The Kingdom and the Power

by Gay Talese

  Catledge had a very paternal way with young Sulzberger without ever being condescending. He gave advice willingly, but Sulzberger made his own decisions. And this warm relationship would continue through most of the next decade, although their drinking pattern would be altered considerably after they had met the women who would become their second wives. Catledge met Mrs. Abby Ray Izard, a widow, at an editors’ convention in 1957, and Punch Sulzberger met a striking brunette divorcée, Carol Fox Fuhrman, at a New York dinner party in 1956.

  The party was in the home of Orvil Dryfoos’ brother Hugh, on Park Avenue. Hugh Dryfoos had first noticed Mrs. Fuhrman at a beach club in suburban New York. She was sitting in the sand with her parents and her young daughter when Dryfoos, a friendly, untimid man, approached her, introduced himself, and engaged her in conversation. Dryfoos’ blond wife, Joan, was then sleeping on the beach, although she would wake up in time to join her husband and receive from him an introduction to the brunette.

  Later in New York—after Punch Sulzberger had said that he would be attending the Dryfoos’ dinner party without a date—Joan Dryfoos decided to invite Carol Fuhrman. Sulzberger and Mrs. Fuhrman got along quite well, and he drove her home that night. Weeks later, Sulzberger invited the Dryfoos’ to a restaurant, and they were surprised and pleased to see that he had brought Carol Fuhrman—and Joan Dryfoos also noticed that Carol was wearing a gold friendship ring. She commented on it, but received only a blushing evasive reply—very different from the reaction of Punch Sulzberger’s estranged wife, Barbara, when she would learn of the ring. It was not that Barbara Sulzberger objected to her husband’s dating other women, for she had dated other men, and they were about to be divorced: but she did object to receiving the bill for the ring, sent to her by a prominent Fifth Avenue jeweler and listed as one “gold wedding band.” It turned out to be a mistake on the store’s part, however, not a sample of Sulzberger humor. And after the initial reaction and embarrassment had subsided, there were no further complications—the divorce proceedings continued, and in December of 1956 Carol Fox Fuhrman and Punch Sulzberger were married.

  The new Mrs. Sulzberger objected to the nickname “Punch,” preferring to call him Arthur. “Punch” was a reminder of a troubled boyhood that was part of the past, and she hoped that he would be seen for what he was to her—a sensitive and quick-thinking young man with commendable qualities that had long been obscured by his more obvious easy manner and his old image. There were some Times executives, like Catledge and a few others, who also felt that Sulzberger was capable of major responsibilities on The Times if given a chance, but until 1963 that chance did not come. Orvil Dryfoos was running the paper and was assisted by Amory Bradford; neither was very impressed with Sulzberger and both thought that it might be better if he learned the newspaper business elsewhere. As a minor executive, he had little to say or do on the fourteenth floor. He sometimes attended the four o’clock news conference and was often seen around the third floor, a clean-cut, dark-eyed young man puffing a pipe, smiling, then looking up at the walls in the newsroom inspecting the paint, or scrutinizing the air-conditioning ducts, appearing to be endlessly fascinated by the mechanical system and machinery around the building. He knew a great deal about automation and the new equipment being used in The Times’ West Coast and European editions. His opinions on news coverage, however, were rarely solicited or expressed, and he was often ignored by some top Timesmen. Even James Reston, when he would come flying in to New York from Washington, would, after a quick handshake and hello, breeze past Sulzberger into the office of the publisher, Orvil Dryfoos. Dryfoos was a vigorous man not yet fifty, the man who was expected to direct the paper through the next two decades. Sulzberger was in his thirties, and he seemed younger. When Amory Bradford would preside at meetings on the fourteenth floor, Sulzberger would sit back quietly and listen like a schoolboy. Sulzberger was awed by Bradford, confused and dazzled as the vice-president stood before the other executives and quickly ticked off facts and figures that everybody in the room seemed to understand except himself. While they nodded knowingly at Bradford, Sulzberger tried to conceal his ignorance with his impassiveness, but inwardly he was embarrassed. Only after he had become the publisher did he learn that the other executives had been no less confused than he.

  The death of Dryfoos and the elevation of Sulzberger brought sudden changes to The Times, and one of the first announcements was the resignation of Amory Bradford. Bradford submitted his public resignation with the amenities that are traditional in such documents, and it was replied to in a statement from the office of the chairman of the board, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, that read: “Amory Bradford has been a valuable source of strength and leadership in our organization. We are sorry he has decided to resign. He will be greatly missed.”

  Later that year, Bradford was appointed assistant general business manager of the Scripps-Howard newspapers. He would remain at Scripps-Howard for a year and a half, but he would not be happy there, and in 1965 he would resign and move to Aspen, Colorado. While cleaning out his desk at Scripps-Howard, he would discover a copy of A. H. Raskin’s strike story that had appeared in The Times. Bradford had never read the story completely through. Now, seated at the open-drawered desk that he was vacating, he would pick up the two-year-old newspaper article and begin to read, and be reminded of the fretful months of the negotiations between 1962 and 1963, the frustration and anger, the additional heat provided by the television coverage, the whole cast of characters from the White House on down. The strike had altered the careers and destiny of so many people. The printers’ leader, Bertram Powers, had gotten the recognition that he sought. Some New York newspapers would become so financially weak that they would never recover. The strike had possibly hastened the death of Dryfoos, and it certainly had not helped Bradford’s own newspaper career, and he conceded that it might have also influenced the course of his marriage, which ended in divorce. Both he and his former wife would remarry. He would marry a California widow who was an artist and conservationist, and he would work as a consultant to the Department of Commerce, heading an experimental program in Oakland aimed at solving problems of minority unemployment.

  After Bradford had finished reading A. H. Raskin’s Times article on the strike of 1962–63, he was rather sorry that he had been too pressured during the negotiations to cooperate more with Raskin. Even so, though the article was critical of him, Bradford thought that Raskin’s reporting was very well done.

  Bradford’s place on The Times was taken by Harding F. Bancroft, an extremely proper, soft-spoken, and handsome man of fifty-three—a descendant of Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury (1604–1610). Bancroft had attended the Harvard Law School after graduation from Williams College, practicing law in New York for five years. After service as a naval officer during World War II, Bancroft worked in the State Department in 1945, meeting and becoming friends with Amory Bradford. In 1951, Bancroft had been appointed by President Truman as the United States deputy representative to the United Nations Collective Measures Committee, and in 1953 he began a three-year assignment in Geneva as legal adviser of the International Labor Office. Bancroft became associate counsel and assistant secretary of The Times in 1956, and secretary in 1957; and with Bradford’s departure, Harding Bancroft was named The Times’ vice-president, moving into Bradford’s office on the fourteenth floor.

  The chain of command under Bancroft, as Punch Sulzberger took over The Times, included many corporate administrators who had been there for years, had their names printed atop the editorial page every day, yet were practically unknown outside the Times building—in fact, with few exceptions, these executives were unknown to most Times reporters and subordinate editors in the building. Monroe Green, the head of advertising, was an exception because his office was on the second floor, and he was often seen there by employees who were collecting their weekly paychecks at the cashier’s window, which was not far from Green’s office. But Francis A. Cox, The Times’ secretary
-treasurer, who had been on the paper since 1951, was recognizable to very few Times employees. Each day Cox came and went at The Times, a quiet former CPA with a softly pleasant undistinguished face, and of the more than five thousand Times employees perhaps a few dozen knew who he was. Andrew Fisher, Sulzberger’s newly appointed business manager for production, was known in certain mechanical areas but not generally in the Times building; although this was beginning to change with his appointment to head The Times’ Western edition, an assignment that brought him into contact with a number of editors and his photograph into the pages of the paper’s house organ, Times Talk.

  Another key administrator on the new publisher’s executive staff was a smallish, bow-tied, dark, very capable man named Ivan Veit. Veit was in charge of Times promotion, personnel and industrial relations, and also radio station WQXR. He joined The Times on his twentieth birthday in 1928, having graduated from Columbia, where he earned the Phi Beta Kappa key that always dangled from his vest. Veit was born in the upstate hamlet of Hornell, New York, as was The Times’ former business manager, Louis Wiley, a close friend of Adolph Ochs’s; and it was through meeting Wiley during one of Wiley’s hometown visits that Ivan Veit was invited to apply for a job at The Times. Veit’s first assignment on the paper in 1928 was that of a classified-ad taker, at eighteen dollars a week, but he moved up through the system quickly. One reason for his swift ascent was his compatibility with Wiley’s brother, a large cauliflowered wrestler named Max Wiley. Louis Wiley was rather embarrassed by the sight of his burly brother, who toured as a wrestler at county fairs, and who visited The Times whenever he was in the vicinity of New York. When Max Wiley would appear, Louis Wiley would employ his young protégé Ivan Veit to get Max out of the office fast—to take Max to the movies, to the Bronx Zoo, to Coney Island, anywhere, so long as it was far from The Times. Veit managed to do this with such esprit and speed that Louis Wiley was ever grateful, and Veit’s early career was off to a good start. He became the promotion chief of The Times in 1934, and not long after World War II his department grew to a staff of eighty and a budget of more than a million a year. This staff included copywriters, artists, researchers, statisticians, production men; and they worked on newspaper and magazine advertisements, radio and television spot announcements, window displays, book fairs, suburban and subway posters—and one of their most successful subway campaigns, stressing the influence of classified advertising in The Times, featured the smiling faces of people announcing, “I Got My Job Through The New York Times.” (This campaign was parodied by rightwing political groups, who often waved posters in parades that quoted the slogan under the smiling bearded face of Fidel Castro.)

  Although it was stated in The Times on the day of Punch Sulzberger’s take-over that no executive changes were planned other than the promotions of Harding Bancroft and Andrew Fisher—Catledge was to continue as managing editor, Lester Markel as Sunday editor, Oakes as editorial-page editor—there would shortly transpire a series of changes more dramatic than any in Times history. Punch Sulzberger, who had previously revealed so little of his inner character, who had done almost nothing that he did not have to do, now suddenly began to demonstrate an initiative and decisiveness that was surprising and startling.

  The first thing that he did, in January of 1964, was to fold The Times’ Western edition. It had been operating for only sixteen months, but it had failed to attract sufficient advertising and it was losing tremendous amounts of money when the home office could least afford it. The 114-day newspaper strike had cut deeply into The Times’ financial reserves, and while Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger was one of the wealthiest women in America—Fortune magazine would claim in 1968 that she was worth between $150 million and $200 million—Punch Sulzberger did not like losing thousands of dollars each week in supporting a force of ninety men in California and the costly electronic equipment that relayed the news from the Times building on Forty-third Street to the regional headquarters in Los Angeles. While the prepublication surveys had indicated that Pacific Coast readers wanted a regional edition of The Times, a paper that they could buy each morning on the newsstands in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and dozens of other Western cities, Sulzberger felt that the circulation figures had not fulfilled that promise, and he did not believe that things would get much better. When the edition had begun in October of 1962, its circulation had been 120,000, but it had dropped to 87,000 in March of 1963, and to 71,000 in June of 1963. Equally discouraging was the fact that this circulation was spread over thirteen Western states—too widespread a readership to appeal to an advertiser in Los Angeles. The owner of a specialty shop in Beverly Hills saw no advantage in buying an ad in The Times’ Western edition if its readers were thinly sprinkled from the Mexican border up the California coast to Seattle and back to the Rocky Mountains and the desert of Las Vegas. Another problem was that the Western edition was not tailored for Westerners. It had been almost assumed by Dryfoos and his advisers in New York that The Times’ success formula on the East Coast would work equally well on the West Coast. So the Western edition was really a thin version of the New York edition, featuring a heavy diet of foreign and national news, the mood of distant jungles and capitals, but lacking the fashion advertising that women like to read, lacking the “feel” and the news of the region west of the Rockies. It was a newspaper run by remote control—the very method that had been mocked by Arthur Hays Sulzberger and James Reston after they had been to Moscow in 1943 and had visited the offices of Pravda, where they were astonished to discover that while Pravda’s printing facilities were on the premises, the news came over wires from government offices elsewhere. “The ‘reporters’ were technicians,” Reston would recall in one of his books more than twenty years later, “processing what officials elsewhere decided should go in the paper.” This is exactly what The Times tried to do in 1962—its California staff members were mostly “technicians”: electronic experts, admen, circulation crews, only a minimum of copyreaders and editors, and no special staff of Western reporters. Consequently The Times could not compete in advertising or local reporting with the suddenly aroused Los Angeles Times. If The New York Times did nothing else in California, it helped to make the Los Angeles Times into a better newspaper. The latter not only launched its own news service in partnership with the Washington Post, but it sharpened its coverage around the nation and overseas and especially at home. When the riots occurred in the Watts section of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, the Los Angeles Times sent dozens of reporters and photographers in to cover the incidents and the aftermath, a performance that would win the 1966 Pulitzer for general local reporting.

  Sulzberger’s decision to close down the Western edition greatly disappointed some Timesmen who were affiliated with the project. They believed that sixteen months had not provided them with enough time to properly test the edition and make adjustments. Other Timesmen wondered aloud about how the failure would affect The Times’ image. “You can’t close down the edition, Punch,” one said, “we must save face.”

  “We’re loaded with face,” Sulzberger replied quickly. “It’s a bad paper. Let’s get rid of it.”

  So in late January of 1964, Sulzberger made the announcement, and the California contingent was disbanded. Some people remained with the Times organization, others found jobs elsewhere. No Timesman was more disheartened than Andrew Fisher. Though the Western project had been Dryfoos’ “baby,” Dryfoos was now gone, and so was Bradford, and the executive most closely associated with the regional edition was Fisher. When Fisher returned to New York he wondered if he would now be gradually eased out. He knew that to some older Timesmen he symbolized the new technology that had long stirred their doubts and suspicions. Furthermore, the technology had failed in California; the scientific surveys had misjudged the people, and The Times had lost a big battle because of faulty intelligence; and if a scapegoat was to be sought it would most likely be Andrew Fisher. As he reestablished himself on the fourteenth floor,
sitting in his office adorned by a two-faced clock simultaneously ticking the time of California and New York, and as he moved through the corridors of the building and rode the elevators that had now become automated, Fisher sensed that it was difficult for some executives to look him straight in the eye. A delicate distance was being maintained, he thought, and he asked himself more than once, Why don’t they fire me? Why are they keeping me here?

  With Punch Sulzberger, however, Fisher did not feel this way, and the discovery was wonderful and reassuring. Sulzberger seemed no different than before, no less friendly, no less confiding than when Fisher had been promoted to head the production department seven months previously on the occasion of Sulzberger’s own elevation to publisher. Fisher and Sulzberger had gotten along very well when Dryfoos was alive. Fisher had been the only executive close to Sulzberger’s age on the fourteenth floor, and they quickly discovered that they had much in common. They were both informal and frank, yet possessing a military passion for orderliness, a respect for charts, training aids, systemization, and brevity in the arrangement of details; they were both enamored of the gadgets and tools of science, and they believed that when certain tools proved inadequate for a job, that these tools should be unsentimentally replaced by newer, better tools. And it was precisely this clear and practical reasoning that had caused Fisher to wonder after the California fiasco if he might be finished at The Times. It not finished in the sense of being fired, then insofar as his future career was concerned. As a tool of the institution he had in a sense failed; and yet this was apparently not the value judgment that Punch Sulzberger had placed on the West Coast venture.