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 those D.C. years, Arthur Jr. did not generate a lot of story ideas and did not seem to have the managerial skills necessary to supervise other reporters. Nor did he have exceptional writing abilities. His political sympathies, however, seemed to leave a lasting impression. Michael Kramer recalled watching the presidential election returns in Houston with Sulzberger in 1980: “We sort of clung together in desperation as the Republicans won a major landslide and Reagan came in.” Richard Burt, a former Pentagon official who was then the Times’ defense expert, remembers getting into heated debates with Sulzberger over arms control in the early 1980s. Sulzberger, he said, liked to think of himself as an anti-establishment liberal. “But how can you be anti-establishment when you are a Sulzberger?” Burt asked rhetorically.
Sulzberger Jr. left the D.C. bureau in 1982 and moved back to New York as a Times Metro reporter. Eventually he was shifted over to a position as an assignment editor on the news desk. As Tifft and Jones explain, “Given his workmanlike prose and creative spelling, which made him unfit to blue-pencil copy, the duties of an assignment editor—coming up with story ideas and motivating people to produce them—were more in keeping with his talents.”
It was fortunate for Sulzberger that he was arriving at the Times as the influence of Abe Rosenthal was beginning to ebb. Rosenthal was an up-by-the-bootstraps hardscrabbler who clawed his way to the top of the Times. Arthur Jr. was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and grew up as the presumed heir to one of the country’s most important and richest media families. Rosenthal was deeply patriotic and temperamentally, culturally and socioeconomically allergic to the Woodstock Generation. Sulzberger was proud to the point of vanity to be part of the sixties and its emancipatory spirit. Nor had his efforts to submerge his sense of entitlement, successful on some people, worked with Rosenthal. According to some reports, Rosenthal had little regard for Sulzberger’s talents and informal affectations. Once, barely containing his fury, Rosenthal grabbed a shoeless Sulzberger by the arm and told him never to come into an editorial meeting in his office that way. At another point, Rosenthal’s secretary caught Arthur Jr. reading her boss’s messages outside his office. “Who do you think you are?” she snapped. Sulzberger contritely apologized. “I’m a reporter. I’ve got all the instincts. I can’t help it,” he supposedly replied.
Years later, in 1999, when he had been firmly established as publisher since 1991, Sulzberger finally got his delayed revenge on Rosenthal when he called the older man into his office to tell him that he would no longer be writing his op-ed column. “It’s time,” Sulzberger said, giving little other explanation. After having given his life to the paper, Rosenthal felt betrayed and heartbroken. “I didn’t expect it at all,” he reportedly told his good friend William F. Buckley.
Family control of the New York Times Company allowed the Sulzbergers to make news decisions free of the financial concerns and strictures that burden a publicly accountable company. The downside of family control is that it has not been able to guarantee that the best people rise to its topmost rungs. The all-pervasive climate of nepotism has also encouraged a kind of schizoid denial about the place that family members have in the hierarchy and how others—the several thousand employees—should treat them.
Punch Sulzberger, for instance, would say that family members would have to work harder than most people if they wanted to get to the top. Yet everyone knew this was not true. “The cousins,” as Arthur Jr. and his immediate relatives working for the paper were called, were objects of a solicitude that would undermine frank, open relations based on workplace equality. No matter what nods to merit were made publicly, almost everyone at the Times knew that a member of the Sulzberger clan was going to run the paper. With the coming of the 1980s, that person looked increasingly to be Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
In managing the succession, Punch Sulzberger put the grooming of his son into the hands of Walter Mattson, a top executive who felt strongly that Arthur Jr. needed to be seen as having “earned his spurs” and that he would win respect for knowing what was going on at every level of the operation, from boiler room to bridge. Mattson structured the apprenticeship, of sorts, that would circulate Sulzberger Jr. through the production, advertising, finance and other key departments. This would expose him to almost every job in the organization and every kind of employee—pressmen, truckers, ad salespeople, night production workers. It was a democratizing experience. If he had felt serious self-consciousness over the nepotism that would propel him into one of the most important positions in American journalism, Arthur Jr. nevertheless grew comfortable with second- and third-generation pressmen who got their jobs from their fathers and grandfathers. “I never knew you could use fuck as an adjective, verb and noun, all in the same sentence,” he once quipped about what he had learned from his contact with the paper’s blue-collar workers.
During Sulzberger Jr.’s apprenticeship, Mattson and Sulzberger Sr. coined a new corporate title just for him, that of “assistant publisher,” although it was said that Mattson himself somewhat teasingly referred to Arthur Jr. as “Deputy Dawg.” In 1988, Arthur Jr. was named “deputy publisher,” at which point he began acting as a kind of “publisher-in-waiting,” sharing in major decisions. In fact, he made the final call on many of those decisions, except for those involved with the editorial page, although he is said to have sat frequently in on meetings there. He was still young, just thirty-five, and even younger looking. His own secretary referred to him as “the Kid.”
Almost from day one, Arthur Jr. demonstrated a management style drastically different from his father’s. While Punch had embraced the “hidden hand” approach and went to considerable lengths to avoid direct confrontation, young Arthur very visibly got involved in almost every facet of the paper and relished being in the middle of battle. His father had allowed strong news executives like Rosenthal virtually as much autonomy as they wanted. By contrast, Arthur Jr., a former reporter—although of mediocre accomplishment—was set on running both sides of the paper, business and editorial, in every respect, no matter how far down the management ladder the decisions had been made in the past. A micromanager, he injected himself into decisions about budgets and finances and also got deeply involved in various labor disputes, which Punch had always let others handle. His friend Anna Quindlen, a former Times columnist, chalked it up to self-doubt: “Arthur is going through his whole life with something to prove,” she told Tifft and Jones. “Every day he wakes up and thinks, ‘How can I show them today that I am the man I want to be?’”
By all accounts, those working around Sulzberger Jr. found the experience an exasperating one. He tended to view the world in black-and-white terms, unaware of, or at least
