Adolph Ochs

Arthur Sulzberger, who everyone calls Punch, is 45 years old.

He's a former Marine and the man who runs the paper his grandfather bought in 1896.

For three months, his reporters have been working in secret on two floors of the New York Hilton Hotel.

They have 7,000 pages of a top secret history of the Vietnam War written inside the Defense Department and copied without permission by a former Pentagon analyst named Daniel Ellsberg.

All three go into the company vault.

The Times has locked a story away before.

In 1908, Salzberger's grandfather, Adolf Ochs, killed an interview with the German Kaiser after President Teddy Roosevelt objected to it, and he left it in his safe for 31 years.

At six o'clock Saturday evening, the presses run the Sunday paper and the front page belongs to Tricia Nixon's wedding in the Rose Garden.

So his connections were huge as well.

Along with Lasker, they then recruited Adolph Ochs.

Now, Adolph Ochs at the time, he was from the South, but he was now the owner of the New York Times.

This guy, he liked he liked to put down the blacks as well.

But he really got involved in this thing.

So this is the year of the fire.

The publisher Adolph Ox went for a walk after a big Christmas Day dinner.

He came across a man, an orphan man is how they described this person, in need outside of a YMCA.

He gave that man a little bit of money, a job in the Times distribution department, and then he felt really good about himself after that act.

And so I did a little bit of research, like a year of archival work.

And I got a little obsessed with this story.

And I couldn't find anything that Ox had ever written or said, you know, that supported this myth or this story.

And also, wasn't he Jewish?

Yeah, you know, you mentioned the New York Times and the story behind the rise of the New York Times actually kind of plays a surprisingly central role in your book.

So can you share a little bit more about who Adolph Ochs was, how he transformed the Times into the institution that we recognize it today, and why it mattered in the public response to the Triangle Fire?

Yeah, so Adolph Ox is a fascinating person, and he really is at the heart of the story, as you say.

He's also someone who I don't think many people know much about.

I mean, even within journalism history circles, he's not as popular as a Pulitzer or a Hearst.

But, I mean, you did a fantastic episode some time ago on Henry Raymond and George Jones, who were the first founding owners of the Times.

And so they came in the 1850s, and Adolph Ox came right after them in 1896.

And Ox is a person who made the paper really into the New York Times we recognize today.

Um, the founder of the dynasty I was just talking about was a German Jewish immigrant to America, a m- m- man who loved America and appreciated all that it had done for him.

His name was A- Adolph Ochs, and he decided that he would report the news without fear or favor.

That was his famous proclamation.

He wrote it in The New York Times as a business announcement, and he kept to his word.

Reston's column hit its stride right before TV or before TV mattered in the news.

Adolph Ox would have been proud.

From Cincinnati.

He looked in disgust at what was going on in the media of his time.

Certain giving confidence to those who wanted to start war with Spain.

This paper will not soil your breakfast linen, was Adolf Och's cry.

Ox had no college education.

He didn't pretend to be a writer or a pundit.