Californians until recently spoke of the United States beyond Colorado as “back East.” If they went to New York, they went “back” to New York, a way of speaking that carried with it the suggestion of living on a distant frontier. Californians of my daughter’s generation speak of going “out” to New York, a meaningful shift in the perception of one’s place in the world. The Los Angeles that Norman and Buff Chandler’s son Otis inherited in 1960—and, with his mother, proceeded over the next twenty years to reinvent—was, in other words, a new proposition, potentially a world-class city but still unformed, outgrowing its old controlling idea, its tropistic confidence in growth, and not yet seized by a new one. It was Otis Chandler who decided that what Los Angeles needed if it was to be a world-class city was a world-class newspaper, and he set out to get one.
Partly in response to the question of what a daily newspaper could do that television could not do better, and partly in response to geography—papers on the West Coast have a three-hour advantage going to press and a three-hour disadvantage when they come off the press—Otis Chandler, then thirty-two, decided that the Times should be what was sometimes called a daily magazine: a newspaper that would cover breaking news competitively but remain willing to commit enormous resources to providing a kind of analysis and background no one else was providing. He made it clear at the outset that the paper was no longer his father’s but his, antagonizing members of his own family in 1961 by running a five-part report on the John Birch Society, of which his aunt and uncle Alberta and Philip Chandler were influential members. Otis Chandler followed up the John Birch series, in case anyone had missed the point, by signing the Chandler name to a front-page editorial opposing Birch activities. “His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm crested the world,” as the brass letters read (for no clear reason, since it is what Cleopatra says about Antony as the asps are about to arrive in the fifth act of “Antony and Cleopatra”) at the base of the turning globe in the lobby of the Times Building. “His voice was propertied to all the tuned spheres.” One reason Otis Chandler could property the voice of the Times to all the tuned spheres was that his Times continued to make more money than his father’s. “The paper was published every day and they could see it,” he later said about his family. “They disagreed endlessly with my editorial policies. But they never disagreed with the financial results.”