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Punch Sulzberger became publisher in 1963. A year later, he put a New York editor in control of the Washington bureau. Reston told Sulzberger that he could not remain bureau chief under these circumstances; Sulzberger responded by making Reston an associate editor, but allowed him to choose Tom Wicker as his successor. With an "awareness of corporate whimsy, his knowledge of how executive wives can sometimes build the bridges that can more tightly bind their husbands," Reston suggested that the Wickers accompany the Sulzbergers on a month's visit to Europe. According to Talese's rather far-fetched account, Reston was betting that the trip would lay the foundation for a friendship that would eventually enable Wicker to maintain most of the bureau's autonomy.
Talese portrays Sulzberger as a competent young man anxious to centralize and modernize the Times to make it more manageable. Being "born to the title, he had grown up within the Times, had skipped through its corridors as a child. He was never awed by the great editors that he met there, for they had always smiled at him, seemed happy to see him, treated him like a little prince in a palace and he developed early in life a sunny, amiable disposition." According to Talese, Sulzberger lacks the ambition and anxieties that Talese dislikes in others.
Throughout the narrative, Talese analyzes the ambitions and anxieties of figures high and low in the Times hierarchy. Managing Editor Clifton Daniel's fortunes have declined under Punch, Talese figures, but the publisher's cousin, John Oakes, editor of the editorial page, remains in favor, "attacking issues with an aggressiveness that Adolph Ochs would have never tolerated, and sniping at important people once regarded within the Times as 'sacred cows.'" Oakes, says Talese, enjoys controversy and has "what amounts to total freedom" to provoke it.
Fascinating News. Times critics, says Talese, have similar freedom. When the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center opened in 1966, the Times' architecture, music, dance and art critics all took it to task. This pained many Times executives, anxious to promote New York City whenever possible. "My God, couldn't they find anything good to write about?" said the anguished Punch Sulzberger. Still, Talese emphasizes that Sulzberger "expressed his feelings to a few executives, but there was no hint of restraining the critics."
Though he is in a sense a rebel against the old Times, Talese emphatically says that he is not trying to "get" the newspaper for any past grudges. "I was trained by the Times and when I left the paper I cried." He devoted nearly three years to the book not to even any scores but because "I consider the New York Times news. Fascinating news. It has been sitting in judgment of America for more than a century and it, too, should be looked at in detail with the same objectivity."
Talese's objectivity is certainly not objectivity in the old-fashioned Times sense. Highly sensitive to office politics and deeply suspicious of "tactics and intrigue," he sometimes overinterprets minor and innocent situations. His dramatic writing style, which makes the book fascinating reading, also gives it a tone too conspiratorial and Machiavellian to be really convincing.