The Story

by Judith Miller

  — CHAPTER 3 —

  THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE TOKEN

  I got my job as a reporter in the New York Times Washington bureau in 1977 through affirmative action. It was the job of my dreams.

  It was also a job for which, by Times standards, I was unqualified. But the paper hired me anyway. It needed women.

  Three years earlier, seven Times women had filed what became a class action suit on behalf of some 550 women at the paper, accusing the Times of sex discrimination. Their case was rock solid. So was that of the plaintiffs in another suit also filed in 1974—the paper’s minority employees, who accused it of racial discrimination. The Times’s leaders, who had always thought of themselves as liberal and enlightened, were alarmed.

  In their depositions and public statements, the paper’s lawyers had derided the women’s charges as “frivolous” and “devoid of substance and rationality”—women who protest too much were often dismissed then, and even today, as hysterical. But employment statistics did not lie, and they were devastating.

  Nan Robertson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who later chronicled the paper’s sexual discrimination, summarized the case.1 No women appeared on the paper’s masthead of twenty-one names at the top of the editorial page, nor were there any female vice presidents or even women in a position to advance to that post. There were no female columnists, photographers, or members of the eleven-man board. None of the twenty-two national correspondents was a woman. There was only one female foreign bureau chief: Flora Lewis, the brilliant former wife of a Times executive; she had just been appointed to Paris. Only 4 of the paper’s 31 cultural critics were women. There was only one woman sports reporter. Four of the 75 copy editors were women. The Times, which employed some six thousand people at the time, had 385 male reporters, and 40 women, 11 of whom worked in the Family/Style Section. In the largest, most prestigious bureau, Washington, only 3 of the 35 reporters were women. “There were no women in the pipeline for power,” Robertson concluded.2

  But discrimination against women ran deeper. Although the paper was subject to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the few women who had managed to win jobs at the paper were paid substantially less than their male counterparts for the same work. The gap between the average salaries of male and female reporters was $59 a week—or some $3,000 a year.

  Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known affectionately as Punch, claimed to be shocked by the evidence that the Women’s Caucus presented at a meeting with him and other senior executives in the spring of 1972. Robertson described how the caucus confronted Punch with “hard truths” about the plight of women toiling on the Sulzberger “plantation.” Promises had been made, she told me years later. But although several women were subsequently hired—including me—the salary disparity between male and female reporters expanded. By the time the women finally filed suit in 1974, the gap had grown from roughly $3,000 to $4,800 a year.

  While such discrimination was fairly standard in the sixties and seventies, the Times’s record was egregious given its sanctimonious editorials blaming others for such sins. While women composed 40 percent of the American labor force, they represented only 26.2 percent of full-time Times employees. And according to census figures, while women held 41 percent of all “editors and reporters” jobs in the nation, they held only 16 percent of these posts at the Times.3

  I had heard little about the women’s suit when John Finney and I had one of our occasional lunches in May 1977 at the Army-Navy Club, a male bastion near the White House. Finney was an avuncular fixture in the paper’s Washington bureau, and we talked mostly about national security. I sought his advice on a story I was writing about Stealth cruise missile technology. Finney took pride in mentoring young reporters, most of them male. He complimented me on my recent articles about the Middle East, defense issues, and nuclear proliferation threats for the Times’s Sunday magazine, the Washington Post, and the Progressive, the nation’s second-oldest monthly, published in Madison, Wisconsin, since 1909. That surprised me, because the Progressive, originally an organ of Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party, was left-wing, especially on national security issues. I didn’t think of Finney, a Pentagon correspondent who was rather conservative, as a Progressive reader.

  Getting a reporting job in Washington in the mid-1970s was not nearly as tough as it became later. In my case, Erwin Knoll, the Progressive’s Washington editor, had chosen me to succeed him when he moved back to Madison to become the magazine’s editor. I had done several freelance pieces for him. The job didn’t pay much, but my association with the well-established journal guaranteed me credentials at the White House and most federal agencies—almost as valuable a commodity as money in the nation’s status- and access-hungry capital. Knoll, a fervent civil libertarian who was deeply suspicious of government, was close to I. F. Stone, the irreverent journalist whose newsletter broke many a story about political finagling in Washington. Stone’s scoops were usually based on information contained in the thousands of documents that agencies published but that few reporters had the time or energy to read. Since I shared “Izzy” Stone’s interest in Israel and the Middle East, I had sought him out for advice before my own first trip to the region. Erwin later told me that Izzy had lobbied him relentlessly to offer me the job—not the last time I would benefit from an influential man’s support.

  * * *

  Erwin knew that I had not always been so liberal. Having grown up, like Hillary Clinton, as a “Goldwater Girl,” I had inherited some of the conservative convictions of my parents. But the official lies told to protect atomic testing in Vegas and then the Vietnam War shattered much of my trust in the government. At Ohio State University in Columbus and later at Barnard College in New York, I came to believe, as did so many in my generation, that the war was not only unnecessary but also immoral—a betrayal of the country’s traditions, policies, and values.

  In college I devoured Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Germaine Greer (Betty Friedan was already passé), H. Rap Brown, and Frantz Fanon. Like so many others, I smoked dope and experimented with cocaine and LSD, reveling in the self-absorption that was a hallmark of the boomer generation.

  Music and the arts were then my passion. I spent part of my year abroad between Barnard and graduate school in Brussels and London with my half brother Jimmy, who had started producing what became some of the Rolling Stones’ greatest hits. Jimmy—who would tragically die at age fifty-two of heroin-related liver failure in 1994—was a son from my father’s second, brief marriage. Since we hadn’t spent much time together when we were young, I loved getting to know him. Though he was only six years older, he was already establishing himself as a musical force in London, the center of the sixties music revolution.

  An avid R&B drummer and composer, Jimmy had remixed what became the Spencer Davis Group’s first big American success—“Gimme Some Lovin’,” whose driving beat made it a megahit in 1967. When Steve Winwood broke away to form his own rock group, Traffic, Jimmy produced its albums, too, among them the rock classic Mr. Fantasy.

  Although I had enrolled at the London School of Economics, I quickly lost interest in my courses, preferring to watch Jimmy work—usually from midnight to dawn. Unlike other producers, he rarely stayed behind the glass wall separating him and the engineer from the musicians in the recording studio. When Jimmy got into the music, a friend recalled, he would abandon his giant console where tracks were mixed and appear in the studio, accompanying the musicians on drums, singing along in harmony, or adding an original sound to a track: a washboard, a whistle, a flute, a tambourine, finger cymbals, congas, castanets, and, my favorite, the cowbell that opened the Rolling Stones’ classic “Honky Tonk Women.”

  Eddie Kramer, Jimmy’s protégé and his favorite recording engineer, said years later that my brother was a true “musical impresario,” who, like our father, knew how to bring musicians together, rehearse them ’til they dropped, and excite them about their work. Jimmy was “unstoppable,” he to
ld an interviewer.4

  Jimmy was just starting to work with the Rolling Stones when I arrived to live in London. Though the reigning dean of rock today, Mick Jagger was anxious back then about bucking the prevailing trends, Jimmy told me. Friends were showering him with unsolicited, contradictory advice about what to record next. Jimmy weighed in emphatically: stick to your roots, he told Jagger. Be who you are, advice he gave everyone he loved, which I, too, would take to heart.

  As much as I loved the musical scene, I knew that it would not be the focus of my life—and I missed America. So when I had a chance to apply for a full scholarship in a master’s program at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, I leapt at it. (The school, too, was short of women grad students. My class had four women and fifty men.) Thanks to Princeton, I fell in love with the Middle East and journalism.

  In the summer of 1972, Princeton sent me to Jerusalem to write a paper required for my degree. The topic was one of Israel’s early grassroots campaigns to stop the government from building an ugly housing compound on a hilltop overlooking Jerusalem, the eastern half of which Israel had annexed after the ’67 war.5

  My academic paper reflected none of the excitement I felt. After I finished my research in Israel, I traveled through Cyprus—Israel was then isolated from its Arab neighbors—to Cairo; Amman, Jordan; and Beirut, Lebanon. After interviewing officials and as many ordinary people as I could, since I didn’t speak either Hebrew or Arabic, I was sure there would be another Arab-Israeli war—and soon. I had seen much that wasn’t showing up in the newspapers. I sent an essay to the Progressive about a group of Israelis who called themselves “black panthers.” These young Jews from North Africa, imitating their American counterparts, were protesting Israel’s discrimination against Jews from Arab lands. The magazine published it. I saw my words in print and found my calling.

  * * *

  Six years later, over our lunch at the Army-Navy Club, Finney told me that he was about to be the Times’s Washington news editor—the second-ranking post in the bureau.

  He admired an article I had written for the Washington Post about how environmentalists had used the plight of the pink-footed booby, an endangered bird that nests on Diego Garcia, to stop the expansion of the American base on that Indian Ocean island. (I was pro-booby.) Finney, a former navy officer who had served in the Philippines, knew Diego Garcia well.

  He had also read some of my other freelance articles for Science magazine, the New Republic, and even my stories for National Public Radio, where I worked part-time as a national security correspondent.

  I greatly admired Finney for having infuriated government officials with articles about how scientific advisers to the government had subsequently gone to work for companies seeking government contracts. Many of the 2,500 articles that carried his byline in his thirty years of reporting focused on the development of nuclear weapons, the satellite technology that guided them, and the arms race they had produced. There was nothing that John did not seem to know about the Atomic Energy Commission and nuclear proliferation, my first obsession since Las Vegas.

  Despite his criticism of government, he respected Washington’s institutions and the often anonymous civil servants who sustained them. “What they are doing is so thankless,” he said, reflecting an unfashionable empathy for federal officials.

  Finney confessed that he enjoyed having lunch with me because, unlike most women, I did not seem to mind the permanent cloud of pipe smoke that enveloped him. A binge cigarette smoker, I liked the smell of pipe tobacco and even cigars.

  Would I be interested in joining the Times? he asked, popping the question casually.

  I tried but failed to appear equally cool. Of course!

  Finney said he would recommend me to A. M. Rosenthal, the Times’s executive editor. I shouldn’t get my hopes up, he warned, but the timing might be propitious. The paper was hunting for “qualified” women reporters, tiptoeing around the women’s lawsuit. Though I was five years out of graduate school, had not attended journalism school, and had not worked full-time for a wire service or a daily regional newspaper—the traditional training grounds for Times reporters—I might be offered a job. I would, of course, have to spend at least six months to a year on the Metro desk in New York.

  My elation evaporated. I can’t do that, I told him.

  “Why on earth not?” said Finney, a polite man who seemed stunned by my reluctance.

  The reasons were personal, I told him. I had recently become romantically involved with someone and did not want to leave Washington, I said, carefully avoiding the man’s name.

  “You mean Les Aspin?” he asked. Finney had heard that I had moved into the Georgetown home of the Wisconsin Democratic congressman and Pentagon gadfly, whom I had gotten to know years earlier through my work for the Progressive.

  “Surely you would not sacrifice a job at the Times because of a boyfriend?” he said, a statement more than a question.

  “Oh yes I would. You can’t take your typewriter home to bed with you at night.”

  Finney suppressed a smile. Perhaps I was not such a radical, his eyes suggested as he tamped down a wad of tobacco in his pipe. Well, he added coyly after several puffs, perhaps we could work around that “constraint.”

  “Don’t discuss your living arrangements with Abe when you see him next week,” he counseled.

  * * *

  Finney gave me a long list of topics I was not to discuss with the formidable Abe Rosenthal, the brilliant journalist who had revolutionized news coverage at the Times but was a polarizing figure inside the paper. Abe could be “challenging,” another early mentor, Bernard Gwertzman, the Times’s State Department reporter, had warned me.

  Abe was impossible; his moods swings were a legend. He was also smart, original, and utterly committed to the paper. He was determined to keep ideology out of the news sections. He knew, of course, that objectivity is an illusion—that every story’s headline, word count, and placement reflect a judgment. Bias can be evident in the stories that the Times chooses to print, or print for only one edition, or delay publishing, or bury in the back of the thick Sunday paper or on Saturday, the week’s least-well-read paper. Abe believed in making the news columns as impartial as possible and confining opinion to the editorial and op-ed pages, where it belonged. Violations of this ethos, however subtle or unconscious, could be punished ruthlessly.

  Friends had warned me that Abe could be harsh and irascible one moment, schmaltzy the next. Nan Robertson, quoting another reporter, called him “a cross between Caligula and a Jewish mother.”

  I flew to New York for the meeting, replaying my earlier conversation with Hedrick Smith, the debonair Washington bureau chief who was planning to offer me a job as a reporter for the paper’s financial section, provided that Abe approved.

  Would I take any available slot in Washington? Rick Smith had asked me.

  “Absolutely anything.”

  “How about the SEC?”

  “Sure!” I said. “But remind me: What does it do exactly?”

  “Well, you are willing to learn about it, aren’t you?” A declaration, not a question.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1977, the list of “no-go” topics reverberated in my head as I paced in front of the Times’s New York headquarters, then the fourteen-story Gothic building on West Forty-Third Street, just off Times Square.

  I was not to discuss Congressman Aspin, my sometimes leftist views, or political activism. Above all, I was not to tell Abe about my participation in the Columbia University student strike of 1968, which had paralyzed the campus for months and upended the university’s administration. Abe had written a notorious attack on the protesters who had occupied the office of Columbia’s president. I hadn’t occupied that office, but I had been among those more than 720 antiwar students from Columbia and Barnard, its sister institution across Broadway, who had seized and occupied four other university buildings before
being removed by the police.

  I shall never forget the thrill I felt pushing my way for the first time through the heavy revolving glass door into the lobby of the Times, which would be my home for the next twenty-eight years.

  Abe was on the third floor—intense, operatic, and unforgettable. A short man whose thick, black-rimmed glasses covered shrewd, lively eyes, he received me in his sitting room at the back of his office. Decorated in Japanese style, with a shoji screen and wall scrolls, the room’s décor—a reflection of his time in the Tokyo bureau—was intended to convey inner peace. But it didn’t.

  Abe, who had won a Pulitzer for his reporting from Poland, from which he had been expelled by the Communist regime, had a honed bullshit detector.

  He seemed intrigued by my Russian-Jewish father and Irish-Catholic mother. How had that worked out? he asked.

  “Not well,” I replied. There was an ugly divorce that began when I was thirteen and ended when I left high school at sixteen, I told him, feeling an instant, intangible rapport.

  What did I consider myself: Jewish or Catholic? he asked—his second politically incorrect question.

  “Jewish, I guess,” hesitating as I thought of my mother’s intense attachment to her church and my years in Catholic school. “But I’m an agnostic,” I added. “Secular, really.”

  What did I think of the new Home section, which was one of several new supplements—Sports Monday, Science Tuesday, and others—that Abe and his number two, Arthur Gelb, had created to emphasize “soft news” and broaden the paper’s appeal to younger readers and advertisers? The new sections, which many in the Times cautious bureaucracy had resisted, saved the paper.

  I hadn’t read the Home section often, I confessed.

  If I were ever lucky enough to join the paper, Abe said ominously, I would have to be prepared to write for all its sections, or at least be passingly familiar with their contents.