Free Behind the Times by Edwin Diamond Page B

reconstruction of the Shatila-Sabra massacre appeared in the
Times
of September 26, 1982. The article stirred near unanimous condemnation of Israel, and helped Friedman win a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. It also reaffirmed the conviction of some American Jews that the
Times
was “anti-Israel.” The contradictory twin notions that the
Times
was a “Jewish paper” and that the
Times
was “anti-Zionist” endured through the decades. Subscribers to the first notion had to reconsider theirposition when Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., succeeded his father in 1992. Young Arthur had been confirmed at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on the Upper East Side of New York City, in the religion of his mother and her second husband.
    Whatever other burdens Arthur inherited when he took charge of the
Times
, one aspect of “the Jewish paper” issue had at last been put to rest. The
Times
of the 1990s was being run by an Episcopalian. Perhaps the
Times
, starting at the top with the family and moving down through the reporting ranks, had been overly sensitive. But Adolph Ochs, his son-in-law AHS, and his grandson Punch were hardly guilty of reflexively imagining the worst, or of sensing slights where none existed (another supposed “Jewish trait”). The family, try as it might to be private and low profile, occupied a prominent position in a keenly competitive field. The
Times
attracted attention; as it grew and flourished, the scrutiny of its “Jewish roots” also increased, sometimes for purely commercial reasons.
    The
Times’
major rival as the quality morning paper in the middle third of the century was the
New York Herald Tribune.
The
Herald Tribune
had a noble history—Horace Greeley was a cofounder, and by tradition it was the paper of the Republican upper classes in the city. Its owners in the years between the wars werethe Reids, a family that seemingly wandered out of the Social Register and into a daytime soap opera. The scion, the handsome Ogden Reid, became an alcoholic; his ambitious wife, Helen Reid, was a former secretary who married the boss’s son; in her later years, she balanced running the paper, caring for her ailing husband, and raising their two sons to succeed their father. After Ogden Reid’s death in 1947, the brothers, Whitelaw and Ogden (known respectively to
Herald Trib
people as the White Prince and the Dark Prince), engaged in a fratricidal struggle for control of the paper, only to see a third party supplant them both.
    These private dramas didn’t stop Helen Reid from patronizing the family that owned the
Times.
She tried to hire away Turner Catledge, the
Times’
editor, by promising him a chance to move “in a different social circle … from those Jews on Forty-third Street.” (The genial Catledge later suggested her words might have been just “a slip of the tongue.”)
    It wasn’t hard to figure out what Helen Reid thought of that “social circle.” Ochs’s
Times
ran a regular column listing the arrival of allout-of-town buyers in the city clothing industry, a practice that continued for two decades after his death. The
Herald Tribune
disdained the “rag trade.” William Robinson, the Reids’ business manager in the late 1940s, once explained that almost half of the
Times’
readership (around 500,000 at the time) consisted of what he called “transient” readers. As Robinson broke down the figures, 75,000 readers bought the
Times
solely for its classified ads; a second group of about the same size bought the
Times
for its “business service in the apparel trades,” and a third group of some 50,000 Jews read the
Times
obituary columns “to be sure they will know of the passing of relatives and friends.” Pulled out of thin air, the figures supported Robinson’s preordained conclusion: 200,000 copies were bought for “a reason other than the news and editorial content of the
Times.
” Because the
Herald Tribune
’s own circulation was around 300,000 at the time,