Gray Lady Down. William McGowan
market analysts to survey readers and advertisers in order to gauge what was wanted—and what was wanting in the paper’s coverage. The analysts returned shocking news: the Times had very little readership under the age of thirty-five. More distressing yet was what the polls and surveys suggested the Times should do. Interest in foreign and national news was practically nil, the market researchers reported, while arts and entertainment scored significantly higher. If the Times was to engage the under-thirty-five reader, it had to focus on the two questions that members of that demographic found most compelling: what to do with their time, and what to do with their money. In short, “lifestyle,” embodied in special weekday sections devoted to leisure time, sports, home, fashion, popular entertainment and contemporary arts.
In a panic, the paper began looking around at publications that seemed to ring bells with younger, affluent urbanites. One was New York magazine, full of service features and celebrity profiles. The other was the Village Voice, with its radical-chic politics and hip take on the downtown scene. Still another was People magazine, which was demonstrating that a sensibility shaped in direct imitation of television could make for a winning format on the printed page as well.
For someone like Abe Rosenthal—an accomplished foreign correspondent, city editor and at this point the managing editor poised to take over the executive editorship in 1976—looking to these particular publications for guidance was distressing. In an interview, he had once described the Voice as “an urban ill, like dog shit in the street, to be stepped over.” He admitted to one interviewer that New York magazine “used to drive me out of my mind.” But eventually, Rosenthal’s resistance was overcome by pragmatic acceptance of the demographic facts. Still, if the Times was going to do “soft” journalism, it would be superior soft journalism, he proclaimed. Instead of “thinning the soup” by watering down its serious coverage, the paper would be “adding more tomatoes” to create a richer broth, which would enhance its appeal in places it had not had appeal before.
The “Sectional Revolution,” as this transformation came to be called, was managed by Rosenthal and Punch Sulzberger along with Walter Mattson, the senior financial manager. It basically saved the paper, restoring circulation and profits to the tune of $200 million in the late 1980s. But in terms of the paper’s overall credibility and gravitas, and its tradition of neutral reporting without ideological taint, the lifestyle revolution was insidious, providing a back door to the countercultural values, liberationist ideologies and special interests that Rosenthal had tried so hard to keep at bay.
Even as this door opened, there was someone coming in the front door who changed the paper in far more fundamental ways. It was Punch’s son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who sat somewhat distractedly in a front-row pew at Central Synagogue on the day that Rosenthal was being eulogized, along with the journalistic sensibility he both projected and protected at the Times. Just as Abe Rosenthal had epitomized the virtues of the paper’s ancien régime, “Young Arthur” would symbolize the postmodernism that lay athwart its future.
two
The Rise of Arthur Jr.
Although he was a lifelong rock climber, it was the golden ropes of nepotism that hoisted young Sulzberger aloft. In their 1999 book about the Sulzberger family, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times, Susan Tifft and Alex Jones relate how Arthur Jr., a child of divorce at five, grew up with a great deal of insecurity over his inheritance and felt a nagging coldness from his own father, who seemed to favor his cousin Stephen Golden, son of Punch’s sister. Sent away to boarding school after grammar school, young Sulzberger returned to New York pretty quickly and acted on a longstanding desire to go live with his father and stepmother, along with his half sister and stepsister. “I was 14 when I came to his [Punch’s] house,” Arthur Jr. told Tifft and Jones, indulging his penchant for off-tone phrasing. “So he had me for more than a year and a half before I became an asshole.”
The tenuousness of his relationship with his father, combined with a certain measure of confusion over his mixed Jewish and Episcopalian heritage, has been said to have left young Arthur with the need “to prove himself to so many people,” as his stepmother later put it. Very much a child of the sixties, he was suspended from Manhattan’s Browning School for trying to organize a shutdown of classes in protest of the shootings at Kent State University. Following a number of his cousins to Tufts University in Boston, Arthur Jr. continued the antiwar activism and earned two arrests for civil disobedience.
Such attitudes did not endear him with his ex-Marine father. Walking across Boston Commons one day discussing the war, Punch asked Arthur Jr. which he would like to see get shot if an American soldier came across a North Vietnamese soldier in battle. Arthur Jr. defiantly answered that he would like the American to get shot because it was the other guy’s country. For Punch, the remark bordered on treason, and the two began shouting. Sulzberger Jr. later said that his father’s inquiry was the dumbest question he had ever heard in his life.
Despite the generational and ideological strains between them, Punch made sure that Arthur Jr. was well taken care of early in his career, set up with internships at the Boston Globe and the Daily Telegraph of London. There he soaked up the mod air and the sartorial styles, and returned home sporting an affected Carnaby Street look, complete with a wide-brimmed hat, wire-framed glasses, loud ties and a cane. His stepmother thought the affectation was a bid for attention. She once spoofed him by dressing up in the same garb for a family cocktail party.
In May 1975, Sulzberger Jr. married his girlfriend, Gail Gregg, whom he had met through his mother in Kansas City. (They separated in 2008.) As Edwin Diamond describes it in Behind the Times, the wedding was certainly “a scene from a modern marriage.” Standing with Arthur were three fathers (his mother had remarried twice after leaving her marriage to Punch), two mothers, one stepsister, three sisters, a half brother and “an assortment of long haired cousins.” For the rehearsal dinner the night before, according to Tifft and Jones, Arthur “had shown up in a long sleeved tee-shirt with a tuxedo design printed on it. In pictures from the wedding, the groom was wearing a headband, with white pants, white tuxedo shirt and a white belt, but with no tie. The bride, an avowed atheist and feminist, kept her maiden name.”
His father arranged for Arthur Jr. to work at the Raleigh Times. Despite his prestigious internships, Arthur came off to his supervisors as “absolutely, totally green.” Mike Yopp, the paper’s managing editor, told Tifft and Jones that working with him was “very much like dealing with a college intern.” His copy, mostly for light features, was riddled with basic spelling mistakes. In one unedited piece, Sulzberger had misspelled the word “hate” as “hait” not once, but several times. He was well liked, however, and though he drove a Porsche, he generally tried to be a man of the people, telling friends that the car actually had a Volkswagen engine.
Punch Sulzberger soon arranged a reporting job for Arthur at the AP in London, and another job for Gail at UPI. According to The Trust, Punch had originally written “we think she is smarter than he is” in his recommendation letter for Gail. His secretary drew Sulzberger Sr.’s attention to the slight, and it was excised from the final draft.
In 1978, Arthur Jr. went to work for the Times as a reporter in the Washington D.C. bureau. It was the staff there who gave him his unfortunate nickname, “Pinch,” a play on his father’s moniker. By all accounts, though, Arthur Jr. offset the connotations of the name and the baggage of his family influence through hard work and late-night socialization with other reporters, particularly the younger ones who carried themselves around town as a kind of Brat Pack. He often volunteered to work for other reporters if they needed time away and would work the phones as long as he could on a story, looking for yet one more source.
Undergoing another sartorial makeover, he adopted the Ben Bradlee “power look” of striped shirts with colorful suspenders and cigars. Some saw this as Arthur trying to look more serious and professional. Others saw it as a sign of immaturity, “like he was trying to be a man, to have weight or something,” as a visiting friend from North Carolina described it.
During