by Seth Mnookin
Ensuring family control, however, did not mean the Times could continue to rely on anachronistic business practices. The joke within the Times was that “God [was] our personnel manager” because people were never fired and positions were never left unfilled. The business side of the paper was sadly disorganized. “We didn’t have a planning process, we didn’t have any goals, we didn’t have any of the things public companies usually [have],” James Goodale, a former Times in-house counsel and executive vice president, told Tifft and Jones. Amazingly, until 1964, the paper had never even been required to work within a predetermined budget.
Wall Street quickly became aware of the company’s woefully out-of-date business practices. Between January 1969 and early 1971, Times stock dropped from $42 to $16 a share. The fortuitously timed 1971 acquisition of Cowles Communication, which owned Family Circle magazine, some newspapers in Florida, a CBS station in Memphis, and Cambridge Books, helped the earnings situation, but it would be years before the Times Company instituted anything close to the rigor and accountability financial analysts looked for when rating companies worthy of investment. But while the progress toward modernization might have been slow, it was successful, and under Punch’s stewardship the Times not only survived what might have been crippling financial downturns, it emerged stronger than ever.
Punch also dramatically changed the scope of the newspaper during his time as publisher. When he took over, the Times was a two-section daily, short on pictures and long on tedious official pronouncements and rote coverage of press conferences. In a move typical of his tenure, Punch decided during the financial crises of the 1970s that he would bulk up the paper instead of paring it back. “My father, Walter Mattson, Abe Rosenthal—that was the generation that said, ‘One, our readers are leaving the city. They’re moving to the suburbs. And two, our paper needs to be rejuvenated,’ ” says Arthur Sulzberger. The Times responded to its financial difficulties by adding the Living and Home sections and later by transforming itself to a four-section daily. Purists roundly criticized the new sections, but they increased both the newspaper’s reach and ad revenues while also boosting circulation. “Instead of putting more water in the soup,” A. M. Rosenthal said of the decision to add heft to the paper during a difficult period, “we put in more tomatoes.” Also in the 1970s, the Times invented something called the Op-Ed page,*10 a section in the paper in which Times columnists and outside writers would have a venue to make their voices heard. Today, daily newspapers around the country almost universally include both those specialty sections and an Op-Ed page.
Punch made another lasting contribution to the culture of the Times by creating the post of executive editor. It was a job his father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, had liked to perform himself, but Punch had neither the inclination nor the temperament to resolve editorial disputes or make snap news judgments. Like Orvil Dryfoos before him, Punch wanted to find a way to unite the Sunday and daily papers, thereby replacing the existing system in which news decisions on Mondays through Saturdays were made by the Times’s managing editor but on the seventh day by Lester Markel, the increasingly intractable Sunday editor. In 1964, Punch appointed managing editor Turner Catledge to the newly created executive-editor position. In 1967, when Catledge retired, James “Scotty” Reston, the paper’s longtime Washington bureau chief and columnist, took over on a temporary basis. From 1969 to 1976, the post remained unfilled: A. M. Rosenthal was the paper’s managing editor*11 but was deemed unready to rise to the top spot. In 1976, Rosenthal finally assumed the role and served until 1986, when Max Frankel was installed; he in turn remained until Joe Lelyveld took over in 1994.
Catledge, Rosenthal, and Frankel all had close personal relationships with Punch, and all three men were careful to court the publisher’s affections. They were given great authority but always were expected to remember that it was the Sulzbergers, and not any individual editor, who made The New York Times special. In turn, the executive editors were treated as more than simply the editorial stewards of the newspaper: Punch consulted with them about strategic decisions involving the Times’s future and relied upon them to help steer the company.
While Punch was a forceful leader, he was not an overbearing one.
He preferred to operate behind the scenes and only rarely exercised his prerogative to overrule the paper’s editorial-page editor.*12 (More commonly, he voiced disagreement by writing letters to the paper, which he signed A. Sock, a play on his nickname.)*13 “Unpretentiousness is his greatest gift,” said Max Frankel, who served as editorial-page editor and was the executive editor when Punch stepped down as publisher. “He was remarkably serene about letting his subordinates do their work. His interventions were extremely polite.”
In 1971, in what would become one of the defining moments of his career—and a defining moment for American journalism—Punch authorized the Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War. After the paper’s outside law firm, Lord, Day & Lord, said it wouldn’t defend the Times if it published the report, Punch retained new lawyers. The Times’s decision to publish, and the Nixon administration’s efforts to halt that publication, led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling that upheld the right of a newspaper to publish free of government’s “prior restraint.”
—————
BY THE EARLY 1990S, Punch, who would turn seventy in 1996, began preparations to cede his title to the next generation of the family. His only son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., was the obvious leading candidate, although Michael Golden, the second son of Punch’s sister Ruth, was also ambitious and active in the company. Arthur Sulzberger had undergone an apprenticeship that went far beyond that of any of the previous publishers at the paper—he had served as a reporter and editor, worked in the paper’s ad department, done nights in the production department, and helped his father as the assistant and deputy publisher. Punch had known he wanted his son to succeed him since the mid-1980s, and in 1986, when he appointed Max Frankel executive editor, Punch told Frankel he had three requests. As Frankel recounted in his 1999 memoir, The Times of My Life and My Life at The Times, Punch told him: “Make a great paper even greater. Help to break in my son Arthur as the next publisher. Make the newsroom a happy place again.” Also, in the mid-1980s, Punch had formed what was termed the Futures Committee, a group that Arthur Sulzberger sat on with Frankel and Lance Primis, the paper’s new general manager. “It was . . . a vehicle to force Arthur Jr. to confront the competing demands of news and business from a management point of view,” wrote Tifft and Jones.
In late 1991, Punch floated the idea of naming Arthur publisher. The company’s board of directors was surprisingly tepid to the idea and asked for more time to learn about the younger Sulzberger. One of the board’s concerns, they told Punch, was that Arthur Sulzberger’s appointment would be seen as a de facto coronation and that it would only be a matter of time before he became the company’s CEO as well.
By January 1992, after more face time with Arthur—and after being assured by Punch that just because Arthur was taking one of his titles didn’t mean he’d eventually get all three—the board was placated, and the forty-year-old Sulzberger became the fifth member of his family to run the newspaper. But Arthur Sulzberger’s ascension was far more complicated than his father’s had been. At the same time that he was charting his rise within the Times, the twelve other sons and daughters (known as the cousins) of the four children of Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Iphigene Ochs (known as the siblings) were struggling with their own roles in the future of the Times Company. The same year Arthur Sulzberger Jr. became publisher, the cousins, five of whom were actively involved in the Times’s operations in one way or another, invited the siblings to dinner and said they wanted to formalize how the company, and the family, would be run in the future. When the four children of Iphigene Sulzberger passed on, there would be a much larger group of family members who could claim the Times as part of their inheritance. The family hired Craig Aron
off, the head of Kennesaw State University’s Family Enterprise Center, to serve as a moderator and facilitator. The result of Aronoff’s work with the cousins was a fifty-page bound volume titled Proposals for the Future: To the Third Generation of the Ochs-Sulzberger Family from the Fourth and Fifth Generations. The preamble stated two goals: to maintain stewardship of the Times and to preserve the unity of the family. These were precisely the goals that had made the Sulzbergers such strong owners, and in the report, Adolph Ochs’s great-grandchildren made it clear that they were just as intent on nurturing that philosophy as Ochs himself had been a hundred years earlier.
By the end of the 1990s, Arthur Sulzberger had solidified his position on the top of the Times’s hierarchy. In early 1997, he withstood a challenge from Lance Primis, the company president, who sought to become CEO, and on October 16 of that year, Sulzberger was elected to the Times’s board of directors and named chairman of the company. After the Times Company directors approved his new post, he was invited into the company’s boardroom on the fourteenth floor of the Times’s headquarters. Punch got out of the chair at the head of the table and invited his son to take the seat.
“If you think I’m sitting in that chair, you’re nuts,” Sulzberger said. He made his first brief remarks as chairman while standing.
Sulzberger would not inherit his father’s third title, that of chief executive officer. Instead, he and Punch worked to install a governing structure whereby the Times Company would hire a nonfamily member as CEO, but that person would report to the company’s chairman instead of to the board. This was a reflection of how the company had actually been run when Punch had held all three titles; first Walter Mattson and then Primis had essentially served as CEOs, which had helped assuage the business community’s fears about Punch’s managerial bona fides. Sulzberger hired Russ Lewis, who had started his career at the Times as a copyboy before working in the legal department, as head of the circulation and production departments and as the president of the Times.
On the afternoon Punch passed the torch to his son, he was feted in an impromptu newsroom ceremony. Joseph Lelyveld, the paper’s executive editor, noted that three things made that day, October 16, 1997, a landmark one. For the first time in its history, the Times had run color photos on its front page. Second, at 138 pages, that edition of the paper was the largest daily Times in history. And third, the paper had its first chairman emeritus.
Punch, from the sidelines, chimed in. “There are four things,” he said. “The stock is at an all-time high.” It was intended as a lighthearted comment, but it also hinted at the intense pressure on the company to prove to the business world that continued family ownership would result not only in a superior product but in sizable profits as well. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. made it clear that he too understood those pressures. “The most important partnership in this institution is the relationship between the family and the non-family management,” he said in an interview that day. His ascension, he said, and the promotion of Russ Lewis to the chief executive’s office, “continue on a corporate level the partnership that allows this institution to survive.”
“This place doesn’t run like a family fiefdom,” says Lewis. “It’s got the best of both worlds: the constancy of purpose that Arthur and the family have given it for over a hundred years, and the accountability of a public company.”
The day after Punch stepped down, the Times’s two-thousand-word, front-page account of the passing of the generational torch made note of Sulzberger’s unique place in American journalism. “His action,” Times reporter Clyde Haberman wrote of Punch’s decision to name his son chairman of the Times Company, “affirmed that in a troubled age for American newspapers, when many of them worry about their future and are increasingly governed by distant corporate boards, control of The Times would remain with the Sulzberger family, the paper’s guiding force for 101 years.”
THE PRINCE
If the Sulzbergers are, as some writers have noted, the closest thing America has to a royal family (when Prince Charles visited the country in 1988, he invited Arthur, along with Don Graham, the heir to The Washington Post, to dinner because he thought they’d best understand his position), then Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. is its crown prince and one who has endured a lifetime of royal-level scrutiny. He’s rarely addressed it publicly, but Sulzberger finds the examination of every aspect of his life intrusive. The few times he’s spoken of the microscope under which he often finds himself, he’s made his annoyance clear. Take one incident in 2000, when Sulzberger visited Harvard to speak at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. The center is run by Alex Jones, who, in addition to co-authoring The Trust, wrote about the media for the Times from 1983 to 1992 and won a 1987 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
At the beginning of the talk, Sulzberger made a reference to his alma mater. “By the way, if you want a more full account of my days at Tufts, you can consult a book, The Trust, which was co-authored by our host, Alex Jones,” he said, and then added dryly, “I do, however, wonder why anyone—other than my wife and children, perhaps my father—would have any interest in such an incredibly dull topic.” This remark, a message of frustration cloaked in the guise of a quip, was typical of Sulzberger, who often tries for humor, only to sound either glib or slightly harsh. He had already complained about the book to his friends. The Trust, he said, delved too deeply into his family’s personal history, their frustrated marriages and intergenerational tensions.
A lifelong New Yorker, Arthur Sulzberger is a boyish-looking fifty-three-year-old, an avid outdoorsman and frequent rock climber. He likes to take off on weekend motorcycle trips or self-styled “Rambo” excursions. He’s infamous for speaking off-the-cuff and for making outrageous and inappropriate comments.*14 A child of the 1960s and 1970s, Sulzberger seems to have a mystical side, and, besides the Times, the organization with which he feels the most kinship is Outward Bound.
But for him, as with his father and great-grandfather, the Times has always come first. Indeed, Sulzberger has spent his entire life, in one way or another, auditioning to run the Times. After graduating from Tufts University in 1974, he went to North Carolina to work for The Raleigh Times. His apprenticeship at The New York Times can be traced back eight years before that, when he moved out of his mother’s New York City apartment and in with his father. One reason for the move was Sulzberger’s mother’s tense second marriage. But “the more compelling motivation for Arthur Jr.’s decision,” wrote Tifft and Jones, “was his desire to become better acquainted with his father and to claim his rightful place in the extended Sulzberger clan, in which he had begun to feel like an outsider.”
Early on, Sulzberger yearned for validation from Punch, but that validation was slow in coming. He was an awkward and shy child. While working as a reporter at The Raleigh Times, he would send clips to Seymour Topping, a Times editor in New York, suggesting he could show the better ones to his father. In 1976, when Sulzberger and his wife, Gail Gregg, moved to London, Sulzberger secured a job at the Associated Press and Gregg applied for one at United Press International. Punch, in his recommendation for Gregg, initially wrote, “We think she is smarter than he is,” before his secretary told him he couldn’t possibly say such a thing.
Sulzberger’s sense that he was never quite able to satisfy his father had led to his lifelong struggle to prove himself. Whereas Punch had been content to stay in the background, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was the opposite—not only did he think his father was sometimes too passive, he seemed to need to remind people constantly how talented and important he himself was.
It became clear quite soon after Sulzberger assumed the position of publisher that he had a very different management style from his father’s. To begin with, there was his personal approach: Punch is often painfully modest, even self-effacing. Arthur, it was quickly noted, wasn’t nearly as demure about his ambitions or as shy about his accomplishments. He struck some as headstrong and impetuous, even offe
nsive.
And unlike his father, Sulzberger wanted his presence to be felt. In December 1992, less than a year after he was appointed publisher, he immediately set about changing the working culture inside the newsroom. He has often professed to have a philosophical belief in teamwork and open communication, and he made it clear that he wanted the Times to be a more fluid organization. Sulzberger’s attempts to make the newsroom less autocratic and hierarchical met with mixed results. During his first year, Sulzberger held retreats in which facilitators bandied around terms like “change agent.” One series of management seminars was the subject of a lengthy and unflattering magazine story. “Sulzberger . . . is impatient with the resistance he sometimes encounters,” Ken Auletta wrote in the June 28, 1993, issue of The New Yorker. “He wants more minority employees in executive positions. He wants more women in executive positions. He wants a less authoritarian newsroom and a business side that is more nimble. He wants each member of the staff to feel ‘empowered’ as part of a team.” “Some would argue that fear is an inherent by-product of any structure based in hierarchy,” Sulzberger told Auletta. “I can’t swear that’s true, but I suspect it is. And if it’s true our course is clear. For The New York Times to become all it can be and for it to flourish in the years ahead, we must reduce our dependency on hierarchy in decision making of every sort.” Needless to say, though, wishing your staff would feel “empowered” and actually having them feel so are two different things, and The New York Times’s senior staff was generally not impressed by Sulzberger’s rhetoric.
