ARCADIA
bathroom in that OWO apartment), the scale of the financial Everest one would have to climb becomes clear.
When it opened in 1906, the building was a
metaphor for the empire that provided the political military collateral needed to enforce the Pax Britannica. Just as Sargent painted ‘swagger’ portraits of the gilded elite of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so this was a ‘swagger’ building. As statistics attest, it was colossal: 1,100 offices, 2½ miles of corridors, 19,000 feet of grilles in the floor to conceal the cables for telephones, 50 acres of plaster ceilings, 17 miles of plaster cornicing, and a kitchen capable of serving 1,000 lunches a day. Viewed from a passing omnibus, hansom cab or one of the new-fangled horseless car- riages, the gleaming new citadel of Portland stone on Whitehall must have seemed capa- ble of housing the entire government rather than just a single department. In 2016 it was acquired by the Hinduja Group and an old friend of mine was tasked with publishing a history of this Whitehall grande dame. She turned to me to write it, and one grey London afternoon I turned up for the first of a number of hard-hat tours of the site. After 110 years it was again a fitting symbol of the political system that had begat it – following the disintegration of the empire it once policed, it was like the rusting hulk of an ancient ocean liner beached and left be- hind by the receding tides of history. The once bustling corridors along which messenger boys used to scurry between de- partments were empty, echoing and coated with a layer of brick dust. Peering down into the interior light well revealed that a series of roofs had been stripped away from lower floors like the lid of a giant tin of sardines. Scaffolding and walkways made of rough- hewn metal-ended planks of wood bridged spaces filled with piles of rubble and twisted iron. Balancing on bare joists, I navigated rooms from which floors were missing and roamed the roofline where I did my best to imagine a time when penthouses and hotel bars would rise here.
And then, amid the debris and deafening noise of a major construction site, a door would open, and I would be vouchsafed a gaze along an enfilade of interconnecting rooms overlooking Whitehall, or enter a tow- ering room with which the chiefs of imperial staff would have been familiar, and through which history itself – in the varied forms of Lloyd George, Churchill and Profumo, inter
alia – once strode. It was here that MIs 5 and 6 were born and two world wars were run. Having seen this, I can understand that one is buying not just a square foot of real es- tate, but a square foot of history. And, as yet, I know of no way to calculate the value, let alone the price, of that. S
Though not specifically groomed for the DYNASTIES
THE FAMILY JOURNAL Jamie Malanowski
IN SOME JOBS, success is measured in tro- phies; in some, profits; in some, survival. In the very narrow category of chairman of the New York Times Company and publisher of its globally influential flagship newspaper, there is only one real measurement: legacy. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger – an art lover and
ex-combat marine nicknamed Punch – took over the paper in 1963 aged 37; when he retired, he left the paper wealthier, more muscular and more stylish. After winning a Supreme Court battle with the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, it had become the undisputed Leader of the Free Press. His son and heir, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger
Jr – unfortunately nicknamed Pinch – took over at age 41. After a cliffhangerish career characterised by high-level personnel turbu- lence, massive editorial challenges (Clinton impeached! Bush-Gore! 9/11!), and an exis- tential threat/opportunity brought on by the worldwide web, he stepped down as publisher at the end of 2017, having almost unobtru- sively added 2.5 million subscribers and 61 Pulitzer Prizes to the paper’s starry crown. His son, the low-key, high-minded, vegetar-
ian Arthur Gregg Sulzberger – thankfully not Panch or Poncho, but simply AG – will start his fifth year as publisher in 2022 and his sec- ond as chairman, and the challenges looming may dwarf his predecessors’. The values of democracy and the free press’s role within it are facing unprecedented pressure.
NYT’s top role, Sulzberger was unavoidably steeped in the family business. He represents the fifth generation of the family to run the paper, and although the company is publicly traded, the family holds all the voting shares. After graduating in 2003 he waded tentative- ly into journalism, accepting a two-year in- ternship at the Providence Journal. As it turned out, he liked it. He next moved across the country to The Oregonian, where among his 300 pieces about local government was an explosive se- ries about malfeasance by the Multnomah County Sheriff, who subsequently resigned. ‘He’s not somebody who backs down,’ former Oregonian colleague Anna Griffin told the Washington Post. ‘He doesn’t like bullies. He does not like people who abuse power.’ Sulzberger was beamed aboard the moth- ership in 2009. In 2013, NYT executive editor Jill Abramson put him in charge of a team to develop new products. Instead, his group pro- duced a 97-page ‘innovation report’ that starkly advised that if the paper didn’t move fast and commit to a digital-first future, it risked being left behind. The report landed hard among the staff, created a blueprint for the modernisation of the paper, and erased any doubts about succession plans. Sulzberger became publisher in 2018, and was soon embroiled in a confrontation with the president of the United States. Donald Trump had regularly thumped the paper, be- ginning with his trash-talky ‘Failing New York Times’, then moving to ‘Fake News New York Times’, and escalating to ‘Enemy of the People New York Times’, employing an incendiary phrase once wielded by both Hitler and Sta- lin. In June 2019, in response to a strongly sourced article about the US’s cyberattacks on Russia, Trump went a step further, tweeting that the story was ‘a virtual act of treason by a once great paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for our country’. Sulzberger had already privately spoken to
Trump on two occasions about the president’s media-bashing. Now he went public, writing an op-ed article not for his own paper but for the conservative Wall Street Journal. ‘Mr Trump’s campaign against journalists should concern every patriotic American,’ wrote Sulzberger. ‘A free, fair and independent press is essential to our country’s strength and vital- ity and to every freedom that makes it great.’ In the face of presidential pressure, the head of the most important newspaper in the
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100
