some of the city’s settlement houses. Her father admired her idealism but he was sometimes startled by the assertive manner in which she expressed her opinions. One day he introduced her to a passage in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography in which Poor Richard, discussing the futility of trying to win arguments by dogmatic force alone, advocated instead the use of such softer phrases as “it appears to me at present” or “I imagine” or “I apprehend”—and this approach in conversation, reinforced by Ochs’s own example of never raising his voice and his tolerant way in correcting Iphigene (“perhaps you had better look into that a little more”), gradually influenced her girlhood and it grew as she got older to a point where people were impressed by her reasonable nature, mistaking it sometimes for timidity.
No perceptive editor on
The Times
, however, made this mistake, particularly after Ochs’s death. It was not that Iphigene Sulzberger was ever intrusive. In fact she was hardly ever seen in the newsroom and her visits to the
Times
building were usually limited to social calls to her husband’s office or to meetings of
The Times
’ board of directors. And yet the impression was shared by nearly all senior
Times
men that Iphigene, in her gentle way, her friendly hints and reminders, in her very existence as Ochs’s only offspring and the direct heir to his fortune, exerted a tremendous influence on the character of
The Times
and on the three men who had followed her father to the top—her husband Arthur Hays Sulzberger, her son-in-law Orvil Dryfoos, and finally, in 1964, her son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. She was the living link in their lives with the spirit of Ochs, and during the century she had grown from Ochs’s little princess into the grande dame of
The Times
, its good gray lady, and the editors and executives were courtly in her presence and mindful in her absence, and some of them would quote from her favorite stories or observations when they made speeches in public. One of her favorite stories that they used was the medieval tale about atraveler who meets three stonecutters along a road one day and asks each of them what he is doing. The first stonecutter says, “I am cutting stone.” The second stonecutter, when the question is repeated, replies, “I am making a corner stone.” But when the question is asked of the third stonecutter, he answers, “I am building a cathedral.” The strength of
The New York Times
, Iphigene Sulzberger always said, lies in the fact that most of its staff are cathedral-builders, not stonecutters. And of all the cathedral-builders to join
The Times
in the last twenty-five years, perhaps her favorite was James Reston.
She admired his idealism, his devotion to
The Times
and the nation, his solid middle-class values that were not unlike those of her father. Reston and Ochs had never met, their generations separated by a half-century, but both had made their own way from the smaller cities to the Eastern seaboard, and both had been guided by many of the same principles and inspirations. Much of what Ochs had understood and admired in America, but could never put into words, would later be written by Reston, and if Adolph Ochs had lived long enough to read Reston and know him personally he would have undoubtedly shared Iphigene’s enthusiasm for him. Reston was just right for
The Times
. His writing expressed faith in the nation’s future, was gentle with the Establishment—he did not rock the boat. He wrote interestingly, often humorously without being excessively cutting or clever. Reston, like Ochs, saw the spirit of America not in the large cities with their teeming tenements, their angry demonstrators and tough labor unions, but rather in the smaller towns with their God-fearing families, their sandlots and Rotary clubs. Having emerged from this America, and having accepted it, James Reston reflected much of its mood in his writing, and thus his America