The Press: Without Fear or Favor

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In a sandstone house on Manhattan’s upper East Side, the door of a third-floor bedroom opened softly at 7:30 a.m. one day last week. Following a routine of many years’ standing, a handsome, grey-haired man, clad in a maroon and navy dressing gown, reached into the hall to pick up the newspaper. Then Arthur Hays Sulzberger hopped back into bed to read his New York Times.

He read it in an oddly methodical way. First he tore off Page One and the editorial page of the bulky newspaper. The moment he had laid aside the body of the paper a masseuse stepped into the room. Reader Sulzberger, having laid his two favorite pages on the pillow, stole glances at them as she pummeled his back. When the rite was over, he sat up, and as the masseuse worked at the fingers of his right hand, stiff from a palm affliction, Sulzberger picked up the detached Page One of the Times in his left. Rapidly, his marble-bright blue eyes took in every story. When the masseuse moved on to his left hand, Sulzberger reached for the editorial page with his right.

Afterwards, Sulzberger put the still-unread portion of the Times on a tilted rack next to his breakfast tray and skimmed through it as he had his bacon & eggs. Now & then he paused to tear out a picture, a story, or a headline, or to circle a word with a red pencil. Done with breakfast and looking over the Times, solicitous Reader Sulzberger donned an expensively tailored grey suit, slipped his neatly folded clippings into his pocket, went downstairs, and in his chauffeurdriven Packard headed for the office. The office is the New York Times, where Arthur Hays Sulzberger is publisher, president and chairman of the board.

The Trial Run? This week, Publisher Sulzberger will observe the 15th anniversary of his election to the biggest job on the best daily newspaper in the world. But the august, 99-year-old New York Times itself will not consider the occasion an item that fits its famed formula, “All the news that’s fit to print.” This will not in the least surprise or distress Publisher Sulzberger, who facetiously confided to a friend last week: “They’re not sure that I’ve made good yet.”

Others (including most of the 3,740 employees of the Times) have already made up their minds. This week Publisher Sulzberger will head for the University of Missouri to receive the annual Missouri Honor Award for “Distinguished Service in Journalism.” Next week Publisher Sulzberger will go to Washington, where President Truman will help dedicate the first of a 52-volume series, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson* to the late, great Adolph Simon Ochs, Sulzberger’s father-in-law and father (1896-1935) of the modern New York Times. Sulzberger himself suggested the inscription: “Dedicated to the memory of Adolph S. Ochs . . . who by the example of a responsible press enlarged and fortified the Jeffersonian concept of a free press.”

One Million Words. In providing the “example of a responsible press,” the Times has long since become the most influential paper in the nation, and since the U.S. became the No. i democratic power it has become the most influential in the world. It is not the biggest (even in New York City), the best-written, the best-edited, or the easiest to read (although last week it won its second consecutive Ayer award for typographical excellence). But the Times carries more news, prints more noteworthy and important journalistic beats, and has won more journalistic prizes, than any other U.S. paper. It has also shown a consistent sense of responsibility that few of the world’s big newspapers can match.

The President of the U.S. feels he has to read the Times (circ. 544,000) every day; so does Pope Pius (who gets the International Air Edition), and so do thousands of diplomats and officials in Washington and around the globe. When roving Times Columnist Anne O’Hare McCormick once asked a top State Department official whether he could add any information to what the Times had on a crucial international problem, he replied with more candor than humor: “Good heavens, no, Anne. Where do you suppose we’re getting our information?” A woman who lived in a cabin under the brooding cliff of a canyon in New Mexico had the Sunday Times lowered 800 feet to her door. “The Times,” she said, “is my only contact with the outside world.”

To keep its readers in touch with the world, the Times receives a million words of news a day from 47 full-time foreign correspondents, 50 part-time foreign correspondents, ten full-time domestic bureaus, 400 part-time domestic correspondents, 158 full-time New York City reporters and specialists and 19 news services (including A.P., U.P., Reuters and Canadian Press). From this vast intake, the Times publishes a daily average of 145,000 words (about 180 columns), and an average of 450,000 words (560 columns) in its Sunday editions.

The Times has won its reputation as “the newspaper of record” by printing such things as the full text of the Versailles Treaty (83,300 words) the even ‘longer Pearl Harbor Report (247,000 words), most other significant state papers and speeches. Once a copy of the bulky Sunday Times which was being delivered from a plane in a rural area accidentally hit an ox and killed the beast. Daily and Sunday, the Times is sold in 12,041 cities and towns, thus is the nearest thing to a national daily newspaper in the U.S.

45 Seconds from Broadway. Incongruously, the gentlemanly Times forced its name on Times Square, a tabloid jungle of bright lights, noise, garish signs, dirt and rowdy manners. But though the flashing news sign still girdles the Times Tower at the south end of the Square, the present home of the paper, its sixth, is not on the Square but in a $13.5 million, 14-story, air-conditioned building at 229 West 43rd Street.

Just 45 seconds from Broadway, the Times is temperamentally as remote from its hurly-burly as if it were in the mountains of Tibet. In the white marble lobby is a sentimental inscription chosen by Publisher Sulzberger: “Every day is a fresh beginning . . . Every morn is the world made new.” The house that Ochs built and Sulzberger expanded is softly lighted and handsomely equipped, from the 88 presses and 106 linotypes to the pink-walled ladies’ washrooms. In the soundproofed third-floor city room no one ever runs and few raise their voices; on the tenth-floor the editorial writers deliberate in monastery-like offices.

Meticulous about details, Publisher Sulzberger designs bookcases, hangs news pictures and mats of memorable Page Ones along the corridors, empties ashtrays and dreams up new improvements for his treasured showcase. Among the improvements already installed: lounges, a game room, dining rooms and a reading room for employees, bedroom suites for top editors. Summers, when the Sulzbergers close their spacious town house and move to 60-acre “Hillandale” in Connecticut, Arthur Sulzberger lives weekdays in his own three-room suite at the office.

Just Looking. When he is asked for advice on how to become the publisher of a great paper, Arthur Sulzberger always amiably replies: “Do as I did—marry the boss’s daughter.” But his remark is not in the Times tradition of fairness; Sulzberger did much more to earn his job. Manhattan-born, the son of Cyrus Leo Sulzberger; a cotton-textile manufacturer, philanthropist and later anti-Tammany candidate for borough president, Sulzberger was brought up on the Times, went to Horace Mann school and Columbia College. There he was on the swimming team, danced as a chorus boy in a musical and met Iphigene Ochs, a student at Barnard College. She was the only child of Ochs and a cousin of Julius Ochs Adler, one of Sulzberger’s best friends, who lived in the Ochs home.

Before long, Sulzberger and Iphigene Ochs were in love. When Sulzberger married her in 1917, Ochs was not his boss; Sulzberger was a second lieutenant in the Army. But Father-in-law Ochs stipulated that as soon as he was discharged he must join the Times, and in 1918 he did. Ochs gave him an office, a secretary, a title (assistant treasurer), and nothing to do. Says Sulzberger: “I didn’t even know enough to ask questions. I just looked.”

He looked, listened to everyone and learned about news and editorial administration, in 1919 was made vice president. (At the same period Adler, also a vice president, was serving his own apprenticeship.) When 75-year-old Adolph Ochs suffered a breakdown in 1933, Sulzberger temporarily ran things. After Ochs died in 1935, Mrs. Ochs (who died in 1937) and Mrs. Sulzberger got life interests in the trust he had set up for the block of stock that controls the Times. Named as trustees were Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, Sulzberger and Adler. By giving control of the trust to Mr. & Mrs. Sulzberger, Publisher Ochs had chosen his successor.

One of the first comments on his new job that Publisher Sulzberger received was a postcard from an indignant subscriber: “I knew the Times would go to hell as soon as Mr. Ochs died. My name was spelled wrong in the paper this morning.”

Nothing Sacred. As most readers sense, nothing short ‘of a direct hit by an atomic bomb could make the Times go to hell overnight: its momentum as a publishing enterprise and its staff of trusted old professionals could carry it on for a long time no matter whom death took from the publisher’s office. But Sulzberger is credited, even by his old pros, with being a big force in keeping the Times cruising at standard speed. He regards the Times as a “public trust” and works unceasingly to keep it that way. His wife, who began working at the Times during the wartime manpower shortage and now puts in three or four days a week in her office in the promotion department, also understands the paper’s problems.

Out of Sulzberger’s small (20 by 15 ft.) office (he uses the imposing publisher’s office only for conferences) flows a constant stream of blue paper memos, suggestions, questions and advice to all departments. Most of those to the editorial department are necessarily after the fact; usually he does not see news stories and editorials until they are printed. To help keep track of things, he makes frequent notes in the notebook he always carries. Once, at a private dinner, he heard a friend talk about a new film-color process, jotted down a note. When a story on the process duly appeared in the Times, the friend was shocked, argued that it had been a breach of confidence to print it. Replied Sulzberger: there is no closed season on news and ideas. The day-to-day job of handling the news he leaves to the men who know it best—the newsmen.

“This Stinks!” The boss of the Times’s vast local, national and foreign news-gathering and news-editing machine is Managing Editor Edwin Leland James, 59. Jaunty “Jimmy” James was a star reporter himself during World War I and in postwar Paris. A 35-year veteran of the Times, Virginia-born James still carries a cane and affects what Alexander Woollcott once admiringly called a manner of “extreme truculence, tinged with contempt.” Occasionally, in a break from Times tradition, he bursts from his private office off the southwest corner of the city room, waving his cigar and copy and shouting, “This stinks,” or something stronger.

James leaves to his assistants what he considers the routine news jobs. His chief deputy is Turner Catledge, 49, assistant managing editor, onetime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, national correspondent of the Times, and editor (1942) of the Chicago Sun. The man responsible for putting the Times to bed is Night Managing Editor Raymond McCaw, 62, a Timesman. for 27 years.

Three for One. The Times city room is one of the world’s biggest: 40 yards wide and a full city block long. The no city-staff reporters are usually summoned to the city desk by a public-address system. From his desk at the south end of the city room, Turner Catledge occasionally uses a pair of binoculars to see which reporters are in at the north end. In this sea of faces (some 300 altogether, including copyreaders, assistant editors, re-writemen, etc.), many a young reporter’s talent often tends to drown.

Thanks partly to its reluctance to fire anybody, the Times is way overstaffed. At best, a reporter can count on one solid story a day. The Times concedes that

“We have three men to do the work of one,” but sometimes this overstaffing pays dividends. When a hurricane struck Long Island and New England in 1938, killing 500, the Times put 35 men on the job, pulled together a comprehensive story in a few hours.

But when Howard Unruh went berserk and killed 13 people in Camden, N.J. last September, the Times sent just one good man from New York to handle the story. Thin, gentle Star Reporter Meyer (“Mike”) Berger, 51, had hardly picked up his mail that morning when Assistant City Editor Frank Adams got an Associated Press bulletin about the killings. Reporter Berger took a look at the dispatch, then headed for Camden. Tramping up & down River Road, thorough, painstaking Mike Berger talked with more than 50 people, making detailed notes and diagrams to resolve the conflicts in their stories. All the while, he kept trying to put himself in Unruh’s shoes to recreate exactly what had happened. This week Berger’s restrained, fully detailed smooth-as-glass story (the city desk never touched a word) won Mike his first Pulitzer Prize* for the best local reporting last year, and the Times its 22nd.

The Pipelines. Though the local staff is far bigger, the 22-man Washington staff gets far more stories on Page One. It is the biggest staff maintained by any daily in Washington, has top prestige, pays the biggest salaries. The Timesman with the fattest salary and the most prestige in Washington is the boss of the bureau: Correspondent Arthur Krock, 63, who has won two Pulitzers, gotten two exclusive interviews with Presidents of the U.S. (TIME, Feb. 27). The rising star of the bureau is British-born, Illinois-educated Diplomatic Correspondent James (“Scotty”) Reston, 40, (TIME, Feb. 20), who has furnished a large number of the 30 important news beats that the Washington office has turned in so far this year. Some of the bureau’s beats come by digging, or through the pipelines that the Times has to most top officials; others are virtually handed to the Times by officials eager for a sounding board and aware that the paper will print prominently (and uncritically) what they have to say.

Copy filed by the foreign correspondents is handled with kid gloves in New York. Says Managing Editor James: “We either print foreign correspondence or we throw it away; we don’t rewrite it.”

Bias & Accuracy. Like every other paper, the Times has occasionally thrown the wrong stories away or played them down. One notable example: when the Teapot Dome scandal first broke, the Times buried the story and editorially denounced the Senate investigators as “mud-gunners.”

Times domestic and foreign coverage has also sometimes fallen short of what Times readers have a right to expect because of the Times ideal of “objectivity” (which many Timesmen realize to be unattainable if it is an ideal in the first place). The Times has long liked to feel that if it gives both sides of a question, or at least two versions, it has done its journalistic job. Sometimes this brings nothing but confusion to the reader, sometimes gives a completely wrong impression. In its tradition of “factual” journalism, the Times policy has been to print newsworthy statements of eminent citizens, Senators and other supposedly responsible people without qualification as long as the words were not libelous. But even Timesmen are wondering latterly whether its policy has not been proved false by the complexity of modern news, and the difficulty of presenting the truth in such cases as Senator McCarthy v. Owen Lattimore. As one troubled Times editor remarked last week: “When a responsible person makes irresponsible statements, what is a responsible paper supposed to do? Merely balancing accusation with denial no longer seems enough.” In groping toward a solution of the problem, the Times has been running more bylined interpretive pieces by correspondents and such staff experts as Military Analyst Hanson Baldwin, whose articles carry as much weight in the Pentagon as Reston’s do in the State Department.

No Turned Stomachs. The job of processing most of the day’s news and writing headlines is done by the three main copy desks, foreign, city and national, which form a semicircle at the southeast end of the city room. There is also an “obit” and utility desk (the Times keeps 1,000 obits in type) presided over by white-goateed “Judge” William D. Evans, ninetyish, who boasts that he has buried all the other members of the Yale Class of 1885. With so much copy coming in, there is not much time (or inclination) for cutting it or making it more readable. “The Times,” cracked one old hand, “is probably the best unedited paper in the world.” Washington Correspondent John Day of the Louisville Courier-Journal aptly summed up this feeling of reluctant admiration recently. “There are mornings,” he told Publisher Sulzberger, “when I grab hold of a copy of the Times and say to it: ‘Damn you, I’m going to read you if it kills me!’J:

Times copy is edited so that it “won’t turn your stomach at the breakfast table.” (An early slogan for the Times was: “Will Not Soil the Breakfast Table.”) In the Times, bodies are never found “lying in a pool of blood,” nor “badly decomposed” in the woods. The Times was net always so squeamish. Ochs once told an editor who complained that a certain story was too smutty for the Times to print: “When a tabloid prints it, that’s smut. When the Times prints it, that’s sociology.”

Luncheon Club. While the editors make the day-to-day news judgments, it is Publisher Sulzberger who in the long run makes the final decisions about the news, editorial and general publishing policies. But he does so, says he, only after “talking things out and, on many occasions, being willing to give way rather than give orders.” Every day at noon, Sulzberger talks things out with Julius Adler, vice president and general manager of the Times, who helps look after its business, mechanical and circulation side, and is better known outside the Times as a veteran of both wars and a major general (reserve).

A good deal more of the “talking out” takes place at Sulzberger’s daily lunch in the Times dining room with the top editors. Distinguished guests who often attend the luncheons are gravely assured by Publisher Sulzberger, who never tires of a single pun, that anything they say is sub rosa. (Point: the ceiling is garlanded with roses.) The male members of this exclusive luncheon club are Managing Editor James; Assistant Managing Editor Catledge; Assistant to the Publisher (and son-in-law) Orvil Eugene Dryfoos; Editor Charles Merz, boss of the editorial page; General Adler; Washington Correspondent Krock (when he’s in town), and Sunday Editor Lester Markel, 56 (TIME, March 8, 1948), the restless, smart and hard-driving boss of the four excellent Sunday feature sections, which have helped boost the Sunday Times from 778,000 to 1,153,000 circulation since he joined the staff as Sunday editor 27 years ago.

The only woman who sits at the oval luncheon table is Correspondent McCormick, whose first contribution to the Times was a poem for which she got $3.50. Her second, written from Italy in 1921, was a comprehensive account of the rise of fascism and helped win her a job and a start on the career that has raised her to topmost bracket among foreign political correspondents—male or female.

On the Other Hand. The Times’s specific editorial stand on any question is decided by Sulzberger and Editor Merz. In actual practice, Merz and his eight editorial writers decide what the Times will say. Sulzberger rarely reads the editorials until they are in print, because he and Merz see eye to eye on most things.

In spite of such close agreement, readers do not always get the opinions of able Editor Merz in the sharp, clear form in which they are laid down in conference, because Times editorials are often hedged.

The Times never crusades, and carries no daily editorial-page cartoon because, says Sulzberger smilingly: “a cartoon cannot say: ‘But on the other hand.'” Part of this caution is due to the powerful tradition left by old Adolph Ochs himself.

At a time when most newspapers were fiercely partisan. Ochs believed that a newspaper could—and should—be absolutely impartial, factual and “objective” in printing the news, and that editorials which took too unqualified a stand might color the judgment of men who were reporting the news. Thus, he ran only editorials that were mere explanations of the news.

Despite its still cautious phraseology, the Times often clearly speaks its mind under Sulzberger and Merz. The editorial page has taken a consistent and strong editorial position in favor of the U.S.’s meeting its international responsibilities (e.g., the Marshall Plan). In 1938, in an outspoken editorial called “A Way of Life,” the Times said that World War II was coming and that the U.S. would—and should—be involved. The Times also abandoned its traditional “independent Democratic” leanings to support Willkie in 1940, Dewey in 1948. Says Publisher Sulzberger, a registered Democrat: “I wish we could be just ‘independent.’ ”

The Times was also pronouncedly anti-Zionist. Sulzberger’s position, which he still holds, was that Judaism is a matter of religion, not nationality, and he thought an American ought to feel that way even though he was (as Sulzberger is) a Jew.

Such departures from the Ochs policy of neutral editorials have troubled Publisher Sulzberger, and he once confided to his wife, “I’m not sure I’m not ruining the Times; we’re constantly taking positions.” Mrs. Sulzberger advised him to go right on taking them. But the mere fact that Sulzberger was worried showed how long a shadow Adolph Ochs still casts over the Times.

Pattern in Cloth. Adolph Ochs was a small man with an impressive leonine head, an even more impressive manner. Often arbitrary and dictatorial, he was also kindly, paternalistic, full of fun, and he had confidence in Adolph Ochs. Born in Cincinnati, he became a printer at the age of 17. At 20, he bought a half-interest in the Chattanooga Times for $250, built it into such a profitable paper in the next 18 years that he decided to expand.

The New York Times looked like the place. Founded in 1851 by a young (31), black-bearded politician named Henry Jarvis Raymond, who later helped found the Republican Party, the Times flourished until Raymond died. Later it went deeply into debt, by 1896 was losing more than $2,000 a week. Armed with a letter of recommendation from President Grover Cleveland (which he had obtained simply by writing the President and requesting it), Ochs went to New York and bought control of the Times for $75,000. By cutting the price from 2¢ to a penny, he tripled circulation in a year.

Not long after, in 1904, Adolph Ochs made an even smarter move: he lured Night Editor Carr V. Van Anda of the New York Sun to become managing editor on the New York Times. In the next 25 years, Ochs and Van Anda made newspaper legend. It was Ochs who had set the basic pattern: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” It was Van Anda, one of the great managing editors of U.S. journalistic history, who cut the cloth to the pattern. When Van Anda finally retired because of ill health in 1932 (he died in 1945), the Times was a great paper.

Watch the Cat. The prospects are that the Times, under the control of the “public trust”-minded Sulzbergers, will long remain a top newspaper. Under the will of Adolph Ochs, control of the Times and of the Chattanooga Times (circ. 54,453), will go after the death of Mrs. Sulzberger to the Sulzbergers’ three daughters, Marian, 31, who is married to Orvil Dryfoos; Ruth, 29, music critic of the Chattanooga Times, the wife of Ben Hale Golden, who is now getting his careful newspaper schooling at the Chattanooga Times; Judith, 26, a doctor married to Dr. Matthew Rosenschein Jr.; and one son, Arthur (“Punch”), 24, who married a New York Times office girl, served in the Marines and is now a junior at Columbia. When control passes to the four the Times will suffer no financial shock from inheritance taxes; shrewd Mr. Ochs arranged for them to be paid when the trust was set up.

Financially, the future looks secure in other ways. Despite its enormous outlay for news, the Times is a profitable paper, owes not a penny to anyone. Last year the Times’s advertising linage was at a record high of 36,089,736, and it is still climbing. Since the 50 common-stockholders and 200 preferred-stockholders join the Sulzbergers in regarding the paper as a public trust, the Times has paid no common dividends for 20 years, used the money for expansion and better news coverage. (It pays an 8% preferred dividend every year.)

And though some other newspapers may sometimes feel the pressure of advertisers’ opinions, the Times has no worries on that score. Whenever an advertiser has tried to put pressure on the Times by threatening to take his ads somewhere else, he has been politely told to do so. Publisher Sulzberger’s view is the view of other bosses of the nation’s well-established newspapers: “We think the advertisers need us more than we need them, and they usually find that out.”

For 54 years, as the Times will proudly point out in its 100-year history, it has been printing news “without fear or favor.” That task, rather than crusading or editorial campaigns, is what the Times still considers its job. In the words of Constant Times Reader Arthur Hays Sulzberger: “We tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat.”

* Edited by Julian P. Boyd, financed ($200,000) by the New York Times, published by Princeton University Press.

* Other Pulitzer winners: Gian-Carlo Menotti, best music, in The Consul (TIME, May 1); South Pacific, best play; A. B. Guthrie, best novel, The Way West; Samuel Flagg Bemis, best biography, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy; O. W. Larkin, best history, Art and Life in America; Gwendolyn Brooks, best poetry, Annie Allen; Seattle Times Reporter Edwin O. Guthman, best national reporting, in clearing a professor of Communist charges (TIME, Nov. 7); Christian Science Monitor Correspondent Edmund Stevens, best international reporting, on Russia; Chicago Daily News and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for public service in exposing Illinois newsmen on state payrolls (TIME, May 9, 1949); Editor Carl M. Saunders of the Jackson (Mich.) Citizen Patriot, best editorial, on Memorial Day; Photographer Bill Crouch of the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune; Cartoonist James T. Berryman of the Washington (D.C.) Evening Star.