Iphigene's Ashes - CJR, September/October 1999

September/October 1999 | Contents

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Iphigene's Ashes

By Jonathan Z. Larsen
Larsen is a former editor of New Times and The Village Voice.

In 1990, when Iphigene Sulzberger, the beloved matriarch of The New York Times, died in her sleep, the family was devastated. Iphigene had held the family together through the death of her father, Adolph Ochs, who had bought the paper in 1896, and later that of her husband, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who had followed Adolph as publisher of the paper. Even at the age of ninety-seven she had remained the moral compass and warm embrace not just for her direct descendants but an entire extended family of distant relatives, including ex-wives and ex-husbands. Without her, it was not at all clear the family’s center would hold. No one was more affected by her death than her son Arthur Ochs ("Punch") Sulzberger, who now became the new head of family. Yet only two days later, just hours after Iphigene had been cremated, Punch happened to run into a Times staffer who was wearing an Ash Wednesday smudge on her forehead. "Oh dear! " said Punch. "I hope that isn’t Mother!"

The staffer was far more shocked by Punch’s flippancy than is the reader of this engrossing biography of the Sulzberger clan. By the time one reaches Iphigene’s death deep into The Trust, one has long since become accustomed to the family’s odd sense of humor, as well as its generous dollop of sangfroid.

A normally private, even circumspect family, the Sulzbergers come fully alive in these pages – jammed as they are with court intrigue and succession struggles, tortured and equivocal feelings around the family’s Jewish heritage, and a rare gift for self-deprecating humor and rapier wit. Finally, with this epic biography, the Sulzbergers take their proper place in the pantheon of New York City’s greatest families. Once, following the publication of one of The New York Times’s breakthrough pieces of journalism – Abe Raskin’s 1963 cold-blooded dissection of the 114-day newspaper strike – the acerbic press critic A.J. Liebling wrote: "I doff my bowler." One is tempted here to doff one’s bowler both to the Sulzberger family and their biographers for conspiring together in this absorbing tale. Though it is clear from the outset that The Trust is not an authorized biography, it nonetheless bespeaks of a level of access to sources and documents that in itself is remarkable.

Tifft, a former associate editor of Time, and Jones, her husband, a Pulitzer Prize-winning press reporter for the Times, seem unusually well prepared for this daunting task. Their first book, The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty, told the story of an equally colorful family in control of another highly regarded newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal. But the Sulzbergers had the responsibility of holding the reins not just of a very good newspaper but the best newspaper. And they managed to succeed where the Binghams failed.

It is hard to comprehend that such entertaining characters own and run such a buttoned-down, sedate newspaper. For openers, there is Adolph Ochs himself, almost a parody of a Horatio Alger hero: job at the age of eleven, walking four miles a day, supporting his family at fourteen, publisher of The Chattanooga Daily Times at twenty, and owner of The New York Times at thirty-eight. A tireless self-promoter with a streak of P. T. Barnum and a talent for flimflam, Adolph was not above cooking the circulation and revenue numbers, keeping major investors from public view, and accidentally pressing himself upon women in the corridors. The authors argue that the family trait of modesty and restraint began with Adolph ("riches, renown, and power had never been central concerns"), but perhaps in this instance they are being too kind. Elsewhere they refer to Adolph as a "huckster," note his "hubris" and quote a confession to his cousin: "My ambition has taken possession of me. I see myself living in luxury, honored and respected by all." Indeed, the book opens with a gloomy and septuagenarian Adolph inspecting the stone mausoleum in which he will soon lay (designed by the architects of the Empire State Building to hold as many as eighteen relatives, with six above ground) and contemplating his epitaph: "None knew thee but to love thee/None named thee but to praise."

Iphigene, Adolph’s only child, was never even considered as a possible successor to her father, a life-long opponent of women’s suffrage. When she secretly secured an entry-level job at the Times with the help of the managing editor, she said, Adolph "was enraged and nearly murdered both of us." For the sake of family peace, she tolerated her father’s sexism and later her husband Arthur’s flagrant affairs, but she quietly kept score and was not above making the following wistful remark at the dinner honoring Arthur’s twentieth anniversary as publisher: "If I’d been the boss’s son instead of his daughter, this party might have been for me instead of you." Iphigene led such a comfortable life that her grandchildren suspected that she did not know toast came from bread, but she was aware of everything going on at the Times, and when she did not like it, would write letters to the editor under the names of deceased relatives.

Husband Arthur, who would go on to make a great success out of his reign, was a wondrously complex and artistic man, a dashing, moody sophisticate possessed of a "withering wit," who composed poems to his children (most of them barbed) as well as his mistresses (loving). Near death, he left Iphigene instructions to send $1,000 checks to several friends from the paper with the note, "Thanks. It was fun!" Due to Arthur’s wise management, the Times was a more financially secure paper than the one he had been handed. He had invested in a paper mill that would see the paper through the Depression, and violated Adolph’s strictures against strong editorial positions by campaigning tirelessly to break American isolationism on the eve of WWII. In the late ’30s, the paper encouraged U. S. citizens to defend "a way of life" by helping Europe fight Hitler, and later by endorsing the draft. At the height of the war, the Times fielded fifty-five overseas correspondents, more than any other paper. The one mark against the paper’s wartime performance was its stubborn refusal to fully acknowledge the plight of European Jews. Because Adolph Ochs had never wanted the Times to appear to be a "Jewish" newspaper, the Times’s front-page account of the 1945 liberation of Dachau "never mentioned the word Jew." Three years later, the paper also declined to endorse Israel’s declaration of independence.

Arthur and Iphigene’s only son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, began life very inauspiciously, with his grandfather Adolph peering down at the wrinkled infant and declaring, "The poor child hasn’t a chance. He can’t possibly turn out well." Unprepossessing and academically challenged, Punch salvaged his own self-esteem by joining the Marines. Forced to apply himself, he excelled, and within weeks of his arrival was promoted to corporal. Unbeknownst to him, he was kept out of combat during World War II by a conspiracy between his father and General MacArthur, but he nonetheless gained enough confidence to follow his destiny. Once, when he was asked to substitute for his father as a speaker at a charity event, he "dutifully went through the motions, but when he got home and took off his suit, he discovered he was covered with hives – only under his clothes, where it wouldn’t show." It was left to his daughter Karen to draw the Ochsian moral: "Now, that’s control."

After a slow start, Punch began to bring the Times into the modern world, with budgets, goals, a more streamlined management, and a four-section paper. The Times’s superb reporting on the Vietnam War, culminating in the release of the Pentagon Papers, was largely due to Punch’s own resolute support of his correspondents and editors. During the city’s economic downturns in the ’70s and again at the end of the ’80s, he invested more rather than less money in the news operation. In the metaphor of Abe Rosenthal, the brilliant but "temperamental" editor who presided during much of Punch’s reign, Punch "put more tomatoes in the soup." As a result the Times emerged from each period far stronger than newspapers around the country that had pinched editorial pennies. On Punch’s watch (1963-92), the Times picked up nearly one-half of its seventy-seven Pulitzer Prizes.

When first introduced to the current publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the reader can be forgiven for despairing. Born in 1951, Arthur Jr. was both a child of divorce and a child of the sixties. He drove motorcycles, dressed in leather, and got arrested at anti-war sit-ins. Later he would affect "fashionable jackets, striped shirts, colorful suspenders, and cigars." Unlike his father Punch, who was reserved and even self-effacing, son Arthur was aggressive bordering on obstreperous, an almost foppish young man of myriad affectations, one of which was his identification with the working classes. During his first year as publisher, he held his first annual staff meeting, at which one employee stood up to complain about the company’s 401K plan. Arthur Jr. "scoffed" and asked the man his age. When the answer was forty, Arthur Jr. shot back: "Hell, I’m forty-two and I’m not worried about a 401K yet."

One associate, watching Arthur Jr. trying to establish his own identity at the Times, suggested that he needed to "go back in the oven and bake a little longer." But the job of Times publisher is a crucible into which both Arthur Jr.’s grandfather and father entered tremulous and awestruck, only to emerge as seasoned and laudable figures. On the strength of The Trust, one can only hope the same for Arthur Jr. His one major news call so far – the publication of the Unabomber’s manifesto – is hard to evaluate.

This chain of Arthurs was broken only once, and briefly. Aging and ill-tempered, Arthur Hays Sulzberger in 1961 had finally turned the job of publisher over to Orvil Dryfoos, a former stockbroker and the husband of his eldest child, Marian. Orvil, genial and well-loved by both the Sulzberger family and the Times staff, was cautious and insecure to a fault, qualities one family wag attributed in part to the fact that he was a "son-in-law of a son-in-law." When the printers struck for 114 days beginning in December, 1962, Orvil and his executives, who were leading the negotiations on behalf of all the papers, made all the wrong moves. When it was over, four New York City newspapers out of seven had gone under, the Times had been crippled, and Orvil was literally heart-broken. Born with an enlarged heart, he collapsed under the pressure of his job – he was running both the edit and business sides, "an impossible task" and something no one had attempted since Adolph. Less than two months after the strike ended, Orvil was dead.

Looking backward, it may seem inevitable that the line of succession at the Times would be so rigorously Arthurian. But the succession battles were never so obvious or easy. Tifft and Jones, indeed, make the battles for succession one of the many engines that drive this book along so briskly. At any given point, there were various aspirants and pretenders, in and out of the family. And the press could always be counted to listen to the wrong inside sources and name the wrong heir apparent. For instance, there was Cy Sulzberger, a nephew to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and, for a time, a great asset to the paper. "Tall, craggy, brilliant, with a booming voice," Cy joined the Times days before the invasion of Poland and before the end of the war had become the chief foreign correspondent. He was almost as swashbuckling in reality as he was in his own mind.

Overbearing and occasionally insufferable, Cy eventually wore out his welcome, and perhaps it was just as well. The authors quote this astonishing passage from Cy’s diary: "I realized with horror that in all my long life I had never done a single thing of which I could genuinely be proud: no act of true courage, generosity, sacrifice, or even pure kindness. It is appalling to contemplate."

Another family contender, in the eyes of many, was John Oakes, Adolph Ochs’s equally brilliant nephew. Oakes’ father, Adolph’s brother George, had changed the family name to Oakes because "he did not want his boys to be burdened, he explained, with ‘an alien appellation . . . that will be anathema’ in the future." Oakes fought in World War II, rising from private to major in army intelligence, earning in the process the Bronze Star and the Croix de Guerre.

Oakes would join the Times in 1946, work his way up to editorial page editor, and develop the op-ed page, now a staple of almost every self-respecting newspaper. He immediately enlivened the editorials – some thought far too much. A take-no-prisoners liberal and early voice for the environment, Oakes became a thorn in the side of the business community – not to mention the business side of the paper. In what would be referred to as Punch’s "putsch," his cousin finally moved Oakes aside in 1977.

Then, of course, there were the "professional" outsiders who were convinced the paper should be left to them, as opposed to ill-trained amateurs from the family. Truth was, the Times desperately needed talented outsiders to run smoothly and profitably, and in principle the family even believed the right outsider could win the publisher’s job – and more. But those who understood the family and its role at the paper did not want the job. And those who wanted it never understood that they had to work with the family, both above them and below them in hierarchy.

Nepotism is an inevitable theme that runs throughout the book. Sulzberger relatives were always welcome to try their hand at the paper – that is, if they were male (only now, under the reign of Arthur Jr., an ardent advocate of diversity, can it be assumed that female descendants are also welcome). But seldom was anything ever laid out clearly; training programs for the family ranged from abysmal to haphazard. Arthur Jr., who had the most rigorous apprenticeship of all, once quipped that the role of heir apparent was like "a womb with a view." The tension over the subject of nepotism between the outsiders and the family was often palpable.

There was, for instance, the moment when Walter Mattson, then the imposing general manager (and later president) of the Times Company, and one of the most successful "outsiders" the family had ever employed on the business side, took one of Iphigene’s grandchildren, Stephen Golden, out to lunch to set him straight. Write the authors: "Mattson locked his blue eyes onto Stephen’s face and said slowly but deliberately, emphasizing each word for effect, ‘I don’t like nepotism.’ ‘Me, neither,’ Stephen replied cheerily, ‘and your son better not ever ask me for a job here.’"

The often unrealistic expectations and dashed hopes of Sulzberger family members played havoc on their marriages. The Trust is literally strewn with broken marriages and both public and secret affairs. In theory, family members were wealthy, but their money was tied up in the Ochs Trust, which held the majority of voting stock as well as much of the family’s real estate. No one seemed to know quite where they stood either in terms of their careers or their finances.

At the center of The Trust is the altogether improbable fact that the descendants of Adolph Ochs have been able to keep the paper not just prosperous but supreme among all daily newspapers in existence, cautiously passing control along from one generation to the next with grace and modesty.

There is an almost centrifugal force that tends to spin each generation of a dynasty farther apart. Somehow the Sulzbergers have resisted that force. The authors attribute the family’s success to "a communion of blood and purpose they all shared." Tifft and Jones describe three remarkable acts undertaken by the family as a whole that should preserve the Sulzbergers’ ownership of the Times for generations to come.

In 1986, the four children of Iphigene and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, otherwise known as "the sibs," and their thirteen descendants, signed a covenant never to sell their critical voting Class B shares of Times stock outside of the family.

Then, in the early ’90s, the cousins, their spouses and their grown children held a series of family meetings to advise "the sibs" on how they thought matters from training to succession should be handled. The result was a fifty-page volume titled Proposals for the Future: To the Third Generation of the Ochs-Sulzberger Family from the Fourth and Fifth Generations.

When Iphigene died, the Ochs Trust had been dissolved and broken out into four separate trusts, one for each branch of the family. But the fourth and fifth generations had other ideas. "Buried deep in the book of recommendations Punch and his sisters had received," write the authors, "was the cousins’ stated wish to consider themselves members of one family, not members of four ‘lines.’" The sibs complied, and the four trusts were recombined.

In the Sulzberger family, there is nothing worse than being regarded as having a "swelled head." By not trying to become too rich, or too influential, or too celebrated, they have kept both The New York Times and the family from spinning out of control. No one appreciated this sense of proportion and decorum better than Iphigene. The authors tell a wonderful anecdote that seems to encapsulate the Sulzberger family secret, not to mention its sense of humor. During the height of the Reagan administration, Punch, as publisher of the Times, was invited to have lunch with the president. He arrived to find not just Reagan but also Vice President Bush and Secretary of State George Shultz. As soon as he got back to the Times Washington bureau, he called his mother. "Mom, guess who I had lunch with?" Iphigene listened politely, according to the authors: "‘Oh, Punch, that’s wonderful!’ she exclaimed and then, with the skilled timing of a comedienne, paused for a moment before asking what, to her, was the obvious question: ‘What did they want, son?’"