THE TRUST: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times.

• Author: Polsby, Nelson W.
• Position: Review

THE TRUST: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New By Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones Little Brown, $29.95

READERS MAY REMEMBER THE book Our Crowd, by Stephen Birmingham, published about 30 years ago, a pleasantly gossipy chronicle of New York City's interlocking families of German-Jewish merchant bankers who arrived on the scene in the middle of the 19th century. These dignified worthies pursued a distinctively Teutonic haute-bourgeois way of life, made lots of money, collected art, struggled with anti-Semitism (their own, as well as other people's), built enormous houses on and around Park Avenue, intermarried, and practiced civic virtue over several generations. The Trust, by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, could be regarded as Volume II. Their crowd consists of the German-Jewish Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty that has owned The New York Times since 1896, whose lifestyle, high-mindedness, industriousness, and other social habits conform faithfully to the Our Crowd template.

What justifies the heroic length (896 pages) of this book is the fact that it is mostly about the stewardship of a newspaper, always an object of fascination to the journalistic enterprises that print or broadcast book reviews. As it happens, many books have been written at least in part about the Times, and so some of the stories Tifft and Jones retell here can be found in easily accessible works by, among others, Max Frankel, Gay Talese, Turner Catledge, and Sanford Unger. Two other books, by Elmer Davis and Meyer Berger, have given authorized institutional histories of the Times as of 1921 and 1951, respectively. This work, while drawing on Times archival sources, and numerous interviews, was not authorized, and includes a fair amount of material about such matters as personal animosities among the cast of characters, marital infidelities, and so on, the sort of thing authorized accounts usually omit.

There seems, in the sources I have consulted, to be broad consensus on such matters as the more or less perpetual disharmony between the Times` Washington bureau and national editors in New York; the reluctance by management until recently to let reporters use the name "Abraham" in their bylines; the smaller internal difficulty in publishing The Pentagon Papers than occurred at The Washington Post (owing I suppose, to the lesser risk to the Times' corporate interests); the tendency for diffident and courteous family members, who are always in charge, to surround...