Arthur Ochs Sulzberger

Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger, Sr., born February 5, 1926, to a prominent media and publishing family, is himself an American publisher and businessman. He succeeded his father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and maternal grandfather as publisher and chairman of the New York Times in 1963, passing the positions to his son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. in 1992.

Biography

He was born on February 5, 1926 in New York City to Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Iphigene Bertha Ochs (daughter of Adolph Ochs, the former publisher and owner of The New York Times and The Chattanooga Times). Sulzberger graduated from the Loomis Institute and then enlisted into the United States Marine Corps during World War II serving from 1944 to 1946, in the Pacific Theater. He married Barbara Winslow Grant (of mostly Scottish and English origin) on July 2, 1948 in a civil ceremony at her parents' home in Purchase, New York. He earned a B.A. degree in English and History in 1951 at Columbia University. As a Marine Forces Reserve he was recalled to active duty during the Korean War. Following completion of officer training, he saw duty in Korea and then in Washington, D.C., before being inactivated. He divorced Barbara Grant Sulzberger in 1956.

He became publisher of The Times in 1963, after the death of his brother-in-law, Orvil Dryfoos. In the 1960s Sulzberger built a large news-gathering staff at The Times, and was publisher when the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for publishing The Pentagon Papers. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988. His son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. succeeded him as the newspaper's publisher in 1992. Sulzberger remained chairman of The New York Times Company until October 1997. In 2005, the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) honored Sulzberger with the Katharine Graham Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1996, he married Allison Cowles, widow of William H. Cowles, 3rd., part of the Cowles family which owns The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash.

Quotes about Sulzberger

• "Eventually, Sulzberger, then in London, rejecting the views of some of his colleagues in senior management as well as the dire warnings of his outside counsel, made the call to accept the risks of publication rather than those of silence. On Sunday, June 13, [1971], the Times published the first in a series of seven articles about the Pentagon Papers. In retrospect, the decision may seem obvious, but it was by no means an easy one at the time, and it remains one for which Sulzberger deserves enormous credit." Floyd Abrams.

References

• Behind the Times: Inside the New New York Times, by Edwin Diamond. Villard Books.
• The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times, by Alex S. Jones, Susan E. Tifft. Back Bay Books (2000), ISBN 0-316-83631-1.