4

The editors in the newsroom, having heard from their correspondents that the world today was in its usual state of greed and disorder, confusion and apathy, were now preparing to attend the news conference and relay the information to Daniel. Daniel would take it all very calmly, they knew, and within an hour the conference would be over, and within a few hours the news would be printed, and then most Timesmen would go home and forget about it, knowing that in the morning it would all come out neatly and tidily in The Times.

They regarded The Times as one of the few predictable things left in modern America and they accepted this fact with degrees of admiration and cynicism, seeing The Times with a varying vision: it was a daily miracle, it was a formula factory. But no matter. It was The Times. And each day, barring labor strikes or hydrogen bombs, it would appear in 11,464 cities around the nation and in all the capitals of the world, fifty copies going to the White House, thirty-nine copies to Moscow, a few smuggled into Peking, and a thick Sunday edition flown each weekend to a foreign minister in Taiwan, for which he would each time pay $16.40. He would pay this because, with thousands of other isolated men in all corners of the earth, he required The Times as necessary proof of the world’s existence, a barometer of its pressure, an assessor of its sanity. If the world did indeed still exist, he knew, it would be duly recorded each day in The Times—as the world was in the process of being recorded on this particular afternoon in New York, June 23, 1966, at three minutes before four, in The Times’ massive Gothic gray-stone building off Broadway at Forty-third Street.

At this moment there were approximately four thousand employees working within the fourteen-story building. They were receptionists and telephone operators, printers and photoengravers, map makers, cafeteria cooks, nurses, editorial writers. Most of them had been in the building since 9 or 10 a.m., arriving as big trucks were backed into the curb unloading dozens of huge rolls of paper that went bumping, thumping down into The Times’ basement and into machines whose paper consumption each year devours more than five million trees.

Of The Times’ complete roster of 5,307 employees, only seven hundred work within the News department on the third floor. They are editors, reporters, copyreaders, critics, news assistants, and they tend to think of themselves as the totality of The Times, its embodiment and only spirit. If they do not completely ignore such other large departments within the building as Production, Promotion, and Advertising, they acknowledge them with a certain condescension. This is particularly true with regard to the Advertising department, which, after all, deals directly and constantly with that most contaminating of commodities, money. It hires hundreds of men to sell what in the News department cannot be bought. It exists as the mundane side of Ochs’s sanctuary.

In the beginning Adolph Ochs was fundamentally a businessman. Later he became much more than that, but without his uncanny business sense he could not have taken over the declining Times in 1896 and revived it, an achievement accomplished by such expedient if inglorious tactics as price-cutting. Ochs in 1898 reduced the price of The Times from three cents a copy, which is what most respectable journals were then charging, to one cent, which was the standard price of the more sensational sheets. Ochs’s associates thought that he was making a major mistake, cheapening The Times’ image without solving its financial problems. Ochs disagreed. The New York Times would not diminish in character, only in price, he said, adding that great numbers of bargain-conscious New Yorkers might switch from the cheaper papers to The Times if the price were the same.

That his assumption was correct was apparent within a year, when The Times’ circulation had tripled, advertising revenue poured in. And by 1915 Ochs’s paper was rich and powerful enough to select and reject advertisers and to eliminate certain ads when more space was needed in the paper for late-breaking news. Such prerogatives, which would quite naturally breed pride and pretension within the News department, were highlights in the career of Adolph Ochs, allowing him to satisfy a duality of drives—he could, under one roof, run both a thriving business and a theocracy, but there must be no intermingling, he knew: they must function separately on different floors; the money changers must stay out of his temple. He meanwhile, financially solid and rising socially, responded to the higher call, never succumbing to such circulation gimmicks as comic strips in his newspaper (although comics were tolerated in his first newspaper, the Chattanooga Times, and still are); and following his death, history would not place Adolph Ochs with so many of his landsmen, those great businessmen, the merchant princes who became bankers—Ochs would be in the more stately company of noble servants.

Still, Ochs never left his store untended, and now in the summer of 1966 the man in charge of making money for The Times was an all-business, no-nonsense type named Monroe Green. Green, who is sixty, sits behind a busy desk in his big office on the second floor, directing the 350-man department that brings in more than $100 million a year by selling ads. A full-page advertisement costs roughly $5,500 in the weekday edition, and $7,000 on Sundays, and the revenue derived from advertising is three times what the paper earns from its circulation sale and its other business ventures combined.

Monroe Green is a big, dark, wavy-haired man who wears sharply tailored dark suits, gleaming cufflinks, white or silvery ties. He speaks quickly, forcefully into a red telephone that rings incessantly on his desk, and he keeps a thousand facts at his manicured, tapping fingertips. He has been on The Times for twenty-five years as an advertising man, before that was on the advertising staffs of the Herald Tribune and the Journal-American, and before that was advertising manager of Macy’s department store, to which he had gone after working his way through the University of Pennsylvania. The luxurious world that is portrayed each day in the advertisements of The Times, the romping happy people off to Europe on holiday, the slim mannequins wearing mink or Tiffany gems, resembles not in the least the world that Green knew most of his life. His father, who ran a small clothing store in South Amboy, New Jersey, died when Green, an only child, was ten years old, and while he can be light-hearted and pleasant, he is more naturally a serious man, a hardened realist, one not easily affected by the airy dreams of his ads.

From his office window he can see the street and a wino sleeping on a stone step behind an old theater. Green can faintly hear the horns of a traffic jam that will inevitably attract a mounted policeman who will inevitably notice press cars or trucks parked illegally but will give out no tickets, knowing that he will park his horse in The Times’ enclosure behind the loading ramps later in the day. Green can feel the vibrations of the press machinery below and sense the power of The Times in ways quite different from Clifton Daniel on the floor above, and his view of life is certainly different from that of the editorial writers on the tenth floor who, within their quiet retreats, write of lofty expectations and ideals that sometimes irritate Green. He remembers one morning when he read a Times editorial critical of the new luxury-apartment skyscrapers being built along the Hudson River, on the New Jersey side a mile south of the George Washington Bridge; the buildings as seen by The Times’ editorial writer were a desecration to the natural beauty of that section of the Jersey cliffs. But Green did not agree—and besides, he had recently sold the builders and owners of the apartments, the Tishman Realty & Construction Company, a $50,000 advertising supplement that had just appeared in The Times praising the project. The Tishman family would be most unhappy about that editorial, Green knew, sitting at his desk expecting a call from them at any moment. They might even wish to withdraw future advertising, which is not an uncommon reaction among some big-business men when a Times article or editorial offends them. A cigarette manufacturer boycotted the Advertising department after a Times editorial dealt with smoking and lung cancer, and this cost the paper several thousand dollars. But with the possible exception of Green, no executive at The Times really cared. When The New York Times cares about what its advertisers think, a few executives have said, it will no longer be The New York Times.

While this is true, Green nonetheless quietly resents the cavalier attitude of a few of his Times colleagues on the floors above, suspecting that their approach to the business side of the paper might also be a reflection of the way they secretly feel about him. He is as aware as they of The Times’ magnetic appeal, but he also believes that it is not this magnetism alone that attracts more than $100 million a year in advertising revenue—Green had something to do with this, his drive, his determination, and that of his staff. It is they who bring in the money that permits piety to reign among the ten wisemen who write editorials on the tenth floor, and it is this money too that permits reporters on the third floor to place a telephone call to Cambodia if necessary to check a single fact. Green also feels that the advertising, though it is paid for by partisans, still provides legitimate news to Times readers. It not only tells what is selling and where, but it also gives a daily portrait of the nation’s economy, an insight into contemporary taste. The ads offer a second perspective on the day, proof that the world is not entirely preoccupied with poverty and threats, bombs and ashes. The pretty girl in the ad wearing a Peck & Peck dress, the man inhaling a mild luxury-length Pall Mall, both offer Times readers an indulgent pause between the gray columns of gravity. And the historians fifty years from now, Green suspects, when they want to know how people lived and dreamed in the Nineteen-sixties, will get as many clues from reading the ads as reading the news. Of course the advertising will stress the positive, the news the negative. The truth will be somewhere in between.

The news of this day in June focused on the “long hot summer,” the race riots in Mississippi; the ads highlighted the summer bargains—Macy’s mink stoles, regularly $299, were down to $236. The news singled out the vast problem of unemployment; the help-wanted ads were jammed with job offers for the skilled and unskilled. The news stressed the shortage of housing; the ads emphasized the availability of housing at all prices around New York, praising the neighborhoods without hinting at the discrimination that exists in these neighborhoods. The news was concentrated on fame and power, grand success and grand failure; the ads catered to the everyday dreams of Everyman, the attainable sweet life, the gadgets and vehicles of escape.

The ads recorded the average man’s tragedies, too, but only in the smallest print in the back of the newspaper, back between the stock-market listings and the bland photographs of executives on the rise—here, buried near the bottom, one could read in tiny type the names of those who had gone bankrupt, those who had been abandoned, those who had lost something including dreams and sought recovery, and they told this to The Times. The Times would publish this, charging a few dollars a line, within its classified-advertising pages—a special department on the sixth floor of the Times building largely staffed by middle-aged women who sit within glass-partitioned cubicles, telephones to their ears, jotting down the forlorn facts of daily life, and then they relay these facts, if they are not too vulgar or vengeful, to the composing room on the fourth floor, where they are methodically set into type for the Public Notices column of the next edition of The Times.

Today The Times would announce the fact that Jean Pompilio, sales girl, 89-01 Shore Road, Brooklyn, had gone bankrupt, her liabilities being $15,251, her assets $1,275. Today Edward Dougherty, 89-36 207th Street, Queens, would declare in The Times that his wife, Florence, “having left my bed and board several months ago,” was now completely responsible for her own debts; he would pay no longer. Today the wife of a runaway husband would plead in The Times: “Len W.—Elizabeth and I are alone and lost. We know you feel our pain and tears. We have nothing without you. Please hurry home.” A Manhattan woman on the East Side, upset because she had misplaced her favorite watch, called The Times and announced: “1 Patek Philippe square shaped gold watch, white & yellow gold band. Liberal reward. RH 4-2765.”

The watch was never returned, so the East Side lady soon purchased another one, and not another Patek Philippe, but this was not news for The Times. The whereabouts of Len W. and Florence Dougherty would not be followed up in The Times either, nor would Times readers ever know the precise circumstances that caused Jean Pompilio, sales girl, to fall $14,000 into debt. If asked to discuss her financial plight she will not do so, it is nobody’s business, she will say. It is not news. News, to The Times’ editors on the third floor, is composed of significant current events that you did not know and should know. News, in the world of Monroe Green, is the drumbeat of business with an emphasis on the upbeat, success, comfort, enchantment. It is news to Green that B. Altman & Co.’s shoe salon has an “exciting op-art pump” for $41, that J. Press Inc. has jackets of weightless Vycron Polyester Cotton Collie Cloth with patch and flap lower pockets, hook vent, washable, dryfast; that Eastern Airlines has nonstop jet service to San Antonio. It is news to Green that “Coppertone gives you a better tan!” and illustrating this point in the ad is a big tawny photograph of Raquel Welch in a bikini, a Playboy pose that raised the eyebrows but not the objections of The Times’ Advertising Acceptability department, which has become more liberal in recent years. These men, who work with Green but not under him, reject advertisements dealing with fortune-telling and horoscopes, miracle medicines, and speculative investments in mines, and they generally tone down the wording in ads to avoid overstatement—“the best buy in town” becomes “one of the best buys,” and “the finest coat we have ever seen” “the finest coat we have ever sold.” They will not permit advertisements in a foreign language unless the English translation is included, and they are quick to turn down advertising copy that is too sexually suggestive or tasteless. They disallow nudes in ads except in the case of children, but they will permit the scantiest of bikinis in ads for tropical islands and suntan lotions and soap—The Times, one executive explained, now accepts the fact that women have navels. Which is good news to Green, and he has since made a fortune for The Times from the ads of ladies’ panties and bras, particularly in the Sunday Times Magazine, which has been called the “Girdle Gazette.” It was rare insight on Green’s part to recognize the commercial possibilities of selling ladies’ clothing within a magazine noted for its weighty content, its articles on the Common Market, famine in India, dilemmas in Washington; but Green knew that the Sunday Times, with its circulation of more than 1.4 million, was browsed through by as many women as men, and the improved color process for advertising gave him an added incentive for turning part of the Magazine into a flamboyant leaping ladies’ locker room which, while it sometimes stole scenes from the foreign ministers photographed on the facing pages, actually gave bounce to the product, a recurring stimulant that seemed to unite within the pages these men who were ideologically different.

Monroe Green and The New York Times—the combination can sell almost anything, and it was quite natural that Green, hearing of Tishman’s skyscraper apartments along the Hudson, would approach his friend Alan Tishman and suggest that he purchase advertising space that would call attention to the construction and would lure tenants. Tishman agreed, and the $50,000 advertising supplement was put together. Then came The Times’ editorial condemning the Tishman construction, and now Monroe Green sat in his office awaiting Alan Tishman’s call. There was little that Green could do. It had been a most unfortunate editorial but it was too late to do anything about it. Personally, Green did not believe, as the editorial writer did, that the skyscrapers marred the natural beauty of the New Jersey cliffs along the Hudson River. The land used by the Tishmans was not a historical landmark or sanctified preserve, Green reasoned, it was almost the opposite—grim acres of weeds and shanties and untrimmed trees, and the construction of apartment houses there, Green thought, was more an improvement than anything else. But Green had no influence with editorial writers. He was not even sure who had written about the site, each editorial being written anonymously by one of the ten-man Editorial Board, but Green knew who was responsible for having it written. He was John Oakes, the editor of the editorial page, an individual widely known throughout the building and beyond as a zealous conservationist, one almost obsessed with the defense of trees and streams and mountains against the intrusion of land developers. Oakes was a high-minded person with almost an abhorrence of money and the profit motive, and once he even denounced the gold-tinted aluminum telephone booths along Fifth Avenue, declaring in an editorial that “the bogus opulence of golden phone booths and golden trash cans … merely detracts from the integrity of the avenue.”

Of the men with power on The Times, perhaps no two have less in common than Monroe Green and John Oakes. Oakes is a tweedy man in his fifties with tight curly white hair, pale blue eyes, a very youthful but serious face; he is a Princeton graduate who became a Rhodes scholar. Oakes has strong opinions on almost everything and, more important, his opinions dominate the editorial page of the paper. While it is true that he does not expect his editorial writers to espouse causes with which they do not agree, it is also true that he does not expect them to espouse causes with which he does not agree. If their views conflict with his, they are not published. If they are consistently in disagreement with him on the major political, social, or economic issues of the day, they are wise to consider transferring to another part of the paper because Oakes insists, as any editorial-page editor must, on a consistent and unified policy harmonious with his own views and with those of the publisher, to whom Oakes is responsible.

The editorial page, Oakes believes, is the “soul” of a newspaper, a reflection of its inner character and philosophy, and since he took over the page at The Times in 1961 that character and philosophy has been more vividly revealed than ever before. It has been condemning of the war in Vietnam, staunch in its support of the Civil Rights movement. It has been generally pro-Labor but critical of such leaders as James Hoffa and the late Michael Quill, a supporter of Israel in wars with the Arabs but critical of some Israeli territorial ambitions and actions following the victories. Though endorsing John F. Kennedy for President, it became disenchanted later when Kennedy did not, in Oakes’s opinion, fulfill his promise with the Federal Aid to Education Bill, and as the editorial sniping continued on this and other issues during the Kennedy years many family members and friends of the President came to detest John Oakes more and more, charging that the negativism was really a manifestation of a deep personal disaffection that Oakes had cultivated during Kennedy’s earlier years in the Senate.

It was Oakes, a few of them suspected, who helped spread the rumor in late 1957 that Kennedy was not the sole author of Profiles in Courage. Oakes actually played no part in the spreading of this rumor. The man most responsible was probably Drew Pearson, who made the charge on an ABC television show, causing the network to follow up with an investigation that could not produce sufficient evidence to justify the charge, and ABC later publicly apologized to Kennedy. All that Oakes did was to inquire of an editor whom he met at a social gathering, a Harper editor who had worked with Kennedy on the book, if there was any substance to the rumor that Theodore Sorensen, or some other Kennedy associate, had helped with the writing. The editor denied it, and that was the end of it as far as Oakes was concerned. But some weeks later, while John Oakes was in Washington on one of his regular visits to various Congressmen, he was greeted in Kennedy’s office with a long hard look from the Senator: then Kennedy lifted from his desk a letter and handed it to John Oakes, saying, “I’ll give this to you now rather than send it to you.” The letter began, “Dear John: It recently came to my attention that you had been quoted as stating that the rumors concerning my authorship of Profiles in Courage were true.” The letter, 300 words in length, went on to state unequivocally that no other author had collaborated on the work, and after Oakes had finished reading the letter Kennedy wanted to further prove the point by having Oakes examine stacks of notes in Kennedy’s own handwriting that formed the book. Oakes assured Kennedy that this was unnecessary and soon they were discussing other things, but Oakes was most impressed with the time and effort that Kennedy was devoting to the refutation of the rumor, and Oakes concluded on this January day in 1958 that Kennedy now had serious plans for the Presidency. Later, in New York, Oakes received a copy of Profiles in Courage from Kennedy; it was inscribed: “To John Oakes—with high esteem and very best wishes from his friend—the author—John Kennedy.”

The deferential treatment accorded John Oakes by ambitious men outside the Times building as well as within is not based entirely on his position as editor of the editorial page, as prestigious as this may be; also involved is the fact that Oakes is a member of The Times’ ruling family. His father, who altered his surname in 1917, was a brother of Adolph Ochs. The name change by George Ochs to George “Ochs-Oakes,” with the stipulation that his sons be known as “Oakes,” was inspired by an intense anti-German feeling during World War I and by a belief that a decidedly German name such as Ochs would be considered repellent by Americans for many years to come. This opinion was certainly not shared by other members of the Ochs family in Chattanooga or New York. They were in fact insulted by George’s presumption, but on second thought they were not altogether surprised. They had always looked upon George Ochs as something of a maverick within the family, an unpredictable and complex person who sought his own identity and fulfillment beyond the pale of indebtedness and yet he could not or would not permanently leave the guaranteed grandeur provided by his older brother Adolph.

Adolph Ochs was three years older than George, the first in a family of three sons and three daughters. They were a remarkable combination of conflicting character, of strong dissent nearly always overcome by a stronger devotion to each other; they were the progeny of German Jews who had met and married in the American South before the Civil War, parents whose political allegiances clashed during the war—their father, Julius Ochs, was a captain in the Union Army; their mother, Bertha Ochs, was loyal to the South and was accused, with some justification, of being a Confederate spy. Their family may well have been separated in later years if Adolph, the child genius, had not at the age of twenty begun to buy and build newspapers that would become towering totems of nepotism, elevating and shaping his family, his grandchildren, nephews, cousins, and in-laws for almost an entire century, committing them to an orthodoxy stronger than their religion—and establishing Adolph Ochs as their benefactor, a little father-figure even to his own father.

Julius Ochs, who immigrated to America in 1845, was a wise and well-educated man of many talents, but making money was not one of them. He was a fine guitar player, an amateur actor, a classically educated student of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and fluent in English, French, and Italian. He had been born in 1826 in the Bavarian city of Fürth, in southwest Germany, a cultured and relatively tolerant city with a large Jewish community that, while well respected, was denied certain civil rights and privileges. These restrictions, however, did not apply to Julius Ochs’s family, which had lived and prospered in Fürth for several generations. In the old Jewish cemetery in Fürth there were tombstones of Ochses going back to 1493. Julius Ochs’s father had been a successful diamond broker, also a linguist and Talmudic scholar, and his mother was a handsome and refined woman who had nine children, Julius being the youngest. During Julius’ second year at a military academy in Cologne his father died and Julius’ older brother, becoming head of the family, withdrew him and placed him in an apprenticeship with a bookbinding firm. Julius rebelled and in the spring of 1845 he left Fürth with a friend, tramped to Bremen, and sailed on a full-rigged ship across the Atlantic, arriving seven weeks later in New York. He first settled in Louisville, where two of his sisters were living and where a brother-in-law, refusing to subsidize Julius’ reentry into college, put him to work as a peddler. He soon quit that and later found a job teaching French at a girls’ seminary at Mount Sterling, Kentucky. When war was declared against Mexico in 1848, Julius Ochs enlisted and, because of his military background in Germany, was made a drill sergeant, but the war ended before his unit was sent to the front. He spent the next several years trying to find work that would suit his intellectuality and wistful idealism and curb his restlessness, but he never found it, being neither very determined nor very lucky, and so his life was one of travel and variety between New York and New Orleans. He was a road salesman for a jewelry company, owned and operated dry-goods stores, organized small theatrical clubs; he dabbled in small-town politics and held municipal government jobs; he occasionally served as a rabbi in marriage ceremonies, and during his ventures into Mississippi he played the guitar at plantation parties. In Natchez, Mississippi, where he briefly settled and ran a store, he met an attractive, somewhat dogmatic young woman named Bertha Levy.

Born in Landau, Bavaria, she was then living with an uncle in Natchez, having been sent there by her father so that she could escape prosecution from German authorities following her role, while she was a sixteen-year-old student in Heidelberg, in political demonstrations at the graves of several martyrs of the revolutionary uprisings of 1848. Julius Ochs met her in 1851 but his stay in Mississippi was too brief for any romance to flourish, and three years later, during the yellow-fever epidemic in the Mississippi valley, he read in a newspaper list of the dead the name Bertha Levy of Natchez. Two years later, at a reception in Nashville, Tennessee, he saw her again; yes, she had been very ill, she said, but as a final desperate attempt to save her life the doctors had resorted to ice-packing, and now she was fully recovered and living in Nashville with her parents, recently immigrated from Bavaria. Within a year, Bertha Levy and Julius Ochs were married. Three years later, in March of 1858, in Cincinnati, where Julius Ochs was based as a traveling salesman, was born the future publisher of The New York Times, Adolph Ochs.

Julius Ochs joined the Union Army when the Civil War began, becoming a captain in a battalion assigned to guard the railroad between Cincinnati and St. Louis. His wife stayed with him during the war but she remained intensely loyal to the South. On one occasion a warrant for her arrest was issued after she had been caught by Union sentries while attempting to smuggle quinine, hidden in the baby carriage of her infant son George, to Confederate troops positioned on the opposite end of a bridge across the Ohio River. This put Captain Ochs in a most embarrassing and crucial situation, requiring of him a performance far more persuasive than any he had been able to demonstrate during his career as a salesman; but he somehow managed to get a senior officer whom he knew to dismiss the warrant, an act of generosity that inspired no sign of gratitude from Mrs. Ochs. She persisted in her dedication to the Southern cause and way of life, being unappalled even by its system of slavery, and years later when the family settled in Chattanooga she became a charter member of the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Before her death, which came in 1908 during her seventy-fifth year, she requested that a Confederate flag be placed on her coffin, and this was done. Next to her grave, on a knoll overlooking the city of Chattanooga, is that of her husband; he died in 1888 in that city and, as he instructed, his funeral was conducted by the Grand Army of the Republic with the Stars and Stripes placed on his coffin.

Such displayed partisanship and commitment to causes, particularly to lost causes, never enticed their son Adolph. He was a hard worker, an unfanciful middle-of-the-road thinker who saw no virtue in offending one faction to please another. He wished to do business with all groups, offending as few people as possible. He was a truly precocious young man who recognized early the aimless, varied course of his father’s life, and he set out to concentrate on one thing, to stay with it, succeed with it. This vehicle for him was the newspaper business, which promised some of the prestige and excitement that he sought, and an opportunity to follow in the tradition of his boyhood hero, Horace Greeley, who rose from a farm in New Hampshire to the ownership of the New York Tribune.

Ochs began at fourteen by sweeping the floors of the Knoxville Chronicle. Three years before he had been a newsboy at the Chronicle but had left to earn a bit more money as an apprentice in a drugstore, then as an usher in a theater, finally as a clerk in his uncle’s grocery in Providence, Rhode Island, attending business school at night. He was bored by these jobs, experiencing none of the exuberance he had felt during his newsboy days at the Chronicle office; and so in 1872, when he applied to the Chronicle for a fulltime job, and was hired as an office boy, he decided that newspapers would be his life’s calling and his parents did not attempt to dissuade him. Ochs’s nature, combining the idealism of his father and the chutzpa of his mother, seemed well suited to the running of a newspaper. It might have led him into politics, where he could have fulfilled some of the social-worker spirit within him, but the spotlight would have distracted him and overemphasized the awkwardness he felt whenever undue attention was focused on him. He was acutely aware of his limitations, both educationally and socially, and he was forced to compensate in an endless variety of ways even after he had achieved greatness at The New York Times, or possibly because he had achieved this greatness. He would usually smile or grin after delivering a comment or observation to his editors so that, should it seem inane or be in some way wrong, it might appear that his words were not really meant to be taken all that seriously. At times his grammar was faulty, his words poorly chosen, but he balanced this by an enthusiasm for detail and an enormous sympathy and tolerance for subject. His mind was always quietly at work challenging the obvious, and this was true even when he was driving through the countryside and stopped to ask directions; he never accepted the directions without asking if he could not also get to the same place by taking a different route. He was both cautious and optimistic, sentimental and tough, a short, dark-haired, blue-eyed little man who, when someone observed that he resembled Napoleon, replied, “Oh, I am very much taller than Napoleon,” and yet he was very humble. He was a modest organizer of grand designs, possessing a sure insight into human nature and into what would sell, and still he was dedicated to the old verities that in another age would mark him as “square.” But he truly believed that honesty was the best policy, and he honored his father and mother and was never blasphemous, and he was convinced that hard work would reap rewards.

Shortly after his debut as an office boy on the Knoxville Chronicle, Ochs was promoted to printers’ apprentice, learning a skill that would become a hallmark on the papers he would own, and this would also make him a printers’ hero throughout his later years and even decades after his death—in the Nineteen-sixties, during a newspaper strike in New York, picket lines of printers would respectfully part ranks, forming a path whenever Ochs’s white-haired daughter, Iphigene, then in her seventies, would approach the front entrance of The New York Times building.

When Adolph Ochs was eighteen, he was setting type for the Louisville Courier-Journal, living with cousins and sending his savings to his family in Knoxville, and working during his spare hours as a part-time reporter, proving to be a dull writer but a very reliable gatherer of facts. When he was nineteen he and two older men obtained an interest in a failing newspaper, the Chattanooga Dispatch, which they could not revive, but it provided for Ochs an introduction to a new city, one that was on the brink of a building boom, which Ochs sensed, and thus he stayed.

Chattanooga, whose ridges and plateaus had been singed and scarred by the cannons and rifle fire of thousands of battling troops during the Civil War, had a population in 1865 of less than 2,000 but this had grown to 12,000 when Ochs arrived in 1877. There had been rumors of iron ore in the mountains, and now the dirt roads were being covered with planks, and stores and homes were being built; there was an atmosphere of optimism, a promise of prosperity among the new settlers. There were no telephones or information centers in Chattanooga then, and newly arrived strangers seeking information had to ask around—until Adolph Ochs came up with the idea of printing a city directory. In it he listed every store in Chattanooga, its location and the type of merchandise it sold, and in the process of collecting this information he walked back and forth through every block in the city, getting to know the merchants, politicians, bankers—people who would be very helpful and useful when, one year later, in 1878, he needed a loan and advertising support to buy and rebuild the Chattanooga Times. The Times was then a mismanaged four-page paper so poorly printed as to be almost illegible, with a declining circulation and little hope of recovery. Its owner was so desperate to sell that Ochs was able to buy it with an initial down payment of $250 and a total cost of $5,750. Ochs’s father, Julius, came down to Chattanooga from Knoxville for a ceremony that highlighted the change of ownership—not for purely sentimental reasons, but also to sign the legal papers in his son’s behalf. Adolph Ochs was eight months shy of twenty-one.

What he did with the Chattanooga Times was what he would later do, on a much grander scale, with The New York Times—he made it into a newspaper and not a gazette of opinion, or showcase for star writers, or a champion of the underdog or topdog, or a crusader for political or social reform. Ochs had something to sell-news—and he hoped to sell it dispassionately and with the guarantee that it was reliable and unsoiled and not deviously inspired. Adolph Ochs wanted to be accepted in Chattanooga, to grow with the town and help it grow, and he knew that one way to do this was not to criticize it but, inoffensively, to boost it. As the building boom continued in Chattanooga, as land speculators and investors moved into the valley and up along Lookout Mountain, chopping down trees and leveling the land that had been a Civil War battleground, Adolph Ochs saw this as progress and he did not, as his nephew John Oakes could afford to do almost a century later, worry about the destruction of trees or desecration of natural beauty.

Ochs worried about, and advocated on his editorial page, the dredging of a deeper channel in the bordering Tennessee River, the construction of an opera house for the increasingly cultured community, the building of better libraries and schools for the young who would one day read and support his newspaper. When the yellow-fever epidemic spread into Chattanooga, stalling the economy temporarily and killing 366 citizens, the Chattanooga Times helped conduct an emergency relief fund and Ochs wrote in an editorial: “Will this ruin Chattanooga? No! If this city was born to be ruined, it would have been blotted out years ago.”

Ochs’s most salient characteristic was optimism, and it was this more than anything else that attracted financial support from bankers and businessmen, although in his first years in Chattanooga Ochs was also a fantastic wheeler and dealer. He printed his own checks on high-quality paper of exquisite design, signing them with a flourishing hand—and then he would just barely get to the bank on time with newly borrowed money to prevent his check from bouncing. He was forever juggling a loan here to repay one there, but he was very honest and punctual, and he demanded that his debtors be equally scrupulous in their dealings with him. Subscribers who had fallen behind in their payments would receive stern notes from Ochs: “The Times will be discontinued if not paid for within five days after the presentation of the account. We will not carry a Deadhead list. Everyone must pay.” He then needed every nickel he could lay his hands on to help with the purchase of legible type, better machinery, and to expand his staff. And after he achieved these goals he met larger challenges, his horizons ever widening, his success inspiring him toward greater risks rather than toward smugness or quiescence. Within not too many years, without his realization at first, Adolph Ochs began to outgrow his town.

Chattanooga, to be sure, was not fulfilling its promise as the South’s leading industrial center. While it had recovered from epidemics and small economic crises, it suffered a serious setback when its ore proved to be too sulfurous to produce the high-quality steel of which Birmingham was capable. This discovery took much of the momentum out of Chattanooga. It made money very tight at a time when Ochs—who had lost considerably in land speculation, a victim of his own optimism—was desperately in need of more loans to continue to improve his newspaper and to complete its new six-story granite building that would be topped by a glittering gold-painted dome.

There was no question in his mind, or in anybody else’s, that he was a good business risk. He had demonstrated as a young man in his twenties that he could take a wreck of a newspaper and, within a decade or so, convert it into a large and enterprising journal earning $25,000 annual profit. He also owned a small farmer’s weekly that was making money. He had bought a big, rambling brick house in one of the better residential areas of Chattanooga and into it he had moved his parents and brothers and sisters from Knoxville, and then his wife from Cincinnati, and there, too, he entertained many distinguished people when they were visiting Chattanooga. When President Grover Cleveland came to Chattanooga, Ochs was on the greeting committee. Borrowing an elegant gray coat for the occasion, he rode in an open carriage near the President in a parade, and during the festivities he conversed privately with the President, confident he was as impressive to the President as the President was to him—and after Grover Cleveland returned to Washington, Ochs kept in touch. And yet despite Ochs’s pluckiness and his profitable management of the Chattanooga Times, he was deeply in debt. This was partly the result of the overborrowing he had done to keep improving his growing paper, and partly the result of his land-speculation project across the Tennessee River which had cost Ochs more than $100,000.

He could not recover, he knew, unless he could make more money at a faster rate, and he could not do this in Chattanooga during a recession. He would have to expand elsewhere. He must try to keep his Chattanooga Times running at a profit while he traveled through Tennessee and beyond in search of another newspaper that he could buy cheaply and rebuild as he had the Times. Any thought of trying to make money in a nonjournalistic way was rejected by Ochs from the start. The real-estate fiasco had taught him his lesson. From that point on he vowed that he would never again invest in anything but newspapers, the only business he really liked.

Newspaper publishers in those days were given free rides by many railroad companies, a forerunner of the “junket,” and Ochs made good use of his pass as he traveled back and forth between Nashville, Knoxville, Cincinnati, Louisville, and even New York, familiarizing himself with the larger newspapers and the men who ran them. Much of the responsibility for the running of the Chattanooga Times was meanwhile transferred to his family, whom Ochs had started to employ shortly after he had acquired the Chattanooga Times. His father, Julius, had been appointed treasurer of the newspaper. His younger brother, George, and then his youngest brother, Milton, were trained as reporters. Following the marriage of two of his three sisters, Ochs brought their husbands into the business; and then there were cousins, nephews, family friends—Ochs’s dynasty had begun. Those who did not work for Ochs in Chattanooga might, after he had bought The New York Times in 1896, work for him in New York or, after 1901, work on the newspaper Ochs would own for more than a decade in Philadelphia. Everybody at one time or another seemed to be working for Adolph Ochs, and they blended into his institutional framework with proper modesty and reverence—all but one, his brother George.

George Ochs, or George Ochs-Oakes as he wished to be called after 1917, joined the Chattanooga Times in 1879 as a reporter, earning nine dollars a week. He had completed three years at East Tennessee University in Knoxville and achieved such high grades that, though he joined his family in Chattanooga rather than complete his senior year, the university awarded him a Bachelor of Arts degree with his class of 1880. He was a sensitive and an articulate young man, having been a member of the university’s debating society, and he was very different from his older brother Adolph. While Adolph sought to avoid controversy, George seemed to court it. Adolph did not crave personal attention, having had more than he wanted as the family’s favorite son; George, three years younger than Adolph, could never get enough of it. He clung to the memory of every honor he ever received. He never forgot a compliment, no matter how small. He never tired of hearing his mother retell the story of how, during the Civil War, she had concealed supplies for the Confederates in his baby carriage, with him asleep within, and he would become infuriated and often cry whenever Adolph would teasingly suggest that it was he, Adolph, who was actually sleeping in the carriage. But Adolph did not often try to provoke his younger brother, a thing too easily done; instead Adolph tried to help George as he had helped the entire family, guiding and inspiring as he earned their respect and devotion, maintaining his position as the loving older brother, the imperturbable marvelous manchild who was his mother’s favorite. Adolph was her first son to survive—a previous son had died in infancy—and after Adolph had been delivered and lived his mother knew no joy to equal it, except possibly the joy that would come as he delivered her, and her family, from poverty to prominence. Adolph could be counted upon, she knew, as her husband, good man that he was, could not. Adolph always made the right moves. Except for the land-speculation deal, he was shrewd about money. He had married a girl that his mother greatly approved of, Rabbi Wise’s gentle Iphigene, and Adolph did not, like his brother Milton, marry outside the faith; nor did he, like George, lose his temper in public and bring embarrassment to the family. George seemed almost driven to prove how different he could be. As a young boy, if told not to do something, he would be sure to do it. As a young man, working on his brother’s staff at the Chattanooga Times, he became embroiled in dramatic situations, controversies, threats—and once he almost killed a man.

George was then a twenty-two-year-old newspaperman on the Chattanooga Times and on this particular day, while he was in the county courthouse making notes from a divorce record that involved the name of a prominent county official, the same county official strolled by and noticed what George was doing, became very angry, and warned that if George printed the item he would “shoot him full of holes.” George printed it. A few days later, as George was conversing with a friend on the main street, he suddenly felt on his head a sharp blow from behind; turning, he saw the county official holding a cane upraised to strike again. George shouted, “If you strike me again, you’ll pay the penalty.” As the county official hit him again and also reached into his pocket, possibly for a pistol, George reached into his pocket, pulled out a gun, and shot the man through the lower abdomen and hip. Though staggering, the man continued to raise his cane and attempted to draw the object from his pocket, whereupon George pushed his gun to the man’s throat and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. But the man collapsed to the ground and George did not fire a second shot. A large crowd had now gathered, and the victim was removed to a hospital where, after being in critical condition for several days, he recovered. George surrendered to the sheriff but no warrant was issued. Nor did George cease to carry a gun. When he was approached a week later and was threatened by the brother of the victim, George dissuaded him by pointing two guns at him. The aftereffect of this encounter left George emotionally shaken but he soon recouped his sense of daring—and a few months later he was knocked unconscious by a large Negro for publishing the fact that there had been an angry dispute in the train station between the Negro and a railroad official who had refused to let the Negro sit in the parlor car. A posse was instantly organized to capture the man, but he fled to Texas and did not return to Chattanooga for several years, by which time George Ochs had drifted into politics and had been elected mayor of Chattanooga. As mayor he graciously accepted his assailant’s apology.

Having entered political life over Adolph’s strong but futile objections, George turned out to be a very successful mayor. He won two terms as a Democrat, beginning in 1893 when he was thirty-one years old, and he could have won the party nomination a third time had he wished. His administration was so efficient that it lowered taxes while improving the welfare of the citizens, but George Ochs remained as independent and unpredictable as ever. In 1896 he refused to support the Democratic party’s choice for President, William Jennings Bryan, and the local leaders in Chattanooga demanded that Ochs resign as mayor, which he would not do. On another occasion Ochs withheld patronage from one of the local political bosses who had strongly supported him, and this provoked a protest visit to the mayor’s office from a delegation of leading Democrats that included George’s younger brother, Milton, and one of his in-laws. But George remained implacable. He had made no deals, he said, adding that he would run the city in a manner he thought proper. He fancied himself an incorruptible man, independent and different, and while he occasionally flaunted his integrity, he nevertheless behaved in accordance with his self-image, doing as he wished and saying what he wanted to say even if the subject was controversial, which it often was.

As a Jew, a German Jew, George Ochs shared with some members of his family, and many German Jews around the nation, a feeling of superiority and disaffection toward the more recently arrived Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—and, unlike Adolph, George was outspoken on this subject. While he sympathized with their poverty and struggle, George had little tolerance for Jews who adhered to foreign customs after settling in America, Jews who persisted in speaking Yiddish along the street, who read Yiddish newspapers on trains and saw Jewishness in terms of a nation or race rather than in terms of a religion. Such Jews, he felt, encouraged by their clannishness the bigotry that kept them aliens, disqualified them socially, stereotyped them commercially, made life not only more difficult for them but, regrettably, also for the more established Jews who had assimilated themselves and prospered in America. He was equally critical of the get-rich-quick Jews who displayed their wealth with ostentation, if not vulgarity.

Throughout his lifetime to the year of his death, which came in 1931 when he was seventy, George Ochs-Oakes overwhelmingly opposed the Zionists and all other advocates of a Jewish state in Palestine, and this view was also endorsed by Adolph Ochs and for years it was part of the editorial policy of The New York Times. When Arthur Hays Sulzberger became publisher of The Times he made speeches and statements urging Jews not to agitate for a Jewish Palestinian state, and in 1939 Sulzberger was among a group of influential Jews who urged President Roosevelt not to appoint Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court because they believed that it would intensify anti-Semitism in America, a notion that Roosevelt resented and ignored. In 1946 The New York Times canceled an advertisement submitted by the American League for a Free Palestine, infuriating Zionists and causing Sulzberger to explain at length that while The New York Times had in the past often run the ads of organizations that it opposed editorially—it had previously carried many Zionist ads, Sulzberger reminded them, and had even run advertising by the Communist party; had in fact once lent the Daily Worker newsprint when the Communist journal was short of it—the decision to cancel the Zionist advertising on this occasion was based, first, on The Times’ conviction that the American League for a Free Palestine was directly connected with one of the Jewish terrorist groups in the Middle East; and second, the anti-British charges in the ad were not supportable by facts, and thus Sulzberger said he could not be responsible for the ill will that the advertisement in The Times would stir between Britain and the United States. “We happen to believe that the British are acting in good faith and not in bad faith,” Sulzberger wrote to one of the Zionist leaders. “From our standpoint, therefore, your advertisement is not true; but since there is no yardstick by which truth of this kind can be proved, it means that we are putting our judgment ahead of yours—something of which you will not approve and which we do only with the greatest hesitancy.”

By the time that George Ochs-Oakes’s son, John Oakes, became influential on The New York Times, the state of Israel had become a reality and The Times’ editorial page has been generally friendly to it in recent years, reaching a high point in 1967 when, during the Israeli-Arab war, The Times reminded the United States government of its commitment to defend the sovereignty and independence of Israel and even advocated the intervention of American military forces if the Israeli army needed help, which, as things turned out, it did not.The New York Times’ News department has also maintained for a number of years, and still maintains in the Nineteen-sixties, a full-time reporter who specializes in covering Jewish activities in America, a very sensitive assignment whose aims include, according to one editor, “keeping the New York Zionists off Sulzberger’s back.” And yet the old German-Jewish attitude that George Ochs-Oakes expressed more than thirty years ago, the disenchantment with American Jews who dwelled on their Jewishness, the desire that Jews blend into the American scene—this thinking on occasion still pervades the hierarchy of The New York Times. Veteran reporters in The Times’ newsroom have long been aware of higher management’s sensitivity to things Jewish. The editing and handling of stories that are about Jews or are of special interest to Jews is a bit more delicate and cautious, if such is possible to perceive—and even if it is not, the reporters’ mere supposition sustains some of the past consciousness of George Ochs-Oakes. The New York Times does not wish to be thought of as a “Jewish newspaper,” which indeed it is not, and it will bend over backwards to prove this point, forcing itself at times into unnatural positions, contorted by compromise, balancing both sides, careful not to offend, wishing to be accepted and respected for what it is—a good citizens’ newspaper, law-abiding and loyal, solidly in support of the best interests of the nation in peace and war.

That such a formidable institution as The Times should be so lacking in arrogance, so weighed down by its sense of responsibility and a fear of going one step too far, may explain in part its survival and strength and it may also hint at a part of its vulnerability—not only the vulnerability of the Jewish family that owns it but also the vulnerability of the nation upon which the family has hitched its star. The anti-Semitic slights and subtleties beneath the surface of America have, in one way or other, touched nearly every member of the family, extending even into the third generation—Sulzberger’s son, a Marine on his way to Korea, was turned away from a restricted resort in Hobe Sound, Florida; a Sulzberger daughter in a girls’ private school in New York was assumed to be a friend of the only other Jewish girl in the class (the two girls came to dislike one another rather quickly); George Ochs-Oakes’s son, John Oakes, a brilliant student, was accepted within a Jewish quota at the Lawrenceville School. Given these and similar incidents, the fact that even the family that owns The New York Times can be subjected to such social scrutiny, it is no wonder that there would be within the institution a sensitivity to Semitism and a fastidiousness about keeping The Times above reproach, untouched by the prejudice within the nation.

The prejudice first became apparent to certain members of the Ochs family when they began to move northward shortly after Adolph had purchased The New York Times in 1896. In Chattanooga they had sensed no anti-Semitism, a circumstance that may have been the result of the very mobile, loosely structured society that had settled there after the Civil War, turning Chattanooga into a kind of frontier town, and it was also possible, George Ochs-Oakes believed, that his type of Jew was more acceptable to Gentiles than the Eastern European Jews who would immigrate to America in great numbers at the turn of the century. George interpreted his own acceptance in Chattanooga, and that of his family, as evidence to support his theory. His father was for years the lay rabbi of the Jewish community in Chattanooga, and George had sung in the choir, and he would later marry a Jewish woman and bring up his sons in the faith: he saw himself as a “good” Jew insofar as religion was concerned, but otherwise he avoided any ethnic or nationalistic commitment to Jews, and when he was elected mayor of Chattanooga in 1893 he was convinced that he had conducted his life wisely and well.

But when he moved to Philadelphia in 1901, accepting his brother’s offer to run a newly acquired Ochs newspaper in that city, George gradually became aware of the fuller meaning of being Jewish. The more tightly entrenched society of Philadelphia was not in the least bit subtle in its discrimination, and George was surprised and appalled, although, uncharacteristically, he did not make an issue of it. He believed that to do so would only further aggravate an unpleasant situation, and he held the Jews partly accountable for the prejudice. If Jews would curtail their desire for their own schools and universities in America, would not seek political power through a Jewish vote, would stop thinking of themselves as primarily Jewish, he felt sure that the wall between Jews and other Americans would be lowered. He conceded that full integration into the American social system might take several years or even decades; the first generation of Jews born in America, and perhaps also the second, might not fully achieve a 100 percent American status. But if they remained patient and set a fine example as outstanding and loyal citizens, then the third and fourth generations would undoubtedly gain acceptance—different from their compatriots in church affiliation, but otherwise typically and totally American. This, at any rate, is what he hoped would happen, and he attempted to live the latter part of his life in such a way that would further this cause and benefit the future of his two sons.

Both sons were born and reared in the Philadelphia area, as had been his wife, the daughter of a merchant and banker whose family had been residents of Philadelphia for nearly three-quarters of a century. George’s first son, George, Jr., was born in 1909. He would attend Princeton and Oxford, becoming a skilled collegiate debater; he would work on various journals and write travel books, would serve as an artillery officer during World War II, and later he would spend about five years working for the CIA. In 1965, at the age of fifty-five, he would be killed in an automobile accident in Vermont.

The second son, John, was born in 1913. Approximately one week later, due to complications during the birth, the mother died, and thereafter George’s sons were brought up with the help of his unmarried sister, Nannie. Nannie Ochs was the oldest of the three daughters of Julius and Bertha Ochs, a year older than George, two years younger than Adolph. She had attended a girls’ college in Bristol, Virginia, but had been called home to help run the household when her mother became ill. Nannie had been courted but had never married, nor had she been encouraged to marry, especially by Adolph, who had a critical eye for suitors. Nannie was needed at home, and that is where she remained until her mother’s death. Her mother died in 1909, at seventy-five, while in New York visiting Adolph.

Nannie was then forty-eight, and she went to Europe to live and travel for the next five years, returning to reside with her brother George in Philadelphia upon the death of his wife. The boys adored Nannie, and as they got older they came to appreciate her keen mind and her strong social conscience which, in the early Thirties, transformed her into an ardent supporter of the New Deal, one who stood up to all the opposition she received at the large family gatherings of the Ochs dynasty, particularly from Arthur Hays Sulzberger and his wife, Iphigene, both of whom could barely tolerate Roosevelt—and Iphigene could absolutely not tolerate Eleanor Roosevelt, could not stand the sound of her voice. But Nannie was invariably persuasive in her views, and many years later John Oakes would trace part of his own political origin as a Liberal Democrat to his Aunt Nannie, his formal personality warming up with the mere mention of her name; although the overwhelming influence on his life was his father, George.

Long after most sons have abandoned the final illusion about their fathers, John Oakes remains firmly convinced that his father was a brilliant man of rare integrity, one who certainly possessed a superior mind to, if not the gall of, the celebrated Adolph. John has always admired his father’s forthrightness in doing and saying what he thought, regardless of how unpopular or awkward the result, and John likes to retell stories that project his father in the role of an independent thinker, bold, uncompromising. He tells of how a large delegation of Philadelphia advertisers once visited his father’s office at the Philadelphia Public Ledger to protest the editorial support that George Ochs had been giving to a Republican reform candidate opposed to the Democratic machine, and they hinted that the continuance of this policy might be costly to the newspaper’s advertising revenue; but George responded with even more support for the reform candidate in the mayoralty race, and this candidate eventually won and, by way of gratitude, asked George if he had any individual whom he wished to recommend for a political job in the new administration, but George declined the offer. He had no favors to ask, no suggestions to make, George told the mayor, wishing only that the city be run with efficiency and honesty. During the mayor’s entire term George never entered the mayor’s office and he made every effort never to talk to the mayor again.

John Oakes’s interest in the protection of trees, rivers, and mountains against the ambitions of land developers was also partially inspired by his father, a devotee of national parks and an enthusiastic hiker, although John Oakes is a much more passionate conservationist than his father ever was—Oakes, in fact, is capable of more emotion and intensity over trees than perhaps any The New York Timesman since Joyce Kilmer, the poet, who at the time of his death, in 1918, while serving in the United States Army, was on military leave from The Times’ Sunday department. Since Oakes became influential on The Times, the changing seasons have been regularly rhapsodized on the editorial page, and one of the major themes on that page has been the endless battle of nature against human greed. Such issues often bring Oakes into disagreement with men of influence, wealth, and self-righteousness, qualities not entirely lacking in John Oakes himself, and it is precisely this delicate balance between Oakes and the world that he weighs, the reflection of himself that he sometimes sees in the people that he criticizes, that has no doubt contributed to his hypersensitivity and soul-searching manner. He seems to be constantly in a state of self-examination, fussing with the words that he writes, agonizing over ideas, worried that he is either too critical or not critical enough, careful to avoid the impression that it is a personal motive that prompts him to do what he is doing, has done, or will do. Thus he may not publish a deserving editorial about a school that he once attended, or an organization to which he belongs; at other times he will condemn something of which he is a part but he will not sever his connection with it because this would be a predictable act, and he does not wish to be predictable. As a student editor at Princeton he was critical of the club system, but was a member of a club; as a Times editor with a commitment to the Civil Rights movement, he was personally repulsed by some of the racial policies of the Metropolitan Club in Washington, among other similar organizations, but he did not join the distinguished ranks that quit the club in the early Nineteen-sixties, making headlines: Oakes quit a few years later, quietly, and refused to discuss publicly the reasons for his resignation.

Like most newspaper editors and critics, Oakes does not relish criticism. Should unflattering comments about The New York Times, particularly about its editorial page, appear in another journal or magazine, Oakes will quickly send off a letter of reply. His letter will most often attempt to discredit the criticism by dwelling on any errors of fact or interpretation that appeared in the criticism, even if the errors were minor or inconsequential to the larger purpose of the piece. It is not that Oakes is more prissy than other editors are, or must often be; it is rather that he is unable to resist the impulse to lash back whenever there is an attack, however slight, upon something that is very close to his heart. He is thinskinned and intense, a man whose life was made no less complex by the tragedy associated with his birth, by the strong sentimentality for a father reared in a tight family dominated by an older brother, by his name change that requires regular clarification as to who he is, where he stands, how he got there. Oakes accepts all challenges, and his life has been a series of small skirmishes, mostly with himself.

Shortly after returning home from Oxford in 1936, he applied for a job at a Trenton newspaper while wearing an FDR button on his lapel; he got the job, but the editor warned him not to reappear in the office for work until he had removed the button. Oakes was offended by the remark, interpreting it somehow as an affront to his independence, and he waited a few extra days, until after Roosevelt’s reelection, before reporting to the State Gazette and Trenton Times without his FDR button. Later, at the Washington Post, and still later at The New York Times, Oakes seemed unable to decide precisely how he wished to sign his articles, and as a result his by-lines have varied through the years from John Oakes to John B. Oakes, J. B. Oakes to John Bertram Oakes—and some of the articles on conservation that he wrote for The Times were signed “by John Bertram.” After he took over The Times’ editorial page and began publishing pieces by Tom Wicker, Oakes began to wonder if that by-line was not perhaps too informal, and one day he wrote Wicker inquiring if Thomas Wicker or Thomas G. Wicker might not be more appropriate. Wicker said he liked his name the way it was.

While John Oakes claims to be pleased that his father changed the name, relieving his family branch of some unnecessary Ochsian weight, he is nonetheless disappointed by his father’s obscurity and the lack of high regard that some members of the family had for him. In a biography about Adolph Ochs written with the cooperation of Iphigene Sulzberger and other close relatives, George was referred to as a “gun-toting dandy.” Adolph himself retained a deep affection for his younger brother throughout his lifetime, but he apparently also sensed in George qualities that were out of harmony with institutionalism, and so he always kept George at a safe distance from the center stage of power. When Ochs began spending more time New York than in the South, he appointed George to manage the Chattanooga Times, and he was well satisfied with things until George decided that he wanted to run for mayor. Unable to discourage him, Adolph neither helped him nor did he vote for him. After George had left political life, Adolph offered him a job in Paris to supervise The New York Times’ exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900, a responsibility that included the publishing of a daily Paris edition of The Times; George accepted this challenge and was very successful, both professionally and socially, moving around town with the international set and promoting The Times as well. When the Exposition ended George received from the French government the Legion of Honor.

A year later George went to Philadelphia to run the Ochs newspaper there, a profitable venture that ended in 1913 when Adolph Ochs, becoming increasingly involved in The Times’ expansion in New York and remaining sentimentally attached to his paper in Chattanooga, accepted George’s advice and sold the Philadelphia newspaper to Cyrus Curtis for two million dollars, with the stipulation that George be retained as publisher of the Philadelphia paper. But policy differences soon arose between George and Curtis—one of George’s complaints had to do with Curtis’ installing his son-in-law in the business department—and by 1915 George had resigned and was again working for Adolph, this time in New York. George was put in charge of two auxiliary publications of The New York Times Company, Current History Magazine and the Mid-Week Pictorial, and he had an office on the tenth floor of the Times building, the same floor on which John Oakes now supervises The Times’ editorial page.

George never did become involved with The Times’ News department—nor has his son John. And John Oakes prefers it that way, liking the clear line that separates his editorial-page staff from the rest of the newspaper, protecting it from the commercial ambitions of Monroe Green on the second floor and the sprawling bureaucracy of Clifton Daniel on the third floor. Oakes enjoys an independence within the institution that is rare—his opinions, and those of the editorial writers under him, are subject only to the scrutiny of the publisher. Oakes is regularly in touch with the publisher and receives what amounts to total freedom, and as a result the editorial page in recent years has been converted from vapidity to vibrance, attacking issues with an aggressiveness that Adolph Ochs would never have tolerated, and sniping at important people once regarded within The Times as “sacred cows,” such people as Chiang Kai-shek, Robert Moses, and Francis Cardinal Spellman. When Oakes began writing editorials for The Times in 1949, after three years of writing for Lester Markel’s “Week in Review” section in the Sunday department, the editorial policy was strongly in support of Chiang Kai-shek. The editorial specialist who produced most of these pieces was an old China hand who had become an admirer of Chiang and expressed few opinions that might offend the Generalissimo, who read The Times through translation. After the writer’s retirement, and with the increasingly important role played by John Oakes in the Fifties, highlighted by his scathing editorials on McCarthyism, The Times’ policy on China, among other major issues, noticeably began to change. Oakes weighed the wisdom of having Communist China admitted to the United Nations, and when this thinking started to penetrate The Times’ editorial page, Chiang Kai-shek was furious. One such editorial appeared a day before a Times correspondent on Taiwan was scheduled to have an interview with Chiang, an exclusive story that the correspondent had dutifully arranged weeks in advance. When the correspondent appeared, the Generalissimo, arms flailing, angrily refused to cooperate, being unappeased by the correspondent’s explanation that the news staff and the editorial page are run as entirely separate departments within The New York Times.

The privileged treatment accorded Robert Moses by The New York Times until relatively recent years was remarkable, and it was achieved mainly through Moses’ audacity, his skill at using his personal connections, or the presumption of these connections with top people at The Times, including the Sulzbergers, to browbeat some Times reporters who were assigned to cover aspects of his vast and varied career. As New York’s most powerful public servant—during the Nineteen-fifties he was, among other things, the Commissioner of Parks, head of the Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee, chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, chairman of the State Power Authority, a member of the Planning Commission—Moses was undeniably a great and valuable source of news. It was also true that he had definite ideas on how news should be covered, and if he was displeased by a story in the newspaper he would unhesitatingly fire off a telegram to The Times denouncing the reporter as incompetent, or he would sometimes call a press conference to castigate the reporter publicly, or sometimes he would write a gentle letter of complaint to Arthur or Iphigene Sulzberger, a note that would be bucked down through channels to the third floor, ending up in the hands of perhaps a second-assistant city editor who might quietly wonder if Robert Moses’ low opinion of the reporter was not in some way justified. While Moses never did succeed in getting a Times reporter dismissed or even chastised, he was never discouraged from trying, and what he did accomplish was to alert reporters to his possible reaction, making many reporters—the less secure ones, to be sure, but The Times always had its quota of these—extraordinarily cautious with every story they wrote about him; they became sensitive to his sensitivity. These reporters knew, or thought they knew, or preferred to believe, that Moses had to be more delicately handled than other important newsmakers in New York. They had heard it rumored about the newsroom that Moses was a friend of the family, that Iphigene Sulzberger particularly liked his manner in responding to her suggestions about city parks; and to what extent this was true was unimportant, truth or rumor being equally persuasive in this context—there seemed to be sufficient evidence within the Times building to support the theory that Robert Moses required special handling, and so he got it.

For example in 1959 when Moses became angered by a series of articles in The Times dealing with the city’s Title I slum-clearance program, which he headed, his letters of objection did not appear in the “Letters to the Editor” space, where they belonged; instead they were published on various days within the news columns as news, being prefaced by an explanatory paragraph, appearing under a news headline, and being given immediate and serious play. This not only raised readers’ doubts about the credibility of the series, but it also took some of the edge off the series, which the reporter had carefully researched for months—and which was accurate and objective, if not totally satisfactory to Moses in all of its detail and interpretation. When Moses wrote magazine articles in The Times for his friend Lester Markel, an editor known for the severity of his stylistic standards, there was rarely any tampering with Moses’ florid prose, cushioned as it was with barbs and pretension, and these articles were featured in the Sunday Times Magazine almost as prominently as those written by Markel himself. During these years, too, there was employed on The Times’ news staff a veteran reporter who was known among his colleagues as a “Moses man,” meaning that Moses had him as a confidant and friend, entrusting to him his private telephone numbers and his whereabouts on weekends so that should The Times wish to reach Moses to confirm or deny or comment on some news development, The Times’ editors could do so by contacting Moses’ man, who would contact Moses. This particular reporter’s status on the staff, his inner confidence and manner, and no doubt his courage in seeking merit raises, was fortified in part by his relationship with Robert Moses; and when Moses went into decline as an important newsmaker in the Nineteen-sixties, so did Moses’ man decline in The New York Times’ newsroom.

Robert Moses’ deterioration as a sacred cow on The Times was largely attributable to the newspaper’s great organizational shift during the Sixties, events prompted by the illness and incapacity of Sulzberger and then the unexpected death of his fifty-year-old successor, Orvil Dryfoos, in 1963. The quick exit of two publishers in three years, together with the reshuffling of the old guard under them, had a disruptive effect on many traditional habits and values at The Times. Suddenly there were new editors with new ideas making decisions on the third floor, and there was John Oakes running the editorial page on the tenth floor, and most of these men had little reverence for the sacred cows. Among the first to feel this change was Robert Moses; another was Francis Cardinal Spellman.

Moses began to feel it during the winter of 1963 when, as president of the forthcoming New York World’s Fair, he encountered a chilly press reception to so many of his plans and deeds—the mood of the media seemed against him, tired of him, not only The Times but the other newspapers as well, plus radio and television. It was not that they reported the news incompletely or inaccurately. If anything they were too complete, too accurate, they overlooked nothing. They quoted that one extra word or phrase that was too much, inserted that extra little detail that can sub-liminally convey skepticism to a reader. They had fun with Moses, this cranky old man trying to ballyhoo the Fair, and they picked it apart before its flimsy construction was complete, and then they continued to downgrade it through the next two summers.

The Times’ editorials criticized Moses’ financial handling of the Fair, his “penchant for invective,” and the reporters seemed to delight in recording his every frustration—his futile attempt to get the A & P to remove its big neon bread sign that peeked over the Fair grounds, his inability to get the Russians to participate in the Fair, his unfulfilled optimism about the number of people who would be visiting the Fair each day. The press, including The Times, overdramatized the Fair’s opening-day threat of racial disturbances, including an automobile “stall-in” by Negro militants along the highways—a threat that, while it never materialized, did not help attendance. No one seemed particularly interested in helping Moses at this point, and the press would display little of the blithe spirit, the indifference to minor flaws that had characterized its coverage of the previous Fair in Brussels, or would spark the reporting of the later Fair in Canada. Moses, the symbol of the New York Fair, had made too many enemies during his long career. He had written too many letters, pushed too many people. And he got what he deserved, even though, as is often the case, he did not get it when he deserved it. For the New York World’s Fair of 1964-65 was not really the ugly, dull, uninspired extravaganza that much of the press coverage indicated. Each day thousands of visitors greatly enjoyed the Fair, found the sights and sounds both marvelous and memorable, but they had no way of expressing this, no voice that could compete with a press that focused on the demonstrators at the gates, the problems of parking, the labor disputes, the flaws that can always be found if one looks for them—as one Timesman did when he reported in his column, “At the Fair,” that there were no paper towels in the men’s room of the Scott Towel Pavilion.

Francis Cardinal Spellman was one of those men who for decades in The New York Times was written about constantly, but never deeply. The Times from Adolph Ochs’s day was hypersensitive in its coverage of religion, ever fearful of offending one group or another, and in Cardinal Spellman’s case the editors’ job was even more precarious because he was not only an immensely powerful clergyman but he also sometimes said or did things that were controversial, putting the onus on the editors to somehow print the news and yet not offend the Cardinal or his many thousands of followers. The editors managed to do this for many years with great skill, blunting the reportorial edge, softening the headlines, emphasizing whenever possible his personal kindnesses, his charities, his simple manner, and the warm applause he received at parochial school graduations and police communion breakfasts, without ever stressing and sometimes totally ignoring Cardinal Spellman’s less glorious moments—his blessing of bombers, his affection for Senator Joseph McCarthy, his involvement in New York politics. And this polite press policy toward him would have undoubtedly continued indefinitely had he not so persistently paraded his patriotism during the Vietnamese war, a time of loosening restraint in America, of growing discord within his own Church—Spellman in the Sixties had, like Robert Moses, gone on too long, and the liberals were now becoming increasingly less liberal, including some on The New York Times John Oakes. One year before Spellman’s death an editorial in The Times attacked the Cardinal for saying, during his Christmas visit to American troops in Vietnam, that anything “less than victory is inconceivable,” a remark not only repulsive to many Catholic liberals in America but also to Pope Paul, who had been carrying on a campaign for a negotiated peace. Even in The Times’ news columns, in an analysis article by the recently hired religious-news editor, John Cogley, a liberal Catholic formerly of the Catholic magazine Commonweal, the Cardinal was chided for his words; Cogley also pointed out that the number of Catholics who traditionally express serious moral reservations about war is proportionately smaller than the number of Protestant and Jewish objectors—a statement that no Times journalist would probably have gotten into print a few years before, and a Timesman with a Jewish by-line might not have gotten into print even on this occasion.

Even more remarkable was the editorial on Cardinal Spellman that appeared in The Times on the day after his death, an appraisal that not only shocked many Catholics but surprised many other Times readers who had mistakenly assumed that The Times’ editorial page would now temper its views on the Cardinal and publish a kind of eulogy to him. Instead, describing him as a man of fixed convictions, strongly expressed, the editorial dredged up what it deemed to be his sins: “He backed the late Senator Joseph McCarthy in his demagogic excesses, and he made a dismaying attack on Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt when she upheld separation of church and state in education. In political affairs and in public debate he often tended to speak in a commanding tone and to don a mask of authoritarianism which, however appropriate in some other time and some other place, was ill-suited to a pluralist democracy. Whether he was trying to ban the motion picture ‘Baby Doll’ or block the reform of New York’s divorce law, Cardinal Spellman sometimes squandered his own and his church’s prestige on trivial issues and lost causes.”

Dozens of letters and calls of protest immediately followed, overwhelmingly opposing the editorial. Of the first seventy letters received, sixty-two condemned it, and a few of these were later published in the “Letters to the Editor” space on the editorial page. In the National Review, its editor, William F. Buckley, wrote an editorial about the editorial, rebuking The Times for not criticizing Spellman’s delinquencies at the time he committed them, charging that it had been editorially silent about Spellman when his friendship with McCarthy and his differences with Mrs. Roosevelt were newsworthy. The Cardinal had then terrorized The Times into restraint, Buckley wrote, and because of this, Buckley concluded, “We mourn the Cardinal’s passing even more.”

Buckley was incorrect in his assertion that The Times was silent over the Mrs. Roosevelt incident; in two editorials in 1949 it supported Mrs. Roosevelt’s position, although its rebuff of the Cardinal was most delicate.

John Oakes remained calm through the clamor following Spellman’s death. Oakes had been through this sort of thing many times before, and he would again, and he rather liked the excitement that such editorials can provoke. He had wanted to run a stimulating editorial page on The Times and that is what he was now doing, expressing opinions that are not always popular but are at least his own, and the publisher’s, and are not influenced by powerful people outside The Times nor by the advertisers who buy space in The Times from Monroe Green.

Monroe Green sat in his office waiting for the telephone call from Alan Tishman about the new luxury skyscraper apartments that The Times’ editorial page that day described as a desecration of the natural beauty of the New Jersey cliffs along the Hudson River. When Green’s secretary announced that Mr. Tishman was on the line, Green was not surprised by Tishman’s immediate tone of anger and confusion. It was terrible, Tishman said—terrible, cruel, stupid, unfair. The apartment buildings did not violate the skyline, as the editorial claimed; instead they brought elegance to that dreary plot of land, Tishman said. Why had The Times permitted such a diatribe to be published? What was gained by it? Who had done such a thing?

Monroe Green, who had been listening sympathetically, told Tishman that he was sorry, and that, while he agreed with Tishman, he had no control over the editorials. As to what recourse to take, Green said that Tishman had two alternatives. He could write a letter of protest to the editorial page, and it would be printed and might do some good—or it might do more harm. It might merely call attention to the editorial itself. Green strongly advised against sending the letter. The best thing to do, Green continued, his salesman’s voice becoming more reassuring, was to do nothing. Forget about it. Pretend it did not happen. The advertising supplement—and future advertising—would offset whatever damage the editorial had done, and personally, Green said, he did not think that the editorial had done any damage at all. Nobody reads the editorials, Green said.

Tishman gave it some thought, and he finally decided to follow Green’s advice. And later, after the luxury apartment houses had opened and were filled with tenants, Tishman decided that Green had probably been right. Nobody reads the editorials.