The Times Pays Tribute to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger

From start to finish he was Punch, just Punch. It is how everyone knew him during his years as chairman and chief executive of The New York Times Company and publisher of its flagship newspaper.

That boyhood nickname traveled with him throughout a life that ended last Saturday when he died at 86 after years of illness. And it was how he was referred to by relatives and former colleagues at a remembrance that was true to a man who prized orderliness and who, by all accounts, had scant interest in having people go on and on about him.

Held in an event space attached to the newspaper, and attended by hundreds of present and former employees, the ceremony lasted barely 40 minutes. It even began two minutes early — “in his honor,” said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., his son and successor as publisher and company chairman.

There was much to say about Punch Sulzberger’s time as publisher, from his putting the newspaper on a secure financial footing to his agreeing in 1971, despite initial reluctance, to publish the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the American descent into a deepening Vietnam War. That decision, considered his finest moment by many journalists and historians, led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the primacy of a free press over government’s desire to preserve secrecy.

Max Frankel, a former Times executive editor, described Mr. Sulzberger as having led “a bloody revolution” with his innovations at the newspaper. But this was a circumscribed revolutionary spirit.

“Punch was a Marine, radical only in his devotion to The Times,” Mr. Frankel said. “His revolutions were not ideological, or even intellectual. In truth, some were forced on him. His contributions were born of an uncommon common sense, better known as wisdom.”

The nickname Punch was bestowed on Mr. Sulzberger by his father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who saw the boy as a counterpoint to one of his older sisters, Judith, called Judy.

More than an evocation of the newspaperman, the gathering was a celebration of the man himself, one described with words like decisive, gentle, modest and — an attribute evoked time and again — funny.

His jokes came “often at his own expense,” said Donald Graham, chief executive and chairman of The Washington Post Company. His mother, Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Post who died in 2001, was a good friend of Mr. Sulzberger. Modesty is not a conspicuous characteristic among publishers, Mr. Graham said, especially among “us natural-born publishers,” inheritors of newspapers. But Mr. Sulzberger, he said, “remained modest after achieving great success.”

Walter E. Mattson, a former Times Company president, described a boardroom of an earlier era, dominated by men forever in suits. He recalled rushing once to a board meeting in shirt sleeves, having forgotten his jacket. “Punch looked at the consternation on my face, stood up, took off his suit coat and hung it on the back of his chair,” Mr. Mattson said. “He never said a word.”

A personal reminiscence involving the Pentagon Papers was provided by one of Mr. Sulzberger’s daughters, Cathy. Her father feared that a prison cell might well be in his future for having published classified documents. He cut short a trip to England to deal with the legal fallout.

The night he returned, he cooked dinner on a grill, but burned everything to a crisp. “We dined that evening on salami sandwiches,” Ms. Sulzberger said, “as he contemplated what prison food might be like.”

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. opened and closed the ceremony. Of his father, he said: “He would probably find some joke to sidestep all the talk about his being one of the great journalistic figures of his time. But he was.”

The program for the event was a 14-page newspaper, filled with recollections of Mr. Sulzberger from employees, past and present, and with a few letters to the editor that he used to write under the name “A. Sock,” a play on Punch.

On the front page was a photo of Mr. Sulzberger in the Times press room, above an excerpt from a speech that he gave to a business group in 1977. “The business of America is freedom,” he said then. “For the journalist, that means the freedom to get to the root of the truth, the freedom to criticize, the freedom to goad and stimulate every institution in our society, including our own.”

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, 1926 - 2012: Arthur O. Sulzberger, Publisher Who Transformed Times, Dies at 86

Barton Silverman/The New York TimesRemembering Arthur Ochs Sulzberger: As publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger saw the paper through a trying strike, expanded its sections and printed the Pentagon Papers.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who guided The New York Times and its parent company through a long, sometimes turbulent period of expansion and change on a scale not seen since the newspaper’s founding in 1851, died early Saturday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 86.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger in 1992, the year he relinquished the position of publisher to his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.  The portrait in the background is of his grandfather, Adolph S. Ochs, who bought The New York Times in 1896. More Photos »

His death, after a long illness, was announced by his family.

Mr. Sulzberger’s tenure, as publisher of the newspaper and as chairman and chief executive of The New York Times Company, reached across 34 years, from the heyday of postwar America to the twilight of the 20th century, from the era of hot lead and Linotype machines to the birth of the digital world.

The paper he took over as publisher in 1963 was the paper it had been for decades: respected and influential, often setting the national agenda. But it was also in precarious financial condition and somewhat insular, having been a tightly held family operation since 1896, when it was bought by his grandfather Adolph S. Ochs.

By the 1990s, when Mr. Sulzberger passed the reins to his son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., first as publisher in 1992 and then as chairman in 1997, the enterprise had been transformed. The Times was now national in scope, distributed from coast to coast, and it had become the heart of a diversified, multibillion-dollar media operation that came to encompass newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations and online ventures.

The expansion reflected Mr. Sulzberger’s belief that a news organization, above all, had to be profitable if it hoped to maintain a vibrant, independent voice. As John F. Akers, a retired chairman of I.B.M. and for many years a Times Company board member, put it, “Making money so that you could continue to do good journalism was always a fundamental part of the thinking.”

On Saturday, President Obama praised Mr. Sulzberger as “a firm believer in the importance of a free and independent press, one that isn’t afraid to seek the truth, hold those in power accountable and tell the stories that need to be told.”

Mr. Sulzberger’s insistence on independence was shown in his decision in 1971 to publish a secret government history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. It was a defining moment for him and, in the view of many journalists and historians, his finest.

In thousands of pages, this highly classified archive detailed Washington’s legacy of deceit and evasion as it stumbled through an unpopular war. When the Pentagon Papers were divulged in a series of articles in June 1971, an embarrassed Nixon administration demanded that the series be stopped immediately, citing national security considerations. The Times refused, on First Amendment grounds, and won its case in the United States Supreme Court in a landmark ruling on press freedom.

Mr. Sulzberger reshaped The Times. In the mid-1970s, another financially difficult period in which he might have chosen to retrench, he expanded the paper to four sections from two, creating separate sections for metropolitan and business news and introducing new ones oriented toward consumers.

They were a gamble, begun in the hope of attracting new readers, especially women, and advertisers.

Some critics dismissed the feature sections as unworthy of a serious newspaper. But the sections — SportsMonday, Science Times, Living, Home and Weekend — were an instant success, without compromising the paper’s hard-news core. They were widely imitated.

Over the next two decades, a billion-dollar investment in new printing facilities made still more innovations possible, among them a national edition, special regional editions and the daily use of color photos and graphics.

“Adolph Ochs is remembered as the one who founded this great enterprise,” Richard L. Gelb, a longtime member of the Times board, said in 1997, when Mr. Sulzberger stepped down as chairman. “Arthur Ochs Sulzberger will be remembered as the one who secured it, renewed it and lifted it to ever-higher levels of achievement.”

Even while the enterprise was put on a secure financial footing, ultimate control never passed from the Sulzberger family. It managed to avoid the internal strife and jealousies that tore apart other newspaper dynasties and traumatized their companies.

At Mr. Sulzberger’s death, The Times was being run by a fourth generation of his family, a rarity in an age when the management of most American newspapers is determined by distant corporate boards. A family trust, unaffected by his death, guarantees continued control by Adolph Ochs’s descendants.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 29, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the New York Times stock holdings owned by Sulzberger family members. The family’s total holdings are 15 percent; they do not own 15 percent of Class A shares.