May 23, 2006
IT'S THE VIETNAMESE HE OWES AN APOLOGY (via Tom Corcoran):
Graduates get an apology (Paul Kirby, 05/22/2006, Freeman)
New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told about 900 SUNY New Paltz graduates Sunday that he was sorry.Posted by Orrin Judd at May 23, 2006 3:50 PMIt wasn't an apology for anything Sulzberger, who first joined the Times in 1978 as a Washington correspondent, specifically did. It was, for the most part, offered as an apology from a member of a generation that had vowed to beat back world ills, such as the Vietnam War and government corruption, and never let them happen again.
"I will start with an apology," Sulzberger told the graduates, who wore black gowns and hats with yellow tassels. "When I graduated in 1974, my fellow students and I ended the Vietnam War and ousted President Nixon. OK. OK. That's not quite true. Maybe there were larger forces at play.
"Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place," Sulzberger added.
Morgan Stanley wants an apology from Sulzberger. A big one. And if they can persuade the shareholders at the NYT to unify the stock, they'll get one. Pinch will crawl to keep from being terminated. $25.07 as of this writing, down from $52 about 3 years ago.
When I saw this in the Journal at lunch, my first thought was that someone should have asked him if he thinks Saddam Hussein is owed an apology.
Posted by: jim hamlen at May 23, 2006 4:37 PMGeneral Nguyen Ngoc Loan would have been the right one to accept this guy's apology.
Posted by: Lou Gots at May 23, 2006 5:22 PM
Makes one wonder whether young Pinch is the product of several generations of Sulzberger inbreeding.
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at May 23, 2006 5:51 PMSemi-off topic on the Sulzberger family breeding thing:
If the 1999 book on the Times, "The Trust" is to be believed, one of the kids I hung out with while a mere child in New York was actually Pinch's illegitimate half-brother, who was something of a bully and a troublemaker (At age 8, he put a parked UPS truck into gear on New Year's Eve and ran it into a fence). Apparently, Punch had an affair with his mom in 1956 (a Timeswoman whose husband had died) and while she maintained her job with the paper and an apartment in Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, the family never acknowledged her son as being any relation to the Sulzburger family, though whenever the subject of his real father came up, he would tell me and others that his dad owned The New York Times (which even at the age of 6-7 I thought was BS ... until 35 years later when I happened to be wandering through Barnes and Nobel and started browsing through "The Trust" and happened to come upon the story on Page 295).
I never felt sorry for him until I read the book, which may go a little way in explaining why he was a bit of a problem child. He declined to be interviewed for the book, and I haven't seen him since about eighth grade, but I wouldn't be surprised if he still would have made a bettre publisher for the New York Times than Pinch has been.
Posted by: John at May 23, 2006 9:51 PM