The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times

Rating:
Summary: The Trust is terrific!
Review: I think The Trust is absolutely riveting. It's worth reading for the chapter on the Pentagon Papers alone--a drama that has you on the edge of your seat, even though you know what happened! But The Trust is a lot more than that. The decisions behind what runs, and what does not run, in The New York Times are complex and difficult. For the first time--as far as I can tell--the authors, with the skill and caring of fine novelists, show us who these people are and why they do (and did) the things they do. If you want to know how The New York Times came to be what it is, read this book. It's a story of human courage, frailty, jealousy, ambition, loss and success. In short--the story of a family. It's right out of Balzac. I really loved it.

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly entertaining family biography
Review: This exhaustively researched and really gripping book tells the story of Sulzberger/Ochs family and their relationship to the New York Times. As the family behind the Times, they were players on the stage of American history for most of the twentieth century. The family itself and the characters in it are fascinating-- the subjects range from Iphegene Ochs frustration that she as a woman would never be considered the heir to the throne, to the way that Adolph Ochs wheeled and dealed his way into building the NYT, to the hard family choices behind the publication of the Pentagon papers, to modern attempts from within the company to break the family power. It's a wonderful glimpse at one of the most powerful families of our time. It's worth noting that this book is not a business case history and that the reader will not find an explicit overview of any of the strategies that made the Times what it is.

Rating:
Summary: Grand and compulsively readable
Review: This is a monumental work of multiple biography and institutional history.

It is cumpulsively readable, like a good novel. This book became my trusted companion during many relaxing evening hours and solitary restaurant meals.

It is also admirably crafted. As in their previous book The Patriarch (about the Bingham family of the Louisville Courier-Journal), Tifft and Jones write beautifully and with great skill for handling detail and narrative.

They also have the ability to balance candor and fairness, steering a sober, high-minded course between warts-and-all skepticism and obsequious hagiography. As a reader you sense you are getting a careful portrait of each major character's personality, strengths, foibles, fond traits, and character flaws, while never getting the feeling the authors are doing either a flack job or a hatchet job.

That's not to say certain characters don't come off better than others. For example, the authors seem consistently sympathetic toward the modestly talented, often hapless but usually wise "Punch" Sulzberger, the dominant figure at the Times from the mid 60s through the mid 90s, while casting his wife Carol as a shallow, cold-hearted Nancy Reagan type. But the book rings of truth and authority, and so one generally trusts the authors' assessments.

While this book overwhelmingly is concerned with people, not events, it provides a valuable account of the internal debates over whether and how to publish the Pentagon Papers. It also illustrates the paper's vigorous post-war anti-communism, its cozy relationship with the Eisenhower administration, its internal battles over editorial voice during the political and cultural upheavals of the 1970s, and its generational differences over homosexuality (contrasting Punch's bigotry with his son and successor Arthur Jr.'s determination to make the Times a progressive place for gays to work). Two consistent threads run throughout the book: the Sulzbergers' ambivalence over their Jewish heritage, and their determination to place journalistic excellence and family control of the paper over the business strategems and high profits necessary to please Wall Street.

This book will be of great interest to journalism junkies. But it also commends itself to all lovers of serious biography.

Rating:
Summary: Beside the Times
Review: This massive chronicle of the Ochs-Sulzbergers and their stewardship of the New York Times gets off to a fascinating start, dramatizing Adolph Ochs' purchase of the then nothing New-York Times and detailing his wildly successful efforts to build a paper of note.

But once Ochs vanishes from the narrative, bequeathing the editorship to son-in-law Arthur Sulzberger, the book slowly loses steam. Focus shifts from the newsroom to the myriad Ochs-Sulzberger relatives and their beside-the-Times activities, in response to which a reader can only offer a heartfelt shrug.

In defense of The Trust it has been pointed out that the authors set out to write about the family rather than the paper, but apparently there's little of inherent interest in the Ochs-Sulzbergers outside the Times. Down the backstretch, the authors seem as bored as the reader, dutifully recounting the gossipy infighting among far-flung cousins.

The Trust, excellent as much of it is, comes to seem unfortunately conceived -- the newsroom coverage is exemplary, but the beside the Times gossip grows quickly tiresome.