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He looked up and in came Pulitzer, inappropriately dressed for the summer in a tightly buttoned dark suit and with his eyes hidden by his usual goggle-like dark lenses. The publisher was crossing the cavernous newsroom, a maze of desks normally filled with reporters, editors, and copy boys running between them. Being guided by a secretary just barely prevented Pulitzer from striking a phone booth but caused the secretary a bruise as he, instead of his boss, smacked into it. “Clumsy!” said Pulitzer when he heard the impact.

The group reached the empty office of Caleb Van Hamm, the managing editor. Sitting in Van Hamm’s desk chair, Pulitzer asked Seitz how many windows there were in the room. “Three,” Seitz replied. Then the party moved to the office of Robert Lyman, the night editor. Pulitzer now asked how far it was from the copy desk. When he was told that fifty feet separated the two, he became agitated. “Idiotic,” he said. “Why not put it over in City Hall Park? The night editor must be near the copy desk. No nonsense about it. Swear you will change it!” All took an oath, but as with most of Pulitzer’s instructions of this sort, they ignored the directive later, when he was gone.

Pulitzer’s irritation was exacerbated by an interview with George Carteret, the night editor. Running his hands over the head of the six-foot-tall, 250-pound editor, Pulitzer exclaimed, “God, you have a big head, Mr. Carteret!”

“You are right, Mr. Pulitzer. I guess I have a big head,” replied Carteret.

“You can’t deny it. Now tell me, Mr. Carteret, what is in that big head for tomorrow’s paper?”

Unfortunately, the editor had come in late and hardly knew what was in that day’s edition. “My God! Only half-past eleven! And you haven’t read the morning papers! Great God! What kinds of editors are running this paper?” Angry, Pulitzer rose, and his entourage followed. He paused at the city desk before beginning his trek back across the newsroom to the elevators.

“I want to say a word to Arthur Clarke,” said Pulitzer. The two men shook hands and, as was usual with Pulitzer, discussed their various health ailments.

“Now tell me, my boy, what are you preparing for tomorrow’s morning paper?”

Clarke listed the various anticipated stories and the leads that reporters were following.

“There isn’t a good, bright Monday morning feature on the whole schedule,” said Pulitzer. Putting his hands on Clarke’s head, he added, “What have you in there, Mr. Clarke? That is where your Monday morning feature should be. You must cudgel your brain all week for it.” Clarke promised he would.

“I know you will have a good paper tomorrow, Mr. Clarke,” finished Pulitzer, who then turned and was escorted from the room, never to return again.

The truth was that the World functioned smoothly and successfully without Pulitzer. He had become a figurehead, an aging ruler whose only domain at the paper remained the editorial page. Even there, his hold was tenuous. He complained about its pessimistic tenor. “I am tired of this pitching into everything in this county,” he told one of his editors. “I am tired of graft and corruption stories, as if the country were going to the dogs and everything corrupt.”

Two months before his surprise visit, the World had celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary under his ownership. Two thousand guests, including dignitaries from Washington traveling in a specially chartered train, gathered at the foot of the building for a spectacular shower of fireworks that bathed all seventeen stories in flickering light for hours. As he had been when the cornerstone was laid, and then when the building was dedicated, Pulitzer was oceans away. Ralph, who presided over the ceremonies, read a cable sent by his father from Nice, where he was testing his new yacht Liberty, which the secretarial staff was already calling The Liberty, Ha! Ha!!

“Without public approval a newspaper cannot live; the people can destroy it any day by merely refusing it,” Ralph said, reading the telegram aloud while standing in front of a portrait of his father draped with flags.