THE TRUST: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times.

THE TRUST: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New By Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones Little Brown, $29.95

READERS MAY REMEMBER THE book Our Crowd, by Stephen Birmingham, published about 30 years ago, a pleasantly gossipy chronicle of New York City's interlocking families of German-Jewish merchant bankers who arrived on the scene in the middle of the 19th century. These dignified worthies pursued a distinctively Teutonic haute-bourgeois way of life, made lots of money, collected art, struggled with anti-Semitism (their own, as well as other people's), built enormous houses on and around Park Avenue, intermarried, and practiced civic virtue over several generations. The Trust, by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, could be regarded as Volume II. Their crowd consists of the German-Jewish Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty that has owned The New York Times since 1896, whose lifestyle, high-mindedness, industriousness, and other social habits conform faithfully to the Our Crowd template.

What justifies the heroic length (896 pages) of this book is the fact that it is mostly about the stewardship of a newspaper, always an object of fascination to the journalistic enterprises that print or broadcast book reviews. As it happens, many books have been written at least in part about the Times, and so some of the stories Tifft and Jones retell here can be found in easily accessible works by, among others, Max Frankel, Gay Talese, Turner Catledge, and Sanford Unger. Two other books, by Elmer Davis and Meyer Berger, have given authorized institutional histories of the Times as of 1921 and 1951, respectively. This work, while drawing on Times archival sources, and numerous interviews, was not authorized, and includes a fair amount of material about such matters as personal animosities among the cast of characters, marital infidelities, and so on, the sort of thing authorized accounts usually omit.

There seems, in the sources I have consulted, to be broad consensus on such matters as the more or less perpetual disharmony between the Times` Washington bureau and national editors in New York; the reluctance by management until recently to let reporters use the name "Abraham" in their bylines; the smaller internal difficulty in publishing The Pentagon Papers than occurred at The Washington Post (owing I suppose, to the lesser risk to the Times' corporate interests); the tendency for diffident and courteous family members, who are always in charge, to surround themselves with authoritarian despots in top management jobs. These and other observations are smoothly blended into a chronological account that brings the story of the management of the Times up to the current team of Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and Joseph Lelyveld, with muted speculation about the line of future succession to the editor's chair. Readers will get best value out of the recent stuff, since many of the other books on the Times (mostly written by Times journalists) cover the older anecdotes quite well. But these accounts are not too interested in the business side of the paper. Therefore, unlike Tifft and Jones, they do not report, and probably do not care very much, why Walter Mattson beat out James Goodale for the presidency of the company or how flamboyant eccentrics (as portrayed here) like Lance Primis and Amory Bradford survived at the top of the company for as long as they did.

There is one overarching argument faintly discernable amid the well-crafted narrative, and this is a somewhat unsystematic but unmistakable brief for monarchy as the preferred form of governance for a daily newspaper. In passing, comparisons are drawn between the happy succession of devoted sons-in-law and sons, now four generations away from Adolph Ochs, at the Times and what happened when outside management was allowed to supplant the Chandlers in Los Angeles, or when Bingham family squabbling forced the sale of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

This argument assumes that monarchy (or hereditary single-family proprietorship) is the only practical alternative to highly bureaucratized public ownership and that only monarchical owners can voluntarily decide to invest in the product rather than send income to the bottom line. Professional management, responsive to stockholders, is more likely to squeeze quality out of the newspaper in the interests of quarterly earnings.

I believe the jury is still out on the larger proposition. Tifft and Jones indicate that Times leadership is far from oblivious to considerations of profit in its management of its other journalistic properties. Some excellent and successful newspapers (say, The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times) are run like conventional businesses rather than royal courts, and at least one, the Milwaukee Journal, is employee owned. Some newspaper-owning families (e. g. Cowles, Graham, McClatchy) have track records Tifft and Jones would no doubt approve of; some (e. g. Hearst, Murdoch, Loeb) may not.

My surmise, not contradicted by Tifft and Jones, is that one reason the Times is an unusual journalistic achievement is because its market niche has long been interpreted by its owners as to deliver the highest quality product as a way of assembling America's largest elite audience, increasingly located all over the nation. Those Times company properties that do not target that market (e.g. the Chattanooga, Tennessee newspaper where Adolph Ochs began his career as a newspaper man) get much less favored treatment. This does not seem to me very different from Knight-Ridders differential treatment of its newspapers in San Jose and the East Bay.

So what, precisely, is held in trust that gives this book its title? As a first approximation I think a commitment to do what it takes to stay influential in the affairs of the nation. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a formulation that does not require quite so much piety as Tifft and Jones, with their copious accounts of dinner party toasts, anniversary celebrations, and miscellaneous tributes, seem to think appropriate.

NELSON W. POLSBY Heller Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.