by Gay Talese
It was not surprising that Dryfoos would be so fond of Reston personally and so respectful of Reston’s judgment. Even before he had known Reston well he had admired Reston’s writing style, which was bright and informal, different from The Times’ and yet complementary to it. And not long after Dryfoos had left Wall Street in 1942, six months after his fortunate marriage, to begin his career on The Times, Reston had left reporting temporarily to serve as an executive assistant to Dryfoos’ father-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the handsome man who in 1917 had married Ochs’s daughter and only child—and upon Ochs’s death in 1935 Sulzberger had assumed command of The Times, ruling it for the next twenty-six years, until stepping aside for Dryfoos in 1961, with a particular modesty and self-consciousness that comes from marrying into the Ochs dynasty and moving among senior Timesmen who had made it the hard way. But The Times prospered under Sulzberger, as it would under Dryfoos, because both men had the wisdom to guide The Times gently and the money to resist impropriety, and both men maintained enough of the Ochsian atmosphere to attract and keep employees who were dedicated and talented, and none was more dedicated and talented than James Reston.
A short, dark-haired man with a spry step and an air of self-assurance that was never graceless, Reston had been born in 1909 to poor and pious parents in Clydebank, Scotland. When he was eleven his parents immigrated to the United States, settling in Ohio, and Reston attended public schools but was undistinguished as a student, neglecting his books for the golf course. Soon he was scoring in the seventies and winning tournaments and he could have become a professional; but his mother, who greatly influenced him, was opposed—“Make something of yourself!” she cried—and with some financial assistance from a rich man for whom he had caddied, Reston got through the University of Illinois. Though he was a slow starter, his dream unfocused, he possessed tremendous energy and ambition, and when he finally concentrated on journalism he shot up through the system more swiftly and smoothly than any young man of his generation. But despite the success that would enable him to meet the great thinkers of his time, and would eventually make them as eager to meet him, Reston never forgot his impoverished past and the circumstances that allowed him to be where he was. He was a poor boy to whom America had indeed been a land of opportunity, and out of this grew a gratitude, a patriotism that made him a better convert than a critic. He was clearly an American advocate and, even as he matured, he would never achieve the universal scope of a Walter Lippmann. Columns by Reston on national or foreign affairs often reflected the pardonable prejudice of the sportswriter he had once been. He was reluctant to condemn the home side, even when it made the errors, or to concede that the local heroes also played dirty sometimes when they had to win. Occasionally he seemed almost naive, seeing only righteousness and never greed in American ambition, and somehow suggesting that there were probably more good guys in the CIA than in the spy ranks of the enemy. But he was at least never cynical and always readable, and this made him just right for The New York Times, where cynicism would not be tolerated, Ochs having detested it, and where readability was often rare. And there was finally in Reston’s style an element far more significant than his writing skill or wit, and this was his persuasive tone of moralism and idealism that brought to his readers the inner elevation of a good Sunday sermon—James Reston was something of a preacher. His strict Scotch Presbyterian mother had wanted him to become a preacher, and as a Timesman he had become one, his column being the podium from which he could spread his Calvinist view of life throughout the land, thrilling thousands with his sound logic and clarity, influencing students, educators, and politicians, sometimes infuriating such presidents as Eisenhower, who once asked, “Who the hell does Reston think he is, telling me how to run the country?” Reston expected great things from the mighty, not only muscle and heart but also some piety and nobility of spirit; and yet when they failed him, as they most often did, he did not damn them but rather foresaw signs of redemption and hope. This was Reston’s special appeal. He communicated hope. The front-page headlines were overcast with gloom and doom, but turning to Reston’s column made the world seem brighter. Or, if not brighter, at least less confused. He could somehow cut through all the complex facts and figures, the allegations and lies and illusions of daily life and put his finger on a central point that suddenly brought everything into sharp focus, making it clear and understandable. There was little negativism or doubt in his vision, and thus his America was a positive place of right-thinking people, and God was on our side—it was as it had been during World War II.
In those days, twenty-five years ago, Reston had been a young political reporter in Washington, and before that a war correspondent in London during the Blitz, living with his Midwestern wife and baby son on the edge of destruction and rubble, working among a generation of American journalists profoundly influenced by the spirit of that time and place. There was then a purity about the Allied purpose, and the characters in the war drama were well defined, it was the Virtuous versus the Huns; and there was great adventure, danger, and commitment to being a newsman then, and London left a lasting mark on many of these men, giving to Edward R. Murrow a voice, giving to Clifton Daniel a style in manner and dress, and giving to Reston such a deep conviction about the war as a holy crusade that he wrote a book about it, and this book was his first big step to fame. Entitled Prelude to Victory, and published in the summer of 1942, it introduced for the first time the spark and patriotism of Reston’s prose. The theme of the book was that “we cannot win this War until it ceases to be a struggle for personal aims and material things and becomes a national crusade for America and the American Dream,” and the voice of Reston from the pulpit could almost be heard in such passages as: “We must defy the danger and welcome the opportunity. We must strengthen the things that unite us and remove the things that divide us. We must look forward to the future with faith in each other and in the rightness of the American Dream. For that is the Prelude to Victory.” Rave reviews greeted the book’s publication both in America and in England, and the movie producer Walter Wanger was so inspired by it that he arranged for a Hollywood bookshop to refund the money to any reader who did not share his view of the book’s importance. The book also expressed great loyalty to The Times, and this fact, together with Reston’s general philosophy and the acclaim it received, did him no harm with The Times’ publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.
Sulzberger was then, in 1942, in the prime of his life—fifty years old, a lean and well-tailored man with gray hair, alert blue eyes, wrinkles in the right places, and finally in a position to make big decisions without having to first clear everything with his father-in-law. Ochs had now been dead for seven years, and Sulzberger was the boss, although he could never be the boss that Ochs had been. Nor would he wish to be. Sulzberger was by nature a modest man, not a monument builder, and he preferred making decisions quietly, taking into account the counsel of his colleagues, and then remaining in the background with the other shrine-keepers and paying homage to the memory of the departed patriarch. Except for the fact that Sulzberger was of Jewish ancestry, as Ochs had been, the two men had little in common. Adolph Ochs’s climb had been a continuous struggle against great odds, he quitting school at fifteen to begin at the bottom—a printer’s apprentice and floor-sweeper in the composing room of a small newspaper in Tennessee. Sulzberger had been privileged from the start. He had been born of a prominent New York family that had settled in Colonial America in 1695—one of his mother’s relatives, Jacob Hays, had been New York’s first police chief—and Sulzberger had been educated in good schools, and had been permitted to indulge a taste for expensive things. He wrote verse, had some talent as a painter, and he thought seriously of someday becoming an architect. But after graduation from college he became, like his father, a textile importer, and was on a buying trip in Peking, China, when the United States entered World War I. He quickly returned for training as an artillery officer, and while in the army he met again some
of his New York friends, one being a nephew of Ochs’s. And it was through the latter that Sulzberger became reacquainted with Ochs’s daughter, Iphigene, whom he had known casually a few years before when they both had attended classes on the campus of Columbia University.
When the courtship began, Ochs had been displeased. Ochs had fashioned his daughter to his Victorian taste, and thought there was no great need for her to marry, all her needs being satisfied at home; but if she were ever to seriously contemplate marriage, as she obviously was with Sulzberger, Ochs had hoped that she would at least select someone with a journalistic background who could make a useful contribution to The Times and perhaps one day help run it. But his daughter was set on Sulzberger, and Ochs finally consented on the condition that the young man, after his discharge from the army, join The Times and learn the newspaper business. If he had any ability, he would rise within the hierarch—meanwhile, Ochs could keep an eye on him.
In 1918, a year after the wedding, Arthur Hays Sulzberger appeared at The Times. He was given an office and a secretary and very little to do. His presence naturally caused curiosity throughout the building, particularly among some of the women who found him extremely attractive, and few details about him eluded their gossip. He loved flowers in his office and was fond of miniature animals, there being some samples on his desk and atop the bookshelves. He was forever moving furniture around the room, and emptying the ash trays, and rolling a stand that held a large atlas globe back and forth along the floor until finding a spot where the north light hit it at an interesting angle. He was absorbed by music and poetry, color and fabric, and could properly have worked in some cultural department on the newspaper, which he would have preferred. But Ochs kept him away from the more glamorous aspects of the business. After he had been assigned to work for a while on The Times’ annual charity drive, The Hundred Neediest Cases, he was sent for half of each day to The Times’ paper mill in the Bush Terminal building in Brooklyn, where he was to familiarize himself with the logistics of newsprint. Soon he became more knowledgeable about this than anybody on The Times, and within a few years it was obvious that Sulzberger possessed a great willingness for work and was learning fast. He seemed constantly busy, remaining late at his office studying the complicated tabulated reports of the various departments within the building, always appearing at The Times on Sundays and holidays if for no other reason than to walk around the place, to talk to people, and, as he once put it, “to register the fact that I wasn’t playing polo with the boss’s money.”
By the late Twenties, with Adolph Ochs slowing down as he approached seventy, Sulzberger’s authority increased, although never to a point of presumption. Once when Sulzberger went a bit far Ochs reminded him, “I’m not dead yet.” And Ochs became irritated on another occasion when he learned that Sulzberger, whose taxicab had been delayed by Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, had suggested to an editor that The Times might print a paragraph or two about the congestion. While Ochs would never alter news to accommodate advertisers, he was nonetheless a practical man, and he saw no reason to risk offending Macy’s just because his son-in-law had gotten into a traffic jam. There were other things about Sulzberger, too, that grated on Ochs in the beginning, small things that were not the result of any disaffection but were inspired rather by their difference in style and by Ochs’s desire to have The Times run as he wished not only until his death, but long after it.
This was one reason why, in his final years, Ochs became almost obsessed by his last will and testament, consulting endlessly with his lawyer lest there be confusion about his ultimate dream: The New York Times must, upon his death, be controlled only by his immediate family, and in turn by their families, and it would be the responsibility of them all to govern during their lifetime with the same dedication that he had during his. But he knew also that this was the predictable dying wish of many men who had established dynasties, it having possibly been the same with Joseph Pulitzer, the great publisher of the World, who died in 1911. But by 1931 Pulitzer’s heirs had sold the World to Scripps-Howard. This fact, occurring so shortly before Ochs’s own death, had caused him particular despondency. For the World had been a remarkable combination of writing and reporting, urbanity and intelligence, and what hurt it was not so much an editorial decline as the mismanagement of its business side. Ochs knew that a talented and idealistic staff alone could not guide The Times through future decades. The paper also had to make money. Ochs’s genius had been not only in the type of newspaper he created but in the fact that he had made such a newspaper pay. Of course Ochs had worked hard, being an indomitable little man with no interests outside his newspaper and with no doubt that news, as he presented it, was a durable and salable commodity. But with his business acumen Ochs had an instinct for avoiding the temptations of business, and he hoped his heirs would also inherit some of this. During Ochs’s earliest days in New York, for example, he was so short of money that, to save a few pennies, he would sometimes wander through The Times shutting off the lights over desks not in use—and yet, when a prominent New Yorker, a trusted friend, offered him a contract for $150,000 worth of municipal advertising with no strings attached, Ochs refused. He did so on the theory that he needed the revenue so desperately that he might adjust his operation to the windfall and he was unwilling to trust himself as to what he might do if, after that had happened, he was threatened with a cancellation of the contract. Ochs was a very human man with his share of human frailties and, knowing this, he was wary of the slightest twitch of temptation in himself. As for his heirs, he could only hope that they too would possess the wisdom to resist, and would run The Times not merely for profit but somewhat along the business lines of a great church, gilding the wealth with virtue, and in such a place Adolph Ochs, after death, could live long in the liturgy.
How long he could live, of course, depended largely on how well his heirs got along in the decades ahead. Nothing would crumble his foundation faster than family squabbles, selfish ambition, or shortsighted goals. His successors would have to make money but not be enticed by it, would have to keep up with trends but not be carried away by them, would have to hire talented people but not people so talented or egocentric that they could become too special as writers or indispensable as editors. Nobody could be indispensable on The New York Times, including Ochs. The Times would go on indefinitely, he hoped, towering over all individuals and groups in its employ, and his family would work together, repressing any personal animosity for the greater good, and, if possible, choose mates in marriage who would also be wed to The Times.
This was part of Ochs’s dream, and when he died in 1935 during a nostalgic visit to the place in Tennessee where it all began, the fulfillment of his wishes became the responsibility of Sulzberger, the son-in-law, and of Ochs’s daughter, Iphigene.
Iphigene Sulzberger was a serious, somber-eyed brunette, no great beauty but pleasant to look at, and, beneath a seemingly soft surface, of very firm fiber. As a girl she had been Ochs’s little princess, and as a young woman at Barnard, from which she graduated in 1914, she had been alert and bright, making her father, who had always been impressed by education and envious of it, extremely proud. Her mother, the unconventional member of the family, was a marvelously strange tiny woman with raven hair who wore long dark dresses and walked around the house alone at night, sleeping by day, and who seemed more charmed by the animals around the Ochs household, including the mice, for which she sometimes left bread crumbs in the fireplace, than by the important men who so often came to dinner. She was the daughter of the distinguished Rabbi Isaac Wise of Cincinnati, founder of Hebrew Union College, and Adolph Ochs had met her while visiting the rabbi’s home one day in 1882. They were married a year later, spending their honeymoon in Washington, where they had tea with President Chester Arthur, and Ochs then returned with his bride to Chattanooga, where he was the precocious publisher of the Chattanooga Times, gaining experience for his future venture in New York. His wife’s interest in
journalism was limited almost entirely to the literary supplement, for which she wrote book reviews, and she had little inclination for cooking or running a home. But this was no problem in Chattanooga because Adolph Ochs’s female relatives there, including his mother, happily occupied and helped run the big house, thus remaining close to Adolph, their pride and joy, and the young Mrs. Ochs, a guest in her own home, was free for such things as riding the new horse that her husband had bought for her soon after their marriage. Far from being displeased with her ethereal quality, Ochs was actually attracted by it, finding it a congenial contrast with his more bourgeois background. The only thing lacking in the early years of their marriage was children, two having died, but nine years after their marriage, in 1892, a baby girl was born and survived, and the ecstatic Ochs named her Iphigene in honor of his wife.
Young Iphigene shared her mother’s great interest in literature but little of her mother’s romantic detachment. She was her father’s child. Had he permitted it she might have become a journalist, a crusading sort urging reform. As a schoolgirl she had been keenly aware of the slums of New York, and during her family’s many trips to Europe she saw more of the same. At Barnard College, where she majored in economics, she developed what was then considered a socialistic point of view. She joined with other students in advocating a better welfare program in New York and also worked as a volunteer in some of the city’s settlement houses. Her father admired her idealism but he was sometimes startled by the assertive manner in which she expressed her opinions. One day he introduced her to a passage in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography in which Poor Richard, discussing the futility of trying to win arguments by dogmatic force alone, advocated instead the use of such softer phrases as “it appears to me at present” or “I imagine” or “I apprehend”—and this approach in conversation, reinforced by Ochs’s own example of never raising his voice and his tolerant way in correcting Iphigene (“perhaps you had better look into that a little more”), gradually influenced her girlhood and it grew as she got older to a point where people were impressed by her reasonable nature, mistaking it sometimes for timidity.
