Behind the Times (10 page)

Baker arrived on a Sunday in November; no one gave him anything to do on his first day, and he passed the time writing a letter to his wife back in Baltimore. He described for Mimi Baker the “vast” and “bleak” newsroom, stretching from 43rd to 44th streets, where desks were “aligned in rows as neatly as stones in a military graveyard.” Halfway down the block shirtsleeved men were playing bridge, while others were working on crossword puzzles or browsing through newspapers. At the
Sun
a half dozen reporters had covered the whole of Baltimore for the night desk; at the
Times
swarms of people in the newsroom had nothing to do for days at a time—a “sea of tedium,” Baker remembered. He eventually came upon an explanation for the paper’s leisurely ways. Meyer Berger, the revered city side reporter who later wrote an official history of the
Times
, traced the
Times’
work habits to
an earlier era: “Mr. Ochs always liked to have enough people around to cover the story when the
Titanic
sinks.”

There was something to be said for overstaffing. In the AHS years, Sulzberger’s editor Turner Catledge set up a permanent
Times
presence in the South. The
Times’
reporter, a Tidewater, Virginia, native and ex-marine named John H.
Popham, was based in Chattanooga, Adolph Ochs’s old hometown. Beginning in the late 1940s, Popham traveled through the South, putting fifty thousand miles a year on his car (before the federal interstates existed). He covered the civil rights story before it had a name. “Popham roamed the South, developing contacts, learning the territory, meeting the players, black and white,” his friend and former
Times
colleague, John Herbers, later remembered. Popham knew he would be left alone by his editors as long as he did a good job. “That was Turner Catledge’s style,” Herbers says. “Hire good people, cheer them on, give them an incentive to produce.” Because Popham was a white Southerner, he moved with relative ease on the Main streets of the South, among the small-town mayors, deputy sheriffs, and store owners. And because he was from the
Times
, he was able to move as well through the other South—from an African Methodist Episcopal church in Mississippi to a Negro weekly newspaper in North Carolina to a black ministers’ meeting in Atlanta.

While Popham worked on his own, creating an enduring newsroom legend, there were other legacies of the AHS years that the paper would rather forget. Within the paper three news entities, each claiming to be “the
Times
,” jostled for position. The newsroom staff, numbering around 800, put out the daily Monday through Saturday paper. These
Times
people worked for the managing editor, Catledge. In addition, a smaller group of around one hundred belonged to the Sunday staff, reporting to Lester Markel. Markel joined the
Times
in 1923, and by the 1950s was running the Sunday paper as a separate principality. The Sunday paper employed its own styles of punctuation and grammar, which differed from the daily’s. The Review of the Week section frequently ran articles written as if on the assumption that subscribers had not read any newspapers during the previous six days. Markel also was in charge of the
Book Review
and the
Times Magazine
, which also sometimes acted as if no daily
Times
existed. Markel cared about the big public issues, and he made the
Magazine
a journal of national and international affairs. Yet as late as the 1960s, the
Magazine
paid contributors
a
penurious $250 for articles of three thousand words or more—and expected the writers to endure multiple rewrites from the demanding Markel, at no added pay. One of his Sunday favorites was the British writer Lady Barbara Ward, whose specialty was economics and politics. When Markel once was reproached about her long-winded essays, he was said to have exclaimed, “I made her rewrite it three times.” The riposte was, “Yes, and you ran all three versions back to back.”

Scotty Reston’s Washington bureau represented another entity. The bureau’s independence was first established in the 1930s by Arthur Krock, the converted Episcopalian and consummate Washington insider (in 1940 Krock helped a well-connected Harvard student named John F. Kennedy write his senior thesis about British politics during Hitler’s rise to power; the thesis was later published as a book, entitled
Why England Slept
). Russell Baker in his day quickly learned that the world of the
Times
was divided into Reston men and New York men, each group with its own fealties. This helped explain Baker’s inactive period of duty while at the home office: He was behind enemy lines. A fourth
Times
“nation” was based overseas; AHS’s nephew Cyrus O. Sulzberger held the title of chief correspondent, and often appeared to preside over his own foreign-news service. Cy Sulzberger and other overseas correspondents were known to travel from one country to another without notifying the foreign desk in New York. When Cy Sulzberger obtained a private interview with
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, the correspondent stretched his notes into a six-part series for the
Times.
In New York, the editors wanted to cut the material to one article; Cy Sulzberger took his case to his uncle. The interview ran in six parts, beginning on page one.

For all the institutionalized redundancy, there were nevertheless telling holes in the
Times’
news coverage. Through the AHS years, the paper ran a regular column devoted to news and personalities of official Washington, but nothing similar for New York City. The
Times’
best local reporter, the storied Meyer Berger, was writing mood-of-the-city pieces and publishing them—in
The New Yorker.
Catledge in time persuaded AHS to start a Berger column called “About New York,” and it became a great success with many readers. AHS wasn’t among its fans; he fretted that Berger’s subjects were “light” and “un-
Times
-like.” The topics that fascinated Berger—in Catledge’s words, “working people, ethnic subcultures, and neighborhood bars and customs”—held minimal
appeal for Sulzberger. “The
Times
had never written about that level of New York, and he wasn’t sure it should,” Catledge remembered. After Berger’s death in 1959, Catledge pushed as a replacement a young reporter named Gay Talese, who had caught his editors’ eyes with his graceful writing for the sports department. AHS refused to resume the column; he wanted a
no-frills paper. The gritty “little people” stories didn’t fit the
Times’
self-image.

AHS’s beau ideal of a newspaper appealed to a number of people—readers, advertisers and talented young men who wanted to work for the
Times
in part because it was the serious paper of record. James Goodale, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, joined the
Times’
outside counsel, Lord, Day and Lord, in 1959. As an undergraduate at Yale, Goodale had thought about a career as a political journalist. At Lord, Day, he enjoyed his arm’s-length involvement with the
Times
, and jumped at the chance to become general attorney of the company in 1963. The
Times
of the postwar era, he believed, wanted to shape public opinion of national and international affairs—“That’s what excited me when I joined the company; that was the Ochs spirit.” The best instruments of the
Times’
potential influence, in Goodale’s view, were the
Times Magazine
and the editorial pages. But when Goodale exchanged his outsider’s perspective for a participant’s role, he was taken aback by what he found at the top managerial levels of the paper.

The place was a big factory, he thought, and a badly run one at that. “Management was concerned solely with getting out the paper each day, and never looked beyond the nightly deadlines,” he recalls. “No one had the time, or interest, to sit back and think about next week, or next year.” Budget projections and forward planning were unheard of; union negotiations sought only “labor peace,” and so generous contracts were signed. The
Times’
management styles affronted the former Lord, Day lawyer: “Millions of dollars were coming in and millions were going out. No one knew where, or why. No one knew how to make the money stay.” Unlike a factory that made, say, widgets, the
Times
couldn’t store its inventory, the news, toward the day when production might be interrupted by strikes or other unforeseen work stoppages.

All the aspects of the old Ochs rule that had seemed so admirable to outsiders looked different on the inside. The desire to be independent
severely limited capital expenditures, for the family didn’t want to borrow and be indebted to the financial markets (as Ochs had been at the very start). New acquisitions and diversification were seen not as opportunities but as threats: They would dilute the “purity” of the company. The idea of realizing more than 1 or 2 percent net return on revenues was somehow inappropriate, as if too boisterous and coarse for this particular family business. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, like Ochs before him, put his physical and intellectual energies into the daily tasks of the
Times.
He was content to remain a private company, pay out modest dividends, stay out of the red, and retain family control. The
Times
, obviously, wasn’t ready for America’s go-go years. It was an unfashionable one-product company. “All he wanted to do was publish a good newspaper,” John May, a businessman and member of the
Times’
board of directors in the post-AHS years recalled, as if talking about a man who has chosen to study Latin or Greek when all his friends were becoming MBAs.

AHS had made some tentative efforts to get the company involved in related communications businesses. The
Times
acquired a radio station, WQXR, in 1944. In the postwar years, too, the
Times
experimented with new technologies and attempted to grow beyond the New York area. It stumbled badly, and its attempts were taken as proof of the quaint old ways.

In the last decade,
facsimile transmission has become a familiar part of business communications and the means for producing nationally distributed publications, such as the
Wall Street Journal, USA Today
and—belatedly—the National editions of the
New York Times.
The fax has become an American household word, just as Japanese-made fax machines are now household appliances. Few
Times
people are aware that their own company, decades before the Japanese, was a major force in the facsimile business, holding more than fifty patents and commanding the services of the preeminent researcher in the field, Austin G. Cooley. An MIT electrical engineer, Cooley first began testing the transmission of graphic materials by wire in the years after World War I. By 1922 he was working for the
Times
, and the paper was using the facsimile technology in its news bureaus throughout the United States and Europe. For almost twenty years, the bureaus supplied stories and photographs both for the
Times’
pages and for other newspapers who had signed on as clients of the service.

In the 1940s the
Times
got out of distribution, selling the fax service to its competitor, the Associated Press, while retaining the fax equipment business. A few
Times
people continued to talk up the potential of facsimile transmission. In September 1953, for example, a
Times
executive named C. Raymond Hulsart attempted to create interest in the product with Donald B. Macurda, a banker at the First Boston Corporation, on lower Broadway. “An acknowledged need for facsimile exists in the banking business,” Hulsart wrote, and added, presciently: “Detailed and statistical communications between departments or units of multiple-plant industrial operations present a problem readily solved by facsimile.” In 1956 the
Times
enterprisingly published an experimental electronic paper using fax technology during the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. News pages made up in New York were transmitted to San Francisco via phone line, and then printed for distribution around the convention hall and at the delegates’ hotels. Today orbiting satellites have supplanted phone lines for long-distance publishing: the much-heralded communications revolution. The principle involved is no different from the
Times’
1956 experiment.

Having helped start the revolution, however, the
Times
walked away from its first benefits. In 1959, just as other publishers were beginning to realize the potential of electronic publishing, AHS decided to get
out
of the fax business. The Times Facsimile Company was sold to Litton Industries for $1,250,000. The
Times
also transferred to Litton most of the patents, trademarks, and contracts—and the services of the estimable Cooley. About this time a Chicago newspaper publisher named Bruce Sagan kept turning over in his mind the implications of the 1956
Times
convention venture. Sagan was just 27 years old and already published a string of weeklies in the Chicago area. The
Times
, he reasoned, was producing a valued daily paper, strong in national and international coverage, and one that Sagan had read when he was growing up in Manhattan, and later used to buy as a college student at the University of Chicago bookstore (it was delivered by air mail, three days late).

Sagan understood that other, less successful papers in Chicago and around the country were in the process of consolidating or disappearing; the New York papers memorialized in the Times Tower copper box were testimony to that reality. Sagan reasoned that the
Times’
fax technology—plus his own printing presses—could together create a
successful new product for these regional markets. On July 29, 1959, he mailed off his proposal to Arthur Hays
Sulzberger. “Your company has developed a process for sending over wire composed pages and receiving at the other end the information on an offset negative,” Sagan wrote. “We have recently installed a 16-page Vanguard offset newspaper press which we are using in the experimental printing of one of our weeklies.” Sagan then made his pitch: “It is perhaps time for someone to try a national daily newspaper.… Do we have anything to discuss?” On August 4, Sulzberger replied, in full: “As I understand your letter of July 29th, your question is whether or not we would be interested in using the facsimile method of reproduction to make the
New York Times
available in other communities. The only answer I can give you at the present time is no.”