Can Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., save the Times—and himself?

[im10ashus]

A great article in The New Yorker this morning about Sulzberger.


Janet Robinson, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and Bill Keller

Last month at the Chelsea Piers sports complex, a group that included corporate leaders, bankers, and teachers held a black-tie benefit dinner to celebrate Outward Bound, and to honor the winner of the award named for its founder, Kurt Hahn. The speakers talked about Hahn’s belief in a person’s “inner strengths,” recounted gruelling outdoor experiences, and gave solemn thanks for the sort of campfire encounter sessions they had come to value at Outward Bound. Throughout the evening, people greeted each other with hugs, and even tears; but there was silence when the award for furthering “the Outward Bound mission” was presented to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the chairman of the New York Times Company and publisher of the Times. Sulzberger was wryly introduced by a friend—“I found his infectious enthusiasm to be irritating when I was dangling over a cliff,” she said—and then Sulzberger, a youthful-looking man of fifty-four, bounded to the microphone. With his hands on his hips, and his jacket unbuttoned, Sulzberger recalled how, when he was sixteen, Outward Bound changed his life. He had felt lost and insecure, he said—a child of divorce, shuttling between two homes—and, alone in the wilderness, with the help of Outward Bound mentors, he learned self-reliance. “I’ve spent a good portion of my life trying to give back to Outward Bound something it gave to me,” he said, and spoke of those “I am so blessed to call comrades,” and of discovering “the truth about ourselves.” His cousin Dan Cohen, who is his closest friend, said, “He was uncertain, as many of us are growing up. Can we handle ourselves in adversity? He had been bounced around. He sort of found a center in this.”

Sulzberger can be just as passionate about journalism and the Times, the newspaper that his family has controlled since 1896. But there his “infectious enthusiasm” sometimes strikes people as immature or sarcastic. Although he occupies perhaps the most august position in the nation’s press establishment, he seems to lack the weighty seriousness of his predecessors, among them Adolph Ochs, the paper’s founder; Orvil Dryfoos; and his father, Arthur (Punch) Sulzberger. This was evident on the afternoon of September 29th, when the Times reporter Judith Miller was released from a Virginia jail, after being held for eighty-five days because she had refused to name a source. Sulzberger and the paper’s executive editor, Bill Keller, waited outside the prison to greet her, but federal marshals wanted Miller to leave in handcuffs and shackles. Suspecting that photographers were waiting, Miller protested; instead, the marshals put her in the back seat of an S.U.V. with tinted windows. The S.U.V. was trailed by Miller’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, in one car and Sulzberger and Keller in a second car. When the marshals stopped to let Miller out, Sulzberger told his driver to pull up alongside the S.U.V. He jumped out and, unable to see through the dark glass, excitedly tapped at the back window. “Judy!” he said. “Judy! It’s me!”

“Get away from the vehicle, sir!” a marshal said, according to Miller.

Bennett, a veteran of many of Washington’s largest legal battles, was surprised. “I said to myself, ‘It sure seems odd for the publisher of the New York Times! ’ ”

cont'd...

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051219fa_fact