The New York Times

The New York Times serves in the novel as a prominent newspaper whose judgments shape how the public may interpret dissent against Lindbergh’s administration. Though the narrator describes it as moderate and not uncritical of Lindbergh’s policy toward Hitler’s Germany, it supports Jergens’s decision to fire Walter Winchell and publishes a government official’s defense of the Office of American Absorption. Its response to Winchell’s later street campaign continues that pattern of treating his warnings as political self-promotion rather than as a necessary alarm.

Position and Public Authority

The narrator identifies The New York Times as a paper founded and owned by Jews, a fact that contributes to his father’s esteem for it. Its moderate reputation matters: the paper is not presented as wholly aligned with Lindbergh’s foreign policy, yet its judgments carry weight precisely because it appears to speak from a respectable, measured position. In a period when public debate over the administration’s treatment of Jews is increasingly charged, that reputation gives its editorials particular authority.

Support for Winchell’s Firing

After Jergens fires Winchell, The New York Times gives the decision unqualified editorial support. It condemns Winchell’s accusations against the president as excessive and unethical, argues that his style violates standards of responsible journalism, and commends Jergens for removing him from the air. The paper therefore does more than report the loss of Winchell’s broadcast: it helps frame his dismissal as a defense of public standards rather than as a silencing of a prominent critic.

The paper’s criticism also casts Winchell’s warnings as an attack on the public’s judgment. That framing becomes consequential because Winchell has described the administration in terms the newspaper rejects, while many Americans continue to admire Lindbergh. The Times’s editorial thus places its institutional credibility on the side of restraint and against Winchell’s confrontational language.

Bengelsdorf’s Letter and Homestead 42

The Times publishes a further defense of the administration in the form of a letter by Lionel Bengelsdorf, director of the Office of American Absorption. It is the first and longest letter elicited by the paper’s editorial. Bengelsdorf accuses Winchell of exploiting Jewish fears and presents Homestead 42 as a means of widening Jewish citizens’ participation in national life, rejecting Winchell’s description of the program as a strategy of exclusion.

The placement gives Bengelsdorf’s official account a prominent platform in a debate the paper has already framed against Winchell. The letter’s appeal to inclusion stands in tension with the relocation program’s special focus on Jewish families, a contrast the narrator’s account makes visible even as the letter insists on the administration’s benevolent purpose.

Response to Winchell’s Campaign

When Winchell takes his campaign to Manhattan street corners and then to cities beyond New York, The New York Times again treats him skeptically. After his first day of public campaigning, the paper’s brief editorial concludes that his strongest talent is self-promotion. This judgment echoes its earlier criticism of him as a broadcaster and turns the campaign into evidence of personal vanity rather than an effective effort to expose organized antisemitism.

The newspaper’s interventions form a sequence: it supports Winchell’s removal from the air, publishes Bengelsdorf’s defense of the administration, and disparages Winchell’s renewed appeal to the public. Its influence in the novel lies not only in what it reports but in how its respectable editorial voice helps define which warnings count as responsible speech and which are dismissed as reckless. That role is especially pointed because the paper’s Jewish ownership and the father’s trust in it do not prevent it from endorsing the public case against a Jewish critic of the administration.