Behind the Times (6 page)

The
Times
seldom had anything more to say about its own processes. If readers were somehow allowed inside the paper on a typical workday, this is what they would have learned, behind the front page.

This Tuesday, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher and chairman of the
Times
, had more immediate concerns than Tower’s drinking habits, the rioting in Caracas, and the fate of dissidents in China. Sulzberger was worried about what was happening outside his own door in a city exhibiting many signs of civic collapse. The Times Building occupied the middle of the block of West 43rd Street, approximately halfway between Broadway—the now seedy “crossroads of the world”—and Eighth Avenue,
with its twenty-five-cent peep show parlors and hole-in-the-wall theaters offering live sex performances. Sulzberger’s father and his grandfather had worked from the same fourteenth-floor offices at the
Times.
But the owner’s suite was hardly insulated from the increasing street sleaze below. Sulzberger had on his desk the final draft of a letter he was sending to Edward I. Koch, the then mayor of New York, expressing “gave concern” over a series of “twenty-three robberies and/or assaults” on
Times
employees in the most recent fourteen-month period. “The situation worsened last week when one of our electricians was seriously injured in a robbery that took place at the Port Authority Bus Terminal while going home,” the Sulzberger letter declared. The publisher detailed the steps the
Times
had taken to increase the safety of its employees, including the hiring of more
Times
private security guards. In addition, Sulzberger told the mayor, “representatives of the
Times
have met with the highest-ranking police officer in the midtown area about protection, and despite their most diligent efforts, the problem appears only to have worsened.” Sulzberger concluded: “any assistance from your office would be greatly appreciated.”

The letter went out over Sulzberger’s signature, and Koch immediately set up the requested meeting—although not a word about the series of assaults, the publisher’s actions, or the mayor’s response ever appeared in the
Times.

That same Tuesday morning, Sam Roberts, the urban affairs columnist of the
Times
, was also arranging to talk to Koch. Roberts’ column appeared on Thursdays on the front page of the B section (the second of the four sections of the paper), and he normally spent Tuesdays reporting his topic for that week, and Wednesdays writing the column. Roberts wanted Koch’s reaction to a proposal of Governor Cuomo’s for a state commission on New York City. Roberts was also trying to arrange to interview the governor for the Thursday column. As a backup in case the interviews fell through, Roberts set up a meeting with officials and residents of the Senate Hotel on upper Broadway. The Senate, sponsored by Goddard-Riverside, a private social agency, had just reopened as a residence for the elderly and the formerly homeless, particularly those with emotional problems. The Goddard-Riverside visit was set for 10:00
A.M.
and Roberts left his Upper West Side apartment early enough to have breakfast with Samuel Freedman, a former
Times
reporter. Every year, two
or three promising young
Times
men and women leave for other publications, or try free-lancing or book writing. Freedman was finishing his book, on the New York City school system—explored mainly through the experiences of one dedicated, overworked teacher at one decaying, Lower East Side high school. Freedman wanted Roberts to read the manuscript and give him some feedback. After Roberts looked through the Freedman manuscript, he walked to the Senate Hotel to begin the research for his backup column. Freedman, Roberts thought, had written a moving narrative of dedication and despair, the kind of gritty New York story that belonged in the
Times.

Anthony Lewis, whose column appeared twice a week on the Op-Ed page, also got an early start. Two decades ago, Lewis was the chief of the
Times
bureau in London. As part of the perks of office, a chauffeur drove him to the bureau each morning in the company’s Jaguar; his office boasted a view of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Thames in the distance. Lewis supervised twenty-seven employees and the London wire room was a key relay point for cable traffic from the foreign desk in New York to the
Times
bureau in Saigon (cables were charged at so-called Empire rates). After his London tour, Lewis chose to live, and write his column, in Boston. These days he traveled by the “T”—the Boston subway—to his
Times
office. He had been out of town the day before, and a large pile of mail awaited him. His secretary helped him answer two dozen letters. Then Lewis read the
Times
, the
Boston Globe
, the
Financial Times
of London, and the
Wall Street Journal
—and began thinking about a topic for his next column.

The pace on the Times Building’s pressroom floor, below street level, was leisurely early Tuesday morning. Pressmen’s Union men Dave Davies, Jimmy Reilly, John Stapleton, and Bobby Reynolds, adjusted and changed the rollers inside the presses, cleaning the reels where the newsprint feeds in, tidying up under the large folding machines that put the pages together. The pressmen’s overnight shift, supervised by Rudy Rella, assistant general foreman for production at 43rd Street, usually ended around 4
A.M.
, depending on the size of the print order. Rella normally came in late in the afternoon and stayed just past midnight
to check the quality of the press run, making sure that the mixture of ink and water was correct and the type readable. The right mix was a matter of concern for the
Times
; one of the readers’ long-standing complaints was that the ink came off on their hands. Sulzberger had made a smear-proof
Times
a top business-side priority over the next three years.

In Honolulu, Robert Reinhold of the
Times’
Los Angeles bureau was finishing up what he judged one of his more frantic assignments in twenty years as a
Times
reporter. At 6:30
A.M.
Los Angeles time on the Friday before, the
Times’
national desk in New York had awakened him with the news that the cargo door of a United Airlines flight had explosively detached from the airframe of a Boeing 747 shortly after the jumbo jet departed from Honolulu on its way to New Zealand. The plane was flying at 23,000 feet at the time, and the resulting decompression sucked out the passengers sitting near the door; nine people died in the nightmarish accident, and the crippled jet returned to Honolulu. The desk wanted Reinhold, whose Los Angeles bureau responsibilities extended from as far east as Denver all the way west to the Hawaiian Islands, to cover the story. Reinhold stuffed a few shirts in a carry-on bag and managed to make the next Los Angeles–to–Honolulu flight, at 9:00
A.M.
L.A. time. He arrived in the Islands at 1:00
P.M.
Hawaiian time—thirty minutes past the normal deadline for filing copy to New York, because of the five-hour time difference. He quickly grasped his competitive position: four people from the
Los Angeles Times
were on scene, putting together a chronology of the flight based on interviews with passengers. Reinhold realized he was encountering something of a first in his career: a rival paper able to deploy
greater
resources than the
New York Times.
The Los Angeles paper’s new presence, he noted, was not confined to “one shots”—such as its blanket coverage of the United flight. It was evident generally, throughout the Pacific Rim.

Reinhold didn’t leave Honolulu Airport to check into his hotel until late that night. The
Times’
deadline was stretched to accommodate his page-one story, and he was able to match a part of the
Los Angeles Times
story, interviewing survivors of the accident as they waited in the terminal to depart Honolulu on other flights. The next morning, Reinhold woke by 5:00
A.M.
, knowing that the
Sunday Times’
deadline was 9:30
A.M.
local time. As soon as he finished telephoning in his Sunday story, he was back at the
airport to do more reporting, and to attend a briefing by the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency investigating the accident. Sunday, he repeated his routine, reporting and filing for the Monday paper. Later, the
Times
gave him a Publisher’s Award for February: a $500 check as well as official recognition of his reporting work.

By Tuesday, February 28, the federal investigation was shifting to Washington, and Reinhold decided that as long as he was in Honolulu, he would look into a story about the Islands that had long intrigued him. First, however, he went for a jog under Diamond Head in the gray and drizzly early morning.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger began coming to a desk at the
Times
in 1954, when he was twenty-eight years old. From the day he walked into the building, he had to contend with the impression that he was an intellectual lightweight, and undeserving of his position at the paper. This early judgment, based as much on hearsay as any firsthand evidence, was never wholly erased. In the Punch Sulzberger years, the
Times
became the centerpiece of a billion-dollar company; the paper burnished its reputation as a world-class publication, while surviving the rough passage to the new post-print era of television—and still Sulzberger’s associates and employees debated his precise contributions. One man, who was as close as anyone professionally to Punch Sulzberger—and so asked for anonymity—believes to this day that Sulzberger succeeded in large part by
not
getting too involved. This executive tells a story of the time when Punch Sulzberger and a friend were being driven by the publisher’s chauffeur on one of the parkways leading from New York to the family’s country estate. The car gets a flat; the passengers and the chauffeur emerge and Sulzberger moves toward the trunk to find the tire jack and spare. The friend pulls Sulzberger aside, whispering that the best way to help is to stand aside, and let the chauffeur fix it. “Staying out of the way of the hired hands,” says the executive. “That was Punch’s contribution.”

The story may be apocryphal; Sulzberger has no recollection of it. Certainly, it represents a harsh verdict. The butler didn’t do it, not all of it by any means. Punch Sulzberger’s managerial style, while unusual, was not passive. If the hired hands were overly dismissive of his role at the
Times
, it was in part because his family initially held a similar low judgment of his abilities.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was born in 1926, the youngest of the four children of Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger; his mother was the only child of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought the
Times
in 1896. Because Arthur Ochs Sulzberger came after his sister Judith in birth order, the family gave him the name “Punch” (the part he played to her “Judy”). The name seemed to suit his sunny disposition and indifferent academic performance as a child. The Sulzbergers then lived on East 80th Street in Manhattan, and the young boy went to a succession of expensive private schools, including St. Bernard’s in New York; there, in the manner of the day, left-handed children were forced by their first teachers to write with their right hand. In Sulzberger’s case, the resulting reversed-letters script convinced his parents that he had dyslexia.

His grades were further confirmation of their worries. The young prince, the sole male heir, should by all natural rights one day run the
Times
, as his grandfather and father had. Yet he was judged not very bright by his own parents. In later years, he would joke to interviewers about the schools he had quit “right before they were going to throw me out.” His laid-back recollections masked deeper feelings. He had a long memory; his
Times
holdings made him one of the wealthiest men in America, yet he never contributed to the schools where he had been judged a “slow student” in his youth, though they rattled the tin cups of the annual alumni-fund drives in his direction.

The war provided a way to escape both family and school; in 1943, at age seventeen, he left the Loomis School in Connecticut to join the Marines, with his father’s written permission. He did well enough, serving in the South Pacific toward the end of the war as a radio man and driver in rear echelons. “Before I entered the Marines, I was a lazy good-for-nothing.
The Marines woke me up,” Punch would later say. After his discharge he attended Columbia University, enrolling in a general studies program (his father was a trustee, and that helped with the admissions office). In 1951, a year after the start of the Korean war,
Sulzberger was recalled to active duty, to be a public information officer in Japan and Korea.