Free Behind the Times by Edwin Diamond

showing the paper’s alleged inattention to the Nazi noose closing on German Jews; in fact, the coverage was no more criminal than any other news organization’s over the same period. Jewish critics of the
Times
were on firmer ground in the Middle East. Long after Ochs’s death, in the years when Arthur Hays Sulzberger was publisher, the
Times
continued to oppose the idea of a Zionist homeland. In AHS’s time, if anything, the paper went through ever greater contortions over the “Jewish question.” The top editorships were occupied as if by custom by men with unmistakably Anglo-Saxonnames—Edwin James, Turner Catledge, and, in the Washington bureau, Arthur Krock (a Jewish convert to the Episcopal Church) and James Reston. As late as the 1950s, Catledge remembered, AHS cautioned that he didn’t want people to think of the
Times
as a “Jewish newspaper.” In the 1970s Punch Sulzberger repeated almost the same words to Leonard Silk, the
Times
economics writer, and his son, Mark Silk. The
Times
did not have a Jewish chief editor until the late 1960s, when Abe Rosenthal became managing editor. Even then, his name appeared on the masthead as A. M. Rosenthal—the same form used in his byline when he was a correspondent—and not as Abraham Michael Rosenthal, or Abraham M. Rosenthal. Other bylines were similarly deracinated; the
Times’
exceptional labor reporter Abraham Henry Raskin appeared as A. H. Raskin, the metro desk reporter Myron Abba Farber became M. A. Farber.
    Such stories have been told and retold by
Times
people, usually with a knowing shake of the head. In the early 1960s, Ben Franklin, then a young reporter in the Washington bureau, claimed that he witnessed an example of what he called the “Jewish craziness.” The newly hired Franklin was on his first orientation trip to the home office in New York. “As soon as the city edition came up on hand trucks from the pressroom,” Franklin remembered, “I saw two copy boys begin to do their ‘Jew-Arab count.’ Using string measures, one would scan the paragraphs of Middle East orIsraeli news stories, if there were any, and break down the coverage in column inches, and then read off the numbers for the other copy boy to record on a sheet of paper: ‘Jew … Arab … Arab … Jew … Jew … Jew … Arab …’ ” The editors, Franklin said, concluding his incredible tale, “wanted to have equal inches at the end of week, or else a bell would go off, like a smoke alarm.”
    Under Punch Sulzberger some of these unwritten rules gradually were bent and, in some cases, broken. Unfolding news events in the 1960s, more than the new publisher’s dictates, pushed the
Times
forward. According to E. Clifton Daniel, who was the paper’s managing editor at the time, the
Times’
final rejection of—in Daniel’s words—“Ochs’s antizionism” was forced by the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel moved on three fronts against the Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians. “The war came at a critical point in Punch’s thinking,” Daniel says. “Here was Jewish nationalism on the rise; there was a need for the
Times
to change and it did.”
    The changes occurred gradually. Initially, the most visible sign ofmovement was signaled by Punch Sulzberger’s choices for senior editors of the paper. Abe Rosenthal, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, rose to the top of the editorial masthead in 1970. He served for almost two decades as Punch Sulzberger’s editor. Rosenthal was replaced by Max Frankel, a refugee from Nazi Germany. By 1990 Sulzberger had effectively designated Joe Lelyveld, the son of a rabbi from Cincinnati, to be Frankel’s successor. Many
Times
people were convinced that, as one executive put it, “there would never be a non-Jewish editor of the
Times
again in our lifetimes.” This man did not intend to imply there was anything sinister or cabalistic in such a development. In New York, a city with one of the largest Jewish communities in