The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  “Yes, sir,” Field said cheerfully, as Ochs turned to listen for the answer.

  After the excitement had subsided and the guests were seated again, Hertz, still sensing something disquieting in Field’s manner, asked him what price he had gotten. Field quoted 30 to 1.

  “You should have done better than that,” Hertz said. “She drifted up in the betting and closed at 40 or 50 to 1.”

  Ochs missed this exchange, for which Field was thankful. But he was also upset by the idea that, despite his having to hand out $150 of his own money, Hertz did not think he had done well enough. And on the following Monday when things were quieter at the track, and Ochs was absent, Field approached Hertz. He explained that his horseplayer’s pride was piqued by Hertz’s insinuation that he had been a fool to take 30-to-1 odds when he might have gotten 40 to 1 or better; and then Field proceeded to tell Hertz the whole story. Hertz was very amused, and he said, finally, “Field, I’d have done the same thing. Mr. Ochs is a great man, and he likes you.”

  In February of 1933, in Palm Beach, Ochs and his wife celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, and a month later Ochs was seventy-five, and various newspapers contacted him and asked if he had any comments to make about himself or about the condition of the world as he saw it. Ochs decided to sit down and write a statement for the press, which he did in his own rather shaky handwriting, and it began:

  Adolph S. Ochs, controlling owner and publisher of The New York Times, is seventy-five years old today. He was born at Cincinnati, Ohio, March 12, 1858. He is quietly celebrating the day here with Mrs. Ochs and his only child, Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and her four children.…

  Mr. Ochs is in good health, active and alert. He is in touch with the minutest details of The Chattanooga Times and of The New York Times, of which he has been the sole owner for thirty-seven years. He is also fully advised of the affairs of the Associated Press, of which for thirty-five years he has been a member of the Board of Directors, and Executive Committee member.

  Mr. Ochs … expressed his confidence that the United States was still up to par and would so continue. He said we would emerge from the mess and confusion that the country was now in as we have on many other occasions when the pessimists had their day and were sure the country, and particularly our government, was doomed to destruction; that universal bankruptcy was certain.

  Never in its history was the United States so rich, so strong, so powerful and with brighter prospects ahead than at present. We have barely scraped the soil of our opportunities, our ultimate resources, our industries, our inventive genius. We are, for the present, recovering from a wild debauch of frenzied finance, crazy speculation, and insensate greed. Everybody seemed to have lost the sense of responsibility of wealth, and a get-rich-quick epidemic swept the country, but I think the situation is now well understood and that we are sobering up and painfully getting our house in order. The tragic experience we are having will result in educating the people that care, caution, and conservatism are as necessary in economics as in physical health, and that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, cannot be ignored, nor forgotten. They should continue to be our guide to a philosophy of life. Spirituality and idealism, now so frightfully dormant, will be awakened for the peace and comfort of our children, and this will be full compensation for our tribulations.

  Two years later, on the day before he died, Adolph Ochs was on a train bound for Chattanooga. He was accompanied by a nurse and by his sixteen-year-old granddaughter Marian, who six years later married Orvil Dryfoos. Ochs had insisted that he had business to attend to in Chattanooga, and he refused to let Sulzberger or Adler go in his place. The dogwoods would be flowering on Lookout Mountain, he said, and he wanted to see them again, and he also wanted to revisit some old familiar places, friends, and relatives.

  In Chattanooga, Ochs spent the night in the big rambling brick house that he had bought in 1882 when he was the rising young publisher of the Chattanooga Times. Now the house was occupied by his sister, Mrs. Harry Adler, and her family. Many visitors called on Ochs during the afternoon and evening, invariably remarking on how well he looked. Early the next morning he walked through the Chattanooga Times’ plant, shaking hands with the staff in the newsroom and the printers in the composing room. Ochs sat for a while with the newspaper’s general manager, Adolph Shelby Ochs, son of his younger brother Milton, and then Ochs went to have lunch at a nearby restaurant with Milton, a few editors, and the nurse. There was jovial conversation around the table for a few moments, then the waiter brought menus, and the men studied them.

  “What do you think you’ll have, Adolph?” Milton asked. When his brother did not answer, Milton looked up from the menu and saw Adolph’s color changing. Then he collapsed at the table, unconscious. He had had a cerebral hemorrhage. He never regained consciousness.

  The death of Ochs on April 8, 1935, at seventy-seven, was marked by tributes from Franklin D. Roosevelt, among hundreds of other leaders, and the wires of the Associated Press were silenced for two minutes around the world. Every business office and factory in Chattanooga closed for a day, and New York City’s flags were at half-mast. Iphigene and Arthur Sulzberger brought the body back to New York, and Ochs was buried on April 12 in Temple Israel Cemetery in Mount Hope, New York, not far from Hillandale.

  8

  One month after Ochs’s death, Arthur Hays Sulzberger became the publisher of The Times. He was forty-four years old and he had been on the paper for eighteen years. On the day after his elevation he announced in The Times that he would never depart from the basic principles of Ochs, but privately he told his editors that there would be some changes in the paper within a year. The era of the patriarch was over.

  Now organized labor, stronger than ever, was trying to recruit all The Times’ reporters and copyreaders. Sulzberger objected to this, saying that while he did not oppose unionism he did not want his entire staff to be affiliated with any single group with a “smaller common denominator than its Americanism.” He agreed to testify before the National Labor Relations Board, and, wishing to present his position effectively, he kept as a reminder in his vest pocket a small piece of paper on which he had written: “Keep calm, smile, don’t be smart.” He smiled throughout the four-day hearings, never agreeing to the closed-shop ambitions of the Newspaper Guild but never antagonizing the labor leaders. His gentle manner was an undeniable asset.

  At The Times, Sulzberger was mildly aloof without seeming directorial. Some of his senior editors would never let him forget that he had been Ochs’s son-in-law, but Sulzberger accepted this as graciously as he could, and a few of his speeches in public began: “Perhaps you wonder how to get to be the publisher of a great newspaper. Let me tell you my own system. Get up early, work hard—and marry the boss’s daughter.”

  He liked to present this side of himself, the lightly humorous and mildly self-deprecating side that, while ingratiating, revealed very little. In his home he also behaved at times like an entertaining guest, telling funny stories and making puns and surprising the family with clever little gifts or gimmicks. One night after dinner a servant placed on the table a cake that Sulzberger said marked the date on which Iphigene had turned down his initial proposal of marriage. The icing on the cake read: “For A.H.S. Only.” Sulzberger took a knife, sliced a piece for himself, and then passed the cake around the table. The rest of the cake was wooden.

  On another occasion, after Sulzberger’s children were fully grown and had neglected his request to contribute some personal anecdotes and remembrances to be included in a privately published book on the Sulzberger-Ochs family, Sulzberger decided to do the book alone. When finished, he presented to each family member a handsome leather-bound volume entitled “An Anthology of Humorous Tales in the Sulzberger-Ochs Clan”; it began: “With my children’s assistance I have put together a collection of stories of both them and their children. As the years roll on you may find it amusing to glance over and recall the episodes.” The rest o
f the book’s pages were blank.

  He rarely forgot a birthday or anniversary, and the cards that he sent usually contained one of his clever drawings or limericks. When he was absent from one of his children’s graduations, which was often, he invariably wrote them tender letters. He sometimes seemed closest to his children when he was farthest away. He was a complex man whose inner tension was evidenced by the occasional rash on his face, by his long silences and the way he drank at night, although he nearly always held his liquor well. He was an extremely handsome man, courtly and sophisticated, the center of romantic gossip, but he was also a totally dedicated publisher under whom The Times prospered beyond Ochs’s grandest dreams. But it would be part of Sulzberger’s burden to live a life of secret victories, private triumphs in the name of Ochs. Neither man would have had it any other way. Even when expressing a personal opinion in a letter to be published in The Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger preferred to sign it with a pseudonym, “A. Aitchess.” He was relatively unknown outside the world of politics and journalism; he blended into the institution and worked through his senior executives, and yet he was keenly aware of the staff and was more human in his feelings toward them than was his more formal father-in-law. When a certain staff member died, Sulzberger sent a note of sympathy not only to the man’s widow, but also to his mistress.

  Sulzberger assumed command of The Times during a very delicate period in its growth. The paper was not only being challenged from within by the Newpaper Guild but it was also being condemned in public: by the Zionists because of the paper’s policy toward Jews, by the Catholics because of Herbert Matthews’ reporting from Spain, by the isolationists who charged that The Times was helping to push the nation into another world war. Every week, it seemed, there was a delegation representing one faction or other that visited the publisher’s office or issued a statement denouncing The Times. “I am not used to being called a son-of-a-bitch,” Sulzberger remarked to an editor after one unpleasant experience, “but I suppose I shall learn to like it.”

  Sulzberger’s closest associate during these years was his chief editorial writer, Charles Merz, a tall, hefty, well-tailored man who wore a blue homburg, walked with the stride of a Prussian officer, and, partly because of a ruddy complexion that suggested high blood pressure, and partly because his small steel-rimmed glasses were so tightly drawn around his broad face and nose that his ears pressed forward, he seemed like a man about to explode. Actually Merz was an even-tempered, amiable gentleman. He had been educated at Yale, had served as a lieutenant in military intelligence during World War I, and he later wrote for Harper’s Weekly, Collier’s, and the New Republic. One of his contributions to the latter, in 1920, was a two-part series coauthored by Walter Lippmann in which The New York Times’ coverage of the Russian Revolution between March of 1917 and March of 1920 was severely criticized. Merz and Lippmann wrote that The Times’ reporting day after day was so slanted against the Soviet revolutionaries, was so eager to present the facts that were most digestible to the United States and its allies, that Times readers were lulled into thinking that the Bolsheviks could not win. The facts favorable to the Bolsheviks were made to seem like propaganda; the unfavorable facts were presented as irrefutable truths. And one of the major conclusions of the Merz-Lippmann analysis of The Times’ reporting was that:

  The news as a whole is dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organization. They began as passionate partisans in a great war in which their own country’s future was at stake. Until the armistice they were interested in defeating Germany. They hoped until they could hope no longer that Russia would fight. When they saw she could not fight, they worked for intervention as part of the war against Germany. When the war with Germany was over, the intervention still existed. They found reasons then for continuing the intervention. The German Peril as the reason for intervention ceased with the armistice; the Red Peril almost immediately afterwards supplanted it. The Red Peril in turn gave place to rejoicing over the hopes of the White Generals. When these hopes died, the Red Peril reappeared. In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see.

  Charles Merz had worked closely with Lippmann on the New York World, and it was from Lippmann that he first heard about the secret negotiations concerning the sale of the World; and in 1931, a day before the World folded, Merz was hired by The Times, relieved that no Times editor had mentioned his criticism in the New Republic, causing him to wonder if The Times’ editors had even read it.

  Almost immediately, Merz and Sulzberger, who were about the same age, were liberal politically, and had much in common, became good friends. They went on vacations together with their wives, spent weekends at Hillandale. Merz at one moment would be discussing Times policy with Sulzberger; a few moments later, he would be helping Sulzberger to complete The Times’ crossword puzzle, a hobby that Sulzberger got into the paper only after Ochs’s death.

  Sulzberger’s relationship with his other editors was not nearly so personal as it was with Merz. The managing editor, Edwin James, who replaced Birchall in 1932, was a bit too crusty for Sulzberger’s taste although the publisher did not find James intolerable. The Sunday editor, Lester Markel, who had come from the Tribune in 1923, was despotic and self-important but he was doing extremely well with the Magazine and the “Review” section, and Sulzberger did not interfere. The Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, did cause Sulzberger considerable uneasiness, however, and there were moments when Sulzberger could not believe that he had been among Krork’s enthusiastic admirers shortly after Krock had come to The Times from the World in 1927. It had been Sulzberger, in fact, who had strongly supported Krock’s ambitions to write a political column from Washington in 1933 after Ochs had expressed reluctance, fearful that such a column would draw The Times into endless controversies with very important people. It was bad enough by Ochs’s standards that The Times had an editorial page and allowed its critics to express opinions on the arts and entertainment; but the idea of permitting a correspondent to pass judgment on the President of the United States and the Congress was, in Ochs’s opinion, highly injudicious. Ochs had proposed instead that Krock write a kind of “letter” from Washington to an imaginary “Aunt Hattie,” a suggestion that Krock had thought was terrible, and Sulzberger had agreed and finally prevailed upon Ochs to let Krock write the sort of column that he wished. But now, a few years after Ochs’s death, Sulzberger was beginning to appreciate Ochs’s circumspection.

  Even when Krock’s prose was dignified and convoluted, which it most often was, there was an undercoating of acid between the lines, particularly when Krock was writing about the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt. While Sulzberger himself did not greatly admire Roosevelt, and while The Times’ editorials had condemned him for such maneuvers as attempting to pack the Supreme Court, The Times’ opposition had never been so personal as Krock’s, and Sulzberger could understand Roosevelt’s bitterness and his tendency to refer to Krock in public as “Li’l’ Arthur.”

  “Li’l’ Arthur,” Roosevelt said, delivering a typical parable to a press gathering that did not include Krock, “once made a trip to Paris and wanted to see the sights. He asked for a guard of honor and was given the President of the Republic and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, for that is the way he likes to do things. By and by, they came to the Louvre Museum, and there they saw the Venus de Milo. ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Li’l’ Arthur, ‘what grace, what classic beauty, what form divine!’ But—approaching nearer—‘Alas, alas! She has halitosis!’ ”

  Arthur Krock responded with satires in which Roosevelt was portrayed as a cunning “Professor” or “Br’er Fox,” and Krock charged that Roosevelt was guilty of “more ruthlessness, intelligence, and subtlety in trying to suppress legitimate unfavorable comment than any other figure I have known.” Krock, a conservative Southern Democrat, regarded the New Dealers as a menacing group who were destroying States’ Rights, were using the Federal Treasury to perpetua
te themselves in office, and were fostering legislation that could one day allow the country to succumb to a more virulent type of liberals, or “a species of fascists.”

  Among Krock’s habitual targets within the Roosevelt circle was the Undersecretary of State, Sumner Welles, whose eventual resignation was partly the result of all the publicity that Krock gave to Welles’s disagreements with the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who was Krock’s friend. Another recipient of the Krock stiletto was Roosevelt’s close adviser Harry Hopkins, about whom Krock once wrote: “Mr. Hopkins may, at times, have thought that something the President said or did was not perfect. If so, he suppressed the unworthy thought with ease.”

  Short of replacing Krock, there was little that Sulzberger could do except to hint that the columnist was going too far, a hint that Krock could and did ignore. Krock was one of the most powerful and best journalists in America. During his years as a political reporter he had established valuable news sources and he had produced countless exclusives for The Times throughout the Roosevelt era. In 1933, on a tip from Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, Krock revealed the outline of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act, a decision to abandon the conservatism within the 1932 platform in favor of a vast public-works program. Roosevelt quickly denied knowledge of any such plan, and a few reporters printed refutations of Krock’s story as a result, but not long afterwards the NRA was legislated by Congress at Roosevelt’s request.

  While Roosevelt’s financial advisers were believed to be debating the question of whether to issue scrip for currency, Krock telephoned a high official to verify a report that the scrip plan had been canceled. “Yes,” the official said, “that’s good, isn’t it? But don’t you think it’s wonderful about gold?” Krock was momentarily silent. Could this mean the abandonment of the gold standard?—Krock was afraid to ask, suspecting that any indication of surprise or ignorance on his part would merely call attention to his informant’s unwitting disclosure. Krock hung up and called the most unwary man he knew in Washington, the Secretary of the Treasury, William H. Woodin, who was playing the piano in his hotel suite when Krock’s call interrupted him. Casually, quickly, Krock asked, “When will the President announce that the United States has gone off the gold standard?”