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editor, Punch told Frankel he had three requests. As Frankel recounted in his 1999 memoir,
The Times of My Life and My Life at
The Times, Punch told him: “Make a great paper even greater. Help to break in my son Arthur as the next publisher. Make the newsroom a happy place again.” Also, in the mid-1980s, Punch had formed what was termed the Futures Committee, a group that Arthur Sulzberger sat on with Frankel and Lance Primis, the paper’s new general manager. “It was . . . a vehicle to force Arthur Jr. to confront the competing demands of news and business from a management point of view,” wrote Tifft and Jones.
    In late 1991, Punch floated the idea of naming Arthur publisher. The company’s board of directors was surprisingly tepid to the idea and asked for more time to learn about the younger Sulzberger. One of the board’s concerns, they told Punch, was that Arthur Sulzberger’s appointment would be seen as a de facto coronation and that it would only be a matter of time before he became the company’s CEO as well.
    By January 1992, after more face time with Arthur—and after being assured by Punch that just because Arthur was taking one of his titles didn’t mean he’d eventually get all three—the board was placated, and the forty-year-old Sulzberger became the fifth member of his family to run the newspaper. But Arthur Sulzberger’s ascension was far more complicated than his father’s had been. At the same time that he was charting his rise within the
Times,
the twelve other sons and daughters (known as the cousins) of the four children of Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Iphigene Ochs (known as the siblings) were struggling with their own roles in the future of the Times Company. The same year Arthur Sulzberger Jr. became publisher, the cousins, five of whom were actively involved in the
Times
’s operations in one way or another, invited the siblings to dinner and said they wanted to formalize how the company, and the family, would be run in the future. When the four children of Iphigene Sulzberger passed on, there would be a much larger group of family members who could claim the
Times
as part of their inheritance. The family hired Craig Aronoff, the head of Kennesaw State University’s Family Enterprise Center, to serve as a moderator and facilitator. The result of Aronoff’s work with the cousins was a fifty-page bound volume titled
Proposals for the Future: To the Third Generation of the Ochs-Sulzberger Family from the Fourth and Fifth Generations.
The preamble stated two goals: to maintain stewardship of the
Times
and to preserve the unity of the family. These were precisely the goals that had made the Sulzbergers such strong owners, and in the report, Adolph Ochs’s great-grandchildren made it clear that they were just as intent on nurturing that philosophy as Ochs himself had been a hundred years earlier.
    By the end of the 1990s, Arthur Sulzberger had solidified his position on the top of the
Times
’s hierarchy. In early 1997, he withstood a challenge from Lance Primis, the company president, who sought to become CEO, and on October 16 of that year, Sulzberger was elected to the
Times
’s board of directors and named chairman of the company. After the Times Company directors approved his new post, he was invited into the company’s boardroom on the fourteenth floor of the
Times
’s headquarters. Punch got out of the chair at the head of the table and invited his son to take the seat.
    “If you think I’m sitting in that chair, you’re nuts,” Sulzberger said. He made his first brief remarks as chairman while standing.
    Sulzberger would not inherit his father’s third title, that of chief executive officer. Instead, he and Punch worked to install a governing structure whereby the Times Company would hire a nonfamily member as CEO, but that person would report to the company’s chairman instead of to the board. This was a reflection of how the company had actually been run when Punch