Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  In 1994, two years after becoming publisher, Sulzberger had to make his first big appointment, when Max Frankel, the paper’s executive editor, retired. Sulzberger had little choice but to promote the fifty-seven-year-old managing editor, Joe Lelyveld, a cerebral man who also felt that Sulzberger’s retreats were simplistic and belittling to Frankel.*15 Despite Lelyveld’s deserved reputation for aloofness, he managed to improve morale during his tenure. Frankel, who had run the Times’s Sunday paper and editorial page before being named executive editor, had installed a tier of assistant managing editors—known as “the masthead,” because these positions were listed on the editorial page under the executive and managing editors—between himself and the desk editors who ran the newsroom departments. “When you run a desk, you have real power,” says Soma Golden Behr, who was the paper’s national editor before being promoted to the masthead by Max Frankel. “When you go on the masthead, all your power is derivative. It all depends on the boss. Max gave each masthead editor a few departments to worry about, which means they would serve as a kind of rabbi.” Lelyveld, by actively promoting strong desk editors, assembled a cadre of talented desk heads during his eight-year tenure, including Jon Landman on metro, Mike Oreskes in Washington, Bill Keller on foreign, Dean Baquet on national, and John Geddes and Glenn Kramon on business. In returning authority to the desk editors, Lelyveld made the paper’s reporters feel as if they were involved more intimately with shaping the daily report, but in the process he disenfranchised and alienated the masthead.

  Lelyveld also coaxed Gene Roberts, the retired editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, to serve as his managing editor for a couple of years, knowing he’d reach the paper’s mandatory retirement age before Lelyveld and therefore wouldn’t be in the running to be the paper’s next editor. (Roberts is a newsroom legend: After a stint as national editor at the Times, he was named executive editor of the Inquirer in 1972. In his eighteen years at the helm of the paper, the Inquirer won seventeen Pulitzer Prizes; since he retired, it has won one.) Roberts in particular viewed the Times’s masthead as being basically worthless, and he made no secret about his views.

  “Joe didn’t use the masthead well,” says Behr. “It was a very frustrating time.” In 1997, Gene Roberts retired and returned to the University of Maryland to teach journalism. Lelyveld chose Bill Keller as Roberts’s successor. Keller, who had been the paper’s South African bureau chief when Lelyveld took over the Times, had been an editor for only two years, since Lelyveld and Roberts appointed him foreign editor in 1995. But Lelyveld felt Keller was a naturally gifted editor, responsive to reporters and skilled at sniffing out good stories.

  As Lelyveld was reorganizing the newsroom, Sulzberger was imagining the Times’s future and was eager to move forward with his plan to make the Times “platform agnostic.” As well as Arthur Sulzberger seemed to be settling into his new role, he was still missing something. Sulzberger wanted a partner. He wanted an executive editor who shared his vision, his ambition, his desire to shake off the cobwebs and make the Times a publication reborn. Sulzberger’s relationship with Lelyveld was less than ideal—Sulzberger sometimes felt Lelyveld wasn’t moving quickly enough, and Lelyveld and some of his top editors occasionally worried that Sulzberger’s investments in new technologies were drawing needed resources from the newsroom. So when, in early 2001, Joe Lelyveld told Sulzberger he was planning on retiring in September, about a year ahead of schedule (he wouldn’t turn sixty-six until April 5, 2003), he did so hoping his protégé, Bill Keller, would replace him. Sulzberger, however, had other ideas. He had already found his editor, one who shared his bold vision and his conviction that the Times should be shaken up, and it was not the mild-mannered Keller. His name was Howell Raines.

  THE MAKING OF AN EDITOR

  As a teenager in Alabama, Howell Raines was captivated by the literary life, and for many years he hoped to become a great novelist. Instead, almost by accident, he became a newsman: In 1964, after graduating from Birmingham-Southern College, he landed a job as a reporter at the Birmingham Post-Herald, followed by a two-year stint at a local TV station. In the late 1960s, Raines shuttled between school, novel writing, and reporting; it wasn’t until 1970 that he returned to journalism full-time, taking a job as a reporter at The Birmingham News. He soon distinguished himself and before the year was out had landed at The Atlanta Constitution, where he stayed for four years, working as a political reporter and movie reviewer during the week and as a novelist on the weekends. During his tenure there, he learned to project authority. John Huey, who first met Raines in the Constitution’s newsroom and is currently the editorial director of Time Inc.’s magazine division, told The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta of Raines, “He always had an air that he had been around—and he hadn’t.”

  In 1974, Raines left journalism to write an oral history of the civil rights movement. That book, titled My Soul Is Rested, and a subsequent novel, Whiskey Man, were published to positive reviews in 1977, but by that time Raines was already back in the game, having been hired in 1976 as the political editor of the St. Petersburg Times. At the time, Raines was married to his first wife, Susan Woodley, whom he had met while in college, and the couple had two young sons. But he was restless.

  In 1978, on the recommendation of Washington bureau chief Bill Kovach and national editor Dave Jones, Raines was hired by The New York Times as a national correspondent based in Atlanta, one of the paper’s most prestigious national postings. “I was looking for a southern reporter with political skills,” remembers Jones. “And I just thought he was a huge talent.” During their interview, Jones explained to Raines that while he was being hired to cover Atlanta, he would need to start his career at the Times in New York. That has long been the paper’s practice—it gives new reporters a chance to work with the top editors, to learn the system, to soak up some of the Times’s history and value system. Raines agreed. But by the time he got out of his interview with A. M. Rosenthal, then the paper’s executive editor, Rosenthal was convinced that Raines was exactly what was needed in the paper’s Atlanta bureau and wanted him to start there immediately. During Jones’s fourteen years as national editor, Raines was one of only two correspondents who began their Times careers outside the paper’s home office.

  Howell Raines’s rise through the ranks of The New York Times was impressive. After less than a year as a correspondent in Atlanta, he was named bureau chief. Less than a year after that, in 1980, the thirty-seven-year-old Raines was drafted by Kovach to cover the first Reagan campaign and then the White House. While in Washington, Raines met the thirtysomething Arthur Sulzberger, who was working as a reporter in the D.C. bureau. Raines immediately struck up a friendship with Sulzberger—some on the paper viewed it more as a courtship, with Raines the suitor—that lasted for the next twenty years. “Howell was a mentor to Arthur when Arthur was a young correspondent in the Washington bureau,” says Jack Rosenthal, a former editorial-page and Times Magazine editor and currently the head of the Times Company’s charitable foundation. “It always seemed to me from then that [Arthur] ordained Howell to climb the ladder.” Both Raines and Sulzberger responded well to Bill Kovach, an editor who managed to be both respected and liked; Sulzberger, in particular, liked Kovach’s open-door policy, in which all of the bureau’s employees were encouraged to tell him if they had any concerns or problems.

  But in a cutthroat industry where reporters constantly vie for the next, bigger assignment, Raines was questioning his place in the world. In his 1993 memoir, Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, Raines wrote of the frustration he experienced covering Reagan, a president he felt was “making life harder for citizens who were not born rich, white and healthy.” He wrote of this time, “And I, as a boy wonder writer who had set out to create novels about the great struggles of our time, was a middle-aged man in a gray suit who trudged to the White House press room to write stories that began, ‘President Reagan said today . . .’ They call it journalism, but some days it felt like
stenography.”

  This feeling of malaise, of intense introspection, came to permeate Raines’s life for years. Anxious and depressed, he began browsing the self-help section of local bookstores. “Figure out what you really want to do and do it,” one book told him. “Easy for you to say,” Raines responded. There was, he would later say, a hole in his soul, an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness, a sense of time “being piddled away, by me, in the grind of daily newspapering.”

  Later in his fly-fishing memoir, Raines wrote, of himself and of humankind, “We are full of lust, and some of it has to get out.” Howell Raines had no outlet for his lust. His marriage was struggling. It appeared he would never be known as a great novelist. Increasingly, he even seemed unsure he’d ever be known as a truly great reporter—it was the 1980s, he was in his forties, and he hadn’t yet won a Pulitzer Prize. He’d had an impressive career, but neither his reportage nor his writing particularly stood out at the Times, a paper well staffed with talented wordsmiths and reporters. “So here is where I came out as I entered my fiftieth year,” he wrote. “We are not on this earth for long. Part of what the midlife crisis is about is figuring out what gives you pleasure and doing more of that in the time you have left without asking for permission or financial or emotional subsidy from anyone else.”

  So Raines set his sights on the Times itself. Thwarted in his other ambitions, he’d instead become a great editor, perhaps even the greatest editor in the history of the paper. It was a job that traditionally went to men in their mid- to late fifties. Raines still had plenty of time to prepare.

  In 1986, Max Frankel succeeded A. M. Rosenthal as executive editor of The New York Times. Bill Kovach, disappointed that he hadn’t gotten the paper’s top job, left to become editor of what had become The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Raines lobbied to be named Kovach’s successor as Washington bureau chief, but Frankel, according to “The Howell Doctrine,” Ken Auletta’s seventeen-thousand-word, June 10, 2002, New Yorker profile, didn’t think he was up for that job, which required leading a largely autonomous office. Instead, Frankel offered Raines his choice of three postings: national editor, where he’d work in New York under the supervision of the paper’s top editors, or London or Paris bureau chief, both positions that were really super-reporter jobs rather than supervisory editing ones. Mindful of the fact that the Sulzberger family often vacationed in London, Raines decided to move to England. Journalistically, his two-year stint there was unimpressive, devoid of any major scoops or memorable reporting. But Raines did deepen his already strong bond with Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

  While Raines was in London, Craig Whitney, Kovach’s replacement in Washington, was floundering. Whitney came to Washington without ever having worked in the capital, and he had tried to force out about half a dozen of the bureau’s correspondents soon after his arrival. It soon became clear he had difficulty understanding the nuances of the culture. The D.C. bureau of the Times has a long tradition of struggling against the authority and control of New York, and Whitney wasn’t attuned to that struggle. Within two years, he was forced out, the victim of a staff mutiny, and Raines was headed back from London—to take the job he had wanted in the first place.

  —————

  RAINES DROVE his staff hard. In the 1980s, only a decade after Watergate, the Times’s D.C. bureau was still very much in the shadow of The Washington Post, and Raines worked furiously to make his troops more competitive. He told associates at the paper that the bureau was used to coming in on Monday, getting back in the swing of things for a day or so, and kicking into gear on Tuesday afternoon. Under his tutelage, it was clear working in Washington was a full-time job. “He was a damn good Washington bureau chief,” says Soma Golden Behr, the paper’s national editor in the late 1980s. “When he came on board my life got a lot easier, just because the stuff coming out of Washington was so much better.”

  But Raines wasn’t making many friends in the process. While in Washington, he gained a reputation for being imperious—even cruel. His underlings coined a new verb—“to Raines,” translated both as “to pretend not to own slaves” and “to have slaves and not admirers.” Raines could be autocratic to the point of ridiculousness—he declared the bureau’s reporters had to stack the books on their desks horizontally instead of vertically and once famously instructed a clerk to take his ficus plant out to a balcony so it could receive its nourishment from natural rainwater. He also was known for dividing the staff into a castelike system whereby his favorites (and fishing buddies) would get the plum assignments and the rest would get the leftovers: At one point, he even told the staff he had mentally divided them into an A team and a B team.

  “He could be very combative and arrogant,” Behr says. “If one of my editors was involved in fixing something on a Washington story, he would get his back up.” Raines, she felt, could be disrespectful: “There was an arrogance and this macho swagger, and I hated that.” Behr would push back against Raines, and eventually he came to respect her judgment and that of her editors. “Over time we got rid of [his arrogance], to the point where we collaborated on stories and had a really good time.”

  It was during this time that Raines wrote the story that won him a Pulitzer Prize, practically a prerequisite for editors who hoped to run the Times’s newsroom. Raines’s winning article, “Grady’s Gift,” which appeared in the December 1, 1991, New York Times Magazine, was a loving portrait of the African American housekeeper who had helped raise him. “She had been ‘our maid,’ but she taught me the most valuable lesson a writer can learn, which is to try to see—honestly and down to its very center—the world in which we live,” Raines had written.*16 Later in the piece, Raines stressed that he didn’t want to make Grady sound like “some 50’s version of Whoopi Goldberg.” “Grady had given me the most precious gift that could be received by a pampered white boy growing up in that time and place,” he wrote. “It was the gift of a free and unhateful heart.” Some black staffers found Raines’s magazine piece condescending—and some referred to the article as “Driving Mr. Raines”—but the overall reaction was positive and further proof of Raines’s fluid prose and literary flair. Still, reporters in the newsroom noted that Raines was forced to rely on a personal remembrance rather than gumshoe reporting or foreign correspondence to win his Pulitzer.

  By the early 1990s, Raines was ready to move on to a new challenge. He knew he was a long shot to replace Frankel, who was to retire as executive editor in 1994, so he spoke with Sulzberger about an appointment as a politically liberal Op-Ed page columnist. Sulzberger, however, had a different idea. He wanted Raines to become the paper’s editorial-page editor. It was a post, Sulzberger promised, where Raines would be considered part of the steering committee that debated issues concerning the future of the Times. Raines, along with the next executive editor and the newspaper’s president, would meet once a week for lunch to discuss the paper’s, and the company’s, future. For Raines, it was, of course, a chance to further build his relationship with Sulzberger.

  Howell Raines took over as the editorial-page editor of The New York Times on January 1, 1993, one month before his fiftieth birthday.*17 The Times, like most daily American newspapers, maintains a Chinese wall between the paper’s news-gathering organization and its editorial page, with the publisher of the paper serving as the only bridge between the two operations. During the eight years that Raines ran the paper’s editorial page, Sulzberger and Raines grew extremely close.

  In replacing Jack Rosenthal, a more traditional-minded journalist, Raines inherited an editorial page that had long defined itself as sober and judicious. He made it clear from the start that he wasn’t much interested in learning from those who came before him. “While we were still in transition, he declined my advice,” Rosenthal says. “He was perfectly polite about it, but I would have thought that, whether or not he wanted advice from me in journalistic terms, he would at least want to know what I thought of individuals and how to handle people.”
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br />   Raines wasted no time transforming the tone and spirit of the page. One of his earliest editorials referred to Bill Clinton—who was inaugurated as president on January 20, three weeks after Raines took over the page—as Slick Willie, a startling break from the page’s historically high-minded tone:

  On the job training is a messy process, and when you’re President everyone gets to watch. Bill Clinton’s early moves on the budget have been a three-ring circus of novice mistakes. Before long—and sooner wouldn’t hurt—he needs to show that he, not Slick Willie, is the ringmaster.

  Raines’s editorial page was an instant sensation. He quickly established himself as a maverick, someone who took obvious delight in throwing metaphoric grenades into crowds just to see what people’s reactions would be. Raines gleefully called Republicans “Dobermans” and wrote that the party’s “intellectual cupboard” was “barer than at any time since the Goldwater implosion.” He accused Clinton of being disingenuous: “Does he really care about the environment,” one editorial asked, “or was that just something he told the voters?” Another piece accused the president of confusing “mere assertion with real accomplishment.” Before spring was out, Raines had made the editorial page a must-read for Washington power brokers and the New York media elite alike. The page was feisty, provocative, fearless, and suddenly, startlingly relevant. Bob Dole, then the minority leader, denounced Raines from the floor of the Senate, complaining that the Times’s editorial page had abandoned the “traditional high road for the gutter.” (Raines shot right back, “It’s an unusual feeling to be called too tough by Bob Dole.”)

  Before the spring was out, The Washington Post had run a feature on Raines, which described how the Times’s “new chief pontificator is wielding a stiletto-sharp quill.” Raines explained his seemingly strident editorials by quoting the aphorism about Harry Truman’s search for a one-armed economist so he would no longer be presented with opinions that began, “On the one hand . . .” Raines also broke from Times tradition in another way: By the mid-1990s, he had become a visible figure in New York’s social scene and gossip columns. He was dubbed “Howell on the Prowl” thanks to his penchant for squiring attractive women to parties (he and his wife, Susan, had divorced while Raines was still in Washington), and unlike the stereotypical Times editor, who shuttled from home to work outfitted in rumpled shirts and sagging trousers, Raines delighted in wearing bespoke shirts and elegant silk ties.