered and solidly built, yet lean enough to fit into the Marine Corps uniform that he had worn more than a decade ago, and his hair was sufficiently close-cropped to pass almost any military inspection. There was no regimental quality about him, however, not even a trace of rigidity, and in this sense he was unlike the publishers who had preceded him. Adolph Ochs had been a model of formality, a starched figure most comfortable at a distance, a self-made man of Victorian presence who rarely lowered his guard in public. While Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Orvil Dryfoos were more mellow and genteel, they were nearly always pressured by the tight strings of the title that they had acquired through marriage. Punch Sulzberger was different—he had been
born
to the title, he had grown up within
The Times
, had skipped through its corridors as a child. He was never awed by the great editors that he met there, for they had always smiled at him, seemed
happy to see him, treated him like a little prince in a palace, and he developed early in life a sunny, amiable disposition.

He had been born in New York City on February 5, 1926. His parents had then been married for nine years, had had three daughters, and it seemed likely that they might never present the sixty-seven-year-old Ochs with a male heir. Whether or not Ochs was panicked by this possibility was hard to tell. Ochs had been enchanted in 1918 by the birth of his first granddaughter, Marian (the future Mrs. Dryfoos). She had arrived during Ochs’s period of melancholia, which had deepened as
The Times
had become embroiled in controversies during World War I (the worst of which occurred in September of 1918 with the publication of the famous pro-Austria editorial that provoked charges of unpatriotism against
The Times
); but the birth of Marian on December 31, 1918, was seen by Ochs as an auspicious end to a gloomy year.

The Sulzbergers were then living in Ochs’s large, darkly ornate house at 308 West Seventy-fifth Street, and upon his return from the office in the evening Ochs would invariably slip into the baby’s nursery with his arms filled with new toys. The sounds of the baby thrilled him, the frills of the nursery contrasting cheerfully with the dim decor and statuary that cluttered the house; with only one child of his own, two having died, Ochs could not be casual about a birth in his family.

When a second granddaughter, Ruth, was born three years later on Ochs’s own birthday, March 12, it was another extraordinary occasion, and Ochs’s ritual of toys was continued, although the Sulzbergers were now occupying another residence nearby. With the birth of a third daughter, Judith, in December, 1923, the Sulzbergers had moved across Central Park into a five-story whitestone building at 5 East Eightieth Street, off Fifth Avenue. But Ochs was still a habitual visitor, and his presence was so pervasive, his affection so boundless, his possessiveness of his daughter, Iphigene, so natural, that Arthur Hays Sulzberger sometimes felt a bit out of place. Ochs was the man of the house no matter which house he was in; while his generosity was enormous, it often made the recipient feel a sense of obligation, a response that Ochs did not exactly discourage. Some of Ochs’s relatives in Chattanooga and elsewhere also had had this feeling and had quietly resented it. Iphigene was aware of this, but she was too romantic about her father to concern herself unduly about the sensitivities of his beneficiaries; although, in her husband’s case, she
tried to make the best of the situation. When her son was born in 1926, and after Ochs had gleefully announced that the boy would be spoiled rotten, she decided that his middle name would
not
be Ochs. He would instead be named Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Jr. Six months later, however, her husband persuaded her to alter it to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger—a noble gesture that Ochs appreciated.

The Sulzberger children and many of their cousins spent the summer months at Ochs’s home in Lake George, New York, and after he had sold his New York town house and had bought Hillandale, the entire family would often gather there and live in the mansion. It was a fantastic setting for children growing up—the endless rooms to romp through, the private lake, the tennis court, the sprawling lawns, the animals, the procession of distinguished visitors: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, Herbert Lehman, David Lilienthal, various musicians and artists, and also Madeleine Carroll, who was one of Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s favorite film actresses. (Madeleine Carroll’s fourth husband, incidentally, Andrew Heiskell, the
Time
executive, would in 1965 marry Sulzberger’s daughter and Dryfoos’ widow, Marian.) Of the three Sulzberger girls, Marian was often referred to by family friends as “the beautiful one,” while the second daughter, Ruth (who would become publisher of the
Chattanooga Times
after her divorce from Ben Golden), was called “the brilliant one”; and the third girl, Judith (who would become a medical doctor), was “the interesting one” and also very individualistic. Her strict French governess could not easily intimidate her, and Judith was quite frank and outspoken even as a child. One night before being put to bed in the Sulzberger home on East Eightieth Street, her parents had promised that their dinner guest, Admiral Byrd, would later come up to say good-night to her. When Admiral Byrd did appear and was introduced, the little girl, confused and obviously disappointed, turned to her parents and exclaimed, “
Byrd
!—I thought you said
Lindbergh
!” Admiral Byrd tried to seem amused.

Judith and Punch were inseparable as children, and this closeness continued through the years. Since Judith was called “Judy” at home, Arthur Hays Sulzberger began calling his son “Punch,” and the nickname was still with him when he became
The Times
’
publisher. As a youth, he had little interest in newspapers, except in the comics, which he read assiduously. Since he was not permitted to play with toy soldiers or guns as a boy—his father was a leading advocate of gun legislation—he would spend considerable time in other children’s homes playing with their toys. He was very adept at Chinese checkers, occasionally beating such opponents as Wendell Willkie and other Presidential aspirants who visited Hillandale, and he was also skillful at hobbies or games that required manual dexterity, having received special tutoring from a manual arts instructor who lived near Hillandale. He set up his own train set in the ballroom at Hillandale, enticing as playmates the young men who had come to take out his older sisters. He liked to build tables, to tinker with gadgets, to disassemble machinery, and one day while playing with a little Westchester girl Punch explained to her the mysteries of birth in simple, mechanical terms: the male inserts his organ into the female, Punch said, and then the baby inside grabs hold of it and is pulled out.

Once in school, however, Punch Sulzberger’s theories and special talents were of little use, and being unaccustomed to hard discipline, he did poorly. His sister Ruth, in a light recollection of her brother’s problems, once wrote in the newspaper’s
Times Talk
:

He, too, was amusing in later life when recalling his school days at Browning or Lawrence Smith or Loomis, or his tutoring at Morningside. But on rare occasionsm, though he tried to conceal it with his laughter and his casual manner, there was a hint of deep hurt at the dark memory of his father’s displeasure. “They sent me to St. Bernard’s, then based on the English school system, and I rebelled,” he once said. “I was a natural left-hander, but I was made to write with my right. And the result even now is that I do a lot of flipping—instead of writing ‘197’ I’ll reverse it to
‘179’ … anyway, I was at St. Bernard’s for maybe five or six years, and I still get those letters addressed ‘Old Boy.’ ” Then, lips hardening, he added quietly, “I never gave them a penny.”

In 1943, at the age of seventeen, Sulzberger left The Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut, and applied to the Marine Corps. His parents were not happy about it, but they gave their consent. While awaiting his call, he worked as a “screw and bolt” man in
The Times
’ telephoto department, displaying his great tinkerer’s enthusiasm, and then in January of 1944 he was inducted into the Marines and was trained to become a radioman. His drill instructor at Parris Island was a tough corporal named Rossides who achieved in a few weeks what a generation of educators and the
Times
family had failed to do in twelve years—Punch Sulzberger reacted immediately to orders, he kept up with his class, and he actually enjoyed the rugged life. He also enjoyed being away from home, which had provided a liberal and loving atmosphere but also much second-guessing from parents and elders: in the Marines the commands were loud and clear, and there was no doubt as to who was the boss. Sulzberger’s family connections carried no weight with Rossides, nor was Rossides swayed by Sulzberger’s boyish charm and idle promises, deceptions that had sometimes worked in private school. Decades later, when Sulzberger was
The Times
’ publisher, he would remember Corporal Rossides with gratitude and affection.

During the war, Sulzberger was sent to the Philippines, serving through the campaigns at Leyte and Luzon, and later he was transferred to Japan. He acted as a naval interceptor operator and also as a jeep driver at MacArthur’s headquarters. He was promoted to corporal, and then in the spring of 1946—on April 1, which he thought was a very appropriate date—he was released from the service and was returned to New York. One of the first things that he did was to take a high school equivalency examination so that he might qualify for college. After receiving a passing grade—“and armed with the fact that my old man was on the board at Columbia”—he entered Columbia and did very well, occasionally making the dean’s list. While a student, he married a very pretty young woman, Barbara Grant, who lived near Hillandale and had also worked as a
Times
office girl on the fourteenth floor. Married in July of 1948, they would have a son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., and a daughter, Karen Alden.