Their Lives And Times

By John F. Stacks

Adolph Ochs was very close to financial ruin when he set out to buy the New York Times, which was losing $1,000 a day. The newspaper Ochs already owned, in Chattanooga, Tenn., was almost underwater, and his personal debts were threatening to sink him and the large extended family he supported. His plan was to save the paper and himself by breaking into the big city market. With brilliant personal salesmanship and no little bit of financial finagling, he finally won the backing he needed. On Aug. 19, 1896, he announced on the front page of his newly acquired newspaper that his "earnest aim was to give the news impartially, without fear or favor."

Such protestations of fairness were not uncommon in the turn of the century press, but Adolph Ochs actually believed what he wrote. Within 25 years, his paper dominated the New York City market and grossed more than $100 million. Now, as another century turns, the Times is the best newspaper in the world, with annual corporate revenues of $2.9 billion. The descendants of Ochs still control the company, and they are no longer worried about financial failure.

The rise of the Times, its continued high quality and its independence make a remarkable story, especially in an era of corporate publishing, declining news readership and profit-driven efforts to dumb down coverage to the level of a TV-numbed audience. That a single family has managed this feat over such a long period of time is even more remarkable. That this particular family, at least as described in The Trust (Little, Brown; 870 pages; $29.95), by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, managed to make and keep the Times great is astounding. In almost voyeuristic detail, the ruling Times family emerges as a kind of textbook study of philandering, adultery, divorce and lousy parenting. The male heirs who got to run the paper arrived mostly either ill-prepared or suffering from the neglect of their familial predecessors.

When Ochs died in 1935, his son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger became publisher and arrived in that position with such "haphazard and incomplete" training that he admitted feeling "frightened and alone." After his retirement, his son-in-law Orvil Dryfoos took over. He had come to the paper from a seat on the stock exchange but had been somewhat more carefully groomed. Tragically, he died young, in 1963, when his diseased heart failed following a bitter strike that shuttered the Times for 114 days. Dryfoos' untimely death foisted the top job at the paper on young Arthur Ochs ("Punch") Sulzberger, the only son and youngest child of Arthur Hays and Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger. Punch's training and apparent aptitude were so slight that his father and the board of directors were reluctant to make him publisher and seriously considered having him share power with an arrogant and ineffective executive from the business side of the paper, or, more improbably, with Washington bureau chief James B. ("Scotty") Reston.

Punch Sulzberger was, however, a veteran of the Marine Corps and refused to accept partial control. His parents relented, and he went on to preside over three decades of corporate expansion and journalistic excellence. It was Punch Sulzberger who had the courage to publish the Pentagon papers. It was Punch who painfully forced family members and aging editors into early retirement.

Punch's son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. took over the paper in 1992 without much real management experience, but like each of his forebears, he grew into the job. He has continued the tradition of trusting in strong and intellectually gifted editors and, like his father, has had the strength to disappoint relatives who hoped to have larger roles in running the paper.

For all the nearly clinical detail about failed marriages and lives (we might have been spared some of minutiae on the family members who had less to do with the newspaper), Tifft--a former writer for TIME--and Jones forcefully make the point that the self-effacing Ochs-Sulzberger clan got one big thing right: the need to protect and nurture the paper entrusted to them. Although this book is light on the financial and business detail that would permit a fuller judgment of the family's management of their trust, the story of the Ochs-Sulzberger family makes one want to join the cheer sent up by former executive editor Max Frankel on the occasion of Arthur Jr.'s accession: "Long live the monarchy."