Behind the Times (15 page)

The younger Sulzberger, then, had strong views about the paper that was his inheritance. The
Times
people who spoke derisively about “Junior’s paper” did so out of the belief that his
Times
would be overly attuned to the demands of readers and advertisers. They feared it would be a “product” that was “market-driven,” and not the traditional, “serious”
Times.
The critics’ memories were short. The drive to be user friendly had begun fifteen years before, when Arthur was still learning the business at the AP.

Anthony Lewis vaguely remembered that Eisenhower once said people should be able to face their accusers, and not “get shot down from the back.” The columnist telephoned Professor Fred Greenstein at Princeton, a specialist on the Eisenhower years. Greenstein didn’t recall the quote. Lewis tried Stephen Ambrose, author of a two-volume biography of Eisenhower and a member of the University of New Orleans faculty. Ambrose was traveling in Mississippi. (He eventually returned Lewis’s call, but didn’t recognize the quotation either.) On the third call, to William Ewald, Jr., a former Eisenhower speech writer and author of
Who Killed Joe McCarthy?
, Lewis got the lead he needed. The quote could be found in the public papers of Eisenhower.

Karl Meyer put aside his folders and gathered with a dozen of his editorial board colleagues for the second of their three regular weekly meetings. The other two meetings were held Mondays and Thursdays. Editorial page editor Jack Rosenthal, a former official at the Justice Department during the Kennedy years, presided at one end of the large walnut table in the board’s conference room on the tenth floor. His deputy, Leslie Gelb, who had been with the State Department in the Carter administration, sat at the other end. On the wall behind them hung framed copies of
Times
editorial pages over the decades—each one from a
Times
edition of May 1. Max Frankel picked the pages and had them mounted when he was editorial page editor a decade before. The May 1 date caused smiles among visitors, who appreciated the “uncharacteristic touch of the Jacobin at the
Times
,” in Meyer’s words. The meeting began, as usual, a few minutes late. Rosenthal went around the table; members spoke their minds. Once again the board took up the Tower nomination: Should the
Times
weigh in? No decision was made, or rather, it was decided a Tower commentary could await further developments in the Senate hearings. Meyer promised to do a short editorial on Iraq’s human rights violations, based on an Amnesty International report carried as a small item in the news pages of the
Times.
Each board member wrote editorials on two or more specialties. Meyer concentrated on the Third World and human rights topics.

The board turned to the civil war in El Salvador, and an animated discussion of Central America. The discussion continued for fifteen minutes. Two visitors from the region were due to visit the
Times
later in the day.

In a space near the southwest corner of the building, toward Eighth Avenue, a meeting of the Style-section editors began. The desks of the Women’s Page at one time clustered in this corner. The page was long gone, replaced by the new feature sections in the great reorganization of the mid-1970s (and a casualty as well of the changing American social order, in which the category
of “women’s news” itself was judged patronizing). Editors were working on the redesign of the second section of the Sunday paper—to introduce a new “Styles of the
Times
” feature (it arrived in May 1992, after the usual bureaucratic battles of control and Talmudic discussions about content).

The old section—“Sunday Main Part 2”—had grown into an unattractive collection of news columns dominated by three pages of wedding announcements and by oversize ads for cameras and electronic equipment, set in line after line of unreadable agate type. The old section was also something of a dumping ground for features held over from the news pages during the week. Still, the section had a distinct flavor. With its leisurely stories datelined Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Cheyenne, Wyoming, or Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, it often read like the
National Geographic
: a slow-paced travelogue of Americana.

All that was changing under the direction of Claudia Payne, a talented editor with a mane of blond hair. Payne introduced new features to accompany the Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s ads for $495 suede bags and $1,900 designer dresses. Under the heading “Evening Hours,” Manhattan society benefits and the chic parties of the week received a half page of candid photographs. The captions often consisted only of the subjects’ names—so well known, the
Times’
arbiters of style were saying, that no further elaboration was needed (“Alexander von Auersperg greets Yasmin Aga Kahn Jeffries at Plaza,” read the caption under two smiling faces, puckered lips aimed at proffered cheek). The latest creative talent, young men and women working in fashion and design, were photographed and profiled as “Style Makers.” A full page was devoted to places to spend money on Sundays—“Sunday Outing,” “Sunday Menu,” “Sunday Dinner.” “The accent is on youth,”
Times Talk
, the in-house newsletter, reported.

Times Talk
neglected to add that the new ‘youth-oriented’ section was the end product of a power struggle going back fourteen years. When the
Times’
daily feature sections were created, the news and business departments had worked well together on the initial four sections—Sports Monday, Home (Wednesday), Living (Thursday), and Weekend (the Friday arts and entertainment guide). But the editors and the sales staff could not agree on what the final section, for Tuesday, should cover. The business side wanted a fashion section, to sell space in the new pages to the department stores. The news department, after the perceived fluff of the first four sections, wanted to offer something more serious and “
Times
-like.” Punch Sulzberger sided with the news
department, and Science Times was born. A decade and a half later, the advertising sales staff at last was going to get the fashion showcase it desired. The
Times
would now have two prime positions to offer advertisers in the Sunday paper: Main Part 1 and Main Part 2. The accent was on selling space.

In the Washington bureau, Barbara Gamarekian worked on a story about infidelity, drinking, and changing mores on Capitol Hill. The idea was inspired by the Tower fight and intended for the Washington Talk page. The wife of Congressman Ron Dellums of California returned Gamarekian’s call, and they talked about a spouse’s view of the subject for ten minutes. Gamarekian called lobbyists, Congressmen, and staff workers on the Hill; she interviewed William Proxmire, the recently retired senator from Wisconsin, and Kevin Phillips, the conservative writer.

“A few random thoughts about possible articles for the Home section,” began the note from Arthur O. Sulzberger to A. M. Rosenthal.

It was the summer of 1978. The
Times
was introducing its new sections covering such topics as food, furniture, and design. These daily magazines, one for each weekday, represented the
Times’
prime editorial initiative of the 1970s. They signaled a major investment of both money and staff, the centerpiece of the effort to attract new readers. Americans were spending an ever increasing amount of time in front of their television sets. They were getting the first hard reports of developments in Washington, Wall Street, or the Middle East from network news on the nights before their morning papers were delivered. Attracted by nightly television and the early morning shows like “Today” on NBC—and, later, by “new media” networks like the twenty-four-hour CNN—the traditional audiences for news seemed to be drifting away from their newspapers. Around the country, editors tried new formats to lure readers. The
Washington Post
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and the
Miami Herald
had all taken the lead in developing sections devoted to “life-style” features.

Change came harder at the
Times
, where past habits weighed heavily on decisions. Punch Sulzberger worried about the harm that might be done to “our traditional franchise”—the coverage of serious national
and international news—as newsroom resources were shifted around. He had doubts about the paper’s ability to deal with the new franchise. The
Times
was still feeling its way unsteadily among these softer topics; neither Sulzberger nor Rosenthal was fully satisfied with the new
Home section. The execution was a bit off, the stories were judged not sufficiently “pertinent” to the lives of the audience desired by the
Times.
Rosenthal, for example, told Nancy Newhouse, the Home editor, that her section was “too architectural in tone.” Newhouse should run more “interesting and useful” stories oriented toward consumers’ needs, and fewer “columns on design.” Both Rosenthal and Sulzberger kept their secretaries busy transcribing possible story ideas. Sulzberger, conscious of the chain of command, sent his memos to Rosenthal; the publisher counted on his executive editor to deal with the departmental editors.

The publisher’s memo with his ideas for the Home section was dated July 6. Sulzberger noted that “awnings may be coming back, in that they are decorative and cut the heat. If so what’s up?” He pointed out that “the home medicine cabinet is usually a mess—filled with old prescription drugs, half used bottles of cold remedies, etc. What should it contain—according to a doctor?” Sulzberger also had a suggestion for a story on city apartments with wood-burning fireplaces (“Where do you buy the wood and store it?”). He wondered about the hallways and other common areas in co-op apartments where the opinions of many tenants had to be taken into account—he expressed special interest in “the lobbies of the older houses along Fifth and Park Avenues.” In a similar vein, he suggested a story on the decor of the offices of “working men and women … such as Joe Cullman [the Phillip Morris chairman] and Edgar Bronfman [of the Seagrams distillers family].” A week later, a second Sulzberger memo of story suggestions declared that “
area rugs … seem to be coming back,” asked if anyone had solved the problems of noisy home washing machines and messy laundry areas and raised some practical questions about the fire extinguishers “that every home should have.” Sulzberger wanted the
Times
to answer such questions as “What kind? Where should it be stored? How long do they last? Are they better for an oven fire, or salt?…”

There were eighteen ideas in the first memo and eleven ideas in the second memo. Suggestion number 7 in the second memo revealed more about Sulzberger the trend spotter than he perhaps intended: “People all over are covering their homes with aluminum siding. How
about interviewing someone who did it and getting the entire economics from paint and fuel saved to cost, etc. Was it worth it?” The advantages of aluminum siding are usually promoted in the spiels of late-night television pitchmen; homeowners in Astoria, or Bensonhurst, might go the aluminum siding route. Was this really a trend among the audience of suburbanites that the
Times
was trying to court? The publisher assured his editor that aluminum siding was definitely upscale. According to the memo, the “people all over” Sulzberger had in mind were “Marian and Andrew [who] did their house in Darien.” Marian Sulzberger Dryfoos Heiskell was one of Punch’s older sisters; her husband, Andrew Heiskell, had been chairman of the board of Time Inc. Darien, Connecticut, is one of the tonier suburban addresses in the greater New York area.

Editors often have a picture in their minds of the “dear reader” to whom their work is addressed. When the
Times
was starting its new sections, Rosenthal told me, he always tried to imagine how the stories would be received by “people like
Teddy White”—the author and Rosenthal friend, the late Theodore H. White. When I reported this recollection to Punch Sulzberger, his reaction was one of laughter. “I’ve heard Abe say that,” Sulzberger said. “I don’t know why he picked Teddy.” Sulzberger himself had no such ideal reader in mind for the sections. “I’m not trained in that way of perceiving things,” he explained. “I read the sections with my own eyes. I deal with the paper every day and
I have no problem expressing myself with a memo or phone call.” Again, he laughed: “What the hell, that’s what ownership means.”

Sulzberger’s story ideas for Home and Living had a certain fey charm; they grew from his own experience, and that of his friends and relatives. The suggestions about the Heiskells’ siding, the halls of Park Avenue co-ops, and the executive suites of “office workers” like Cullman and Bronfman all added up to something more than the sum of the trivial parts. They helped set a tone at the
Times.
The paper always had a singular readership in the family of Adolph S. Ochs. The sectional revolution at the
Times
left that tradition untouched.