Behind the Times (13 page)

The Binghams of Louisville, like the Reids of New York, were another one of those storybook “aristocratic” families in the newspaper business. The Sulzbergers had known the Binghams for decades, through the publishers’ association and other newspaper-industry committees. The Binghams owned the
Louisville Courier-Journal
, the leading newspaper in the mid-South and one of the best dailies in the
country; the company also included broadcasting properties and a gravure facility. As the retired patriarch Barry Bingham, Sr., neared his eightieth birthday, his children sharply split over the direction of the company, and about their own roles in its future. Their disagreements turned father against son, sister against brother. For almost two years, the Binghams remained divided over a plan that would have permitted two of the children to share the properties while providing for the buy-out of a third. In the end, a difference over a relatively modest sum of money hardened the family split. One sister, Sallie Bingham, had asked $32 million for her shares; her brother, Barry Bingham, Jr., acting in the name of the company, was willing to offer her only $26.3 million. But something more than dollars was involved. Behind the $5.7 million difference were several emotional intangibles, such as Sallie Bingham’s feminist views and her feelings of parental neglect, Barry Jr.’s lifetime in others’ shadows, and his efforts to force his sisters off the company’s board of directors. The father, convinced he could not break the impasse, put the paper up for sale. In 1986 the
Louisville Courier-Journal
properties were sold for $434 million to the Gannett Company, the media corporation that owned
USA Today
, among other papers.

The Bingham story was a cautionary tale for the Sulzberger family. Two of the longest news stories ever published in the
Times
scrupulously chronicled first “The Fall of the House of Bingham” (January 19, 1986) and then revisited the family and its misfortunes later in the year to report on “The Binghams: After the Fall” (December 21, 1986). The two articles ran well over ten thousand words, and won a Pulitzer Prize for
Times
reporter Alex S. Jones. The overtones of Greek tragedy in the
Times
headlines were deliberate, and the lessons of family hubris explicit. One passage read like an internal memo for consumption in the
Times’
boardroom. “For large families struggling with the problems of multigenerational ownership of a business, the saga of the Binghams and their failure to hold together was particularly poignant,” Jones wrote. “And for the dwindling number of families still operating their own newspapers, the news from Louisville was chilling.”

Jones, with his wife, Susan Tifft, expanded the articles into a book. They allowed Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., an advance look at the manuscript. He returned it with the one word comment, “horrifying.” Punch Sulzberger, Arthur’s father, remembered that he read “every
word of the Bingham stories.” Afterward, “I told my sisters, ‘I’ll be nice to you!’ ” Then, turning serious, he said: “We all get along very well as a family, my sisters and I. There’s no way it can all go down the drain here.” If some of the Sulzbergers’ children or grandchildren have no interest in the company, he explained, “they can always sell into the pool, and go away and buy IBM or become hot dog vendors or whatever.” The family interest comes first, before all else: Richard N. Cohen, a stockbroker and the husband of Judith Sulzberger Cohen—the Judy to Punch—was on the board of directors of the Times Company. When the Cohens’ marriage ended in divorce, the wife resumed using her maiden name—and Cohen was removed from the board, after twelve years of service.

The Times’ new family-stock “pool” was formalized in the months after the Bingham split became the talk of the newspaper business. The four Sulzberger children—and their children—announced in June 1986 that they had agreed on a recapitalization plan for the Times Company’s class-B stock, essentially the family trust set up by Ochs. Holders of class-B stock elect 70 percent of the company’s board of directors. The 1986 agreement keeps all class-B stock within the family. If a family member wishes to sell the Times Company stock—taking the money and running, as did Sallie Bingham—he or she cannot sell to outsiders until the stock is first offered to the other family members, and then to the company. Even in the all-but-inconceivable event that neither the family nor the company offered to buy the stock, the shares can be sold to nonfamily members only after being converted to the class-A noncontrolling stock available to the public. The agreement, signed August 5, 1986, would remain in effect twenty-one years beyond the lifetime of the last surviving family member who was alive on that date. In this way, the Sulzbergers insured
family control well into the twenty-first century. Whatever conceivable dissension arises among the Sulzbergers, the
Times
stays in the family “until way out there,” in Punch Sulzberger’s words.

The emotional attachment of the various Sulzberger family members to the
Times
is a private matter. The value of their financial connection is relatively easy to calculate. The same editions of the
Times
that reported the news of Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger’s death and the terms of the new trusts also carried the information that the Times Company’s revenues reached $1.8 billion in 1989. The company does not break out specific earnings figures, but operating profits from the
Times
newspaper alone were estimated to be $200 million that same year. A general formula used in the media business places the value of a newspaper property at $1,000 per reader. The circulation of the daily
Times
reached 1.1 million in 1990, while the Sunday circulation climbed toward 1.7 million in the same period.

This wealth places the
Sulzbergers among “the owners of the Great Republic,” in the phrase of Gore Vidal. The family belongs to the American ruling class, which since the depression of the 1930s has chosen, in Vidal’s words, “not to be known to the public at large.” While the deeds of Wall Street raiders, leveraged-buy-out kings, show-business personalities, and other nouveaux riches helped fill the pages of newspapers—including the
Times’
—during the Reagan era, the enduring rich were seldom heard or seen. Shunning celebrity, they kept to what Vidal calls their “private islands.” Within this orbit, the personal styles of Punch Sulzberger and his son, Arthur Jr., simultaneously suggest self-deprecation
and
entitlement—as if they want you to believe they are not among the nobles who own America, but know that you understand that they are. In early 1988, at the start of the presidential election primaries, the Reverend Jesse Jackson visited the
Times’
editorial board. Like other presidential candidates who have been invited to the publisher’s executive suite through the years, Jackson was there to make himself known to the
Times’
senior executives and editorial board. If the
Times’
endorsement of the Jackson candidacy in the April primary in New York was unlikely, given the Sulzbergers’ cautious politics, then at least some favorable notice in the paper’s editorial page would be helpful, preferably before primary day. The two Sulzbergers—Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., was then assistant publisher—sought to explain to Jackson the collegial nature of the
Times.
Jackson believed the Sulzbergers were free to endorse whomever they chose in the campaign. The Sulzbergers demurred: “Mr. Jackson, we don’t own this place. The stockholders own the
New York Times.
” Jackson would have none of it. Come on, he chided in the tone of someone who wasn’t born yesterday, “You control the voting stock.”

The Reverend Jackson had grasped the meaning of “the power of the press” more readily than some of the paper’s reporters, who when they went out on stories, sometimes fell into the habit of thinking they were “the
Times.
”

The
Times
belongs to the Sulzbergers, whatever the formal listing
on the American Stock Exchange. They seldom venture from their private island. Although Punch Sulzberger ran the
Times
for a third of a century, he confined his public life to a minimum of formal appearances—presiding at the
Times’
annual stockholders’ meetings and fulfilling his obligations for the American Newspaper Publishers Association. In late middle age, too, he took on the duties of board chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Ronald Reagan, a master of the calculatedly “modest” gesture, once remarked that one of the best things about the presidency was living in the White House “over the store.” Similarly, Punch Sulzberger joked that he became chairman of the Met because “I live right across the street.”

The Met chairman’s post might well have been tailored for Sulzberger as he neared his sixty-fifth birthday. The assumption of his employees was that at some time around his birth date the father would pass on the publisher’s title to his son, Arthur, the only male heir of Punch Sulzberger from his two marriages. “The age of sixty-five, or sixty-six, is a pretty good time to move on,” he reflected as the date approached. “You’ve done what you could do in that kind of job; someone else should pick up on it.” Sulzberger didn’t want to suggest that he was “burned out,” but only that “it was a good
time for a change.” The passing of power was partial: The father relinquished his formal role at the newspaper, but remained as chairman of the Times Company. Along with the title of publisher, the son inherited a fresh set of anxieties about the
New York Times.

Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the fifth man to become publisher of the family paper, was born in 1951, long after the death of the founder of the dynasty, his great grandfather Adolph H. Ochs. Arthur Jr.’s recollections of his grandfather, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and of his uncle Orvil Dryfoos, his predecessors as publisher, were hazy. For a time, it seemed that he might not get to know his own father much better.

His parents had divorced in 1956, when he was five. His mother, Barbara, remarried, and for the next eight years, young Arthur traveled back and forth between his two natural parents. Some weekends he spent with his father at “Granny’s house,” Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger’s gracious 262-acre estate, Hillandale, near Stamford, Connecticut. There, through the late 1950s and early 1960s, young Arthur played with his cousins, enjoying the estate’s olympic-size pool, its all-weather tennis court, and its private five-acre lake. From their ranks some thirty
years hence, the next publisher of the
Times
would come, if the paper still belonged to the family.

Children barely in their teens may not ordinarily dwell on such matters of power and primogeniture, and young Arthur certainly was a normal young boy. Handsome, smallish, outgoing, he was an active student at the Browning preparatory school on East 62nd Street in New York. The 1970 Browning yearbook credits him with three years on the Debating Club and two years of junior varsity football. He also spent three years on the school newspaper, the
Browning Grytte
, rising to assistant editor in his final year.

In the middle of this ordinary prep school routine, however, he decided to leave his mother and live permanently with his father. Edward Klein, a former
Times
senior editor who came to know both Sulzberger men during an eleven-year tenure at the paper, theorized that “
a sense of dispossession” may have overwhelmed the boy. His father and Punch’s second wife, young Arthur’s stepmother, already had two children, both girls, the older one from the new Mrs. Sulzberger’s first marriage. There was always a possibility of another child—this time, a male, who would bear the Sulzberger name, and might then become the next head of the dynasty. Between his thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays, young Arthur left his mother’s apartment on East 74th Street and moved into his father’s home on Fifth Avenue.

From Browning, Sulzberger went on to Tufts University, where he majored in political science. As his grandfather had done for Punch, so, too, did Punch arrange for his son the chance to accumulate on-the-ground experience at a good regional newspaper. Arthur worked as a reporter for the
Raleigh
(North Carolina)
Times
and then in the London bureau of the Associated Press. His mother had again divorced and remarried, and was living with her third husband in Topeka. Visiting her in Kansas, young Arthur met, literally, the girl next door, Gail Gregg. They began seeing each other and were married in 1975 in the backyard of the Greggs’ Victorian house in Topeka. According to Edward Klein, their wedding was a scene from a modern marriage; the groom’s side of the family was represented by three fathers, two mothers, one stepsister, three sisters, (half, step-, and full), a half brother, and an “assortment of long-haired cousins.” Gregg kept her maiden name. When Arthur was working for the AP in London, she was at the rival United Press International.

In recent years, Arthur began gathering a group of
Times
people his own age around him to be his new “team” at the paper. After hours, in social settings, he sometimes regaled them with the same kind of self-deprecating stories his father used to tell his associates. In London, Arthur recalled at one such dinner party, he and Gail directly competed against each other. During a minor British cabinet crisis, reporters on the sidewalk outside Number 10 Downing Street were being restrained by police; as AP man Sulzberger tried to press closer to find out what was going on, he recounted, he spotted UPI reporter Gregg inside the police cordon, getting a clean beat on the story. If it wasn’t quite like his father’s debacle at the Le Mans auto race, it nevertheless produced appreciative chuckles among the guests.

His non-
Times
seasoning considered complete, Arthur joined the family paper in 1978. He worked first on the news side, as a general assignment reporter in the Washington bureau and then for the metropolitan desk in New York. In Washington, Sulzberger played his part of the prince in waiting, fraternizing, drinking, and staying out late with the Falstaffs of the bureau. In New York, his metro training included half a year covering City Hall during the second term of Edward I. Koch. His business-side apprenticeship at the
Times
began in 1982, in the advertising department. He went out on sales calls, and then worked as a strategic planner. By 1987 he was working in operations, overseeing the production of the paper, and joking about his assignment: “
I’m a journalist who just got off on the wrong floor.”