by Gay Talese
That such a formidable institution as The Times should be so lacking in arrogance, so weighed down by its sense of responsibility and a fear of going one step too far, may explain in part its survival and strength and it may also hint at a part of its vulnerability—not only the vulnerability of the Jewish family that owns it but also the vulnerability of the nation upon which the family has hitched its star. The anti-Semitic slights and subtleties beneath the surface of America have, in one way or other, touched nearly every member of the family, extending even into the third generation—Sulzberger’s son, a Marine on his way to Korea, was turned away from a restricted resort in Hobe Sound, Florida; a Sulzberger daughter in a girls’ private school in New York was assumed to be a friend of the only other Jewish girl in the class (the two girls came to dislike one another rather quickly); George Ochs-Oakes’s son, John Oakes, a brilliant student, was accepted within a Jewish quota at the Lawrenceville School. Given these and similar incidents, the fact that even the family that owns The New York Times can be subjected to such social scrutiny, it is no wonder that there would be within the institution a sensitivity to Semitism and a fastidiousness about keeping The Times above reproach, untouched by the prejudice within the nation.
The prejudice first became apparent to certain members of the Ochs family when they began to move northward shortly after Adolph had purchased The New York Times in 1896. In Chattanooga they had sensed no anti-Semitism, a circumstance that may have been the result of the very mobile, loosely structured society that had settled there after the Civil War, turning Chattanooga into a kind of frontier town, and it was also possible, George Ochs-Oakes believed, that his type of Jew was more acceptable to Gentiles than the Eastern European Jews who would immigrate to America in great numbers at the turn of the century. George interpreted his own acceptance in Chattanooga, and that of his family, as evidence to support his theory. His father was for years the lay rabbi of the Jewish community in Chattanooga, and George had sung in the choir, and he would later marry a Jewish woman and bring up his sons in the faith: he saw himself as a “good” Jew insofar as religion was concerned, but otherwise he avoided any ethnic or nationalistic commitment to Jews, and when he was elected mayor of Chattanooga in 1893 he was convinced that he had conducted his life wisely and well.
But when he moved to Philadelphia in 1901, accepting his brother’s offer to run a newly acquired Ochs newspaper in that city, George gradually became aware of the fuller meaning of being Jewish. The more tightly entrenched society of Philadelphia was not in the least bit subtle in its discrimination, and George was surprised and appalled, although, uncharacteristically, he did not make an issue of it. He believed that to do so would only further aggravate an unpleasant situation, and he held the Jews partly accountable for the prejudice. If Jews would curtail their desire for their own schools and universities in America, would not seek political power through a Jewish vote, would stop thinking of themselves as primarily Jewish, he felt sure that the wall between Jews and other Americans would be lowered. He conceded that full integration into the American social system might take several years or even decades; the first generation of Jews born in America, and perhaps also the second, might not fully achieve a 100 percent American status. But if they remained patient and set a fine example as outstanding and loyal citizens, then the third and fourth generations would undoubtedly gain acceptance—different from their compatriots in church affiliation, but otherwise typically and totally American. This, at any rate, is what he hoped would happen, and he attempted to live the latter part of his life in such a way that would further this cause and benefit the future of his two sons.
Both sons were born and reared in the Philadelphia area, as had been his wife, the daughter of a merchant and banker whose family had been residents of Philadelphia for nearly three-quarters of a century. George’s first son, George, Jr., was born in 1909. He would attend Princeton and Oxford, becoming a skilled collegiate debater; he would work on various journals and write travel books, would serve as an artillery officer during World War II, and later he would spend about five years working for the CIA. In 1965, at the age of fifty-five, he would be killed in an automobile accident in Vermont.
The second son, John, was born in 1913. Approximately one week later, due to complications during the birth, the mother died, and thereafter George’s sons were brought up with the help of his unmarried sister, Nannie. Nannie Ochs was the oldest of the three daughters of Julius and Bertha Ochs, a year older than George, two years younger than Adolph. She had attended a girls’ college in Bristol, Virginia, but had been called home to help run the household when her mother became ill. Nannie had been courted but had never married, nor had she been encouraged to marry, especially by Adolph, who had a critical eye for suitors. Nannie was needed at home, and that is where she remained until her mother’s death. Her mother died in 1909, at seventy-five, while in New York visiting Adolph.
Nannie was then forty-eight, and she went to Europe to live and travel for the next five years, returning to reside with her brother George in Philadelphia upon the death of his wife. The boys adored Nannie, and as they got older they came to appreciate her keen mind and her strong social conscience which, in the early Thirties, transformed her into an ardent supporter of the New Deal, one who stood up to all the opposition she received at the large family gatherings of the Ochs dynasty, particularly from Arthur Hays Sulzberger and his wife, Iphigene, both of whom could barely tolerate Roosevelt—and Iphigene could absolutely not tolerate Eleanor Roosevelt, could not stand the sound of her voice. But Nannie was invariably persuasive in her views, and many years later John Oakes would trace part of his own political origin as a Liberal Democrat to his Aunt Nannie, his formal personality warming up with the mere mention of her name; although the overwhelming influence on his life was his father, George.
Long after most sons have abandoned the final illusion about their fathers, John Oakes remains firmly convinced that his father was a brilliant man of rare integrity, one who certainly possessed a superior mind to, if not the gall of, the celebrated Adolph. John has always admired his father’s forthrightness in doing and saying what he thought, regardless of how unpopular or awkward the result, and John likes to retell stories that project his father in the role of an independent thinker, bold, uncompromising. He tells of how a large delegation of Philadelphia advertisers once visited his father’s office at the Philadelphia Public Ledger to protest the editorial support that George Ochs had been giving to a Republican reform candidate opposed to the Democratic machine, and they hinted that the continuance of this policy might be costly to the newspaper’s advertising revenue; but George responded with even more support for the reform candidate in the mayoralty race, and this candidate eventually won and, by way of gratitude, asked George if he had any individual whom he wished to recommend for a political job in the new administration, but George declined the offer. He had no favors to ask, no suggestions to make, George told the mayor, wishing only that the city be run with efficiency and honesty. During the mayor’s entire term George never entered the mayor’s office and he made every effort never to talk to the mayor again.
John Oakes’s interest in the protection of trees, rivers, and mountains against the ambitions of land developers was also partially inspired by his father, a devotee of national parks and an enthusiastic hiker, although John Oakes is a much more passionate conservationist than his father ever was—Oakes, in fact, is capable of more emotion and intensity over trees than perhaps any The New York Timesman since Joyce Kilmer, the poet, who at the time of his death, in 1918, while serving in the United States Army, was on military leave from The Times’ Sunday department. Since Oakes became influential on The Times, the changing seasons have been regularly rhapsodized on the editorial page, and one of the major themes on that page has been the endless battle of nature against human greed. Such issues often bring Oakes into disagreement with men of influence, wealth, and self-righteousness, qualities not enti
rely lacking in John Oakes himself, and it is precisely this delicate balance between Oakes and the world that he weighs, the reflection of himself that he sometimes sees in the people that he criticizes, that has no doubt contributed to his hypersensitivity and soul-searching manner. He seems to be constantly in a state of self-examination, fussing with the words that he writes, agonizing over ideas, worried that he is either too critical or not critical enough, careful to avoid the impression that it is a personal motive that prompts him to do what he is doing, has done, or will do. Thus he may not publish a deserving editorial about a school that he once attended, or an organization to which he belongs; at other times he will condemn something of which he is a part but he will not sever his connection with it because this would be a predictable act, and he does not wish to be predictable. As a student editor at Princeton he was critical of the club system, but was a member of a club; as a Times editor with a commitment to the Civil Rights movement, he was personally repulsed by some of the racial policies of the Metropolitan Club in Washington, among other similar organizations, but he did not join the distinguished ranks that quit the club in the early Nineteen-sixties, making headlines: Oakes quit a few years later, quietly, and refused to discuss publicly the reasons for his resignation.
Like most newspaper editors and critics, Oakes does not relish criticism. Should unflattering comments about The New York Times, particularly about its editorial page, appear in another journal or magazine, Oakes will quickly send off a letter of reply. His letter will most often attempt to discredit the criticism by dwelling on any errors of fact or interpretation that appeared in the criticism, even if the errors were minor or inconsequential to the larger purpose of the piece. It is not that Oakes is more prissy than other editors are, or must often be; it is rather that he is unable to resist the impulse to lash back whenever there is an attack, however slight, upon something that is very close to his heart. He is thinskinned and intense, a man whose life was made no less complex by the tragedy associated with his birth, by the strong sentimentality for a father reared in a tight family dominated by an older brother, by his name change that requires regular clarification as to who he is, where he stands, how he got there. Oakes accepts all challenges, and his life has been a series of small skirmishes, mostly with himself.
Shortly after returning home from Oxford in 1936, he applied for a job at a Trenton newspaper while wearing an FDR button on his lapel; he got the job, but the editor warned him not to reappear in the office for work until he had removed the button. Oakes was offended by the remark, interpreting it somehow as an affront to his independence, and he waited a few extra days, until after Roosevelt’s reelection, before reporting to the State Gazette and Trenton Times without his FDR button. Later, at the Washington Post, and still later at The New York Times, Oakes seemed unable to decide precisely how he wished to sign his articles, and as a result his by-lines have varied through the years from John Oakes to John B. Oakes, J. B. Oakes to John Bertram Oakes—and some of the articles on conservation that he wrote for The Times were signed “by John Bertram.” After he took over The Times’ editorial page and began publishing pieces by Tom Wicker, Oakes began to wonder if that by-line was not perhaps too informal, and one day he wrote Wicker inquiring if Thomas Wicker or Thomas G. Wicker might not be more appropriate. Wicker said he liked his name the way it was.
While John Oakes claims to be pleased that his father changed the name, relieving his family branch of some unnecessary Ochsian weight, he is nonetheless disappointed by his father’s obscurity and the lack of high regard that some members of the family had for him. In a biography about Adolph Ochs written with the cooperation of Iphigene Sulzberger and other close relatives, George was referred to as a “gun-toting dandy.” Adolph himself retained a deep affection for his younger brother throughout his lifetime, but he apparently also sensed in George qualities that were out of harmony with institutionalism, and so he always kept George at a safe distance from the center stage of power. When Ochs began spending more time New York than in the South, he appointed George to manage the Chattanooga Times, and he was well satisfied with things until George decided that he wanted to run for mayor. Unable to discourage him, Adolph neither helped him nor did he vote for him. After George had left political life, Adolph offered him a job in Paris to supervise The New York Times’ exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900, a responsibility that included the publishing of a daily Paris edition of The Times; George accepted this challenge and was very successful, both professionally and socially, moving around town with the international set and promoting The Times as well. When the Exposition ended George received from the French government the Legion of Honor.
A year later George went to Philadelphia to run the Ochs newspaper there, a profitable venture that ended in 1913 when Adolph Ochs, becoming increasingly involved in The Times’ expansion in New York and remaining sentimentally attached to his paper in Chattanooga, accepted George’s advice and sold the Philadelphia newspaper to Cyrus Curtis for two million dollars, with the stipulation that George be retained as publisher of the Philadelphia paper. But policy differences soon arose between George and Curtis—one of George’s complaints had to do with Curtis’ installing his son-in-law in the business department—and by 1915 George had resigned and was again working for Adolph, this time in New York. George was put in charge of two auxiliary publications of The New York Times Company, Current History Magazine and the Mid-Week Pictorial, and he had an office on the tenth floor of the Times building, the same floor on which John Oakes now supervises The Times’ editorial page.
George never did become involved with The Times’ News department—nor has his son John. And John Oakes prefers it that way, liking the clear line that separates his editorial-page staff from the rest of the newspaper, protecting it from the commercial ambitions of Monroe Green on the second floor and the sprawling bureaucracy of Clifton Daniel on the third floor. Oakes enjoys an independence within the institution that is rare—his opinions, and those of the editorial writers under him, are subject only to the scrutiny of the publisher. Oakes is regularly in touch with the publisher and receives what amounts to total freedom, and as a result the editorial page in recent years has been converted from vapidity to vibrance, attacking issues with an aggressiveness that Adolph Ochs would never have tolerated, and sniping at important people once regarded within The Times as “sacred cows,” such people as Chiang Kai-shek, Robert Moses, and Francis Cardinal Spellman. When Oakes began writing editorials for The Times in 1949, after three years of writing for Lester Markel’s “Week in Review” section in the Sunday department, the editorial policy was strongly in support of Chiang Kai-shek. The editorial specialist who produced most of these pieces was an old China hand who had become an admirer of Chiang and expressed few opinions that might offend the Generalissimo, who read The Times through translation. After the writer’s retirement, and with the increasingly important role played by John Oakes in the Fifties, highlighted by his scathing editorials on McCarthyism, The Times’ policy on China, among other major issues, noticeably began to change. Oakes weighed the wisdom of having Communist China admitted to the United Nations, and when this thinking started to penetrate The Times’ editorial page, Chiang Kai-shek was furious. One such editorial appeared a day before a Times correspondent on Taiwan was scheduled to have an interview with Chiang, an exclusive story that the correspondent had dutifully arranged weeks in advance. When the correspondent appeared, the Generalissimo, arms flailing, angrily refused to cooperate, being unappeased by the correspondent’s explanation that the news staff and the editorial page are run as entirely separate departments within The New York Times.
The privileged treatment accorded Robert Moses by The New York Times until relatively recent years was remarkable, and it was achieved mainly through Moses’ audacity, his skill at using his personal connections, or the presumption of these connections with top people at The Times, including the Sulzbergers, to browbeat some Times
reporters who were assigned to cover aspects of his vast and varied career. As New York’s most powerful public servant—during the Nineteen-fifties he was, among other things, the Commissioner of Parks, head of the Mayor’s Slum Clearance Committee, chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, chairman of the State Power Authority, a member of the Planning Commission—Moses was undeniably a great and valuable source of news. It was also true that he had definite ideas on how news should be covered, and if he was displeased by a story in the newspaper he would unhesitatingly fire off a telegram to The Times denouncing the reporter as incompetent, or he would sometimes call a press conference to castigate the reporter publicly, or sometimes he would write a gentle letter of complaint to Arthur or Iphigene Sulzberger, a note that would be bucked down through channels to the third floor, ending up in the hands of perhaps a second-assistant city editor who might quietly wonder if Robert Moses’ low opinion of the reporter was not in some way justified. While Moses never did succeed in getting a Times reporter dismissed or even chastised, he was never discouraged from trying, and what he did accomplish was to alert reporters to his possible reaction, making many reporters—the less secure ones, to be sure, but The Times always had its quota of these—extraordinarily cautious with every story they wrote about him; they became sensitive to his sensitivity. These reporters knew, or thought they knew, or preferred to believe, that Moses had to be more delicately handled than other important newsmakers in New York. They had heard it rumored about the newsroom that Moses was a friend of the family, that Iphigene Sulzberger particularly liked his manner in responding to her suggestions about city parks; and to what extent this was true was unimportant, truth or rumor being equally persuasive in this context—there seemed to be sufficient evidence within the Times building to support the theory that Robert Moses required special handling, and so he got it.
