The Kingdom and the Power Read Free Page B

position to make big decisions without having to first clear everything with his father-in-law. Ochs had now been dead for seven years, and Sulzberger was the boss, although he could never be the boss that Ochs had been. Nor would he wish to be. Sulzberger was by nature a modest man, not a monument builder, and he preferred making decisions quietly, taking into account the counsel of his colleagues, and then remaining in the background with the other shrine-keepers and paying homage to the memory of the departed patriarch. Except for the fact that Sulzberger was of Jewish ancestry, as Ochs had been, the two men had little in common. Adolph Ochs’s climb had been a continuous struggle against great odds, he quitting school at fifteen to begin at the bottom—a printer’s apprentice and floor-sweeper in the composing room of a small newspaper in Tennessee.Sulzberger had been privileged from the start. He had been born of a prominent New York family that had settled in Colonial America in 1695—one of his mother’s relatives, Jacob Hays, had been New York’s first police chief—and Sulzberger had been educated in good schools, and had been permitted to indulge a taste for expensive things. He wrote verse, had some talent as a painter, and he thought seriously of someday becoming an architect. But after graduation from college he became, like his father, a textile importer, and was on a buying trip in Peking, China, when the United States entered World War I. He quickly returned for training as an artillery officer, and while in the army he met again some of his New York friends, one being a nephew of Ochs’s. And it was through the latter that Sulzberger became reacquainted with Ochs’s daughter, Iphigene, whom he had known casually a few years before when they both had attended classes on the campus of Columbia University.
    When the courtship began, Ochs had been displeased. Ochs had fashioned his daughter to his Victorian taste, and thought there was no great need for her to marry, all her needs being satisfied at home; but if she were ever to seriously contemplate marriage, as she obviously was with Sulzberger, Ochs had hoped that she would at least select someone with a journalistic background who could make a useful contribution to
The Times
and perhaps one day help run it. But his daughter was set on Sulzberger, and Ochs finally consented on the condition that the young man, after his discharge from the army, join
The Times
and learn the newspaper business. If he had any ability, he would rise within the hierarch—meanwhile, Ochs could keep an eye on him.
    In 1918, a year after the wedding, Arthur Hays Sulzberger appeared at
The Times
. He was given an office and a secretary and very little to do. His presence naturally caused curiosity throughout the building, particularly among some of the women who found him extremely attractive, and few details about him eluded their gossip. He loved flowers in his office and was fond of miniature animals, there being some samples on his desk and atop the bookshelves. He was forever moving furniture around the room, and emptying the ash trays, and rolling a stand that held a large atlas globe back and forth along the floor until finding a spot where the north light hit it at an interesting angle. He was absorbed by music and poetry, color and fabric, and could properly have worked in some cultural department on the newspaper, which he would have preferred. But Ochs kept him away from the more glamorousaspects of the business. After he had been assigned to work for a while on
The Times
’ annual charity drive, The Hundred Neediest Cases, he was sent for half of each day to
The Times
’ paper mill in the Bush Terminal building in Brooklyn, where he was to familiarize himself with the logistics of newsprint. Soon he became more knowledgeable about this than anybody on
The Times
, and within a few years it was obvious that Sulzberger possessed a great willingness for work and was