The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  Many people are rooting for Arthur Sulzberger, and many people like him. It can be hard to persuade those who know him to talk candidly on the record. For this story, Arthur stuck by his decision to get out of the business of being interviewed, and he also declined to permit his employees to talk to me. Nevertheless, many did. I interviewed dozens of current and former Times reporters, editors, and business managers, as well as industry analysts, academics, and editors and publishers at rival newspapers. Nearly every one of them hopes that Arthur will succeed. Few expect that he can.

  Only two years ago the New York Times Company moved into a new skyscraper on Eighth Avenue designed by Renzo Piano. Its facade rises into the clouds like an Olympian column of gray type. Whether owing to hubris or sheer distraction, the erection of new headquarters often seems to spell trouble for corporations, and many had questioned the wisdom of this investment. The new Times building has now been sold, one more measure to relieve the company’s mounting debt. Eyeing the handsome grove of birch trees planted in its soaring atrium, one reporter told me, “We used to joke about how many trees died for a story. Now we ask, How many stories died for those trees?”

  1. The Sword and the Stone

  America is not kind to the heir. He is a stock figure in our literature, and an unappealing one at that. He tends to be depicted as weak, pampered, flawed, and a fop, a diluted strain of the hardy founding stock. America celebrates the self-made. Unless an heir veers sharply from his father’s path, he is not taken seriously. Even in middle age he seems costumed, a pretender draped in oversize clothes, a boy who has raided his father’s closet.

  Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. is fair-skinned with small, deep-set, light brown eyes. He has a high forehead with a steepening widow’s peak; his crown is topped with a buoyant crop of wavy hair, now graying. He is a slight man who keeps himself fit, working out early in the morning most days of the week. He has a wide mouth that curls up at the edges, and when he grins he is slightly bucktoothed—this adds to the impression, unfortunate for a man in his position, of puerility. He is a lifelong New Yorker, but there is no trace whatever of region or ethnicity in his speech. When he chooses to be, Arthur is a fluent, eager, even urgent talker, someone who listens impatiently and who impulsively interrupts, often with a stab at humor. He has delicate hands with long fingers, which he uses freely and expressively in conversation. He is long-winded and, in keeping with his tendency toward affectation, fussily articulate, like a bright freshman eager to impress, speaking in complex, carefully enunciated sentences sprinkled with expressions ordinarily found only on the page, like “that is” and “i.e.” and “in large measure,” or archaisms like “to a fare-thee-well.” He exaggerates. He works hard, endearingly, to put others at ease, even those who in his presence are not even slightly intimidated or uncomfortable.

  His witticisms are hit-or-miss, and can be awkward and inadvertently revealing. “Some character traits are too deep in the mold to alter,” says one longtime associate. Arthur has the clever adolescent’s habit of hiding behind a barb, a stinging comment hastily disavowed as a joke. Some find him genuinely funny, while others, particularly those outside his immediate circle, read arrogance—the witty king, after all, knows that his audience feels compelled to laugh. His humor can also be clubby. He will adopt, for instance, a pet expression, which becomes an in-joke and which he will repeat often. One of these expressions is “WSL.” It stands for “We suck less,” a self-deprecatory boast, which he will vent in discussions of the industry’s woes as a reminder for those in the know that, for all their travails and failings, they remain, after all, the New York Times.

  While clearly smart, Arthur is not especially intellectual. For what it’s worth, he is a Star Trek fan. His mind wanders, particularly when he is pressed to concentrate on complicated business matters. Diane Baker, a blunt former investment banker who served for a time as the chief financial officer of the New York Times Company, has described him as having the personality of “a twenty-four-year-old geek.” She did not long survive Arthur’s ascent to the chairman’s office. His thirty-year marriage has reportedly foundered over a relationship Arthur had with Helen Ward, from Aspen, Colorado, whom he met on a group excursion to Peru. Since separating from Gail, he has been living alone and has not been involved with Ward or anyone else. Perturbations on the home front are also a family tradition. (Arthur’s grandfather Arthur Hays Sulzberger was always, as the saying goes, a tough hound to keep on the porch. His father, Arthur Ochs (“Punch”) Sulzberger, paid child support for sixteen years to a newspaper staff member who bore a child she claimed was his—this according to Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones in The Trust, a history of the Times.) Arthur is provincial. Asked once if he had seen a story on the front page of that day’s Post, he looked confused until it was explained that the item had appeared in the Washington Post. He said, “I only read the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post.” He sometimes takes the bus or subway to work, and for many years jogged in Central Park. Recently his knees have started to bother him, so he now prefers exercising on an elliptical trainer. He also takes Pilates classes and can be evangelical about them, telling friends the practice wards off arthritis, which has begun to worry him. But he is not a complete health nut. He still enjoys unwinding with a cigar and a martini. He still goes on motorcycle treks with his cousin Dan Cohen and other friends. His attraction to feats of personal daring, and to rock climbing, is a vestige of his enthusiasm for Outward Bound. He has little interest in sports, particularly team sports, and dismissed as silly the effort to lure the Olympic Games to New York City, which included plans for a sports stadium in Manhattan. In a presentation at the Times building, Arthur greeted the scheme’s promoters with cutting sarcasm, even though the paper’s editorial board supported it.

  He has been publisher for seventeen years now and chairman of the board for twelve of those years, yet no weight seems to adhere to him. What Arthur’s manner does suggest is a hyper self-awareness: he is one of those men who seem condemned to stand apart from themselves, watching. Arthur is theatrical. His theatricality shows in his public speeches, which can be impressive. He has a nice sense of comic timing, and enjoys attention and applause. This is a man who, after spending a few years living in London in his youth, returned home wearing suspenders and a top hat, and carrying a cane. He long ago abandoned that Carnaby Street affectation, although the suspenders lasted well into middle age, but the basic impulse for showmanship is still there, manifested by a very calculated ease. He prowls the Times building in his stocking feet, and will pounce on colleagues as they happen by his sixteenth-floor office, urging them to step in and visit, saying conspiratorially, “Let me show you something cool.” His corner office in the new building is spare and sunny and much smaller and less imposing than his old one, the one his father had. The old office was musty and formal, with rich wooden bookcases and heavily sculptured furniture upholstered in leather. It was the Citizen Kane version of the publisher’s lair. The new office has windows that stretch from floor to ceiling. On his desk is a crystal Steuben sculpture of a gold-handled Excalibur embedded in stone, a gift from his sisters when he was named publisher, the third Arthur in the line.

  The plainer office is an expression of Arthur’s desire to lessen the distance between himself and those he employs. He deliberately placed his office in the center of the floors inhabited by the Times in the new building. At his most romantically self-effacing, he speaks of the Times in the language of family. In an hour-long interview with Charlie Rose in 2001, to mark the newspaper’s anniversary, he talked about how fortunate his own family was to have been “adopted” by the extraordinary talents who create the newspaper. He frets when people on his staff are unhappy, and he looks out, or tries to look out, for his friends. When one of his old reporter pals was transferred and asked the Times to cover the loss on the sale of a residence, Arthur wanted to do it. When his business managers balked, complaining about the precedent it would
set, he backed down, annoyed, and sent them to inform the reporter—“You handle it,” he said. To a degree some of his top staff consider unwise, he tends to base promotions not on a cold-eyed assessment of people’s talent but on how comfortable he feels around them—on how much fun they are. As Arthur was deciding between Howell Raines and Bill Keller for the executive editorship of the newspaper, in 2001, the reserved Keller kept a professional distance. The gregarious Raines sought to sweep Arthur off his feet. “I remember seeing them at the 2000 Democratic convention, in Los Angeles,” said an editor at another newspaper. “Joe Lelyveld [then the Times’ executive editor] was there. He was running the paper. But what everyone noticed most was how Howell Raines seemed glued to Arthur. It was evident that Howell was seducing Arthur, insinuating himself. Howell is a brilliant journalist, and he exudes confidence. You could watch him making this big impression on Arthur.” Raines became the executive editor.

  2. “Dad, Can I Come See You?”

  The single defining fact of Arthur Sulzberger’s life is his birth. His father; his grandfather Arthur Hays Sulzberger; his uncle Orville Dryfoos; and his great-grandfather Adolph Ochs were publishers and chairmen of the Times. Arthur was the firstborn male heir in a line that stretched back to 1896, when Ochs bought the newspaper. In an era when merit generally counts for more than genes, Arthur is ill at ease about his archaic path to power, so he handles it the way he handles many things that make him uncomfortable: he jokes about it.

  Near the end of his interview with Arthur, Charlie Rose scanned the long history of family ownership and success, and asked, “Does this make you believe in nepotism?” “To hell with nepotism!” said Arthur, smiling. “I’m a believer in primogeniture!” He was kidding … and he wasn’t. He does in fact have three sisters with exactly the same genetic link to old Adolph, and while there is much discussion of his son eventually succeeding him, there is no such speculation about his daughter. On a stage before a big audience at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002, Arthur was asked a similar question by his host, Orville Schell, then the dean of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Earlier, Arthur had joked with the dean about how he had achieved his position in the same way as Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator, who had succeeded his dictator father, Kim Il Sung.

  Schell: “You said the difference was that in their family [the line of inheritance] was only two generations, whereas in your family it was four.”

  “I don’t like where this is going one damn bit!” Arthur protested comically, to much laughter. “And if you don’t be a little more careful, I may nuke you!”

  “My question is,” Schell persisted, “really, I mean, the New York Times is governed and held in a very unique way for corporate America. It decides who the successor will be in a way that is neither very corporate nor democratic. Tell us about that, and the effect you think it has on how this great paper comports itself in the world.”

  Arthur sighed.

  “There’s a lot behind that question,” he said. “First of all, just to get it on the record, the family did go for talent.” More laughter.

  But Arthur wasn’t just born to his position—the story is more complicated. He may have been the firstborn son in the line of succession, but he also staked his claim to the crown deliberately and dramatically, when he was only fourteen years old. His mother, Barbara Grant, and Punch Sulzberger divorced when Arthur was just five. He lived throughout his early childhood on the Upper East Side with his mother and her new husband, David Christy, a warm and supportive stepfather. Punch is nominally Jewish, although not at all religious, but his son was raised Episcopalian. Arthur senior and Arthur junior were not close: Punch was generally aloof, even when Arthur was around. Yet, understanding what his famous name meant, and who his distant father actually was in the world, he packed up his things and moved himself the half mile to his father’s home on Fifth Avenue, to live with Punch and his stepmother and their daughters. He was not pulled by any strong emotional connection. It seemed more like a career move. His biological father and his stepmother were wealthy, socially connected, and powerful; his biological mother and his stepfather were not. Arthur opted for privilege and opportunity. That his stepmother, Carol Sulzberger, despised Arthur—she would stick out her tongue at pictures of him—did not seem to matter. He was Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and showing up on his father’s doorstep was a way of asserting, consciously or not, that when Punch changed wives he had not washed his hands of an obligation to his son. While the inheritance was his by birth, it was also very much Arthur’s choice.

  Some heirs flee the burdens and expectations of family, determined to make their own way. Arthur chose to be defined by his name, and his father. When he went off to summer camp in 1966, the year he moved in with Punch, Arthur took his father’s old portable typewriter case with him. It was stamped, “A. O. Sulzberger, The New York Times.” This was at a moment when many members of Arthur’s generation were questioning received wisdom in all its forms, turning their backs on conventional careers, disdaining not just their parents but the entire establishment. Arthur, too, would grow his bushy hair long, try drugs, demonstrate against the Vietnam war, and embrace the style and rhetoric of the 1960s. He has said that he worked on his high school newspaper but not his college paper, at Tufts, because “we had a war to stop.” But even then Arthur, draped in Punch’s old (and newly fashionable) marine corps fatigue jacket, was just acting out the editorial policy of the newspaper he planned someday to run. Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, he was the exact opposite of a rebel.

  Arthur has spent a lifetime faithfully placing his feet in his father’s footsteps. Like Punch, he served a long apprenticeship during his inevitable rise. Perhaps inevitable is too strong a word. He began as a reporter for the the Raleigh Times, then moved on to the London bureau of the Associated Press. He was a hard worker and a cheerful colleague, and he produced competent if unspectacular work. His friend Steve Weisman, a former Times reporter (and now the editorial director for the Peterson Institute for International Economics), asked him once—when they were both in their late twenties and working as reporters in the Times’ Washington bureau, where Arthur landed after the AP—if he was going to be publisher one day. “Well, there’s always the fuckup factor,” said Arthur, which Weisman took to mean that, barring a serious misstep, Arthur’s path was assured.

  In The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese described the similar path taken by Punch in his youth. Talese and Sulzberger were roughly contemporaries (Punch was six years older). They started working at the newspaper at about the same time, Punch having gone to college only after his stint in the marines. Talese, the son of a tailor, considered himself fortunate when he landed a job as copyboy at the Times, after distinguishing himself as a college journalist and a columnist for his hometown newspaper, the Ocean City (New Jersey) Sentinel-Ledger. He went on, one finely crafted story after another, to earn distinction as the best writer at the Times. What he wrote about Punch’s apprenticeship could have been written about Arthur’s:

  He would learn a good deal during the next few years, but he would never become a top reporter, lacking the qualities that are essential and rarely cultivated by men such 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.

  There is one other essential trait shared by ambitious reporters that the Sulzbergers, father and son, would never know: desperation. Reporting is a highly competitive craft where one’s work is on display, sometimes on a daily basis. There is no faking it—not for long, anyway. When Arthur started working in Raleigh, the young men and women competing furi
ously for plum beats and a front-page showcase could only dream of someday working at the New York Times. For the ambitious, those early years at small newspapers were a scramble to get noticed, to shine brightly enough to catch the eye first of the local editors, then of those at bigger papers, and then of editors at the top newsrooms across the country. It was a fierce winnowing. Little wonder that his coworkers in those years found Arthur a man without an edge. He was charming, eager, cheerful, and ever willing to take on the most mundane assignments. He wore a leather jacket and roared to work on a motorcycle. He was having a ball. And why not? He wasn’t competing; he was paying his dues. He didn’t need front-page stories. He didn’t need sources, a scoop, or any particular narrative flair to get ahead. It was easy to be Arthur. And it was smart to befriend Arthur.

  His career progressed in prodigious and unearned leaps. He went from the Washington bureau, where he was close friends with Steve Rattner, Judith Miller, and a few other reporters, to New York, where he worked briefly as a very young assistant editor on the Metro desk, before moving on to stints in the advertising and production side of the paper, becoming deputy publisher in 1987. People liked Arthur everywhere he went, and he worked at being liked. But he was not deeply respected. Just as Arthur would never pass as an authentic reporter among those who have spent their lives in newsrooms, his brief apprenticeships in advertising, production, and various other departments were seen for exactly what they were: way stations on the road to publisher. The Times’ business managers do not enjoy the same status in their field as the paper’s top reporters and editors do among journalists. Newspapers do not attract top-tier business and financial talent, because it would be unseemly to pay those on the business side disproportionately more than the most senior editors, and the salary scale for even the highest-paid editors is a small fraction of that for high-level CEOs and bankers. Yet even the mid-level talent around Arthur does not regard him as a peer, much less a suitable leader. He is accepted, of course. The family does own the newspaper, and there appears to be a consensus that—as one veteran Timesman, no longer at the newspaper, told me—if a family member has to run the newspaper, Arthur is “the Sulzberger you would want.”