The Kingdom and the Power Read Online Free

learning fast. He seemed constantly busy, remaining late at his office studying the complicated tabulated reports of the various departments within the building, always appearing at
The Times
on Sundays and holidays if for no other reason than to walk around the place, to talk to people, and, as he once put it, “to register the fact that I wasn’t playing polo with the boss’s money.”
    By the late Twenties, with Adolph Ochs slowing down as he approached seventy, Sulzberger’s authority increased, although never to a point of presumption. Once when Sulzberger went a bit far Ochs reminded him, “I’m not dead yet.” And Ochs became irritated on another occasion when he learned that Sulzberger, whose taxicab had been delayed by Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, had suggested to an editor that
The Times
might print a paragraph or two about the congestion. While Ochs would never alter news to accommodate advertisers, he was nonetheless a practical man, and he saw no reason to risk offending Macy’s just because his son-in-law had gotten into a traffic jam. There were other things about Sulzberger, too, that grated on Ochs in the beginning, small things that were not the result of any disaffection but were inspired rather by their difference in style and by Ochs’s desire to have
The Times
run as he wished not only until his death, but long after it.
    This was one reason why, in his final years, Ochs became almost obsessed by his last will and testament, consulting endlessly with his lawyer lest there be confusion about his ultimate dream:
The New York Times
must, upon his death, be controlled only by his immediate family, and in turn by their families, and it would be the responsibility of them all to govern during their lifetime with the same dedication that he had during his. But he knew also that this was the predictable dying wish of many men who had established dynasties, it having possibly been the same with Joseph Pulitzer, the great publisher of the
World
, who died in 1911. But by 1931 Pulitzer’s heirs had sold the
World
to Scripps-Howard. This fact,occurring so shortly before Ochs’s own death, had caused him particular despondency. For the
World
had been a remarkable combination of writing and reporting, urbanity and intelligence, and what hurt it was not so much an editorial decline as the mismanagement of its business side. Ochs knew that a talented and idealistic staff alone could not guide
The Times
through future decades. The paper also had to make money. Ochs’s genius had been not only in the type of newspaper he created but in the fact that he had made such a newspaper pay. Of course Ochs had worked hard, being an indomitable little man with no interests outside his newspaper and with no doubt that news, as he presented it, was a durable and salable commodity. But with his business acumen Ochs had an instinct for avoiding the temptations of business, and he hoped his heirs would also inherit some of this. During Ochs’s earliest days in New York, for example, he was so short of money that, to save a few pennies, he would sometimes wander through
The Times
shutting off the lights over desks not in use—and
yet
, when a prominent New Yorker, a trusted friend, offered him a contract for $150,000 worth of municipal advertising with no strings attached, Ochs refused. He did so on the theory that he needed the revenue so desperately that he might adjust his operation to the windfall and he was unwilling to trust himself as to what he might do if, after that had happened, he was threatened with a cancellation of the contract. Ochs was a very human man with his share of human frailties and, knowing this, he was wary of the slightest twitch of temptation in himself. As for his heirs, he could only hope that they too would possess the wisdom to resist, and would run
The Times
not merely for profit but somewhat along the business lines of a great church, gilding the wealth with virtue, and in such a place