The new publisher was a friendly, unostentatious, young man who had curly, dark hair, smoked a pipe, wore Paul Stuart suits, and always said hello to whoever was in the elevator. If he bore any physical resemblance to his distinguished-looking father, it was not obvious to those in the newsroom: he seemed more an Ochs than a Sulzberger. He had his mother’s dark penetrating eyes, and he had Adolph Ochs’s large-lobed ears that turned up at the bottom. He was of average height, square-shouldered and solidly built, yet lean enough to fit into the Marine Corps uniform that he had worn more than a decade ago, and his hair was sufficiently close-cropped to pass almost any military inspection. There was no regimental quality about him, however, not even a trace of rigidity, and in this sense he was unlike the publishers who had preceded him. Adolph Ochs had been a model of formality, a starched figure most comfortable at a distance, a self-made man of Victorian presence who rarely lowered his guard in public. While Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Orvil Dryfoos were more mellow and genteel, they were nearly always pressured by the tight strings of the title that they had acquired through marriage. Punch Sulzberger was different—he had been born to the title, he had grown up within The Times, had skipped through its corridors as a child. He was never awed by the great editors that he met there, for they had always smiled at him, seemed happy to see him, treated him like a little prince in a palace, and he developed early in life a sunny, amiable disposition.
He had been born in New York City on February 5, 1926. His parents had then been married for nine years, had had three daughters, and it seemed likely that they might never present the sixty-seven-year-old Ochs with a male heir. Whether or not Ochs was panicked by this possibility was hard to tell. Ochs had been enchanted in 1918 by the birth of his first granddaughter, Marian (the future Mrs. Dryfoos). She had arrived during Ochs’s period of melancholia, which had deepened as The Times had become embroiled in controversies during World War I (the worst of which occurred in September of 1918 with the publication of the famous pro-Austria editorial that provoked charges of unpatriotism against The Times); but the birth of Marian on December 31, 1918, was seen by Ochs as an auspicious end to a gloomy year.
The Sulzbergers were then living in Ochs’s large, darkly ornate house at 308 West Seventy-fifth Street, and upon his return from the office in the evening Ochs would invariably slip into the baby’s nursery with his arms filled with new toys. The sounds of the baby thrilled him, the frills of the nursery contrasting cheerfully with the dim decor and statuary that cluttered the house; with only one child of his own, two having died, Ochs could not be casual about a birth in his family.
When a second granddaughter, Ruth, was born three years later on Ochs’s own birthday, March 12, it was another extraordinary occasion, and Ochs’s ritual of toys was continued, although the Sulzbergers were now occupying another residence nearby. With the birth of a third daughter, Judith, in December, 1923, the Sulzbergers had moved across Central Park into a five-story whitestone building at 5 East Eightieth Street, off Fifth Avenue. But Ochs was still a habitual visitor, and his presence was so pervasive, his affection so boundless, his possessiveness of his daughter, Iphigene, so natural, that Arthur Hays Sulzberger sometimes felt a bit out of place. Ochs was the man of the house no matter which house he was in; while his generosity was enormous, it often made the recipient feel a sense of obligation, a response that Ochs did not exactly discourage. Some of Ochs’s relatives in Chattanooga and elsewhere also had had this feeling and had quietly resented it. Iphigene was aware of this, but she was too romantic about her father to concern herself unduly about the sensitivities of his beneficiaries; although, in her husband’s case, she tried to make the best of the situation. When her son was born in 1926, and after Ochs had gleefully announced that the boy would be spoiled rotten, she decided that his middle name would not be Ochs. He would instead be named Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Jr. Six months later, however, her husband persuaded her to alter it to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger—a noble gesture that Ochs appreciated.
The Sulzberger children and many of their cousins spent the summer months at Ochs’s home in Lake George, New York, and after he had sold his New York town house and had bought Hillandale, the entire family would often gather there and live in the mansion. It was a fantastic setting for children growing up—the endless rooms to romp through, the private lake, the tennis court, the sprawling lawns, the animals, the procession of distinguished visitors: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, Herbert Lehman, David Lilienthal, various musicians and artists, and also Madeleine Carroll, who was one of Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s favorite film actresses. (Madeleine Carroll’s fourth husband, incidentally, Andrew Heiskell, the Time executive, would in 1965 marry Sulzberger’s daughter and Dryfoos’ widow, Marian.) Of the three Sulzberger girls, Marian was often referred to by family friends as “the beautiful one,” while the second daughter, Ruth (who would become publisher of the Chattanooga Times after her divorce from Ben Golden), was called “the brilliant one”; and the third girl, Judith (who would become a medical doctor), was “the interesting one” and also very individualistic. Her strict French governess could not easily intimidate her, and Judith was quite frank and outspoken even as a child. One night before being put to bed in the Sulzberger home on East Eightieth Street, her parents had promised that their dinner guest, Admiral Byrd, would later come up to say good-night to her. When Admiral Byrd did appear and was introduced, the little girl, confused and obviously disappointed, turned to her parents and exclaimed, “Byrd!—I thought you said Lindbergh!” Admiral Byrd tried to seem amused.
Judith and Punch were inseparable as children, and this closeness continued through the years. Since Judith was called “Judy” at home, Arthur Hays Sulzberger began calling his son “Punch,” and the nickname was still with him when he became The Times’ publisher. As a youth, he had little interest in newspapers, except in the comics, which he read assiduously. Since he was not permitted to play with toy soldiers or guns as a boy—his father was a leading advocate of gun legislation—he would spend considerable time in other children’s homes playing with their toys. He was very adept at Chinese checkers, occasionally beating such opponents as Wendell Willkie and other Presidential aspirants who visited Hillandale, and he was also skillful at hobbies or games that required manual dexterity, having received special tutoring from a manual arts instructor who lived near Hillandale. He set up his own train set in the ballroom at Hillandale, enticing as playmates the young men who had come to take out his older sisters. He liked to build tables, to tinker with gadgets, to disassemble machinery, and one day while playing with a little Westchester girl Punch explained to her the mysteries of birth in simple, mechanical terms: the male inserts his organ into the female, Punch said, and then the baby inside grabs hold of it and is pulled out.
Once in school, however, Punch Sulzberger’s theories and special talents were of little use, and being unaccustomed to hard discipline, he did poorly. His sister Ruth, in a light recollection of her brother’s problems, once wrote in the newspaper’s Times Talk:
Nearly every school in the vicinity of New York was graced with Punch’s presence at one time or another. They were all delighted to have him, but wanted him as something other than a spectator. One after another confessed that though they found him charming, they were not “getting through” to him. One school kept him rather longer than the others. It turned out that the Headmaster’s wife was a sculptress and thought Punch had such a beautiful head that she was using him as a model. Since he did not afford anyone the opportunity to judge what was inside his head, it was gratifying that the outside at least was admired.
He, too, was amusing in later life when recalling his school days at Browning or Lawrence Smith or Loomis, or his tutoring at Morningside. But on rare occasionsm, though he tried to conceal it with his laughter and his casual manner, there was a hint of deep hurt at the dark memory of his father’s displeasure. “They sent me to St. Bernard’s, then based on the English school system, and I rebelled,” he once said. “I was a natural left-hander, but I was made to write with my right. And the result even now is that I do a lot of flipping—instead of writing ‘197’ I’ll reverse it to ‘179’ … anyway, I was at St. Bernard’s for maybe five or six years, and I still get those letters addressed ‘Old Boy.’ ” Then, lips hardening, he added quietly, “I never gave them a penny.”
In 1943, at the age of seventeen, Sulzberger left The Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut, and applied to the Marine Corps. His parents were not happy about it, but they gave their consent. While awaiting his call, he worked as a “screw and bolt” man in The Times’ telephoto department, displaying his great tinkerer’s enthusiasm, and then in January of 1944 he was inducted into the Marines and was trained to become a radioman. His drill instructor at Parris Island was a tough corporal named Rossides who achieved in a few weeks what a generation of educators and the Times family had failed to do in twelve years—Punch Sulzberger reacted immediately to orders, he kept up with his class, and he actually enjoyed the rugged life. He also enjoyed being away from home, which had provided a liberal and loving atmosphere but also much second-guessing from parents and elders: in the Marines the commands were loud and clear, and there was no doubt as to who was the boss. Sulzberger’s family connections carried no weight with Rossides, nor was Rossides swayed by Sulzberger’s boyish charm and idle promises, deceptions that had sometimes worked in private school. Decades later, when Sulzberger was The Times’ publisher, he would remember Corporal Rossides with gratitude and affection.
During the war, Sulzberger was sent to the Philippines, serving through the campaigns at Leyte and Luzon, and later he was transferred to Japan. He acted as a naval interceptor operator and also as a jeep driver at MacArthur’s headquarters. He was promoted to corporal, and then in the spring of 1946—on April 1, which he thought was a very appropriate date—he was released from the service and was returned to New York. One of the first things that he did was to take a high school equivalency examination so that he might qualify for college. After receiving a passing grade—“and armed with the fact that my old man was on the board at Columbia”—he entered Columbia and did very well, occasionally making the dean’s list. While a student, he married a very pretty young woman, Barbara Grant, who lived near Hillandale and had also worked as a Times office girl on the fourteenth floor. Married in July of 1948, they would have a son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., and a daughter, Karen Alden.
Punch Sulzberger received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia in 1951, and then he joined The Times as a cub reporter in the newsroom, where he quickly made what was considered a horrible mistake. Assigned to a banquet with instructions to report what was said there, Sulzberger unfortunately was away from his table and in the men’s room when it was announced that a substitute speaker would deliver the text instead of the scheduled speaker, who was unavoidably absent. Sulzberger returned in time to hear the speech, quoting from it in the short article that he wrote for the next morning’s Times, but he did not realize that the scheduled speaker was absent. When The Times was informed of the error, and was obliged to print a correction, the city editor, Robert Garst, sent for Sulzberger and lectured him in a stern, grim manner worthy of Rossides.
During the Korean War, Sulzberger’s unit was recalled. After he had earned a commission and had attended the Armed Forces Information School at Fort Slocum, New York, Sulzberger served in Korea as an assistant public information officer with the First Marine Division. He returned to the United States to work in the office of the legislative assistant to the commandant in Washington, and later in 1952 he was released with the rank of first lieutenant and he resumed his newspaper training.
He was now twenty-six, considerably more mature and poised, well liked around the newsroom, eager to learn about journalism. And he would learn a good deal during the next few years, but he would never become a top reporter, lacking qualities that are essential and rarely cultivated by such men as himself, the properly reared sons of the rich. Prying into other people’s affairs, chasing after information, waiting outside the doors of private meetings for official statements is no life for the scion of a newspaper-owning family. It is undignified, too alien to a refined upbringing. The son of a newspaper owner may indulge in reporting for a while, regarding it as part of his management training, a brief fling with romanticism, but he is not naturally drawn to it.
The reportorial ranks are dominated by men from the lower middle class. It is they who possess the drive, patience, and persistence to succeed as reporters; to them reporting is a vehicle to a better life. In one generation, if their by-lines become well known, they may rise from the simplicity and obscurity of their childhood existence to the inner circles of the exclusive. They may gain influence with the President, friendship with the Rockefellers, a frontrow seat in the arenas of social and political power. From these positions they might not only witness, but influence, the events of their time—as did Reston, the son of poor Scottish immigrants; as did Krock and Catledge, Daniel and Wicker, the sons of the rural South; as did A. M. Rosenthal and dozens of other Jewish Americans whose forebears escaped the ghettos of Europe.
Not only on The Times, but on other newspapers, the news staffs were largely populated by products of the lower middle class—by liberal Jews and less liberal Irish Catholics from the North, by progressive Protestants from the South and Midwest; and, not unexpectedly, by relatively few Italo-Americans. The immigrants from Italy took longer to become familiar with the English language and its literature, as did other ethnic groups to whom the English language was difficult; they did not produce many newspaper reporters, except in the category of nonwriting “legmen” or district men in the police “shacks.” Negroes were only tokenly represented in the newsroom for a number of reasons—they lacked the education or incentive, the encouragement or opportunity, or some combination of all these. On The Times’ staff, there was often only one Negro reporter, rarely more than two. Conversely, nearly every one of The Times’ elevator operators was a Negro, smiling plantation types in uniform, a hiring practice that had begun with Ochs, who was a conventional Southerner on the issue of race.
The fact that most newspaper reporters descended from lower-middle-class whites did not mean a total absence of the sons of the wealthy and privileged; but few of them became outstanding reporters. The job seemed almost antipathetic to their nature. They found newspaper reporting interesting, as did John F. Kennedy, but not for very long. If they did not crave by-lines to satisfy their need for a name, having already a family name that guaranteed special considerations, then there was little inclination toward a reporting career except if they liked the irregular life or regarded journalism as an important public service or an instrument for social reform. But the rich could perhaps more adequately satisfy their social conscience and encourage change by buying a newspaper and controlling the editorials—or by entering political life and becoming a reform candidate or a financial supporter of such candidates. But as reporters their privileged past was no asset, and few of them could compete favorably with the hungrier newsmen with more keenly developed instincts—a critical eye, a cynicism and skepticism based on firsthand experience, a total commitment to their craft because it was all that they had. The best reporters, even when not on assignment, were always working. In the middle of a crowd they felt apart, detached observers, outsiders. They remained subconsciously alert for the overheard quote, the usable line, the odd fact or happening that might make a story. They reacted immediately to events in ways that Punch Sulzberger and Orvil Dryfoos—who had also worked briefly as a Times reporter early in his career—would not.
In 1955, Punch Sulzberger, after a year on the Milwaukee Journal, was back on The Times and working as a reporter in the Paris bureau. One day in June of 1955 he was attending the automobile race at Le Mans. He was not assigned to cover it, nor was any Timesman—it was not then the practice of The Times to send staff reporters to many European sports events. Suddenly, one of the drivers lost control of his car. The vehicle jumped the road, went spinning through the air, and plowed into a section of spectators. Eighty-three persons were killed. Sulzberger saw the accident and was horrified by the sight. But it never occurred to him to call The Times.
Sulzberger was returned to the New York office later that year to become an assistant to his father. He was now separated from his wife, Barbara, and he was spending considerable time in the company of Turner Catledge, who was also separated, and with other Catledge cronies who were either having marital difficulties or were so happily married that they could take liberties with their wives, staying out drinking in Sardi’s bar or in Catledge’s little “club” behind his office on the third floor. Catledge’s circle of Timesmen during these years included Joseph Alduino, The Times’ controller, and Irvin Taubkin from promotion, both of whom had marriage problems; and also Nat Goldstein, the circulation manager, whose tolerant wife never counted on his appearances at home. Catledge also enjoyed the company of several actors whom he had met around Sardi’s—Robert Preston, David Wayne, and Martin Gabel.
Catledge had a very paternal way with young Sulzberger without ever being condescending. He gave advice willingly, but Sulzberger made his own decisions. And this warm relationship would continue through most of the next decade, although their drinking pattern would be altered considerably after they had met the women who would become their second wives. Catledge met Mrs. Abby Ray Izard, a widow, at an editors’ convention in 1957, and Punch Sulzberger met a striking brunette divorcée, Carol Fox Fuhrman, at a New York dinner party in 1956.
The party was in the home of Orvil Dryfoos’ brother Hugh, on Park Avenue. Hugh Dryfoos had first noticed Mrs. Fuhrman at a beach club in suburban New York. She was sitting in the sand with her parents and her young daughter when Dryfoos, a friendly, untimid man, approached her, introduced himself, and engaged her in conversation. Dryfoos’ blond wife, Joan, was then sleeping on the beach, although she would wake up in time to join her husband and receive from him an introduction to the brunette.
Later in New York—after Punch Sulzberger had said that he would be attending the Dryfoos’ dinner party without a date—Joan Dryfoos decided to invite Carol Fuhrman. Sulzberger and Mrs. Fuhrman got along quite well, and he drove her home that night. Weeks later, Sulzberger invited the Dryfoos’ to a restaurant, and they were surprised and pleased to see that he had brought Carol Fuhrman—and Joan Dryfoos also noticed that Carol was wearing a gold friendship ring. She commented on it, but received only a blushing evasive reply—very different from the reaction of Punch Sulzberger’s estranged wife, Barbara, when she would learn of the ring. It was not that Barbara Sulzberger objected to her husband’s dating other women, for she had dated other men, and they were about to be divorced: but she did object to receiving the bill for the ring, sent to her by a prominent Fifth Avenue jeweler and listed as one “gold wedding band.” It turned out to be a mistake on the store’s part, however, not a sample of Sulzberger humor. And after the initial reaction and embarrassment had subsided, there were no further complications—the divorce proceedings continued, and in December of 1956 Carol Fox Fuhrman and Punch Sulzberger were married.
The new Mrs. Sulzberger objected to the nickname “Punch,” preferring to call him Arthur. “Punch” was a reminder of a troubled boyhood that was part of the past, and she hoped that he would be seen for what he was to her—a sensitive and quick-thinking young man with commendable qualities that had long been obscured by his more obvious easy manner and his old image. There were some Times executives, like Catledge and a few others, who also felt that Sulzberger was capable of major responsibilities on The Times if given a chance, but until 1963 that chance did not come. Orvil Dryfoos was running the paper and was assisted by Amory Bradford; neither was very impressed with Sulzberger and both thought that it might be better if he learned the newspaper business elsewhere. As a minor executive, he had little to say or do on the fourteenth floor. He sometimes attended the four o’clock news conference and was often seen around the third floor, a clean-cut, dark-eyed young man puffing a pipe, smiling, then looking up at the walls in the newsroom inspecting the paint, or scrutinizing the air-conditioning ducts, appearing to be endlessly fascinated by the mechanical system and machinery around the building. He knew a great deal about automation and the new equipment being used in The Times’ West Coast and European editions. His opinions on news coverage, however, were rarely solicited or expressed, and he was often ignored by some top Timesmen. Even James Reston, when he would come flying in to New York from Washington, would, after a quick handshake and hello, breeze past Sulzberger into the office of the publisher, Orvil Dryfoos. Dryfoos was a vigorous man not yet fifty, the man who was expected to direct the paper through the next two decades. Sulzberger was in his thirties, and he seemed younger. When Amory Bradford would preside at meetings on the fourteenth floor, Sulzberger would sit back quietly and listen like a schoolboy. Sulzberger was awed by Bradford, confused and dazzled as the vice-president stood before the other executives and quickly ticked off facts and figures that everybody in the room seemed to understand except himself. While they nodded knowingly at Bradford, Sulzberger tried to conceal his ignorance with his impassiveness, but inwardly he was embarrassed. Only after he had become the publisher did he learn that the other executives had been no less confused than he.
The death of Dryfoos and the elevation of Sulzberger brought sudden changes to The Times, and one of the first announcements was the resignation of Amory Bradford. Bradford submitted his public resignation with the amenities that are traditional in such documents, and it was replied to in a statement from the office of the chairman of the board, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, that read: “Amory Bradford has been a valuable source of strength and leadership in our organization. We are sorry he has decided to resign. He will be greatly missed.”
Later that year, Bradford was appointed assistant general business manager of the Scripps-Howard newspapers. He would remain at Scripps-Howard for a year and a half, but he would not be happy there, and in 1965 he would resign and move to Aspen, Colorado. While cleaning out his desk at Scripps-Howard, he would discover a copy of A. H. Raskin’s strike story that had appeared in The Times. Bradford had never read the story completely through. Now, seated at the open-drawered desk that he was vacating, he would pick up the two-year-old newspaper article and begin to read, and be reminded of the fretful months of the negotiations between 1962 and 1963, the frustration and anger, the additional heat provided by the television coverage, the whole cast of characters from the White House on down. The strike had altered the careers and destiny of so many people. The printers’ leader, Bertram Powers, had gotten the recognition that he sought. Some New York newspapers would become so financially weak that they would never recover. The strike had possibly hastened the death of Dryfoos, and it certainly had not helped Bradford’s own newspaper career, and he conceded that it might have also influenced the course of his marriage, which ended in divorce. Both he and his former wife would remarry. He would marry a California widow who was an artist and conservationist, and he would work as a consultant to the Department of Commerce, heading an experimental program in Oakland aimed at solving problems of minority unemployment.
After Bradford had finished reading A. H. Raskin’s Times article on the strike of 1962–63, he was rather sorry that he had been too pressured during the negotiations to cooperate more with Raskin. Even so, though the article was critical of him, Bradford thought that Raskin’s reporting was very well done.
Bradford’s place on The Times was taken by Harding F. Bancroft, an extremely proper, soft-spoken, and handsome man of fifty-three—a descendant of Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury (1604–1610). Bancroft had attended the Harvard Law School after graduation from Williams College, practicing law in New York for five years. After service as a naval officer during World War II, Bancroft worked in the State Department in 1945, meeting and becoming friends with Amory Bradford. In 1951, Bancroft had been appointed by President Truman as the United States deputy representative to the United Nations Collective Measures Committee, and in 1953 he began a three-year assignment in Geneva as legal adviser of the International Labor Office. Bancroft became associate counsel and assistant secretary of The Times in 1956, and secretary in 1957; and with Bradford’s departure, Harding Bancroft was named The Times’ vice-president, moving into Bradford’s office on the fourteenth floor.
The chain of command under Bancroft, as Punch Sulzberger took over The Times, included many corporate administrators who had been there for years, had their names printed atop the editorial page every day, yet were practically unknown outside the Times building—in fact, with few exceptions, these executives were unknown to most Times reporters and subordinate editors in the building. Monroe Green, the head of advertising, was an exception because his office was on the second floor, and he was often seen there by employees who were collecting their weekly paychecks at the cashier’s window, which was not far from Green’s office. But Francis A. Cox, The Times’ secretary-treasurer, who had been on the paper since 1951, was recognizable to very few Times employees. Each day Cox came and went at The Times, a quiet former CPA with a softly pleasant undistinguished face, and of the more than five thousand Times employees perhaps a few dozen knew who he was. Andrew Fisher, Sulzberger’s newly appointed business manager for production, was known in certain mechanical areas but not generally in the Times building; although this was beginning to change with his appointment to head The Times’ Western edition, an assignment that brought him into contact with a number of editors and his photograph into the pages of the paper’s house organ, Times Talk.
Another key administrator on the new publisher’s executive staff was a smallish, bow-tied, dark, very capable man named Ivan Veit. Veit was in charge of Times promotion, personnel and industrial relations, and also radio station WQXR. He joined The Times on his twentieth birthday in 1928, having graduated from Columbia, where he earned the Phi Beta Kappa key that always dangled from his vest. Veit was born in the upstate hamlet of Hornell, New York, as was The Times’ former business manager, Louis Wiley, a close friend of Adolph Ochs’s; and it was through meeting Wiley during one of Wiley’s hometown visits that Ivan Veit was invited to apply for a job at The Times. Veit’s first assignment on the paper in 1928 was that of a classified-ad taker, at eighteen dollars a week, but he moved up through the system quickly. One reason for his swift ascent was his compatibility with Wiley’s brother, a large cauliflowered wrestler named Max Wiley. Louis Wiley was rather embarrassed by the sight of his burly brother, who toured as a wrestler at county fairs, and who visited The Times whenever he was in the vicinity of New York. When Max Wiley would appear, Louis Wiley would employ his young protégé Ivan Veit to get Max out of the office fast—to take Max to the movies, to the Bronx Zoo, to Coney Island, anywhere, so long as it was far from The Times. Veit managed to do this with such esprit and speed that Louis Wiley was ever grateful, and Veit’s early career was off to a good start. He became the promotion chief of The Times in 1934, and not long after World War II his department grew to a staff of eighty and a budget of more than a million a year. This staff included copywriters, artists, researchers, statisticians, production men; and they worked on newspaper and magazine advertisements, radio and television spot announcements, window displays, book fairs, suburban and subway posters—and one of their most successful subway campaigns, stressing the influence of classified advertising in The Times, featured the smiling faces of people announcing, “I Got My Job Through The New York Times.” (This campaign was parodied by rightwing political groups, who often waved posters in parades that quoted the slogan under the smiling bearded face of Fidel Castro.)
Although it was stated in The Times on the day of Punch Sulzberger’s take-over that no executive changes were planned other than the promotions of Harding Bancroft and Andrew Fisher—Catledge was to continue as managing editor, Lester Markel as Sunday editor, Oakes as editorial-page editor—there would shortly transpire a series of changes more dramatic than any in Times history. Punch Sulzberger, who had previously revealed so little of his inner character, who had done almost nothing that he did not have to do, now suddenly began to demonstrate an initiative and decisiveness that was surprising and startling.
The first thing that he did, in January of 1964, was to fold The Times’ Western edition. It had been operating for only sixteen months, but it had failed to attract sufficient advertising and it was losing tremendous amounts of money when the home office could least afford it. The 114-day newspaper strike had cut deeply into The Times’ financial reserves, and while Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger was one of the wealthiest women in America—Fortune magazine would claim in 1968 that she was worth between $150 million and $200 million—Punch Sulzberger did not like losing thousands of dollars each week in supporting a force of ninety men in California and the costly electronic equipment that relayed the news from the Times building on Forty-third Street to the regional headquarters in Los Angeles. While the prepublication surveys had indicated that Pacific Coast readers wanted a regional edition of The Times, a paper that they could buy each morning on the newsstands in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and dozens of other Western cities, Sulzberger felt that the circulation figures had not fulfilled that promise, and he did not believe that things would get much better. When the edition had begun in October of 1962, its circulation had been 120,000, but it had dropped to 87,000 in March of 1963, and to 71,000 in June of 1963. Equally discouraging was the fact that this circulation was spread over thirteen Western states—too widespread a readership to appeal to an advertiser in Los Angeles. The owner of a specialty shop in Beverly Hills saw no advantage in buying an ad in The Times’ Western edition if its readers were thinly sprinkled from the Mexican border up the California coast to Seattle and back to the Rocky Mountains and the desert of Las Vegas. Another problem was that the Western edition was not tailored for Westerners. It had been almost assumed by Dryfoos and his advisers in New York that The Times’ success formula on the East Coast would work equally well on the West Coast. So the Western edition was really a thin version of the New York edition, featuring a heavy diet of foreign and national news, the mood of distant jungles and capitals, but lacking the fashion advertising that women like to read, lacking the “feel” and the news of the region west of the Rockies. It was a newspaper run by remote control—the very method that had been mocked by Arthur Hays Sulzberger and James Reston after they had been to Moscow in 1943 and had visited the offices of Pravda, where they were astonished to discover that while Pravda’s printing facilities were on the premises, the news came over wires from government offices elsewhere. “The ‘reporters’ were technicians,” Reston would recall in one of his books more than twenty years later, “processing what officials elsewhere decided should go in the paper.” This is exactly what The Times tried to do in 1962—its California staff members were mostly “technicians”: electronic experts, admen, circulation crews, only a minimum of copyreaders and editors, and no special staff of Western reporters. Consequently The Times could not compete in advertising or local reporting with the suddenly aroused Los Angeles Times. If The New York Times did nothing else in California, it helped to make the Los Angeles Times into a better newspaper. The latter not only launched its own news service in partnership with the Washington Post, but it sharpened its coverage around the nation and overseas and especially at home. When the riots occurred in the Watts section of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, the Los Angeles Times sent dozens of reporters and photographers in to cover the incidents and the aftermath, a performance that would win the 1966 Pulitzer for general local reporting.
Sulzberger’s decision to close down the Western edition greatly disappointed some Timesmen who were affiliated with the project. They believed that sixteen months had not provided them with enough time to properly test the edition and make adjustments. Other Timesmen wondered aloud about how the failure would affect The Times’ image. “You can’t close down the edition, Punch,” one said, “we must save face.”
“We’re loaded with face,” Sulzberger replied quickly. “It’s a bad paper. Let’s get rid of it.”
So in late January of 1964, Sulzberger made the announcement, and the California contingent was disbanded. Some people remained with the Times organization, others found jobs elsewhere. No Timesman was more disheartened than Andrew Fisher. Though the Western project had been Dryfoos’ “baby,” Dryfoos was now gone, and so was Bradford, and the executive most closely associated with the regional edition was Fisher. When Fisher returned to New York he wondered if he would now be gradually eased out. He knew that to some older Timesmen he symbolized the new technology that had long stirred their doubts and suspicions. Furthermore, the technology had failed in California; the scientific surveys had misjudged the people, and The Times had lost a big battle because of faulty intelligence; and if a scapegoat was to be sought it would most likely be Andrew Fisher. As he reestablished himself on the fourteenth floor, sitting in his office adorned by a two-faced clock simultaneously ticking the time of California and New York, and as he moved through the corridors of the building and rode the elevators that had now become automated, Fisher sensed that it was difficult for some executives to look him straight in the eye. A delicate distance was being maintained, he thought, and he asked himself more than once, Why don’t they fire me? Why are they keeping me here?
With Punch Sulzberger, however, Fisher did not feel this way, and the discovery was wonderful and reassuring. Sulzberger seemed no different than before, no less friendly, no less confiding than when Fisher had been promoted to head the production department seven months previously on the occasion of Sulzberger’s own elevation to publisher. Fisher and Sulzberger had gotten along very well when Dryfoos was alive. Fisher had been the only executive close to Sulzberger’s age on the fourteenth floor, and they quickly discovered that they had much in common. They were both informal and frank, yet possessing a military passion for orderliness, a respect for charts, training aids, systemization, and brevity in the arrangement of details; they were both enamored of the gadgets and tools of science, and they believed that when certain tools proved inadequate for a job, that these tools should be unsentimentally replaced by newer, better tools. And it was precisely this clear and practical reasoning that had caused Fisher to wonder after the California fiasco if he might be finished at The Times. It not finished in the sense of being fired, then insofar as his future career was concerned. As a tool of the institution he had in a sense failed; and yet this was apparently not the value judgment that Punch Sulzberger had placed on the West Coast venture.
There had been a major mistake, it was true, but no one individual or group was to blame, nor did Sulzberger’s manner indicate that he was greatly distressed or discouraged by the failure. Failure was nothing new to Punch Sulzberger. While he could not now casually condone it, not with the stakes so high, he also did not believe in overreacting to it. The West Coast reversal represented to him a single setback in a large forward-moving operation. He saw no reason to become suddenly defensive, or to shy away from experimenting with the modern techniques that might help run The Times more effectively and economically in the future. On the contrary, Sulzberger now more than ever wanted to experiment with modern systems and to learn more about them; his newspaper could not merely follow the formulas of his father or grandfather. The Times would have to preserve what was inviolable in its tradition, yet adjust to changing trends and new tools. The Times had to make more money than was the custom, Sulzberger believed: the economics of newspaper ownership was never more precarious than at present—the recent newspaper strike had shown how vulnerable some New York newspapers were to the whims of labor, how quickly old institutions can decline and crumble. While The Times had had the cash reserves to withstand strikes, a greater income was essential not only to meet the rising costs of production and higher salaries, but also for the paper to remain unpanicked during future labor threats. One way to make more money was to sell more newspapers and to charge higher advertising rates, to diversify and to gamble on such expansionistic ventures as the Western edition and to try something else if these failed; another way was to operate The Times more economically—not by skimping on the news coverage or the hiring of top talent, but rather by modernizing the plant, by retiring aging veterans (God could no longer be The Times’ personnel director), and by cutting down on the employment of more bookkeepers and clerks to handle the mounting paperwork. The Times would have to accept the computer. The computer was still a rather controversial subject at The Times, but now in Sulzberger’s first year as publisher he began to prepare the institution for its introduction. Timesmen would have to overcome their aversions and romantic notions about the newspaper business: while it was true that The Times was the most influential paper in the nation, it could not relax, because there were other papers outside New York that were advancing fast. The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal were better than ever, matching and occasionally beating The Times in the coverage of politics and economics. And the Los Angeles Times, while still primarily a regional paper with limited influence around the nation, had a daily circulation in excess of eight hundred thousand. It was about to overtake the second-place Chicago Tribune, and it was clearly topped only by the tabloid New York Daily News, whose two-million weekday circulation was more than double that of any other metropolitan newspaper in the nation. The Wall Street Journal, being in a specialists’ market, was often not classified with general newspapers; but its four regional editions each day gave it a total national circulation of more than eight hundred thousand.) Among the other big-city dailies, The New York Times ranked number seven in 1964, averaging a weekday sale of about six hundred and fifty thousand, although this figure would suddenly climb as other New York newspapers went bankrupt in the wake of labor difficulties; and The Times within a few years would exceed eight hundred thousand and surpass the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Detroit News, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and even the Chicago Tribune. But it would still follow the second-place Los Angeles Times. While circulation figures are not necessarily indicative of the economic strength of a newspaper (the New York Mirror, for example, folded in 1963 with a daily circulation of more than nine hundred thousand), there was no question of the Los Angeles Times’ wealth. For nearly a decade the Los Angeles Times had led the nation’s dailies in advertising linage, and if it had great ambitions east of the Rockies it could now afford to gamble on them, being backed by the Chandler family’s Times-Mirror Company, which had diversified and profited tremendously in recent years with the purchase of several new companies publishing everything from telephone books and Bibles to aeronautical charts for pilots. The Los Angeles Times’ newspaper plant was a model of modernism. As the only major daily without unions, being militantly antilabor during much of its history, the Los Angeles Times had been free to automate as it wished—to have computers to make up the payroll, to set type, to analyze circulation trends, to pinpoint people who owed money for ads. The New York Times, centered in a tight city of organized labor and rooted in different traditions, could not compete electronically with the Los Angeles Times even if it wished to do so, but Sulzberger wanted to modernize as much as prudently possible, and he began by arranging for the rental—at eight thousand dollars a month—of a Honeywell H.200 computer to do the accounting paperwork of twenty-five employees. While the employees were being retrained to do other work, the computer would be moved into a white-walled windowless room, dehumidified and dust free, on the seventh floor of the Times building. The room, twenty-five feet by thirty-two feet, was to be off limits to all Times employees except those who worked in conjunction with or fed the computer. The computer was under the supervision of a newly appointed systems manager at The Times, a former New York University professor from Georgia named Carl Osteen. Osteen and the computer were both answerable to Andrew Fisher.
In another move to modernize The New York Times, to centralize its executive authority and eliminate the last of the ancient “dukedoms,” Punch Sulzberger decided that as of September, 1964, Turner Catledge would be appointed to the newly created title of “executive editor.” This title would give Catledge unquestioned authority over Lester Markel’s Sunday department, over Reston’s bureau in Washington, and over all Timesmen in the newsroom and in the bureaus around the nation and overseas. Catledge had been envisioning this arrangement for nearly twenty years. Now he had it. He would not have had it if Orvil Dryfoos had lived, or if other events had not prematurely occurred, or if Punch Sulzberger had not been a part of Catledge’s little backroom “club”—but such dialecticism was of minor significance at this point: Turner Catledge, at the age of sixty-three, slightly overweight, ailing with the gout, a large, tall, flaccid man with a round, red face, slack jaw, quick darting dark eyes that missed almost nothing, a soft and courtly manner that had long defied description, preventing most people in the newsroom from knowing exactly whether he was a corporate genius or a lucky bumbler—Catledge was now to become so eminent in The Times’ News department that Arthur Krock in Washington would remark with an inflated sigh: “I hesitate to breathe his name.”
Catledge would be serving as a kind of regent to young Sulzberger. Sulzberger had much to learn about the News department, and he wanted to have at his side the one man who knew it all. Catledge’s vast experience made him the obvious choice, although even Catledge could make only a highly educated guess about what was going on under him, for the department was now too large, too spread out and mobile to be kept constantly in check even by computers. The News department consisted of almost 20 percent of The Times’ total employment of more than five thousand—about one thousand people who in various ways helped to write and edit the daily and Sunday editions of The Times. Not counting the senior editors in New York or the foreign correspondents, or the secretaries in bureaus, or the stringers, or chauffeurs; not counting The Times’ national correspondents around the United States and in Washington; not counting the women’s-news staff on the ninth floor of the Times building, or the supporting casts on other floors, but counting only the news personnel on the third floor, there were about two hundred staffers under the New York editor, fifty-nine under the financial-news editor, fifty-two under the sports editor, forty under the cultural-news editor, twenty-five under the picture editor.
The entire News department at home and abroad—including copyboys, clerks, copyreaders, foreign correspondents, subeditors, senior editors—would run up an annual operating bill of approximately $11 million to the Sulzberger family. The cost of publishing The New York Times each year—the cost of paper, ink, machinery, the delivery trucks, trains, planes, the salaries and expenses of Timesmen everywhere, and the taxes—would be more than $134 million. If the projected earnings were accurate, if there were no long strikes or unforeseen liabilities or recessions, The Times would realize from its advertising revenue, its circulation sale, and smaller incidentals, between $136 million and $137 million. Thus the profit from owning what is regarded as the greatest newspaper in the world would not be enormous—a bit more than $2.6 million.
To increase that profit Sulzberger did not want to jeopardize tradition or the uniqueness of The Times’ coverage. A Times editor should never give a second thought to tossing out an ad in making room for an important late-breaking story. The Times should continue to publish long texts of speeches that few people read, as well as such historical documents as the Warren Commission’s Report on the assassination of President Kennedy, which would fill forty-eight pages of a Times edition in September of 1964. And so Sulzberger believed that the advertising rates should go up, and so did Andrew Fisher and Ivan Veit; but the advertising manager, Monroe Green, felt differently. A rate increase might cause a decline in advertising linage, which was Green’s special source of pride, his batting average, and he was reluctant to change the rules under which his department had dominated all other New York newspapers in advertising linage for many years. In 1964, Green’s department had recorded 67.7 million lines of advertising, bringing $100 million into The Times’ treasury; the New York Herald Tribune had printed only 18.5 million lines at lower rates, and Green saw no reason to tamper with this kind of success. Green also felt a bit uneasy about young Sulzberger. When Arthur Hays Sulzberger had been the publisher, Green’s judgment had rarely been questioned, but now Green felt changes in the wind; he felt somehow threatened by Fisher’s closeness to the new publisher. There had been rumors that Punch Sulzberger someday hoped to bring Green’s Advertising department, Veit’s Promotion-Circulation department, and Fisher’s Production department under one head, as the news divisions were about to be consolidated under Turner Catledge. It was said that Sulzberger liked the chain-of-command management style of the Marine Corps, a single line of authority from top to bottom. Whether this could work at The New York Times remained to be seen, although Green had little doubt that Sulzberger would attempt it. Sulzberger had already revealed his inclination with his decision to unify the daily and Sunday news staffs under one editor; and Sulzberger’s official statement, when it was finally announced on September 1, 1964, gave insight perhaps into his general approach to running The Times. In naming Catledge to supervise the entire news operation, the daily as well as Sunday sections, Sulzberger added: “I feel that we are recognizing the current trends in our operations and their future course.”
The elevation of Turner Catledge was reported in The Times on the first page of the second section, on September 2, 1964. The article was accompanied by photographs of Catledge and five other editors who would be affected by the move—Markel, Daniel, and Reston, Tom Wicker, and Daniel Schwarz. But the wordage of the article was couched in such corporate vagueness, was so lacking in the interpretation that The Times now deemed essential to modern reporting, that it is doubtful whether any outsider understood the full significance of the story. If there had been an executive reorganization in the television industry or the State Department, or if there had been a bureaucratic shuffle in Romania, then The Times would have opened up its columns to clear reportage, interpretative analyses and editorials, cold facts interspersed with speculation (“According to informed sources …”); but no newspaper, including The Times, is very informative about its own executive maneuvers. And so there was no hint of the behind-the-scenes jockeying, the tension and despair, that had occurred within the Times organization during the weeks prior to Sulzberger’s public decision to end the dukedoms and to centralize the news flow under Catledge. The article in The Times made it seem that the principal figures were all being calmly, cheerfully moved up to greater challenges within the institution. The four-column headline over the article and photographs read: “Catledge Named Executive Editor of Times,” and the smaller headlines banked underneath: “Markel, Reston Raised to Associate Editors—Schwarz Sunday Chief; Daniel Managing Editor—Wicker Will Direct Washington Bureau.” And the article began, routinely: “Six major changes in editorial assignments for The New York Times were announced yesterday by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher.”
When Lester Markel first learned of Sulzberger’s plan, he was furious. Markel was seventy years old. He had built the Sunday Times into an American institution, a five-pound package thick with advertising and with a circulation that was climbing slowly but steadily toward 1.5 million. Now Markel saw his whole life’s career being undermined by what he considered the negative trends of the paper—not only by Catledge’s collectivist ambitions that were being fulfilled by Sulzberger; not only by the theories and innovations of such third-floor editors as Theodore Bernstein, who had introduced the “Man in the News” profile, and other daily background features that had intruded somewhat into Markel’s former prerogatives—but Lester Markel was now equally concerned with what he sensed as a tendency to change The New York Times from a “good gray lady” into a swinging operation with circulation trucks boasting: “Without It, You’re Not with It.” The Times had achieved uniqueness, Markel believed, not from being with it in an ultramodern superficial sense, but rather by remaining always a bit above it. This did not mean that The Times had failed to cover trends—Ochs’s Times had, in fact, led the way in covering the great scientific discoveries, the preludes to wars, the major questions and debates of every decade—but Ochs’s Times had not been swayed by popular fads and froth; it had remained remote, a little stodgy and stiff, a manner that Ochs had fancied. Even when The Times had stooped to report the great murders or scandals of the Nineteen-twenties or Thirties, it did so with a tone of Victorian restraint. As late as 1942, The Times was referring to Frank Costello, the racketeer, as a “sportsman.” And in the Twenties, when Markel had asked Ochs why The Times was devoting as much space as the Daily News to the scandalous Hall-Mills case—a still-unsolved murder in which Reverend Hall and his choir mistress, Mrs. Mills, were discovered slain under a crabapple tree in New Jersey—Ochs had replied: “When the Daily News prints it, it is sex; when we print it, it is sociology.”
Now, in 1964, despite his vigorous health and his even more vigorous protests, Markel was being replaced as the Sunday editor. Markel was aware of his unflattering reputation, but he had been hired by Ochs forty-one years ago to do a job, and he had done it; and he attributed much of his personal reputation to embittered writers who had failed to meet his test—and there were some who admired Markel, such as the deskman in the Sunday department who said: “The trouble with Markel is that he’s always right.” Marilyn Monroe, with whom Markel had occasionally dined—and whom he had once escorted through the Times building—had considered him charming and brilliant, and there were others who sensed a tenderness and great vulnerability beneath Markel’s terrorizing exterior. Markel had been absolutely shattered when he had not been invited to Brooks Atkinson’s testimonial party at Sardi’s. It had been a grand affair attended by the top names on Broadway and by every major executive on The Times. But Mrs. Atkinson, in reviewing the guest list in advance, had eliminated Markel from the group. This had quickly become the talk of the Times building, and when Orvil Dryfoos had arrived at Sardi’s, the first thing he had asked was, “Is Markel here?” When told that he was not, Dryfoos, shaking his head, had exclaimed, “Boy, I’m going to catch hell tomorrow.”
But Punch Sulzberger possessed none of the traditional timidity toward Markel. While appreciative of Markel’s enormous contributions, and respectful in his approach, Sulzberger nevertheless insisted, in a face-to-face meeting with Markel, that Markel relinquish the Sunday editorship to Daniel Schwarz, a judicious and wellliked man who had been Markel’s assistant since 1939. Schwarz would now be answerable to Catledge. Markel would move up to the fourteenth floor as an “associate editor,” would get his name printed on the editorial page masthead each day, and would work in the newly established department of public affairs, which was concerned with “the advancement of a better-informed public.” Markel would continue to serve as the host on his educational-television news show, being regularly joined by Tom Wicker and Max Frankel, and he would also deal broadly with The Times’ expanding ventures in adult education, radio, and books. Of course, all the prose padding and euphemisms in the world would not belie the fact that Markel was being kicked upstairs, an event that inspired no great protest on the eighth floor. And yet in this inglorious time of his life, Markel somehow revealed a strength of character that was admirable. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, or walking out in a huff, or being destroyed with humiliation, Markel—after an initial outburst of anger—accepted the inevitable and proceeded to move up to his new office on the fourteenth floor. There he worked energetically in the months ahead, and eventually he expanded his assignment in scope and importance. Within a few years he would take on such newer responsibilities as the chairmanship of The Times’ “Committee of the Future,” which Markel, adapting to space-age jargon, would call “COMFUT”; this committee, whose membership included other executives and research assistants, was to ascertain what effect social changes and technological advances would have on newspapers in general, and The Times in particular, in the coming decades. The committee would try to perceive what human habits will prevail, how nonworking hours will be utilized in the Nineteen-seventies and Nineteen-eighties, and how The Times can best meet the challenges of this new scene. Some of the Markel committee’s research would be done in an office within The Times, while much of it would be farmed out to scientific-research organizations.
And so Markel’s energies would continue to propel, although the fragility of his ego would be shown by the fact that he rarely set foot in the Sunday department after Sulzberger had removed him. If Markel had spent time browsing through his old domain on the eighth floor, he would have passed, across the hall from his former office, a rather formally furnished Spanish-style room with a refectory table, wooden chairs, and an iron chandelier. On the wall was a portrait of Lester Markel, unsmiling. The room, which has no important function in the department, is most often empty and very quiet. It is sometimes referred to as Markel’s “chapel.”
When the preliminary word of Sulzberger’s reorganization plan first reached the Washington bureau, the reporters and other staffmen were shocked, but not surprised. They conveyed the impression that nothing from New York, no matter how preposterous, would surprise them. For two years now, or ever since Salisbury’s promotion to national editor in 1962, and since Clifton Daniel’s ascendancy as the assistant managing editor under Catledge, the Washington bureau had felt the bombardment of second-guessing from the New York office. If it was not Daniel claiming that the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal had published something that The Times had not, then it was Harrison Salisbury on the telephone relaying his story ideas, his suspicions, and questions: Was there any Murchison money behind that Lyndon Johnson deal? What was Abe Fortas really up to? Was it true, as rumored, that the State Department would finally recognize Mongolia? Getting recognition for Mongolia seemed to be one of Salisbury’s pet campaigns, perhaps because he thought that Mongolia would make an ideal “listening post” for China-watchers—or perhaps Salisbury was just fond of Mongolians. In any case, Salisbury had promoted Mongolian recognition in one of his books, and he was regularly hearing “rumors” of Mongolian recognition in Washington. Washington bureaumen claimed that they had queried the State Department so often about this that soon, out of boredom or harassment, the State Department would recognize Mongolia.
With the death of Orvil Dryfoos, the balance had shifted from Washington to New York, and one of the first results of this shift was the resignation of Reston’s number two man, Wallace Carroll. Carroll claimed to have “seen the writing on the wall” in the summer of 1963, shortly after Sulzberger’s appointment as publisher, and so Carroll decided to leave The Times and become the editor-publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel. Carroll had been on The Times since 1955, had run the bureau under Reston with efficiency and composure, and when Dryfoos had been alive he had thought of Carroll as a possible successor to Markel. But Carroll quickly saw that he had nothing to look forward to but increased pressure from New York, and he could not be dissuaded from quitting. Catledge, who had liked Carroll, offered him the Rome bureau, or any other bureau that was open, if he would change his mind. Reston had volunteered to turn over the Washington bureau to Carroll, devoting himself entirely to the column. Carroll was appreciative, but his decision was irrevocable; he sensed what life would be like under Daniel as the managing editor, and Salisbury as Daniel’s deputy, and so he accepted the position in Winston-Salem, where he had once worked, and he was happy to be going back.
Unknown to nearly everyone during this period, Reston was contemplating his own resignation. He had been deeply disappointed that no member of the Sulzberger family had consulted him during those weeks after Dryfoos’ death and before Punch Sulzberger’s appointment as the publisher. This was odd, considering how close Reston had always been to the family. But in retrospect, it was also revealing. Reston, at least for the present, was out of the inner circle. Reston had delivered the Orvil Dryfoos eulogy at the funeral, and then had returned to Washington as the Sulzbergers and the directors had gathered in secret session to select the successor. There had been rumors of Reston’s playing a key role in New York, but nobody had approached him, and this had disturbed and confused him. If he had been offered the executive editor’s job, he might have turned it down; and yet he would have appreciated the opportunity of considering the job. Now he did not know exactly where he stood. He was outranked by Catledge, that was clear. When Dryfoos was alive, Reston had been officially under Catledge, but in actuality he was not. Reston had immense pride, and he could not accept the situation as it now stood, and he seriously considered accepting the impressive offer extended him by his close friend Katharine Graham, president of The Washington Post Company. In a position at the Post, Reston would not only continue as a syndicated ccolumnist but he would also have a hand at guiding her newspaper as well as the company’s other publication, Newsweek. Reston would receive enough money and stock benefits to guarantee that he and his family would be quite rich, and he no doubt could lure to the Washington Post a few of the very best young Timesmen. So during the summer he gave serious thought to quitting, and discussed it with such friends as Walter Lippmann. In the end, however, Reston decided to remain at The Times.
There was no newspaper like The Times, no other medium that each day reached the people that Reston wanted to reach with his words and thoughts. Reston could get along without The Times, and vice versa, but that was of minor importance. By staying with The Times, and concentrating on his column, he was more influential with American policy makers, with the power brokers of the nation and the leaders abroad, than he would be if he quit at triple the money. Reston believed that The Times alone had the audience that moved America. The President of the United States read it every morning, and so did the Congress, and so did seventy embassies in Washington, including the Russians. More than half the college presidents in the United States read The Times, and more than 2,000 copies were sold each day at Harvard, more than 1,000 at Yale, 700 at Chicago, 350 at Berkeley. These were the people that Reston wished to influence—the Establishment of today, the Establishment of tomorrow: he was the Establishment columnist, and he could be that only on The Times.
Reston also loved the paper. He had once told Carroll that he would sooner divorce his wife than quit The Times. This was, of course, not even close to the truth—Reston had debated quitting The Times in 1953, until Krock had stepped down as bureau chief; but there was no doubt that Reston was a Timesman in the old sense, a man emotionally committed to the institution as a way of life, a religion, a cult, and it would not be possible for him to quit as easily as Wallace Carroll had done. Reston had joined The Times in 1939, had grown with it, had used it, had been used by it—they had been a wonderful combination, and Reston, at fifty-four, still had a considerable way to go. And so he decided to remain on The Times and see what was ahead for himself and for it. Young Sulzberger was now feeling his oats. The paper was in a strange state of transition. Arthur Hays Sulzberger was too ill to influence it, being confined to a wheel chair, and being so stricken with heart attacks that he was now a thin, drawn figure, very different from his handsome photographs and his large portrait in the Times building. Iphigene Sulzberger had the financial power but she also had a son, only one son, and he was now the publisher, the hope of the future. She could not, would not interfere at this point. Punch Sulzberger had spent much of his lifetime being second-guessed by people who knew better or thought they knew better, but these days were gone, as were most of these people. All that Reston could do was to try to understand the Sulzberger that he had never known, to perhaps build a working relationship that would deepen with time into a warm friendship. And so Reston flew to New York and spent amiable hours with Sulzberger during the summer of 1964, shortly before the announcement about Catledge was to become final. Reston made one last attempt to get Sulzberger to reconsider, talking to Sulzberger in the concerned, public-spirited way that Reston spoke with presidents and senators, suggesting that the youthful publisher might be wise to surround himself not with older men but rather with the bright young men of his own generation—such men as Tom Wicker, Max Frankel, or Anthony Lewis. Sulzberger listened, but he was not now responsive to the idea of altering his plan. Catledge was to be the boss of the News department, indisputably responsible for the whole news section—everything except the editorial page, which would remain under Sulzberger’s cousin, John Oakes. Reston could not, under these conditions, continue to serve as the bureau chief. And so at his own request, Reston asked to be relieved of his title and to select his successor. Reston would become, like Markel, an “associate editor,” and would continue to occupy an office in the Washington bureau from which he would write his column. Sulzberger did not want to lose Reston, and he was relieved and delighted that Reston would remain, and he was agreeable to Reston’s selecting his own successor. Reston chose Tom Wicker. Sulzberger did not know Wicker well, but he admired his reporting. Reston knew Wicker very well, not only as a reporter but as an individual. Wicker was the sort of man, Reston believed, who could be driving down a country road during a political campaign, could jump over a fence and learn what a farmer was really thinking, and could then go back to town, change into a tuxedo, and be equally at home at an embassy party. Such an individual, of course, was not unlike Reston himself.
Also in the summer of 1964, Sulzberger endorsed Wicker as the next Washington bureau chief, not fully anticipating the effect that it would have on the New York editors, who now would be unable to select a man of their own choosing to solve what they considered the problems of Washington coverage, the cronyism, the lack of imagination and drive. And there would also be two Timesmen in Washington who would not be elated by the selection of Wicker, one of these being Max Frankel.
Frankel had nothing personal against Wicker, but Frankel, who had been almost a child prodigy on The Times, now felt that the quick pace of his earlier development had stalled; and his failure to become the bureau chief, at the age of thirty-four, did little to relieve his anxiety. He had become a Times reporter at twenty-one, in the summer of 1951, between his junior and senior years at Columbia. He had begun writing for The Times as a Columbia campus correspondent in 1949. Those were the Eisenhower years at Columbia, and it had been a very important assignment for a young correspondent; and Frankel had made the most of the opportunity. He was an alert young man, politically oriented and curious, rather stocky, bespectacled, round-faced, fast-stepping—one to whom the drama of World War II had not been learned out of a history text, but had rather been felt personally by himself and his family.
Max Frankel had been born in Gera, Germany, now in the East Zone, and had lived near Leipzig for eight years until his family was expelled in a mass roundup of Jews of remotely Polish ancestry. Driven to the German-Polish border by the Gestapo, the Frankels were finally admitted to temporary residence in Cracow, Poland. In 1939 he returned with his mother to Germany to try to arrange for emigration to the United States. His father, remaining in Poland, soon was fleeing the Nazi armies and was later taken into custody by Soviet authorities, who tried him as a German spy and gave him a choice between Soviet citizenship and a fifteen-year sentence of hard labor in Siberia. Jacob Frankel chose the latter, vaguely hoping to someday rejoin his wife and son, who had meanwhile obtained from the Gestapo an exit permit and had sailed from Holland for the United States, arriving in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the winter of 1940.
They settled in the Washington Heights section of New York, not far from the George Washington Bridge, in an area of refugees sometimes called the “Fourth Reich.” There Frankel attended public schools, studying hard, and after the war his father, released from prison, left the Soviet Union and rejoined the family, later opening a small dry-goods store in West Harlem. Frankel graduated in 1948 from the High School of Music and Art in New York, where he had edited the school newspaper; then he worked six months for the United World Federalists as an Addressograph machine operator, and then, winning a New York State scholarship, he enrolled at Columbia. His rise from campus correspondent and editor-in-chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator to The New York Times’ staff was rapid, as was his elevation to a prominent place on the staff. After an impressive tour as a rewriteman in the newsroom, following two years’ service in the United States Army, Frankel became a Times correspondent in Vienna, then Belgrade, then Moscow. In 1961, after ten years of extensive and varied experience, Frankel joined Reston’s bureau. In the next two years he covered the State Department, the White House, occasionally the Pentagon, the CIA, the Congressional committees and foreign embassies. When Reston decided to relinquish his bureau job, Frankel was ready for something other than just straight reporting.
Two days after Wicker’s appointment as bureau chief, Max Frankel resigned. In a long and emotional letter to Punch Sulzberger, Frankel announced that he was joining The Reporter, where he hoped to have the freedom to write on national as well as international subjects, official as well as human affairs; to travel freely, to deliver lectures, to teach occasionally, to appear on television, to see if he could make the grade as a writer, not merely a reporter; to write with a subjectivity that in The Times’ news columns is forbidden. Frankel wanted to become more his own man, he suggested to Sulzberger. But then, after he had sent the letter, Frankel had a rather sudden change of mind. The Times loomed larger, the outside world seemed less enticing, he could not break the knot. Finally, and with considerable embarrassment, Frankel sent a telegram to The Reporter’s editor, Max Ascoli, stating that he had withdrawn his resignation from The Times—he simply could not leave.
The second Times reporter in Washington who had hoped to succeed Reston was a cool, lean, well-scrubbed-looking, intense, and brilliant young man named Anthony Lewis. At thirty-seven, Lewis was three years older than Frankel, and he was Frankel’s opposite in many ways. Whereas Frankel could be emotional, Lewis seemed tightly contained at all times, incredibly controlled, his orderly mind concentrating only on those things that were relevant now, at this second, and he was careful not to overstate his case or overstep his boundaries. His handwriting was an exquisite example of perfect letter formation, neatness, clarity of communication. His eyes were brightly alert, and his hairline, receding beyond an already high forehead, made him appear almost tonsured. His voice was soft, sometimes warm and friendly, and with just an edge of tension when things displeased him. He had been born in New York, had attended Horace Mann School, a private school, and then had gone to Harvard, graduating in 1948. Even now, sixteen years later, he somewhat symbolized in appearance, if not in fact, the Ivy League style of that postwar period—conservative, Brooksbred, conditioned to blending, accentuating the symbols of similarity, toning down any natural eccentricities or temptations. Only those who knew him well, or with whom he was sufficiently impressed and thus responsive, sensed the interesting man beneath—the connoisseur of opera, the serious man married to a tall, blithe student of modern dance, the superb mimic of W. C. Fields, the charming dinner guest. Few reporters in The Times’ bureau knew this side of him. They knew mainly the perfectionist, the purposeful, hard-working reporter who had won a Pulitzer in 1955 for a series of articles on the Federal loyalty-security program, while working for the Washington Daily News. Lewis had won a second Pulitzer in 1963 for his reporting on the Supreme Court. It had been Reston’s idea, encouraged by Justice Felix Frankfurter, to have a Timesman specialize in the coverage of law. Lewis drew the assignment, returning to Harvard for a year on a Nieman Fellowship to study law. And Justice Frankfurter later said of Lewis’s Supreme Court coverage: “There are not two members of the Court itself who could get the gist of each decision so accurately in so few words.” In 1964 Lewis published an important book concerning a landmark decision of the Supreme Court—Gideon’s Trumpet, which was excerpted in The New Yorker.
And yet if Reston had selected Lewis as his replacement, there were Timesmen in Washington who said they would resign. He was too coolly ambitious and driven, they believed, lacking the easy congeniality of a Reston or a Wicker. In New York, some editors felt that Lewis, who had also specialized in covering the Justice Department, had become overly enamored of the Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, developing a friendship that was possibly a flaw in Lewis’s objectivity. Reston was aware of all this, and while he was proud of Lewis and liked him personally, he thought that Wicker would be more suitable as the head of the bureau than either Frankel or Lewis.
Anthony Lewis was deeply disappointed by Reston’s decision. And when Lewis had the opportunity to become the London bureau chief, he took it. He replaced Sydney Gruson, who was returning to New York as the foreign editor, replacing in turn Emanuel R. Freedman, who was becoming an assistant managing editor, joining Theodore Bernstein and Robert Garst. Harrison Salisbury, who had vacated his national-news editor’s job to an energetic Atlanta-born reporter named Claude Sitton, was also moving up to become an assistant managing editor under the newly appointed managing editor, Clifton Daniel.
During all this shifting, and before turning the Washington bureau over to Tom Wicker, James Reston had arranged one other detail with Punch Sulzberger that seemed very inconsequential at the time, but as events would transpire in the years ahead, it would perhaps rank as a marvelously astute move, one that would reveal something of the Restonian mind—its awareness of corporate whimsy, its knowledge of how executive wives can sometimes build the bridges that can more tightly bind their husbands. Reston, knowing that Sulzberger and his wife, Carol, would be going on a trip to Europe after the November election, planted the idea with Sulzberger of inviting Wicker and Wicker’s wife, Neva, to accompany them. This would be an ideal opportunity for Sulzberger to get to know more intimately his new bureau chief, and Sulzberger agreed. These executive trips could be disastrous, Reston knew—the constant companionship could magnify personality differences, or result in hours of boredom in the middle of the Atlantic, or there was always the chance that the wives would not get along. Or such trips could produce harmonious results, bringing a young publisher and a young journalist closer as men, ultimately producing perhaps the kind of friendship that had begun in the Forties when Reston had taken trips with Arthur Hays Sulzberger—and it is possible that Turner Catledge would have never become managing editor in 1951 if he had not proven to be such a compatible drinking companion for Arthur Hays Sulzberger in 1944 during their Pacific junket. So the executive trip was a gamble—a source of envy to those executives who had been left at home, but perhaps a great boon to the executive who accompanied the boss: in any case, Reston thought that it was a chance worth taking, for Wicker would have to emerge as a major figure on the paper if the bureau were not to be completely swallowed up by New York. Reston was also confident that Wicker and Sulzberger would get along. They were both the same age, were both very informal, and they both were married to pretty young brunettes. Neva Wicker was a delicate and appealing North Carolina girl who knew when not to talk. Carol Sulzberger sensed simplicity and sincerity in people and admired it, and she had only briefly met Neva Wicker, and had barely known Tom Wicker.
So it was arranged—a month’s trip to Europe in November of 1964, just Punch and Carol Sulzberger, Tom and Neva Wicker. And, as Reston had imagined, Punch Sulzberger got along well with Wicker—and their wives got along very well.