by Gay Talese
On June 20, a little more than three weeks after Dryfoos’ death, a statement from the office of Arthur Hays Sulzberger announced that his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, would be the publisher of The Times. The new publisher, at thirty-seven, was the youngest chief executive that the paper had ever had. His grandfather, Adolph Ochs, had been five months past his thirty-eighth birthday when he took over The Times in August of 1896.
“It can be truly said,” Arthur Hays Sulzberger stated, “that The Times is a family enterprise.”
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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 tho
ught 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.