by Gay Talese
Monroe Green and The New York Times—the combination can sell almost anything, and it was quite natural that Green, hearing of Tishman’s skyscraper apartments along the Hudson, would approach his friend Alan Tishman and suggest that he purchase advertising space that would call attention to the construction and would lure tenants. Tishman agreed, and the $50,000 advertising supplement was put together. Then came The Times’ editorial condemning the Tishman construction, and now Monroe Green sat in his office awaiting Alan Tishman’s call. There was little that Green could do. It had been a most unfortunate editorial but it was too late to do anything about it. Personally, Green did not believe, as the editorial writer did, that the skyscrapers marred the natural beauty of the New Jersey cliffs along the Hudson River. The land used by the Tishmans was not a historical landmark or sanctified preserve, Green reasoned, it was almost the opposite—grim acres of weeds and shanties and untrimmed trees, and the construction of apartment houses there, Green thought, was more an improvement than anything else. But Green had no influence with editorial writers. He was not even sure who had written about the site, each editorial being written anonymously by one of the ten-man Editorial Board, but Green knew who was responsible for having it written. He was John Oakes, the editor of the editorial page, an individual widely known throughout the building and beyond as a zealous conservationist, one almost obsessed with the defense of trees and streams and mountains against the intrusion of land developers. Oakes was a high-minded person with almost an abhorrence of money and the profit motive, and once he even denounced the gold-tinted aluminum telephone booths along Fifth Avenue, declaring in an editorial that “the bogus opulence of golden phone booths and golden trash cans … merely detracts from the integrity of the avenue.”
Of the men with power on The Times, perhaps no two have less in common than Monroe Green and John Oakes. Oakes is a tweedy man in his fifties with tight curly white hair, pale blue eyes, a very youthful but serious face; he is a Princeton graduate who became a Rhodes scholar. Oakes has strong opinions on almost everything and, more important, his opinions dominate the editorial page of the paper. While it is true that he does not expect his editorial writers to espouse causes with which they do not agree, it is also true that he does not expect them to espouse causes with which he does not agree. If their views conflict with his, they are not published. If they are consistently in disagreement with him on the major political, social, or economic issues of the day, they are wise to consider transferring to another part of the paper because Oakes insists, as any editorial-page editor must, on a consistent and unified policy harmonious with his own views and with those of the publisher, to whom Oakes is responsible.
The editorial page, Oakes believes, is the “soul” of a newspaper, a reflection of its inner character and philosophy, and since he took over the page at The Times in 1961 that character and philosophy has been more vividly revealed than ever before. It has been condemning of the war in Vietnam, staunch in its support of the Civil Rights movement. It has been generally pro-Labor but critical of such leaders as James Hoffa and the late Michael Quill, a supporter of Israel in wars with the Arabs but critical of some Israeli territorial ambitions and actions following the victories. Though endorsing John F. Kennedy for President, it became disenchanted later when Kennedy did not, in Oakes’s opinion, fulfill his promise with the Federal Aid to Education Bill, and as the editorial sniping continued on this and other issues during the Kennedy years many family members and friends of the President came to detest John Oakes more and more, charging that the negativism was really a manifestation of a deep personal disaffection that Oakes had cultivated during Kennedy’s earlier years in the Senate.
It was Oakes, a few of them suspected, who helped spread the rumor in late 1957 that Kennedy was not the sole author of Profiles in Courage. Oakes actually played no part in the spreading of this rumor. The man most responsible was probably Drew Pearson, who made the charge on an ABC television show, causing the network to follow up with an investigation that could not produce sufficient evidence to justify the charge, and ABC later publicly apologized to Kennedy. All that Oakes did was to inquire of an editor whom he met at a social gathering, a Harper editor who had worked with Kennedy on the book, if there was any substance to the rumor that Theodore Sorensen, or some other Kennedy associate, had helped with the writing. The editor denied it, and that was the end of it as far as Oakes was concerned. But some weeks later, while John Oakes was in Washington on one of his regular visits to various Congressmen, he was greeted in Kennedy’s office with a long hard look from the Senator: then Kennedy lifted from his desk a letter and handed it to John Oakes, saying, “I’ll give this to you now rather than send it to you.” The letter began, “Dear John: It recently came to my attention that you had been quoted as stating that the rumors concerning my authorship of Profiles in Courage were true.” The letter, 300 words in length, went on to state unequivocally that no other author had collaborated on the work, and after Oakes had finished reading the letter Kennedy wanted to further prove the point by having Oakes examine stacks of notes in Kennedy’s own handwriting that formed the book. Oakes assured Kennedy that this was unnecessary and soon they were discussing other things, but Oakes was most impressed with the time and effort that Kennedy was devoting to the refutation of the rumor, and Oakes concluded on this January day in 1958 that Kennedy now had serious plans for the Presidency. Later, in New York, Oakes received a copy of Profiles in Courage from Kennedy; it was inscribed: “To John Oakes—with high esteem and very best wishes from his friend—the author—John Kennedy.”
The deferential treatment accorded John Oakes by ambitious men outside the Times building as well as within is not based entirely on his position as editor of the editorial page, as prestigious as this may be; also involved is the fact that Oakes is a member of The Times’ ruling family. His father, who altered his surname in 1917, was a brother of Adolph Ochs. The name change by George Ochs to George “Ochs-Oakes,” with the stipulation that his sons be known as “Oakes,” was inspired by an intense anti-German feeling during World War I and by a belief that a decidedly German name such as Ochs would be considered repellent by Americans for many years to come. This opinion was certainly not shared by other members of the Ochs family in Chattanooga or New York. They were in fact insulted by George’s presumption, but on second thought they were not altogether surprised. They had always looked upon George Ochs as something of a maverick within the family, an unpredictable and complex person who sought his own identity and fulfillment beyond the pale of indebtedness and yet he could not or would not permanently leave the guaranteed grandeur provided by his older brother Adolph.
Adolph Ochs was three years older than George, the first in a family of three sons and three daughters. They were a remarkable combination of conflicting character, of strong dissent nearly always overcome by a stronger devotion to each other; they were the progeny of German Jews who had met and married in the American South before the Civil War, parents whose political allegiances clashed during the war—their father, Julius Ochs, was a captain in the Union Army; their mother, Bertha Ochs, was loyal to the South and was accused, with some justification, of being a Confederate spy. Their family may well have been separated in later years if Adolph, the child genius, had not at the age of twenty begun to buy and build newspapers that would become towering totems of nepotism, elevating and shaping his family, his grandchildren, nephews, cousins, and in-laws for almost an entire century, committing them to an orthodoxy stronger than their religion—and establishing Adolph Ochs as their benefactor, a little father-figure even to his own father.
Julius Ochs, who immigrated to America in 1845, was a wise and well-educated man of many talents, but making money was not one of them. He was a fine guitar player, an amateur actor, a classically educated student of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and fluent in English, French, and Italian. He had been born in 1826 in the Bavarian city of Fürth, in southwest Germany, a cultured an
d relatively tolerant city with a large Jewish community that, while well respected, was denied certain civil rights and privileges. These restrictions, however, did not apply to Julius Ochs’s family, which had lived and prospered in Fürth for several generations. In the old Jewish cemetery in Fürth there were tombstones of Ochses going back to 1493. Julius Ochs’s father had been a successful diamond broker, also a linguist and Talmudic scholar, and his mother was a handsome and refined woman who had nine children, Julius being the youngest. During Julius’ second year at a military academy in Cologne his father died and Julius’ older brother, becoming head of the family, withdrew him and placed him in an apprenticeship with a bookbinding firm. Julius rebelled and in the spring of 1845 he left Fürth with a friend, tramped to Bremen, and sailed on a full-rigged ship across the Atlantic, arriving seven weeks later in New York. He first settled in Louisville, where two of his sisters were living and where a brother-in-law, refusing to subsidize Julius’ reentry into college, put him to work as a peddler. He soon quit that and later found a job teaching French at a girls’ seminary at Mount Sterling, Kentucky. When war was declared against Mexico in 1848, Julius Ochs enlisted and, because of his military background in Germany, was made a drill sergeant, but the war ended before his unit was sent to the front. He spent the next several years trying to find work that would suit his intellectuality and wistful idealism and curb his restlessness, but he never found it, being neither very determined nor very lucky, and so his life was one of travel and variety between New York and New Orleans. He was a road salesman for a jewelry company, owned and operated dry-goods stores, organized small theatrical clubs; he dabbled in small-town politics and held municipal government jobs; he occasionally served as a rabbi in marriage ceremonies, and during his ventures into Mississippi he played the guitar at plantation parties. In Natchez, Mississippi, where he briefly settled and ran a store, he met an attractive, somewhat dogmatic young woman named Bertha Levy.
Born in Landau, Bavaria, she was then living with an uncle in Natchez, having been sent there by her father so that she could escape prosecution from German authorities following her role, while she was a sixteen-year-old student in Heidelberg, in political demonstrations at the graves of several martyrs of the revolutionary uprisings of 1848. Julius Ochs met her in 1851 but his stay in Mississippi was too brief for any romance to flourish, and three years later, during the yellow-fever epidemic in the Mississippi valley, he read in a newspaper list of the dead the name Bertha Levy of Natchez. Two years later, at a reception in Nashville, Tennessee, he saw her again; yes, she had been very ill, she said, but as a final desperate attempt to save her life the doctors had resorted to ice-packing, and now she was fully recovered and living in Nashville with her parents, recently immigrated from Bavaria. Within a year, Bertha Levy and Julius Ochs were married. Three years later, in March of 1858, in Cincinnati, where Julius Ochs was based as a traveling salesman, was born the future publisher of The New York Times, Adolph Ochs.
Julius Ochs joined the Union Army when the Civil War began, becoming a captain in a battalion assigned to guard the railroad between Cincinnati and St. Louis. His wife stayed with him during the war but she remained intensely loyal to the South. On one occasion a warrant for her arrest was issued after she had been caught by Union sentries while attempting to smuggle quinine, hidden in the baby carriage of her infant son George, to Confederate troops positioned on the opposite end of a bridge across the Ohio River. This put Captain Ochs in a most embarrassing and crucial situation, requiring of him a performance far more persuasive than any he had been able to demonstrate during his career as a salesman; but he somehow managed to get a senior officer whom he knew to dismiss the warrant, an act of generosity that inspired no sign of gratitude from Mrs. Ochs. She persisted in her dedication to the Southern cause and way of life, being unappalled even by its system of slavery, and years later when the family settled in Chattanooga she became a charter member of the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Before her death, which came in 1908 during her seventy-fifth year, she requested that a Confederate flag be placed on her coffin, and this was done. Next to her grave, on a knoll overlooking the city of Chattanooga, is that of her husband; he died in 1888 in that city and, as he instructed, his funeral was conducted by the Grand Army of the Republic with the Stars and Stripes placed on his coffin.
Such displayed partisanship and commitment to causes, particularly to lost causes, never enticed their son Adolph. He was a hard worker, an unfanciful middle-of-the-road thinker who saw no virtue in offending one faction to please another. He wished to do business with all groups, offending as few people as possible. He was a truly precocious young man who recognized early the aimless, varied course of his father’s life, and he set out to concentrate on one thing, to stay with it, succeed with it. This vehicle for him was the newspaper business, which promised some of the prestige and excitement that he sought, and an opportunity to follow in the tradition of his boyhood hero, Horace Greeley, who rose from a farm in New Hampshire to the ownership of the New York Tribune.
Ochs began at fourteen by sweeping the floors of the Knoxville Chronicle. Three years before he had been a newsboy at the Chronicle but had left to earn a bit more money as an apprentice in a drugstore, then as an usher in a theater, finally as a clerk in his uncle’s grocery in Providence, Rhode Island, attending business school at night. He was bored by these jobs, experiencing none of the exuberance he had felt during his newsboy days at the Chronicle office; and so in 1872, when he applied to the Chronicle for a fulltime job, and was hired as an office boy, he decided that newspapers would be his life’s calling and his parents did not attempt to dissuade him. Ochs’s nature, combining the idealism of his father and the chutzpa of his mother, seemed well suited to the running of a newspaper. It might have led him into politics, where he could have fulfilled some of the social-worker spirit within him, but the spotlight would have distracted him and overemphasized the awkwardness he felt whenever undue attention was focused on him. He was acutely aware of his limitations, both educationally and socially, and he was forced to compensate in an endless variety of ways even after he had achieved greatness at The New York Times, or possibly because he had achieved this greatness. He would usually smile or grin after delivering a comment or observation to his editors so that, should it seem inane or be in some way wrong, it might appear that his words were not really meant to be taken all that seriously. At times his grammar was faulty, his words poorly chosen, but he balanced this by an enthusiasm for detail and an enormous sympathy and tolerance for subject. His mind was always quietly at work challenging the obvious, and this was true even when he was driving through the countryside and stopped to ask directions; he never accepted the directions without asking if he could not also get to the same place by taking a different route. He was both cautious and optimistic, sentimental and tough, a short, dark-haired, blue-eyed little man who, when someone observed that he resembled Napoleon, replied, “Oh, I am very much taller than Napoleon,” and yet he was very humble. He was a modest organizer of grand designs, possessing a sure insight into human nature and into what would sell, and still he was dedicated to the old verities that in another age would mark him as “square.” But he truly believed that honesty was the best policy, and he honored his father and mother and was never blasphemous, and he was convinced that hard work would reap rewards.