Lives and Times

...And now, with The Trust, Tifft and Jones have given us the story of the owners of the New York Times, the House of Windsor in the publishing galaxy—and, like the Windsors, filthy rich, encrusted with honors, and probably well past their prime...

...For many," Tifft and Jones write, "working for the New York Times was both a mission and a substitute family," with alumni coming back frequently to visit the paper and "reconnect, if only for the moment, with something larger than themselves"—which suggests that their employees shared the beliefs of the Ochs-Sulzberger family...

...I have come to believe that what is good or bad for the Times is good or bad for every American," the financier Thomas Lamont once wrote to the family, which concurred with his feelings...

...Immediately, he was plagued by the son-in-law syndrome that would help drive Kay Meyer's husband Philip Graham to suicidal depression, struggling to earn retroactively what he had already been given...

...At the celebration of Arthur's twentieth anniversary as publisher, as he was harvesting greetings from President Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson, Winston Churchill, and other notables, her toast took the crowd's breath away: "Dear Arthur...

...A gay reporter dying of AIDS was allowed to cover gay themes in the news pages while remaining an activist...

...When you work for your wife's father, there's an enormous desire to assert yourself in some way," said his old friend Charley Bartlett...

...The Times's explosion from four to six sections (seven on Fridays) dropped all pretense at writing...

...But that may be because of the way they picture themselves...

...A feature called "Styles," that ran for two years, was filled with stories on gay rodeos...

...As another friend put it, "It's as if they were overseeing the National Gallery of Art...

...The Times news pages can still be impressive, and the paper has many fine writers who write many good stories, but it is now in key ways a less fair and less serious paper...

...This is the problem with dynastic endeavors...

...Then came the profile of the plaintiff in the William Kennedy Smith rape case, which gave her name, repeated old gossip, and said she had "a little wild streak...

...When General Leslie Groves, the man in charge of directing the Manhattan Project, wanted an official version of the story of how the atomic bomb was developed, he chose as his Boswell William L. Laurance, the science reporter for the New York Times...

...Part of the reason has to do with the times, not the Times...

...Whereas the Times used to want to make its readers better citizens, it now seems more interested in making them better consumers," said James Wolcott in Vanity Fair...

...His eye settled on his eldest daughter's husband, Orvil Dryfoos, a quiet broker on Wall Street who was thrilled to leave his job to become heir in training, and who had wooed his wife by showing her, in his parents' apartment, his carefully saved back issues of the Times...

...Eighteen years later, he expanded his influence, buying the decrepit New York Times...

...And so it was made a condition of her marriage to the dashing Arthur Hays Sulzberger that he leave his job in his own family's business and come to work for the Times...

...So why does this talk of the Times as a trust, a cathedral, now seem so dated...

...Both the clan feelings and the sense of mission descended from the founder, Adolph Ochs...

...the Big Three television networks, before video, dishes, and cable...

...There was a long affair with the stunning blonde actress Madeleine Carroll (whose ex-husband would later marry one of the Sulzbergers' daughters), whom Arthur invited to visit his family, where Iphigene received her as an honored guest...

...In Britain in 1942, he lunched with Lord Mountbatten, conferred with Dwight Eisenhower, and dined at Chequers with Winston Churchill, whose American grandfather, Leonard Jerome, had been a director of the New York Times in its pre-Ochs days...

...BY NOEMIE EMERY In the late 1980s, when Prince ; Charles visited the United States, he asked to meet his American counterparts—the people who : shared his pressures and problems...

...Bedding beautiful women boosted his self-confidence, gave him something indisputably his own, and kept Iphigene offbalance, thereby maintaining his masculine prerogatives of power and potency," Tifft and Jones insist...

...Much more than merely the changing times has gone wrong with the Times, however...

...At a posh family dinner, Sulzberger ostentatiously presented his wife with a small pig made of seashells, with the message, "Happy Birthday to My Shellfish Pig...

...But when the longed-for boy did arrive—called Punch, for his ties to his big sister, Judy—he was rapidly pushed to one side...

...Meanwhile, Punch, the blood heir, was being put through his paces in a half-hearted process of training to do something, though no one was quite sure just what...

...Orvil was seen as the hand on the tiller, the steady presence, the "coach," who would keep things in order...

...So Arthur Sulzberger, the man who years before had the good fortune to marry Mr...

...Sometimes a trust fails when it slips out of control of the family...

...Like Graham, Sulzberger cut a more glamorous figure than his intelligent wife and sometimes enjoyed letting her know it...

...Iphigene could twist the knife herself, on occasion...

...Where his rivals sought confrontation, money, and power, Ochs craved admiration...

...As the 1950s wore on, Arthur Hays Sulzberger faced dynastic problems of his own...

...The Times is no longer the paper, but merely a paper, though of the uppermost tier...

...made speeches suggesting that "alienating older white male readers meant that 'we were doing something right.'" It hardly seems worth mentioning that this is not the mystique that Adolph Ochs had in mind for his paper back in 1896...

...The Times came out of the war with a Pulitzer Prize and enhanced stature as almost a new branch of government...

...This gives their national role an interesting tension and, with their undoubted power, it makes their family lives as fascinating as any tale of Roosevelts, Rockefellers, or Kennedys...

...claimed guardians of republican virtue in the most democratic of modern societies—run themselves on the most traditional form of aristocratic descent...

...Like the daily feature sections, the Sunday magazine also changed, becoming fatter and stranger...

...But, as Tifft and Jones make clear, the Ochs-Sulzberger clan see themselves as the custodians of something quite rare and precious, a national treasure...

...But none of them has disbelieved in the one true religion of the Times...

...And so he dined with the blood heirs of publishers: Donald Graham, the son of Philip and Katharine Graham and the grandson of Eugene Meyer, owners of the Washington Post and Newsweek...

...Two years later, after the ending of a brutal 114-day walkout, Orvil was dead of a heart attack, literally killed by the strike...

...Ochs had one child, a girl...

...his speeches and statements on political matters recorded by his and others' newspapers as news...

...Christopher Ogden made a riveting book out of the story of the Annenberg publishing family...

...By the turn of the century," the authors report, he "had fostered a mystique about the Times that had many convinced that the paper was on its way to becoming the greatest in the nation...

...the big labor unions, before the unionized worker gave way to the small entrepreneur and the home office...

...and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the son of one Arthur Sulzberger and the grandson of another, publishers of the New York Times...

...But Arthur's tenure saw the Times reach its peak...

...Born in 1858 to Bavarian immigrants, Ochs became the owner of the Chattanooga Daily Times when he was only twenty...

...The great days of the newspaper came in the age of the great institutions: the Big Three car manufacturers, before foreign imports...

...But when in 1999 a credible rape charge was brought against a president who was a social liberal whom the Times had twice supported, the news was not reported until five days later on page sixteen—and then in a story whose focus was the anguish of the staff of the paper in deciding to print it at all...

...If I'd been the boss's son, instead of his daughter, this party might have been for me instead of you...

...As the United States became the world's greatest power, the publisher of the most important paper to cover it became by extension a figure of worldwide significance...

...Our leading newspapers—our self-proA frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery lives in Alexandria, Virginia...

...It was an omen, as bleak as the jeweled cross that had tumbled from the crown of England on the accession of Edward VIII...

...Charles made the right choice...

...two tricky successes for a dynasty...

...Iphigene Ochs, her father decided, could not herself become publisher, but—as the Washington Posfs Eugene Meyer thought of his daughter, Kay—she could at least bring one into the family...

...A poor student, and a diffident child, he did not much impress his high-powered bon-vivant father, who began looking elsewhere for heirs...

...In response to complaints, Arthur Jr...

...A dynastic trust demands a succession, and the family behind the New York Times has always had an imbalance of daughters—which has brought a series of battles over the years as male cousins and nephews struggled for power with the husbands of the girls...

...Assuming the publisher's throne in 1961, Orvil was greeted on his first day with a brief half-day strike—and when he returned to his office after settling the strike, he found that a Steuben glass owl given him by Punch and his sisters had somehow been broken in half...

...After a century, the Times is still an important paper, and its ruling family still has not fractured...

...Two recent books— one by Marie Brenner and another by the husband-and-wife team of Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones—dissected the fall of the Binghams of Louisville, a family that started imploding with the death in a freak accident of the crown prince, Worth Bingham, and developed into a Lear-like battle among his princess sisters...

...But even art doesn't describe it: The family members tend to confuse the firm at least with religion and possibly with God...

...a clothing store specializing in lace-up "bondage trousers" and a piece on "the body part as fashion accessory" referred to gay sexual practices...

...Beginning and ending with the triumphal party in 1996 when the family celebrated the centennial of Ochs's great purchase, Tifft and Jones's The Trust is intended as a success story— which in some measure, it is...

...Other publishers put out a paper...

...But when Arthur took to giving out New Year's greetings over the Times's radio station in the rolling patrician tones of a Eranklin D. Roosevelt, even his family thought he was going too far...

...Katharine Graham wrote a memoir entitled Personal History, a casting of her own tale as a royal princess who was forced by adversity to ascend a publishing throne and yet managed to hand on an expanded empire to her son...

...These were the decades when Philip Graham and his friend Joseph Alsop could pressure friend John E Kennedy to put their other great friend Lyndon B. Johnson on his national ticket and thus alter history...

...He and his wife and his wife's father had watched anxiously as he and Iphigene had produced three girls in a row...

...There was the covenant between the Times and its readers...

...Anita Hill's charges against the Justice for sexual harassment were reported for weeks on the paper's front pages...

...There was the page-one story on Kitty Kelly's book about Nancy Reagan that merely repeated Kelly's un-sourced nasty rumors and broke the Times's old rules about using anonymous quotations rarely and pejorative anonymous quotes never...

...As Jews and as Protestants, the family members have ranged from indifferent to agnostic...

...And at the same time that the paper veered socially far left of center, Ochs's iron wall of separation between the editorial and the news sections began springing serious leaks...

...Much worse than all this were the campaigns carried on in the news pages against black conservatives, the most egregious of which was a notorious profile of quota foe Ward Conner-ly, which gave the impression that minority opponents of the Times's editorial agenda were deeply disturbed...

...Much has been made, in this book and elsewhere, of whether the family has been too Jewish, or not Jewish enough, or, in leading branches, Jewish at all...

...Yet no one could deny the paper's centrality...

...The new sections became vehicles to stoke yuppie greed, the incitements to spend lavishly on entertainment and luxuries mocking the editorial commitment to self-restraint and community spirit...

...His technique was to create the appearance of sweep and majesty, and then to work relentlessly to make it a reality," plowing back profits to better the paper...

...But the new heir—loathing privilege as only someone who got his job by being somebody's great-grandson can loathe it—has embraced an agenda of identity politics and left-leaning values...

...It paid off brilliantly during World War I, when the Times found its niche as the Paper of Record, creating an unrivaled diplomatic archive and expanding war coverage by cleverly anticipating where the next battles would happen...

...Like Graham, Sulzberger reacted with obsessive work that would bring on near-breakdowns, while being unfaithful to and frequently insulting Iphigene...

...It was a modernized Times he passed on to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., his only son, from the first of three marriages...

...But it scarcely matters...

...The Times started out before weekly national news magazines like Time and Newsweek, flourished before televised coverage, and peaked before C-SPAN and the allnews-all-the-time networks...

...In royalist terms, "Punch had become the Times's version of the Prince of Wales, hapless, not taken seriously, and without a job of substance," set by his father to do over the men's room, and water the trees outside of the news plant...

...Traveling abroad frequently, he was treated as the head of a sovereign country...

...Put in at the insistence of his wife and his grandmother, Punch in his time would prove the good steward, standing up to presidents, unions, Times poobahs, and shrill left-wing cousins...

...Its three pillars, as defined by its founder, were comprehensiveness, fairness, and dignity...

...Ochs's daughter, became one of the very few men in the country to know in advance that the United States would drop the atom bomb on Japan...

...The Times then hired as head of its Washington bureau a woman who had coauthored a book-length attack on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the paper's favorite targets...

...seeing the paper through the Pentagon papers, the installation of the op-ed page, and the breakout in 1971 from two to four sections, the addition of which—feature-like sections on the arts, food, decor, and science—would save the paper from fiscal catastrophe...

...Serious newspaper talents are more likely to start at the Times and move elsewhere than to seek out the Times at the height of their powers...

...The Times is the most clannish of newspapers, seeding cousins, nephews, and in-laws liberally through its news and business departments...

...Other attempts to make the Times trendy came off like a yard sale at Tiffany's...

...With this, the succession, which might in time have been diverted to Orvil's son Bobby, moved back to the male Sulzberger line...

...The language in The Trust is heavy with biblical reference...

...The Times is still the most complete paper, but the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal do some important things better, and are usually much better written...

...Sometimes it fades when it stays...

...The family matriarch Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger is described as speaking in parables and her grandchildren as the disciples who will carry on her work in the world...

...If this were not a man's world as I've always insisted it is, I would not be left out in the cold tonight...

...The revamped magazine ran one story with pictures from a Japanese sadomasochism movie and another with pictures of Nazi trinkets made from human skin...

...In a market dominated by partisan tabloids, he carved out a quality paper, seeking ads from the higher priced merchants, while promising a "clean, dignified, and trustworthy" paper, dedicated to giving the news "without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved...

...Once more you must admit that I am right...

...Readers complained, Tifft and Jones report, but "the gay stories kept coming, as did fashion pieces that many readers considered so cutting edge as to be incomprehensible...