The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  “It wouldn’t help The Times,” Garrett said, “but what of that?”

  “It would divide my energies,” he replied, “and in that way it would hurt The Times.” Then, as if remembering what Garrett had said about The Times being made, Ochs added: “I’ve hardly begun here yet.” That, Garrett thought, was Ochs’s dream—that he had yet a great deal more to do to The Times; the fact was that Ochs was afraid to do anything more.

  “You do not realize it,” Garrett said, “but you yourself are limited in your own expression by the traditions of this great institution that your industry and genius have created.”

  Ochs refused to believe that. Instead he talked of the great future of The Times, and of how futile the Tribune’s competition would turn out to be.

  Garet Garrett did well on the Tribune but, being more a writer than a journalist, he was happier after he had left the newspaper business and was writing books and also critical essays for the Saturday Evening Post, where he acquired a national reputation. He kept in touch with his friends on The Times, however, including Adolph Ochs, and in 1921, as Ochs celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as publisher, Garrett wrote in a letter:

  Dear Mr. Ochs:

  Twenty-five years ago you began with The Times. Twenty-four years ago you began with it. Ten years ago, five years ago, one year ago, yesterday, you began with it. That is what seems so wonderful to me. Each day you begin with The Times, and it is never finished. You do not say, “I have,” but always, “We will.” I remember once speaking to you of The Times as an institution; I wondered how it felt to have done it. You stared at me and said: “But I haven’t begun yet.”

  A perfect issue of The Times, if that were conceivable to your restless spirit, would give you but a moment’s happiness. For perfection is of this instant; tomorrow is a new time, and tomorrow is where you live.

  Ochs was momentarily cheered by Garrett’s letter, it arriving at a time when he seemed almost incapable of contentment. He had reached the nadir of his depression late in 1918, two years after Garrett’s resignation, and he had been only slightly better since then. If any single event was responsible for Ochs’s condition it was probably the overwhelmingly negative reaction of readers to an editorial written by Charles R. Miller near the end of World War I. The Germans at that point were clearly being defeated in Europe, and the jubilant Van Anda, who was directing his correspondents like a general, plotting on his map each night their positions for viewing the next battle and Allied victory, telephoned both Ochs and Miller at their homes on Sunday, September 15, 1918, and announced, “This is the beginning of the end”—Austria had just proposed a nonbinding discussion of peace. Miller, responding to Van Anda’s enthusiasm, wrote an editorial on the subject from his home and telephoned it into the office. Miller’s editorial advocated consideration of the Austrian proposal for a “nonbinding” discussion of peace, adding: “Reason and humanity demand that the Austrian invitation be accepted. The case for conference is presented with extraordinary eloquence and force, a convincing argument is made for an exchange of views that may remove old and recent misunderstandings.… We cannot imagine that the invitation will be declined.… When we consider the deluge of blood that has been poured out in this war, the incalculable waste of treasure, the ruin it has wrought, the grief that wrings millions of hearts because of it, we must conclude that only the madness or the soulless depravity of someone of the belligerent powers could obstruct or defeat the purpose of the conference.”

  No Timesman, not Miller nor Van Anda nor Ochs, could have anticipated the reaction that resulted from the editorial. Suddenly, several hundred telegrams, telephone calls, public statements, and letters from around the nation arrived at the Times building charging the paper with selling out to an enemy that should be forced to surrender unconditionally. The jingoists in America damned The Times for “running up the white flag,” and the Herald began a circulation campaign under the slogan: “Read an American Paper.” President Wilson was reportedly enraged by the editorial, and he demanded that his aides find out whether or not it had been cabled to Europe. It had. Within days the bitter reactions were coming into The Times from London and Paris, Rome and Belgium. In New York, the Union League Club, composed of many influential and powerful New Yorkers, men whose good will Ochs had sought above all others, scheduled a meeting to consider a public denunciation of The Times. Fortunately for the paper, tempers cooled within a week or so, and no public diatribe was issued, but this whole episode was shattering to Ochs. He felt that the entire institution was going under; all his work, his years of dedication to upright thinking and fairness, now, suddenly, was being demolished by a single editorial that he had not even read in advance of publication. Normally, Charles Miller’s editorial would have been reread in galley form by either Miller or some other editorial editor, and perhaps also by Ochs. But since Miller had written it from his home in Great Neck, Long Island, and since Ochs was spending the weekend at his summer place in Lake George, New York, and since the other editorial editors who were on duty over the weekend thought there was nothing startling about Miller’s words, the editorial was published without further consideration.

  The next day, and for days afterwards, Ochs sat at his desk, stunned. Letters were piled high in front of him, telegrams and editorials from rival publishers were shown him, he could not believe that the editorial had provoked this violent response. Many of the letters attacked Ochs personally, as a Jew who was unpatriotic, as an internationalist with commitments abroad. Miller was also bewildered, and he quickly consulted the opinions of his friends outside The Times; one of them, President Charles Eliot of Harvard, agreed with Miller’s editorial on the whole, though finding a few phrases ill-chosen. Ochs was urged by his editors to reveal somehow that he had not read the editorial beforehand, but he replied, “I could not do such a thing. I have always accepted public praise and public approval of the many great editorials Mr. Miller has written for The Times. When there is blame instead of praise I must share that, too.”

  Ochs did, however, arrange a private meeting with President Wilson’s confidant, Colonel Edward M. House. He explained how the editorial was published, emphasizing how The Times had been consistently patriotic and pro-Ally throughout the war. House responded with understanding, and the issue was smoothed over, but at the same time Ochs was nauseated by his own manner in apologizing for The Times when he truthfully felt that there was nothing to apologize for; and when he returned to New York, he again spoke to his wife about retirement.

  Now his daughter, Iphigene, was married, and immediately after the war his son-in-law, Sulzberger, and his favorite nephew, Julius Ochs Adler—his sister Ada’s son, who had graduated from Princeton and had received many decorations for his courage as a combat officer in Europe—had joined The Times. Ochs had also brought into The Times as its “executive manager” an old friend named George McAneny, who had been president of the Board of Aldermen in New York. McAneny’s duties were never precisely defined to the satisfaction of many editors, including Van Anda; officially McAneny was to concentrate on the newspaper’s most costly item, its procurement of paper, which had been rationed during the war, but it soon became clear that McAneny was expanding his interests within The Times, was perhaps being used by Ochs to contain the others, and soon Van Anda had passed the word to his subordinates on the third floor that McAneny’s questions were to be ignored. Ochs was aware of this, and very displeased, but he did nothing about it. McAneny would somehow have to overcome it by himself, Ochs confided to another friend, explaining that McAneny’s primary role on the paper was to be that of a “kind of moral background,” an individual who would not ever take over the paper—that power would remain within Ochs’s family—but rather would be a corporate consultant and family adviser should something tragic occur.

  In December of 1918, a year after Iphigene Ochs’s marriage, Arthur Hays Sulzberger reported for work at The Times, still wearing his boots, spurs, and the rest of what w
as then the uniform of a second lieutenant in field artillery. Ochs sent Sulzberger down to see McAneny, and for the next year or so McAneny helped to guide Sulzberger through the New York plant as well as The Times’ paper mill in the Bush Terminal building in Brooklyn. By 1921, it was obvious that Sulzberger had the capacity to learn the newspaper business, and George McAneny, who was making no profound impression on Van Anda and saw no real future for himself on The Times, resigned and later became chairman of the New York Transit Commission.

  Whether it would be Arthur Hays Sulzberger or Julius Ochs Adler who would one day succeed Ochs at the top, however, was still an open question. Ochs himself was not sure which of the two would make the better publisher. They were very different—Sulzberger seemed more modest and sensitive, more cautious, an adherent of tradition; Adler, a broad-shouldered, chesty young man with a small brush moustache, was aggressive and direct. Ochs was proud of Adler, particularly of his war record and his image as a patriot, but there was some doubt as to Adler’s adaptability or desire to fit into Ochs’s scheme as a shrine keeper. Ochs finally decided to leave the matter of his succession up to his daughter and the two men themselves. He gave to each a single vote that would enable them to select his successor upon his death. As long as his daughter was happily married, the odds would be with Sulzberger 2 to 1.

  In the interim, Ochs watched both men’s performance, with Sulzberger’s duties being primarily on the editorial side, Adler’s on the business side. Iphigene, whom Ochs had reared as a Victorian lady, was to remain at home and produce grandchildren, which she did rather quickly. In December of 1918, thirteen months after her marriage, she had a daughter, Marian. Iphigene had a second daughter, Ruth, in 1921 on Ochs’s birthday, March 12; then a third daughter, Judith, in 1923, and finally a son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, in 1926. Adler, who in 1922 married Barbara Stettheimer of San Francisco, had a son, Julius Ochs Adler, Jr., in 1924, and later two daughters, Barbara and Nancy, in 1928 and 1930. By the Nineteen-fifties, all of the Sulzberger and Adler children (with the exception of Judith Sulzberger, who became a doctor) were working in the family business; and by the Nineteen-sixties, the first member of the fourth generation was working for The Times, a nineteen-year-old reporter, Stephen Arthur Ochs Golden, Ruth Sulzberger’s first son.

  If it is true that a deeply depressed person is more likely to feel at odds with the world on holidays, sunny days, or periods of general contentment than he is on rainy days or times when the world seems dark, then there is possibly some explanation for Adolph Ochs’s mysterious personality change in the final years of his life, in the early Nineteen-thirties, during the Great Depression. Ochs was suddenly a man of vitality again, an optimist. He was reading the paper each morning, writing memos, giving orders. Carr Van Anda was now in semiretirement, and Charles R. Miller was dead, meaning that Ochs had no other major egos to consider before responding to each impulse. He was now letting his white hair grow and he was combing it back along the sides of his head in imitation of George Washington, having been told by someone in Europe that he seemed to resemble the portraits of America’s first President. Ochs had sold his house at 308 West Seventy-fifth Street—which had become overcrowded with the white marble busts of great artists and musicians, with trinkets from overseas trips, with endless photographs of the Ochs family and relatives, including pictures of his daughter, Iphigene, through every stage of her development—and he was now living with his wife and a retinue of servants and sometimes (at his insistence) with the entire Sulzberger family, in the White Plains columned mansion, with its great ballroom and sprawling lawns. For the first time in his life, Ochs was living in grandeur. From his paneled study he could peer through a big window and see part of his 57-acre estate, called Hillandale, which included a private lake and boat house, a gardener’s cottage and green house, other small buildings and animal pens. He kept domestic pets as well as pigs, turkeys, and steer; all the animals, except the steer, which would be slaughtered, were given names. Mrs. Ochs, now a small plump cheerful pixie with long white hair, had a servant who did little else but cater to the dogs, and Mrs. Ochs herself occasionally gave parties for the pets, inviting her grandchildren and their friends, serving dog biscuits and hotdogs indiscriminately to all.

  After the Lindbergh kidnapping, Ochs hired a guard to protect the estate against possible harm to the grandchildren, and at one point he insisted that they be taken to Europe for a while as a further precaution, and they were. Ochs was determined to preserve the Ochsian future, meanwhile enjoying what was left of the present. The Depression had little effect on him mentally, except that it seemed to make him feel better, or it possibly provided him with a new challenge, and it did not hurt him financially to any degree. After his one horrible experience with land speculation in Chattanooga more than forty years before, he had not invested in anything that was not concerned with his own business. He did cut his employees’ salaries by 10 percent for a while in the Thirties, but this was a mere token of the austerity that existed elsewhere, and no Times employee was laid off either in Chattanooga or New York. He was nevertheless angered by the economic condition of the country, and he abandoned his lifelong Democratic conservatism to become a liberal, endorsing Roosevelt before the 1932 election. At this time Ochs was also irritated when the Pulitzer family sold the World to Scripps-Howard. He did not want the various editions of the World for himself, but he had hoped that they would remain independent in one form or other. When he heard that the Morning World and Sunday edition were to be discontinued and that the Evening World was to be consolidated with Scripps-Howard’s Telegram, Ochs cut short his vacation in Honolulu and returned as quickly as he could to New York, but not before the transaction had been completed. Ochs spent much of the next week telling his editors how the World might have been saved had he been in charge.

  Ochs’s vanity and optimism at this time, which in another man might have been seen as a sign of senility, was also evident at the racetrack. He would take groups of important people to the track at Saratoga, never betting on the favorite, nor did he ever permit his guests to lose a bet—Ochs paid for everybody’s bets. He also picked everybody’s horses. Before each race, after consulting with The Times’ racing writer, a debonair young man named Bryan Field, Ochs would place a five-dollar bet to win on certain horses and then assign a horse to each of his guests. Should a guest object to the assigned horse because of its name, color, number, or for other reasons, Ochs would attempt to rearrange things. He wanted his guests to be happy. If a guest’s horse won, the guest kept all the money. The guest could only win, never lose. Since the Saratoga track was known as a graveyard for favorites, there usually was a winner in Ochs’s box after each race, and the Ochs party was invariably a happy, cheering crowd except for Mrs. Ochs, who did not like racing because the jockeys hit the horses.

  One of Bryan Field’s many jobs as The Times’ racing expert was to assure Mrs. Ochs that the horses were not being cruelly treated. He explained repeatedly that the jockey’s whips were only “poppers,” a bat made so loosely and in such a way that it made a loud noise, pop, but it did not cut into the horse’s flank. Mrs. Ochs remained unconvinced. Field’s other tasks included the keeping of a record of each guest’s horse, the buying of tickets before each race, and the collection of any winning money. It was a difficult and confusing job at times, particularly when the guests decided to switch horses after Ochs’s initial assignment, but Field was consoled by the fact that he was becoming good friends with the big boss of The New York Times, an individual whom The Times’ sports editor never saw.

  On one Saturday afternoon at Saratoga, Ochs arrived with six guests and was seated in a box next to that of John D. Hertz of Chicago, the multimillionaire investor in films and banking, taxicabs and race horses. Field knew Hertz quite well, and Hertz was appreciative of Field’s efforts a few years before in influencing William Woodward to send his champion, Gallant Fox, to race in Hertz’s Arlington Park in Chicago. After Field had introdu
ced Hertz to Ochs and had listened to their friendly conversation for a while, Hertz asked Ochs which horse he was betting in the next race. Ochs turned to Field, who had already placed the bets. Field knew that the next race, which featured two-year-old fillies, had such a large entry that some horses, Hertz’s horse among them, had not been covered by any of Ochs’s seven bets.

  “Well,” Hertz said, softly, “I think my horse has a chance here.”

  Ochs did not grasp the significance of Hertz’s remark, but Bryan Field, who knew Hertz to be a very conservative man who rarely gave tips on his own horses, became excited. He whispered his feelings to Ochs, but the publisher was hesitant. Then one of the guests noticed that Hertz’s horse was a 30-to-1 longshot, and Ochs, wishing to please the guest, turned to Bryan Field and told him to put five dollars on the Hertz filly.

  Field ran up the aisle through the crowds toward the ticket window. It was seconds before the race was to begin. But before he could work his way to the window he heard the clang of the bell—the race had begun, and the bookmakers’ slates snapped shut over their windows. Field headed slowly back toward the box, watching the horses galloping around the turn. As Field rejoined Ochs, the Hertz filly was breezing across the finish line ahead of the rest, and Ochs and his guests were applauding hilariously. At 30-to-1, the five-dollar bet had earned $150, and Ochs announced that since the bet had been an afterthought made in no particular person’s name, the $150 would be divided equally among them.

  John D. Hertz looked sharply at Field, sensing that something was not quite right, and he asked, “Did you get down?”