Behind the Times (8 page)

Ochs didn’t acquire ownership of the
Times
outright; he had to show a profit for three straight years before formally becoming the controlling stockholder. It was an uphill struggle. The paper’s daily circulation stood at about nine thousand on the August day in 1896 when Ochs became publisher. His first move was inspired; he cut the newsstand price from three cents to a penny. The newspaper-reading public responded, and the
Times
was born again. Within four decades, by the time Ochs died in 1935, the
Times’
daily circulation had passed 400,000. Meanwhile, the competing dailies, Joseph Pulitzer’s
World
and William Randolph Hearst’s
Journal-American
, were entering their long swoon toward extinction. Some of the
Times’
rivals screamed the news from their front pages. It was said of Hearst that he wanted
New York American
readers to look at page one and say “Gee whiz,” to turn to page two and exclaim “Holy Moses,” and then at page three, shout “God Almighty!”

Ochs had a different vision. The day after he took over the
Times
, an editorial page announcement informed readers of the new management’s intention to “give the news impartially without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interest involved.…” Ochs’s
Times
had
an air of sobriety. Its credo, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” carried the clear message that certain kinds of news were not considered
Times
news. Hearst might boast that he started a war with Spain to help his papers’ circulation; Pulitzer may have contributed to the birth of yellow journalism (along with Frank Munsey, James Gordon Bennett, and Charles Dana).
Ochs chose to make the
Times
the serious paper: no comics, no cartoons, no shouting headlines. Today his approach would be called market positioning—shrewdly claiming the niche of respectability in a field crowded with noisemakers. But Ochs was also smart enough to know that even serious newspapers required enticing “reader” pieces: stories about crime, sex, and violence—sensationalism in other papers, sociology in the
Times.

He also made another managerial decision, to reinvest
Times
profits—after adequate provision for his family, and his share holders—in the
Times’
news-gathering operations.

Ochs’s approach was bold in its day. There were other serious papers in New York, such as the
Sun
and the
Herald
, although none quite matched the gravamen of the
Times.
Given the antic habits of most of the competition, the position of reliable, objective recorder of the news would not seem that hard to claim. But almost all popular journalism in America at the turn of the century was somewhat suspect. The
Times
was no exception: Ochs’s first business ties to the financial establishment of New York were never a well-kept secret.

The years before the United States entered the Great War of 1914–18 were not an easy time to publish a paper with such ties. Ochs didn’t want the
Times
to be considered either pro-British or pro-German. It had been accused of both positions, the former because of its ties to big banking, the latter because of the Ochs family’s origins. The war years also put a great strain on Ochs’s professed nonpartisanship. When the
Times
gave sympathetic coverage to an apparent peace overture by Austria, Ochs became the target of “almost universal execration,” according to the historian, and Ochs family friend, Barbara Tuchman. During the Great War, too, some of the
Times’
editorial stands helped start other rumors that the paper was British owned. (The story had no factual basis, though Ochs was an admirer of the
Times
of London and its publisher, Lord Northcliffe.)

Ochs’s desire to lower the
Times’
voice was founded on something more than good marketing strategy. While his New York of the
1890s—like the city of the 1990s—was open to entrepreneurs and self-made men, there were nevertheless certain unspoken limits to the meritocracy. Ochs was able to parry the charges that J. P. Morgan, or the British, owned the
Times
; but he had to deal with the undeniable fact that the
Times was
owned by Jews. The
Times’
identity as a “Jewish paper” caused Ochs as much anxiety as the labels “Morgan paper” or “British paper.” The paper’s successes made him, by definition, a prominent Jewish New Yorker. Moreover, his wife, Effie, was the daughter of Rabbi Isaac M. Wise of Cincinnati, one of the paramount figures of Reform Judaism in America. Reform Jews believed in assimilation. When Adolph Ochs attended a dinner at Delmonico’s during his first months as owner of the
Times
, he took pleasure in the fact that “the party was made up of the
crème de la crème of New York Jewish culture and refinement … not a coarse joke, nothing boisterous, not too much drinking—nothing that would not have taken place in the very best society.”

Reform Judaism also opposed a Zionist state in Palestine; Ochs wanted it known that he believed Judaism was a religion, rather than a national identity. On one occasion, Ochs explicitly instructed his city editor not to give “
too much space” to the efforts of the American Jewish Committee to aid European Jews caught in the war zone. The AJC campaigners, Ochs explained to the editor, “work to preserve the characteristics and traditions of the Jew, making him a man apart from other men. I am interested in the Jewish religion—I want that preserved—but that’s as far as I want to go.” The passage of time did nothing to soften his position. “Religion is all I stand for as a Jew,” Ochs declared in 1925. Over the years, Jewish groups faulted Ochs’s
Times
over its policies on the immigration of Eastern European Jews to America. “No paper was more anxious to exclude these
‘undesirables,’ ” one academic critic concluded.

The rise of Hitler in the 1930s subsequently produced a number of studies aimed at showing the paper’s alleged inattention to the Nazi noose closing on German Jews; in fact, the coverage was no more criminal than any other news organization’s over the same period. Jewish critics of the
Times
were on firmer ground in the Middle East. Long after Ochs’s death, in the years when Arthur Hays Sulzberger was publisher, the
Times
continued to oppose the idea of a Zionist homeland. In AHS’s time, if anything, the paper went through ever greater contortions over the “Jewish question.” The top editorships were occupied as if by custom by men with unmistakably Anglo-Saxon
names—Edwin James, Turner Catledge, and, in the Washington bureau, Arthur Krock (a Jewish convert to the Episcopal Church) and James Reston. As late as the 1950s, Catledge remembered, AHS cautioned that he didn’t want people to think of the
Times
as a “Jewish newspaper.” In the 1970s Punch Sulzberger repeated almost the same words to Leonard Silk, the
Times
economics writer, and his son, Mark Silk. The
Times
did not have a Jewish chief editor until the late 1960s, when Abe Rosenthal became managing editor. Even then, his name appeared on the masthead as A. M. Rosenthal—the same form used in his byline when he was a correspondent—and not as Abraham Michael Rosenthal, or Abraham M. Rosenthal. Other bylines were similarly deracinated; the
Times’
exceptional labor reporter Abraham Henry Raskin appeared as A. H. Raskin, the metro desk reporter Myron Abba Farber became M. A. Farber.

Such stories have been told and retold by
Times
people, usually with a knowing shake of the head. In the early 1960s, Ben Franklin, then a young reporter in the Washington bureau, claimed that he witnessed an example of what he called the “Jewish craziness.” The newly hired Franklin was on his first orientation trip to the home office in New York. “As soon as the city edition came up on hand trucks from the pressroom,” Franklin remembered, “I saw two copy boys begin to do their ‘
Jew-Arab count.’ Using string measures, one would scan the paragraphs of Middle East or
Israeli news stories, if there were any, and break down the coverage in column inches, and then read off the numbers for the other copy boy to record on a sheet of paper: ‘Jew … Arab … Arab … Jew … Jew … Jew … Arab …’ ” The editors, Franklin said, concluding his incredible tale, “wanted to have equal inches at the end of week, or else a bell would go off, like a smoke alarm.”

Under Punch Sulzberger some of these unwritten rules gradually were bent and, in some cases, broken. Unfolding news events in the 1960s, more than the new publisher’s dictates, pushed the
Times
forward. According to E. Clifton Daniel, who was the paper’s managing editor at the time, the
Times’
final rejection of—in Daniel’s words—“Ochs’s antizionism” was forced by the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel moved on three fronts against the Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians. “The war came at a critical point in Punch’s thinking,” Daniel says. “Here was Jewish nationalism on the rise; there was a need for the
Times
to change and it did.”

The changes occurred gradually. Initially, the most visible sign of
movement was signaled by Punch Sulzberger’s choices for senior editors of the paper. Abe Rosenthal, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, rose to the top of the editorial masthead in 1970. He served for almost two decades as Punch Sulzberger’s editor. Rosenthal was replaced by Max Frankel, a refugee from Nazi Germany. By 1990 Sulzberger had effectively designated Joe Lelyveld, the son of a rabbi from Cincinnati, to be Frankel’s successor. Many
Times
people were convinced that, as one executive put it, “there would never be a non-Jewish editor of the
Times
again in our lifetimes.” This man did not intend to imply there was anything sinister or cabalistic in such a development. In New York, a city with one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, and in journalism, an industry where Jews are overrepresented in terms of their numbers relative to the general population, it was altogether natural that the
Times
newsroom contained a large group of Jews—and that some of them would be promoted to senior editorships.

(On January 1, 1993, Howell Raines, the Washington bureau chief, and a Southerner in the Turner Catledge mold, became editorial page editor, a position that put him in line to succeed Joe Lelyveld and break the “Jewish succession” string.)

The paper’s post-1967 coverage of Jewish affairs in general and of Israel in particular was another, more complex matter. As the Middle East became one of the seemingly permanent flashpoints in the world, the
Times
foreign desk regularly had to deal with stories that rolled off the news wires like live grenades, ready to detonate. The editors tried elaborate countermeasures aimed at protecting the paper’s reputation. According to Thomas Friedman, one of the
Times’
foreign correspondents, the
Times
as late as the 1980s had an unwritten rule of “never allowing a Jew to report from Jerusalem.” Friedman was born in 1952 and grew up in Minneapolis—“a Jew who was raised on all the stories, all the folk songs, and all the myths about Israel,” he would later remember. In 1984, Abe Rosenthal appointed Friedman chief of the
Times
bureau in Jerusalem, making him the first Jew to hold the job. Rosenthal thought he had broken the Jewish “barrier” five years earlier when he designated David K. Shipler as the
Times’
Jerusalem man. But when Rosenthal boasted about the move at an editors’ meeting, one of his colleagues corrected him: The bearded, sad-faced Shipler was a Protestant (“He just looked like a rabbi”).

Friedman served in the Middle East for almost a decade, and then
took a leave of absence from the
Times
to write about his experiences. In his journals he examined how the weight of his Jewish past, as well as the
Times’
past, affected his work—an introspective analysis the
Times’
“objective” format barred from its news pages. Before his assignment in Jerusalem, Friedman covered the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 for the
Times.
He entered the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut on Saturday morning, September 18, 1982, soon after Lebanese Phalangists, operating within Israeli Army jurisdiction, had conducted a three-day “mop-up” of Shatila and nearby Sabra. The operation, supposedly aimed at rooting out Palestinian “terrorists,” instead resulted in the massacre of civilian noncombatants, perhaps as many as eight hundred to one thousand men, women, and children. Shatila-Sabra became “a personal crisis” for Friedman, convinced as he was of Israeli knowledge—and probably, approval—of what happened inside the camp. Sitting at his typewriter, trying to reconstruct the massacre, he felt driven by “two conflicting impulses,” the truth-telling role of a
Times
journalist and his private Jewish sympathies. “One part of me wanted to nail [Israeli Prime Minister] Begin and [Defense Minister] Sharon.… Yet another part of me was also looking for alibis—something that would prove Begin and Sharon innocent, something that would prove the Israelis couldn’t have known what was happening.” Friedman’s reporting convinced him of official Israeli complicity. He angrily banged on the table during an interview with the Israeli senior army commander and raged at the general: “How could you do this?” Friedman realized that he was really saying, “How could you do this to me.… I always thought
we
were different.… What do I tell people now?”

The encounter left Friedman “literally sick to my stomach.” He telephoned
Times
foreign editor Craig Whitney back in New York and told him, “I really don’t want to shovel this shit anymore. Let somebody else write the story.” Whitney reminded him that he was the
Times
correspondent on scene. Duty won out: Friedman’s reconstruction of the Shatila-Sabra massacre appeared in the
Times
of September 26, 1982. The article stirred near unanimous condemnation of Israel, and helped Friedman win a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. It also reaffirmed the conviction of some American Jews that the
Times
was “anti-Israel.” The contradictory twin notions that the
Times
was a “Jewish paper” and that the
Times
was “anti-Zionist” endured through the decades. Subscribers to the first notion had to reconsider their
position when Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., succeeded his father in 1992. Young Arthur had been confirmed at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on the Upper East Side of New York City, in the religion of his mother and her second husband.