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

Rating:
Summary: The story of the family dynasty behind the headlines
Review: I listened to this book on cassette tape, which is an abridged version of the book. It's very interesting, well presented, and professionally recorded, spoken by Steve Tom, who has a pleasantly authoritative voice. It comes on four tapes, recorded front and back. Total playing time is about 6 hours. There's no accompanying music, as is the case with many fictional books on tape, except for the transitions that ends one side and begins another.

The book tells the story of how Adolph Ochs, shortly after the Civil War, started both a newspaper and a family dynasty that became the New York Times. Their family tree, their Jewish culture, and their approach to the paper, which has been described by many others, is told here with names, anecdotes, and quotes.

The abridged version of the story (I haven't read the book) spends more time with the concern of which member of the each successive generation would assume control, and less with editorial decisions than you might think. The earliest stories of Adolph Ochs are an insight into the financials decisions that helped him achieve the coup of siezing control of the paper, and his marriage to the daughter of the rabbi who was leading the Jewish Reformation movement in America in the late 19th century lends insight into the family culture.

The cassette box indicated that this story explores such significant events as the Holocaust, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate. Each is mentioned on the tape, but I found that only the Pentagon Papers story had any significant treatment. As to the others, if you weren't paying attention, you'd miss any mention of them at all. Perhaps the books has more.

A big warning regarding foul language: the first three cassettes had none that I recall, but the fourth cassette, which begins to deal with the 1980's up to the time the book was written, suddenly assaults the listener with a several occurrences of foul language. It's one thing to see these words in printed form, quite another to have the narrator speak them out loud on the tape. The "f" word and "s" word are not only used in direct quotes from the family's exclamations, but are also used to graphically describe homosexual behavior in one passage that is quite graphic. The fourth cassette should be rated "R" as a minimum, if not worse. Consider yourself warned. Don't just pop these cassettes into the car tape deck during the family vacation.

The bottom line: if you're a NYT subscriber, the story told here is probably of great interest to you. If you follow news at all, you probably know of the control that the New York Times exerts in American media, and would benefit from knowing more about the source of much of America's news.

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.