by Gay Talese
Turner Catledge shook Nixon’s hand at the door, and with an arm over the President-Elect’s shoulder, he escorted him up the aisle to a seat in the front not far from where the family was assembled—Iphigene Sulzberger, her son and her three daughters; members of the Adler branch, the Oakeses, and close family friends. In the pews to the right were such leaders as Bruce A. Gimbel, president of Gimbel Brothers, Inc.; Robert W. Sarnoff, president of the Radio Corporation of America; Eugene R. Black, Robert Moses, General Edward S. Greenbaum; David Rockefeller, Laurance S. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller 3d. The top men of The Times were there: Harding Bancroft and Andrew Fisher, Ivan Veit and Francis Cox; Clifton Daniel and Harrison Salisbury, Theodore Bernstein and Lester Markel and Daniel Schwarz. Among the many former Timesmen in the congregation were Brooks Atkinson, Charles Merz, and Bosley Crowther; and seated near A. M. Rosenthal was an individual who had worked briefly for The Times—James Greenfield.
Greenfield was now a news executive with the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, having done very well since leaving The Times less than a year ago. He had also maintained close ties with many Timesmen, including Punch Sulzberger, with whom he planned to spend New Year’s Eve. He had also visited with Tom Wicker in Washington shortly after the incident of last February, and there were no hard feelings between them. In October, with the announcement of Jacqueline Kennedy’s plans to marry Aristotle Onassis, Greenfield suddenly received numbers of calls from newspapers and networks seeking help in reaching Kennedy sources, most of whom Greenfield knew personally; among the callers was the Washington bureau of The Times, and Greenfield helped in every way that he could.
The service for Arthur Hays Sulzberger was a simple one, in accordance with the instructions that he had written five years ago for this occasion. He wanted no flowers, no elegant casket, no extravagant display of mourning—and no Mozart, a composer whose music offended Sulzberger’s otherwise tolerant spirit. The service began with the singing of Schubert’s musical arrangement of the Twenty-third Psalm, “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” Then after Rabbi Nathan A. Perilman had recited three psalms, and after the choir had again sung, James Reston appeared in the bright light of the altar and climbed the pulpit that had been donated to the temple many years ago by Adolph Ochs. Reston was to deliver the eulogy, as he had done in 1963 for Dryfoos, and though his voice was solemn it seemed to convey a sense of history and continuity as it echoed through the towering heights of the great hall.
The passing of Sulzberger, Reston said, marked the end of the last member of the seventh generation of a remarkable family that had settled in America in 1695, before the country had gained independence. Sulzberger had inherited from his forebears a deeply serious strain, Reston said, a genuine modesty, a belief in service, and he had no fear of revision. Sulzberger was not a moralizer, Reston continued, but he was mortally afraid of abusing personal power, or the power of the paper; he thought of himself in terms of stewardship rather than of ownership, and he preserved the vanishing gift of actually listening to what other people were saying, and then thinking about it before answering. The result, Reston said, was that men went away from him feeling that they had been heard out to the end and that they were being treated fairly.
“If you have any doubt about the enduring quality of his example and character,” Reston said, looking up from the pulpit, his voice rising slightly, “all you have to do is look around. The new generation of this family is already in place, with another Arthur Sulzberger at its head, and he has carried The Times to even greater successes than ever before; and they are going to have to stepively, for the next generation is already knocking at the door.
“The test of great leadership,” Reston concluded, “is whether it leaves behind a situation which common sense and hard work can deal with successfully. Reverence for the symbol and fearlessness of revision—all that we have and mean to defend—all that and Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, and her children, and their children, who will learn the art in their time.”
Author’s Note
This book evolved out of an Esquire article on Clifton Daniel written during the summer of 1966. The idea for the article had come from Esquire’s editor Harold Hayes. After completing the article, and in spite of the fact that I had worked as a reporter on The Times for ten years, I began for the first time to see the paper in historical terms, to sense Daniel’s relationship to others in the hierarchy, and it gradually began to occur to me that a story about The Times was no doubt as valid and dramatic as any The Times was reporting.
So the book was begun, and hundreds of interviews were conducted with Timesmen and former Timesmen during the next two and one-half years. Some talks were “off the record,” but very few individuals refused to see me, and I was also granted interviews by the paper’s executives and its owners, the Sulzberger family. Though my book was not to be submitted to The Times for prepublication approval or editing, I nonetheless received permission from many editors and staff members to make use of their personal files and to quote from their letters and memos. I received the loan of family albums, historical data, and other considerations from the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and his parents, sisters, and friends, in New York, Connecticut, and Chattanooga; and I also had access through John Oakes to the privately published memoir of George Ochs-Oakes, which revealed something of the Ochs family philosophy. The authorized books commissioned by The Times—Elmer Davis’ book in 1921, and Meyer Berger’s in 1951—were very valuable insofar as the history of the newspaper was concerned, although a perhaps more vivid sense of the Ochs family is to be found in Doris Faber’s book, Printer’s Devil to Publisher, published by Julian Messner, Inc., in 1963. But for me the most interesting insights into Adolph Ochs himself were to be found in the private papers of a Timesman named Garet Garrett, who knew Ochs and kept a kind of diary on Ochs and the editors in the early 1900’s.
Garrett, who died in his seventies in 1954, owned a farmhouse on a river very close to the island resort of Ocean City, New Jersey, where I was born and reared. I remember as a boy seeing Garrett entering my father’s store, a distinguished gentleman invariably wearing a dark blue hat, dark suit, and with long flowing white hair. He would sit sometimes for hours talking to my father about the state of the world or reminiscing about The Times, a subject that fascinated my father, who was one of three people in the town who read The Times, receiving it by mail each morning two days late.
After I had gone to work for The Times my father asked more than once if Garrett’s name was ever mentioned there. I had to say no, never, and I wondered if the high esteem in which Garrett was held in my home as a journalist and raconteur was felt anywhere else on earth. Then after I had begun the Times book and was unable to understand enough about the style and character of Ochs from the interviews and reading that I had done up to then, I came upon a copy of The American Scholar during the summer of 1967 in which was printed part of Garet Garrett’s journal about Ochs. It had been sent to The American Scholar by Richard C. Cornuelle, a writer and business consultant in New York who had also been a friend and admirer of Garrett. It was through Richard Cornuelle that I was able to read and profit from Garrett’s entire diary.
Another valuable source of information were the Times, men’s own accounts of their experiences while on assignment for the paper—such as Tom Wicker’s recollection of Dallas on the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, and McCandlish Phillips’ description of his interview with the Jewish Klansman who later committed suicide after The Times published Phillips’ piece. These and several other examples of personal reportage were printed in Times Talk, the newspaper’s excellent house organ edited by Ruth Adler.
For the most part, however, the source material in this book came from personal interviews with Timesmen, or from my own observations during the many years that I worked in the newsroom (beginning in 1953 as a copyboy), or from what I had heard while gathered with other reporters listening to veteran Times, men recalling the past, or f
rom the long letters of reply from Times, men answering my inquiries concerning certain anecdotes or incidents that are part of the office legend. Newspapermen write superb letters. Their letters are usually crammed with interesting detail and also a strong point of view, revealing not only what they had seen and heard with regard to certain situations, but also what they had personally felt and thought. These last two were of particular importance to me for the kind of book that I knew I wanted to write—a human history of an institution in transition, a book that would tell more about the men who report the news than the news they report, a factual story about several generations of Timesmen and the interplay within those generations, the internal scenes and confrontations and adjustments that are part of the vitality and growth of any enduring institution.
In pursuit of reporting this, I asked those I interviewed to describe not only the situations that they had witnessed or in which they had played a part—such as the events reported in Chapter 20—but also to tell me something of their own emotional reactions, what they felt and thought. The fact that I have been able to write in this book, as I often have, that so-and-so felt a particular way, or thought a certain thought, during the tense incidents that transpired within The Times during the Nineteen-sixties, is largely due to the cooperation of those Timesmen who were so candid and honest about themselves, and to whom I am indebted.
G. T.
February, 1969
for NAN
ALSO BY GAY TALESE
A Writer’s Life
Unto the Sons
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
Honor Thy Father
Fame and Obscurity
The Bridge
New York—A Serendipiter’s Journey
The Overreachers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GAY TALESE worked as a reporter for The New York Times from 1956 to 1965, and has frequently contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s and Esquire, among other national publications. Esquire’s editors declared his article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” to be the best they ever published. He is the bestselling author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Honor Thy Father, and Unto the Sons. His most recent work is A Writer’s Life. He lives in New York City.