The Kingdom and the Power Read Online Free Page A

Adolph Ochs, after death, could live long in the liturgy.
    How long he could live, of course, depended largely on how well his heirs got along in the decades ahead. Nothing would crumble his foundation faster than family squabbles, selfish ambition, or shortsighted goals. His successors would have to make money but not be enticed by it, would have to keep up with trends but not be carried away by them, would have to hire talented people but not people so talented or egocentric that they could become too special as writers or indispensable as editors. Nobody could be indispensable on
The New York Times
, including Ochs.
The Times
would go on indefinitely, he hoped, towering over all individuals and groups in its employ, and his family would work together, repressingany personal animosity for the greater good, and, if possible, choose mates in marriage who would also be wed to
The Times
.
    This was part of Ochs’s dream, and when he died in 1935 during a nostalgic visit to the place in Tennessee where it all began, the fulfillment of his wishes became the responsibility of Sulzberger, the son-in-law, and of Ochs’s daughter, Iphigene.
    Iphigene Sulzberger was a serious, somber-eyed brunette, no great beauty but pleasant to look at, and, beneath a seemingly soft surface, of very firm fiber. As a girl she had been Ochs’s little princess, and as a young woman at Barnard, from which she graduated in 1914, she had been alert and bright, making her father, who had always been impressed by education and envious of it, extremely proud. Her mother, the unconventional member of the family, was a marvelously strange tiny woman with raven hair who wore long dark dresses and walked around the house alone at night, sleeping by day, and who seemed more charmed by the animals around the Ochs household, including the mice, for which she sometimes left bread crumbs in the fireplace, than by the important men who so often came to dinner. She was the daughter of the distinguished Rabbi Isaac Wise of Cincinnati, founder of Hebrew Union College, and Adolph Ochs had met her while visiting the rabbi’s home one day in 1882. They were married a year later, spending their honeymoon in Washington, where they had tea with President Chester Arthur, and Ochs then returned with his bride to Chattanooga, where he was the precocious publisher of the
Chattanooga Times
, gaining experience for his future venture in New York. His wife’s interest in journalism was limited almost entirely to the literary supplement, for which she wrote book reviews, and she had little inclination for cooking or running a home. But this was no problem in Chattanooga because Adolph Ochs’s female relatives there, including his mother, happily occupied and helped run the big house, thus remaining close to Adolph, their pride and joy, and the young Mrs. Ochs, a guest in her own home, was free for such things as riding the new horse that her husband had bought for her soon after their marriage. Far from being displeased with her ethereal quality, Ochs was actually attracted by it, finding it a congenial contrast with his more bourgeois background. The only thing lacking in the early years of their marriage was children, two having died, but nine years after their marriage, in 1892, a baby girl was born and survived, and the ecstatic Ochs named her Iphigene in honor of his wife.
    Young Iphigene shared her mother’s great interest in literature but little of her mother’s romantic detachment. She was her father’s child. Had he permitted it she might have become a journalist, a crusading sort urging reform. As a schoolgirl she had been keenly aware of the slums of New York, and during her family’s many trips to Europe she saw more of the same. At Barnard College, where she majored in economics, she developed what was then considered a socialistic point of view. She joined with other students in advocating a better welfare program in New York and also worked as a volunteer in