Otis Chandler, who died yesterday at 78, was a hard-charging young editor and publisher who elevated his family’s newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, into the top ranks of American journalism from its status as a mediocre, reactionary rag.

His life played out with the intensity of Greek tragedy, and by the end his publishing empire was sold off in pieces, as the family rivalries ignited by his installation as editor in 1960 rekindled and consumed the edifice.

He was the son of giants who had formed modern California, its factories and cities, its real estate and farming, and, perhaps most importantly, its water. The newspaper was the tool with which the Chandlers wielded power. The fourth in a line of publishers descended from General Harrison Gray Otis (Chandler’s namesake), who bought the Times in 1882, Chandler was the first to care about its role as a journalistic institution.

Groomed for the job by his father, Norman Chandler, also the Times’s publisher, Chandler took over with the help of a bit of bureaucratic legerdemain – a management consultant’s report disqualified his uncle Philip from taking the job for being, at 51, a single year too old.

Among Chandler’s first projects was a series of articles condemning the John Birch Society, a not-so-subtle dagger aimed directly at Philip’s heart, or, more precisely, that of his wife, an ardent Bircher. Philip quit the Times Mirror board within months and died early.

It was Philip’s children who knocked Chandler out as chairman of the board in 1986. It was they who were behind the installation of a new publisher and editor whose thirst for short-term profits began with the closing of the New York City edition of Newsday and ended with the near-meltdown of the crown jewel itself when it was disclosed that the Los Angeles Times had split revenues from ads in a huge special section with the subject of that section, the Staples Center. It was an unforgivable breach of the sacred “Chinese wall” between advertising and editorial.

Chandler emerged from a decade or more of Olympian slumber to rain sturm and drang upon the offenders, labeling the affair “unbelievably stupid and unprofessional,” and helping drive them from office. “That’s when I came down, like Zeus,” he told the American Journalism Review in 2001.

It was a rare emergence from a puzzling passivity that seemed to overtake him from 1980,when he turned over the publisher’s job for the chairman’s. After 20 years of dynamic leadership in which he increased spending in the newsroom tenfold, moved the paper from right to center to, some felt, moderate left, and garnered seven Pulitzer prizes, the great voice fell silent. It was an active silence, to be sure, and Chandler, just 52 when he left the newsroom, continued his racecar driving, surfing, and big game-hunting ways. This other activity only deepened the silence. Once he had boasted that he would “push the New YorkTimes off its perch.” Now he mumbled to an interviewer that the quotation had been merely some kind of motivational device.

As the scion of California’s most eminent newspaper family after the Hearsts, Chandler grew up wealthy but not, by his account, pampered.

“I worked in the citrus orchard weekend after weekend,” he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1980. “When I was young enough to be still living at home, I don’t remember having much fun with my friends from school, because I went to school in Pasadena, and this was 15 miles away.”

He prepped at Phillips Andover and was an outstanding athlete at Stan ford, where he set numerous records in the shot put. He later described being left off the 1952 U.S. Olympic team because of injury “the biggest disappointment of my life.”

In 1953, after a few years in the Air Force, where his massive physique – Newsweek once called him a “mesomorphic golden boy” – kept him out of the pilot’s seat, Chandler came home with not much idea of what to do next. His father, Norman, brought him into the family business and groomed him for the publisher’s job by cycling him through each department at the Times. In 1955, he worked in the newsroom, and produced a series of articles on sporting topics (“Top Hackney Ponies Bred in Southland,” “DIVER FORCEFEEDS CAPTIVE BLUE SHARK”) and a series on children’s health (“Swimming Aids Little Naomi’s Fight on Polio,” “Some Juvenile Cases Go to Psychopathic Court”).

In 1960, his father became chairman of Times Mirror, the newspaper’s parent organization, and Chandler, 32, took over as publisher. The newspaper he inherited was judged by many to be among the worst in the nation, regularly scraping the bottom of the list in polls of newsmen. “Little more than the instrument with which …[the Chandlers] scooped out a financial and social empire in Southern California,” sniffed Time. “Real Estate deals dictated editorial policy.” Chandler, in a 1967 interview with Newsweek, agreed: “If we gave the Republicans a big story, we’d give the Democrats a small one, and we only gave the management’s side in labor disputes.”

Chandler set out to change things in a hurry. After attacking the John Birch Society (and his uncle’s family) with a series that included a signed, FrontPage editorial, he jerked the paper’s political bent to the center by supporting Rockefeller over Goldwater in the election of 1964. He raided other papers for their top writers, beefed up the Washington bureau, which grew to 26 reporters from one, and opened more than 20 foreign bureaus. Reporter’s salaries were raised to above the industry average. The newspaper was the first large-circulation daily to introduce computer typography.

Success came quickly in the form of increased circulation. It didn’t hurt that, shortly after he took the publisher’s job, the Times shut down its afternoon edition and Hearst shut down his morning Los Angeles paper, the Herald Examiner. There was more than a whiff of collusion in the air, but it was investment and hard work that made the paper grow. In 1969, daily circulation topped 1 million for the first time, double what it had been a decade earlier.

Important stories from his two decades at the helm included a series on life in Mexico City, and one on what it was like to be Jewish in Los Angeles. The paper covered with renewed vigor the police department, and emerging issues like homosexual rights and women’s rights. A series on the Watts riots of 1968 garnered a Pulitzer Prize, although Chandler’s level of responsibility for it could be mooted; when he met with civil rights leader Louis Lomax during the riots, Chandler had to ask Lomax where Watts was located.

On a personal level, Chandler could be aloof. He pronounced his city’s name the old-fashioned way, with a hard ‘G’. A former associate was quoted as saying in a profile in Fortune from 1968 that Chandler’s “chief characteristic is more like a killer instinct.”

Still, the newsroom had its elements of humor, if not always ones that Chandler found funny. His mother was akin to a force of nature, a woman who by dint of personal will raised the money, wangled the property, and had built the Los Angeles Music Center, which now includes the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as well as the new Walt Disney Con cert Hall. She was also perhaps the only person who could intimidate him, and was also a constant source of embarrassment when she pumped his friends and associates for donations. After the center opened, in 1964, as the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its music director, Zubin Mehta, she shepherded it carefully.

A Times music critic, Martin Bernheimer, “would write something about Zubin being too young and off the wall and she would come down and tell me to fire him,” Chandler told his own newspaper in 2003. “My mother was … complicated. She could be so nice. She’d come down to the paper and talk to people in classified, would go into the women’s room to make sure that was all right, then ask to see the men’s room too. But if someone didn’t give her the money she wanted [for the music center] she was down on them like a house afire.”

By 1980, Chandler seemed to be flagging. Outside interests like auto racing and surfing were taking up more of his time, and his marriage of 30 years was coming to an end. (Possessed of something of a reputation of a lady’s man, he remarried in 1981 to Bettina Whitaker, who survives him.) In 1981, Chandler willingly followed in his father’s footsteps to become chairman of the Times Mirror Corp., where he oversaw further diversification and expansion, including the opening of New York Newsday.

Yet, within five years he was pushed out, and although he remained on the Times Mirror board for another decade, he became an almost silent partner, often sighted roaming the country in his giant RV, racing, surfing, bagging big game in Africa and Alaska. He eventually opened the Vintage Museum of Transportation and Wildlife in Oxnard, Calif., to store his collections of motorcycles and cars, as well as the heads of his many trophies.

He was mainly silent until his thundering critique of the Staples Center affair in 2000, at which point he was once again welcomed into the newsroom, where his views were often sought by reporters and editors alike. He thought the paper had gone so wrong that he actually supported its sale, for a record $8 billion. The unwinding of his patrimony was complete, but his mark had been indelibly set on Los Angeles.

Otis Chandler
Born November 23, 1927, in Los Angeles; died February 27 at his home in Ojai, Calif., of Lewy body disease, a degenerative brain disorder; survived by his wife, Bettina, his children, Harry, Michael, Carolyn, and Cathleen, fifteen grandchildren, and a sister, Camilla Chandler Frost. His eldest son, Norman, the only son to follow him into the news business, died in 2002.