Punch Sulzberger and His Times WHEN he felt a need to concern himself with what was printed in his newspaper, Punch, as everyone called him, would descend 11 floors to the editor's office and humbly await his turn for an audience. Could we please handle the wedding notice of the daughter of a major advertiser? Are the charitable projects of Bill Scranton, a director of The New York Times, not worth a story? Did we really have to be so mean in reviewing the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber? Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who died on Saturday at age 86, was a media mogul who never ordered an article to be printed or deleted from the news columns of his paper. In a quarter-century in which I reported directly to him, he never once summoned me to his office to complain about our journalistic decisions. As he always insisted, The Times sold not just news, but judgment about the importance and interest of news, and once invested in his choice of subordinates he wanted them to feel secure in their labors, comfortable with their judgments. He had our backs. Punch himself proved to be the most secure among us. Poorly prepared when he suddenly became publisher, at the age of 37, he quickly overcame his stage fright. He shuffled and reshuffled his executives, abandoned unprofitable strategies, pursued new income beyond the reach of restraining craft unions and lured new readers and advertisers with an imaginative redesign of The Times. He could be bold because he did not marry into the family business, as had his father and brother-in-law, his predecessors as publisher; he felt a sovereign birthright to run it. He kept studying the shifting theories of corporate management, but he had inhaled The Times's journalistic values since childhood. As his grandpa put it, his job was to give the news impartially and reliably, without fear or favor, and to assure the survival of a precious institution. He had to make money, not to enrich the family or the stockholders, but mainly to protect the paper's integrity and independence. Certain of his mission and comfortable with his inheritance, he was an extraordinary boss. I remember a time when a major corporation withdrew all its advertising to protest some truthful yet embarrassing articles. Punch went hat in hand for weeks to woo it back, but months passed before he ever told any of us in the newsroom about the grief we had inadvertently caused him. I remember his fortitude when, while a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he let the news department challenge the pedigree of a beautiful Greek krater the museum had acquired by a suspect route. I remember his forbearance when not a single financial journal that had scoffed at his business strategies bothered to acknowledge the huge success that he ultimately achieved in the quality of The Times and the price of its stock. Punch's inner calm allowed him to indulge a playful charm, a willingness to confess ignorance where others would feign sophistication and to offer shocking opinions about public affairs. If the Japanese and Chinese were not trading fairly, he would ask a visiting American official, why not just let their goods pile up and rot on West Coast piers? If drug dealers were ruining urban America, he would ask a judge or law professor, what's wrong with the Saudi solution of lopping off their hands? His insouciance would provoke fascinating and revealing debate. When Punch wanted to share a potent opinion with the world, he would sometimes write a brief editorial, about the miserable treatment of jurors in New York courts or the intolerable noise of parades below his Fifth Avenue window. But in delivering his commentaries to the editorial department, he only asked that they be considered, maybe rewritten, or just thrown away, as often they were. Indeed, when he learned one day that the editorial page had decided to oppose a candidate for Congress with whom he and his wife often shared a Sunday night dinner, he gulped at the awkwardness but readily acquiesced. Next day, when the verdict appeared in print, he sent the grieving candidate a dozen roses. He let his editorial page wander a shade left of his own centrist beliefs but he also insisted on an "Op-Ed" page (opposite the editorial page) that would offer a wide range of views, an innovation that was widely copied. Punch's most celebrated decisions look easy only in retrospect. Picture an inexperienced publisher whose profits were dwindling taking the company public so that he could use stock to acquire new sources of income. Or picture an ex-Marine with proud service in two wars, and with the nation again at war in Vietnam, being asked to sanction the publication of scores of "top secret" documents bearing on the deceptions surrounding Vietnam policy. He was told he risked prosecution, costly litigation, perhaps the very reputation of The Times as a patriotic and valued institution. We editors lobbied for the glory of confronting the government; he, uniquely, bore the risk. One battle won, Punch confidently faced the next. When the computer began to threaten the delivery of information faster than any printing press, he used to urge us to stay calm until the problem was clearly defined. "Wake me up when I can take it to the toilet," he would say. Well, he lived to see that day, and with his lapsing breaths in a debilitating illness, he insisted that The Times would prevail in the new world. He was sure of it as he died. Max Frankel was The New York Times's editorial page editor from 1977 to 1986 and executive editor from 1986 to 1994. Arthur Gelb joined The Times in 1944 as a copy boy and retired in 1989 as managing editor.