Hard News (4 page)

By the end of the 1990s, Arthur Sulzberger had solidified his position on the top of the
Times
’s hierarchy. In early 1997, he withstood a challenge from Lance Primis, the company president, who sought to become CEO, and on October 16 of that year, Sulzberger was elected to the
Times
’s board of directors and named chairman of the company. After the Times Company directors approved his new post, he was invited into the company’s boardroom on the fourteenth floor of the
Times
’s headquarters. Punch got out of the chair at the head of the table and invited his son to take the seat.

“If you think I’m sitting in that chair, you’re nuts,” Sulzberger said. He made his first brief remarks as chairman while standing.

Sulzberger would not inherit his father’s third title, that of chief executive officer. Instead, he and Punch worked to install a governing structure whereby the Times Company would hire a nonfamily member as CEO, but that person would report to the company’s chairman instead of to the board. This was a reflection of how the company had actually been run when Punch had held all three titles; first Walter Mattson and then Primis had essentially served as CEOs, which had helped assuage the business community’s fears about Punch’s managerial bona fides. Sulzberger hired Russ Lewis, who had started his career at the
Times
as a copyboy before working in the legal department, as head of the circulation and production departments and as the president of the
Times.

On the afternoon Punch passed the torch to his son, he was feted in an impromptu newsroom ceremony. Joseph Lelyveld, the paper’s executive editor, noted that three things made that day, October 16, 1997, a landmark one. For the first time in its history, the
Times
had run color photos on its front page. Second, at 138 pages, that edition of the paper was the largest daily
Times
in history. And third, the paper had its first chairman emeritus.

Punch, from the sidelines, chimed in. “There are four things,” he said. “The stock is at an all-time high.” It was intended as a lighthearted comment, but it also hinted at the intense pressure on the company to prove to the business world that continued family ownership would result not only in a superior product but in sizable profits as well. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. made it clear that he too understood those pressures. “The most important partnership in this institution is the relationship between the family and the non-family management,” he said in an interview that day. His ascension, he said, and the promotion of Russ Lewis to the chief executive’s office, “continue on a corporate level the partnership that allows this institution to survive.”

“This place doesn’t run like a family fiefdom,” says Lewis. “It’s got the best of both worlds: the constancy of purpose that Arthur and the family have given it for over a hundred years, and the accountability of a public company.”

The day after Punch stepped down, the
Times
’s two-thousand-word, front-page account of the passing of the generational torch made note of Sulzberger’s unique place in American journalism. “His action,”
Times
reporter Clyde Haberman wrote of Punch’s decision to name his son chairman of the Times Company, “affirmed that in a troubled age for American newspapers, when many of them worry about their future and are increasingly governed by distant corporate boards, control of The Times would remain with the Sulzberger family, the paper’s guiding force for 101 years.”

T
HE
P
RINCE

If the Sulzbergers are, as some writers have noted, the closest thing America has to a royal family (when Prince Charles visited the country in 1988, he invited Arthur, along with Don Graham, the heir to
The Washington Post,
to dinner because he thought they’d best understand his position), then Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. is its crown prince and one who has endured a lifetime of royal-level scrutiny. He’s rarely addressed it publicly, but Sulzberger finds the examination of every aspect of his life intrusive. The few times he’s spoken of the microscope under which he often finds himself, he’s made his annoyance clear. Take one incident in 2000, when Sulzberger visited Harvard to speak at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. The center is run by Alex Jones, who, in addition to co-authoring
The Trust,
wrote about the media for the
Times
from 1983 to 1992 and won a 1987 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

At the beginning of the talk, Sulzberger made a reference to his alma mater. “By the way, if you want a more full account of my days at Tufts, you can consult a book,
The Trust,
which was co-authored by our host, Alex Jones,” he said, and then added dryly, “I do, however, wonder why anyone—other than my wife and children, perhaps my father—would have any interest in such an incredibly dull topic.” This remark, a message of frustration cloaked in the guise of a quip, was typical of Sulzberger, who often tries for humor, only to sound either glib or slightly harsh. He had already complained about the book to his friends.
The Trust,
he said, delved too deeply into his family’s personal history, their frustrated marriages and intergenerational tensions.

A lifelong New Yorker, Arthur Sulzberger is a boyish-looking fifty-three-year-old, an avid outdoorsman and frequent rock climber. He likes to take off on weekend motorcycle trips or self-styled “Rambo” excursions. He’s infamous for speaking off-the-cuff and for making outrageous and inappropriate comments.
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A child of the 1960s and 1970s, Sulzberger seems to have a mystical side, and, besides the
Times,
the organization with which he feels the most kinship is Outward Bound.

But for him, as with his father and great-grandfather, the
Times
has always come first. Indeed, Sulzberger has spent his entire life, in one way or another, auditioning to run the
Times.
After graduating from Tufts University in 1974, he went to North Carolina to work for
The Raleigh Times.
His apprenticeship at
The New York Times
can be traced back eight years before that, when he moved out of his mother’s New York City apartment and in with his father. One reason for the move was Sulzberger’s mother’s tense second marriage. But “the more compelling motivation for Arthur Jr.’s decision,” wrote Tifft and Jones, “was his desire to become better acquainted with his father and to claim his rightful place in the extended Sulzberger clan, in which he had begun to feel like an outsider.”

Early on, Sulzberger yearned for validation from Punch, but that validation was slow in coming. He was an awkward and shy child. While working as a reporter at
The Raleigh Times,
he would send clips to Seymour Topping, a
Times
editor in New York, suggesting he could show the better ones to his father. In 1976, when Sulzberger and his wife, Gail Gregg, moved to London, Sulzberger secured a job at the Associated Press and Gregg applied for one at United Press International. Punch, in his recommendation for Gregg, initially wrote, “We think she is smarter than he is,” before his secretary told him he couldn’t possibly say such a thing.

Sulzberger’s sense that he was never quite able to satisfy his father had led to his lifelong struggle to prove himself. Whereas Punch had been content to stay in the background, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was the opposite—not only did he think his father was sometimes too passive, he seemed to need to remind people constantly how talented and important he himself was.

It became clear quite soon after Sulzberger assumed the position of publisher that he had a very different management style from his father’s. To begin with, there was his personal approach: Punch is often painfully modest, even self-effacing. Arthur, it was quickly noted, wasn’t nearly as demure about his ambitions or as shy about his accomplishments. He struck some as headstrong and impetuous, even offensive.

And unlike his father, Sulzberger wanted his presence to be felt. In December 1992, less than a year after he was appointed publisher, he immediately set about changing the working culture inside the newsroom. He has often professed to have a philosophical belief in teamwork and open communication, and he made it clear that he wanted the
Times
to be a more fluid organization. Sulzberger’s attempts to make the newsroom less autocratic and hierarchical met with mixed results. During his first year, Sulzberger held retreats in which facilitators bandied around terms like “change agent.” One series of management seminars was the subject of a lengthy and unflattering magazine story. “Sulzberger . . . is impatient with the resistance he sometimes encounters,” Ken Auletta wrote in the June 28, 1993, issue of
The New Yorker.
“He wants more minority employees in executive positions. He wants more women in executive positions. He wants a less authoritarian newsroom and a business side that is more nimble. He wants each member of the staff to feel ‘empowered’ as part of a team.” “Some would argue that fear is an inherent by-product of any structure based in hierarchy,” Sulzberger told Auletta. “I can’t swear that’s true, but I suspect it is. And if it’s true our course is clear. For
The New York Times
to become all it can be and for it to flourish in the years ahead, we must reduce our dependency on hierarchy in decision making of every sort.” Needless to say, though, wishing your staff would feel “empowered” and actually having them feel so are two different things, and
The New York Times
’s senior staff was generally not impressed by Sulzberger’s rhetoric.

In 1994, two years after becoming publisher, Sulzberger had to make his first big appointment, when Max Frankel, the paper’s executive editor, retired. Sulzberger had little choice but to promote the fifty-seven-year-old managing editor, Joe Lelyveld, a cerebral man who also felt that Sulzberger’s retreats were simplistic and belittling to Frankel.
^*15
Despite Lelyveld’s deserved reputation for aloofness, he managed to improve morale during his tenure. Frankel, who had run the
Times
’s Sunday paper and editorial page before being named executive editor, had installed a tier of assistant managing editors—known as “the masthead,” because these positions were listed on the editorial page under the executive and managing editors—between himself and the desk editors who ran the newsroom departments. “When you run a desk, you have real power,” says Soma Golden Behr, who was the paper’s national editor before being promoted to the masthead by Max Frankel. “When you go on the masthead, all your power is derivative. It all depends on the boss. Max gave each masthead editor a few departments to worry about, which means they would serve as a kind of rabbi.” Lelyveld, by actively promoting strong desk editors, assembled a cadre of talented desk heads during his eight-year tenure, including Jon Landman on metro, Mike Oreskes in Washington, Bill Keller on foreign, Dean Baquet on national, and John Geddes and Glenn Kramon on business. In returning authority to the desk editors, Lelyveld made the paper’s reporters feel as if they were involved more intimately with shaping the daily report, but in the process he disenfranchised and alienated the masthead.

Lelyveld also coaxed Gene Roberts, the retired editor of
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
to serve as his managing editor for a couple of years, knowing he’d reach the paper’s mandatory retirement age before Lelyveld and therefore wouldn’t be in the running to be the paper’s next editor. (Roberts is a newsroom legend: After a stint as national editor at the
Times,
he was named executive editor of the
Inquirer
in 1972. In his eighteen years at the helm of the paper, the
Inquirer
won seventeen Pulitzer Prizes; since he retired, it has won one.) Roberts in particular viewed the
Times
’s masthead as being basically worthless, and he made no secret about his views.

“Joe didn’t use the masthead well,” says Behr. “It was a very frustrating time.” In 1997, Gene Roberts retired and returned to the University of Maryland to teach journalism. Lelyveld chose Bill Keller as Roberts’s successor. Keller, who had been the paper’s South African bureau chief when Lelyveld took over the
Times,
had been an editor for only two years, since Lelyveld and Roberts appointed him foreign editor in 1995. But Lelyveld felt Keller was a naturally gifted editor, responsive to reporters and skilled at sniffing out good stories.

As Lelyveld was reorganizing the newsroom, Sulzberger was imagining the
Times
’s future and was eager to move forward with his plan to make the
Times
“platform agnostic.” As well as Arthur Sulzberger seemed to be settling into his new role, he was still missing something. Sulzberger wanted a partner. He wanted an executive editor who shared his vision, his ambition, his desire to shake off the cobwebs and make the
Times
a publication reborn. Sulzberger’s relationship with Lelyveld was less than ideal—Sulzberger sometimes felt Lelyveld wasn’t moving quickly enough, and Lelyveld and some of his top editors occasionally worried that Sulzberger’s investments in new technologies were drawing needed resources from the newsroom. So when, in early 2001, Joe Lelyveld told Sulzberger he was planning on retiring in September, about a year ahead of schedule (he wouldn’t turn sixty-six until April 5, 2003), he did so hoping his protégé, Bill Keller, would replace him. Sulzberger, however, had other ideas. He had already found his editor, one who shared his bold vision and his conviction that the
Times
should be shaken up, and it was not the mild-mannered Keller. His name was Howell Raines.