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In a sandstone house on Manhattan's upper East Side, the door of a third-floor bedroom opened softly at 7:30 a.m. one day last week. Following a routine of many years' standing, a handsome, grey-haired man, clad in a maroon and navy dressing gown, reached into the hall to pick up the newspaper. Then Arthur Hays Sulzberger hopped back into bed to read his New York Times.
He read it in an oddly methodical way. First he tore off Page One and the editorial page of the bulky newspaper. The moment he had laid aside the body of the paper a masseuse stepped into the room. Reader Sulzberger, having laid his two favorite pages on the pillow, stole glances at them as she pummeled his back. When the rite was over, he sat up, and as the masseuse worked at the fingers of his right hand, stiff from a palm affliction, Sulzberger picked up the detached Page One of the Times in his left. Rapidly, his marble-bright blue eyes took in every story. When the masseuse moved on to his left hand, Sulzberger reached for the editorial page with his right.
Afterwards, Sulzberger put the still-unread portion of the Times on a tilted rack next to his breakfast tray and skimmed through it as he had his bacon & eggs. Now & then he paused to tear out a picture, a story, or a headline, or to circle a word with a red pencil. Done with breakfast and looking over the Times, solicitous Reader Sulzberger donned an expensively tailored grey suit, slipped his neatly folded clippings into his pocket, went downstairs, and in his chauffeurdriven Packard headed for the office. The office is the New York Times, where Arthur Hays Sulzberger is publisher, president and chairman of the board.
The Trial Run? This week, Publisher Sulzberger will observe the 15th anniversary of his election to the biggest job on the best daily newspaper in the world. But the august, 99-year-old New York Times itself will not consider the occasion an item that fits its famed formula, "All the news that's fit to print." This will not in the least surprise or distress Publisher Sulzberger, who facetiously confided to a friend last week: "They're not sure that I've made good yet."
Others (including most of the 3,740 employees of the Times) have already made up their minds. This week Publisher Sulzberger will head for the University of Missouri to receive the annual Missouri Honor Award for "Distinguished Service in Journalism." Next week Publisher Sulzberger will go to Washington, where President Truman will help dedicate the first of a 52-volume series, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson* to the late, great Adolph Simon Ochs, Sulzberger's father-in-law and father (1896-1935) of the modern New York Times. Sulzberger himself suggested the inscription: "Dedicated to the memory of Adolph S. Ochs . . . who by the example of a responsible press enlarged and fortified the Jeffersonian concept of a free press."