Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

Immediately after September 11, the Times, like many New York–based newspapers, made counseling available for staffers who felt emotionally overwhelmed, but the vast majority of reporters and editors were too busy, or felt too proud, to avail themselves of help. Over the months, the demands on the newsroom and the stresses of working at a potential target for terrorist attacks only grew. The Times wrote about how Times Square—its home—was a largely unprotected magnet for suicide bombers. “There was the enormous stress of September 11 as a news story, and then there was also the enormous stress of September 11 as a horrifying tragedy in your hometown,” says assistant managing editor Mike Oreskes.

  Oreskes himself says he didn’t fully realize the pressure the newsroom was under until it was brought home by his young son. A couple of weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, his son was speaking with a counselor in school, and he said that he had never before realized that his parents had jobs that required them to rush toward danger. (Oreskes’s wife is a New York–based columnist for the Los Angeles Times.) “[The events surrounding September 11] affected us individually as human beings in ways I don’t think we quite realized,” Oreskes says. “We had an anthrax scare in the newsroom. The enormous stress of the story was unlike anything our generation has ever dealt with.

  “At some level, I think we accepted the idea that some of the problems we were wrestling with in the newsroom were about the multiple traumas of September 11,” he says. “I thought we would recover. Things would get better—we would act to make them better.”

  As stressful as September 11 was to the staff, not all the tensions in the newsroom were attributable to the disaster. Editors and reporters alike became increasingly dismayed by what they felt was Raines’s self-centeredness. The week of the September 11 attacks, Raines met with investigative editor Stephen Engelberg and reporter Ethan Bronner in a conference room on the fourth floor to strategize about the best ways to pursue the unfolding story. Engelberg tried to talk to Raines about a three-part series he’d worked on with reporter Judith Miller, a specialist in bioterrorism and chemical weapons, about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda that ran in January 2001. “It became clear he hadn’t read it,” Engelberg says. Frustrated, he then proposed examining the Bush and Clinton administrations’ planning and response to warnings about attacks on American soil, but Raines dismissed the idea. (“Let’s just say we had heard of Richard Clarke,” Engelberg says dryly, referring to the Bush and Clinton antiterrorism adviser who, in the spring of 2004, ignited a firestorm when he criticized President Bush for dropping the ball on warnings about al-Qaeda. Clarke was quoted in Engelberg and Miller’s January 2001 series.) After a vague discussion in which Raines said he wanted to look forward, not back, he told Engelberg and Bronner, “I don’t want my obituary to read that I was the editor who blew the biggest investigative story of my generation.”

  “I was just staggered,” says Engelberg. “The sheer ego of it. It wasn’t about doing great journalism. It wasn’t about the thousands dead at ground zero. It wasn’t about getting the story right. It was about his obituary.”

  Still, the newsroom needed a leader, and it’s entirely possible that the Times’s staff might have embraced one in Raines if he’d been willing to show them he valued having them on his team. But Raines seemed uninterested in providing that sort of leadership. In his first month on the job, he had already begun to alienate a key constituency, a group of powerful newsroom brokers who could have helped interpret his vision: the desk editors. In taking authority and control away from the men and women who ran the paper’s myriad departments, Raines immediately disenfranchised the layer of management that had the most interaction with reporters. “When you empower the desk editors, you in effect empower the reporters,” says Gene Roberts, Joe Lelyveld’s first managing editor. “Ten o’clock is the busiest time of the day for the assignment desk. Reporters are coming in, they’re checking with sources, so between ten and eleven, reporters and editors are making deals about what their days are going to be like. And then meanwhile you have the AMEs [assistant managing editors] meeting with the executive editor and reflecting on yesterday’s newspaper. So they come out of that meeting and give marching orders to the desk editors, but they’ve already talked to their reporters.

  “At this point either the assignment editor basically ignores the assistant MEs or they have to go back to the reporters and say, ‘Oops, I said you could do story X, but now you have to do story Y.’ So you have a kind of institutional disconnect that gets built right into the system, and no matter what your personality is, having that kind of day-in-day-out problem starts unsettling people on a massive scale.” By ignoring the desk editors, Howell Raines had all but forced them to make an unpleasant choice: either they could cheerily carry out Raines’s marching orders and risk the wrath of their reporters or they could align themselves with their staffs and join in the griping. Most of them sided with their reporters—and against Raines.

  There were also more personal reasons that the paper’s midlevel editors felt frustrated. The Times, like any tribal institution, has its own set of social classes. One of the most important is made up of midlevel editors, the group of Times lifers between thirty and sixty years old who actually put out the paper on a day-to-day basis. They assign the stories, they edit the copy, they deal with complaints. They are, invariably, journalists who have made enormous sacrifices to work at the Times. “Where are these people going?” asks one Times editor. “They’re not going to Esquire, they’re not going to Vanity Fair. They carve out some small amount of space, they fight for some tiny bit of creativity, and they do it for the chance to be a part of something larger. Howell took that away.”

  As the year stretched on, the Times settled into a routine in which reporters and editors were working seven-day weeks. In the midst of this chaos, Raines began a campaign to more purposefully remake specific sections of the paper.

  He began by focusing on both the national and business desks. Raines, working through Gerald Boyd and Andrew Rosenthal, would send marching orders to national editor Katy Roberts, who sometimes ended up in tears because she had to go to a reporter to whom she had already given a story and take back the assignment.

  Raines had more success with the business section. “Early on,” says Glenn Kramon, “there was this sense that Biz Day needed to be told what to do.” Kramon responded by exhorting his staff to prove to Raines that they were worthy of his respect and praise. “As it went on, it became much more of a collaboration.” In early 2002, no business story was more consuming than the collapse of Enron, and Raines’s intense desire to dominate breaking news coupled with the hard-nosed work of Kramon’s staff pushed the Times’s coverage of the story into the lead, ahead of The Wall Street Journal, which had dominated the story early on. On January 17, the Times’s David Cay Johnston broke a story on page one detailing how the company had avoided paying income taxes for four out of the previous five years. On January 25, Alex Berenson detailed how Enron had created illusory profits in a division run by Thomas White, who left Enron to become secretary of the army. And on February 10, Kurt Eichenwald authored a 6,460-word front-page story that to this day serves as an excellent primer on the downfall of a once mighty company.

  “[Howell] recognized early on what a huge story Enron was,” says Kramon. “And he pushed us hard to dominate the story, to stay ahead of competitors like the Journal. On days we did, he was extremely complimentary and enthusiastic. He had great instincts for stories that would excite readers.”

  Once Kramon showed he was able to lead his staff to dominate the coverage, Raines became less dictatorial as well. On days when Enron would be a major focus of the paper’s news report, Raines, Boyd, and Rosenthal would meet with Kramon and other reporters and editors involved in the story to map out coverage. “It wasn’t, ‘You should do this or you should do that,’ ” says Kramon. “Which was in contrast to what happened early on.

  “I always told my staff that they saved my job.
We did so well on that story, it became clear to Howell that we were quite good already and that we could be trusted.”

  With the business and national staffs still trying to find their footing, Howell Raines set his sights on an even bigger project: reorganizing his old stomping grounds, the Washington bureau. It would become one of the most contentious managerial battles he would fight.

  THE WASHINGTON BUREAU

  Jill Abramson was hired by the Times from The Wall Street Journal in 1997. Abramson is a short, droll woman who draws out her words as she speaks. She’s also a ferocious political reporter and was scooped up by the Times because she was regularly beating the paper on stories involving Clinton’s fund-raising scandals. After only three years there, she was named the Times’s Washington bureau chief: On Election Day 2000, Abramson was in New York helping to coordinate the Times’s coverage when Joe Lelyveld called her into his office. “We don’t know who’s going to be the next president,” Lelyveld said, “but we know who’ll be the next Washington bureau chief.” Abramson started her new post on January 1, 2001.

  Only five months later, Raines was named as Lelyveld’s successor, and that summer Raines asked Abramson to dinner. The two had met before—Abramson’s best friend at the Times is Op-Ed page columnist Maureen Dowd, who was one of Raines’s stars when he led the Washington bureau. Now, the agenda was the future. “He clearly wanted me to take a different job in New York,” Abramson says. But Abramson had barely begun her new job, which was one she thought she “was born to do.” Besides, her son was just starting high school in Washington.

  Over dinner, Raines asked Abramson if she thought Patrick Tyler, the paper’s London bureau chief and an old friend of Raines’s, would make a good Washington bureau chief. Abramson was taken aback. “That struck me as odd,” Abramson says. After all, Washington already had a bureau chief. But despite that awkwardness, Abramson liked Raines: “He had a really good sense of humor and a very sharp take on politics, which had always been my passion. I thought we would be kind of simpatico.”

  After Raines took over, things went downhill fast. The Washington bureau, Raines felt, had underperformed in its September 11 coverage, and he grew even more autocratic than usual when it came to deciding what stories the bureau should be pursuing. By October, Raines was dictating stories for the bureau to write over the daily squawk box meetings. “He became the Washington bureau chief,” Abramson says. “He was deciding who he wanted to write most of the big stories. And he decided to have Pat Tyler come back from London. . . . I definitely had the feeling that he did not have the confidence in me and anyone else in the Washington bureau who hadn’t been part of his own Washington bureau A-team.”

  Tyler’s appointment reinforced Raines’s reputation among the bureau’s staffers as someone who was insensitive and arrogant. As far back as Scotty Reston’s days in the 1940s and 1950s, the Washington bureau has resented what it sees as the meddling from New York; Raines himself had pushed back against the authority of the home office when he was bureau chief. In picking a fight with Abramson so early on, Raines virtually guaranteed that the bureau would unite against him. And in selecting Tyler as Abramson’s designated successor, Raines also inflamed speculation that he was willing to dole out key positions based upon friendship rather than reportorial chops. Tyler was a fine correspondent, but he had also famously been a fishing buddy of Raines’s for more than three decades. Before long, the fifty-person Washington bureau had begun referring to the paper’s masthead as the Taliban and Raines as Mullah Omar. (“Jill Abramson never expressed any frustration to me . . . about my assignment to the Washington bureau,” Tyler wrote to me in an e-mail. “On the contrary, she expressed gratitude to me that I would be bringing my extensive experience in international affairs . . . to the bureau management team.”)*26

  In mid-October 2001, Gerald Boyd flew to Washington to meet with the staff there. He spoke about the importance of the Washington report but did so in a way that made the bureau feel inconsequential. “He kept saying, ‘At nine o’clock, we [the masthead] decide, then at ten o’clock we decide, and at noon we decide.’ That angered people,” Abramson says. Boyd also explained how when something “major” happened in Washington, “we want Johnny Apple writing the story.” R. W. “Johnny” Apple, who at one time had specialized in writing the Times’s trademark page-one comprehensive summaries of the issue of the day, hadn’t been a daily presence in the bureau for years; by 2001, his input was increasingly felt in the Dining In/Dining Out section, for which he contributed articles about his gastronomical adventures. The bureau was surprised by this announcement, especially because Boyd seemed to overlook Adam Clymer, the Times’s Washington correspondent, who was the paper’s presumptive go-to guy on major D.C. events. But as of late, he too had been forgotten—or neglected—in Raines’s frenzied reorganization.

  “The thing about Howell and Gerald to a degree is they’d been out of the newsroom for a while,” Abramson says. “So they missed this whole generation of new reporters who’d broken incredible stories. It was like they didn’t exist.”

  Boyd was shaken by the level of discontent he encountered in the D.C. bureau. “The issue of the heavy-handedness was a lot more personal than I certainly realized,” Boyd told Ken Auletta for The New Yorker. “I didn’t defuse it. I probably added to it, which wasn’t good.” After the bureau meeting, Abramson and Boyd sat outside on a bench facing the White House to talk one-on-one.

  That meeting went much better than the one at the bureau. “What I appreciated about [Gerald] was that he was approachable,” Abramson says. The two spoke in depth, and Abramson told Boyd that she felt Raines and Boyd were “especially disrespectful to the women managers in the newsroom.” Abramson felt national editor Katy Roberts was being “run over” and Week in Review editor Susan Chira was “pretty desperate” because her weekly lineup was being dictated to her. Boyd told Abramson that things could get worse before they got better, but Abramson left the meeting feeling that she and Boyd had reached an understanding. “I felt like he was talking to me from the heart and honestly,” says Abramson. “And I felt that he went back and at least conveyed my message to Howell.”

  But Raines and Abramson’s relationship would continue to deteriorate throughout the new year, even though Raines did make attempts to reach out to his Washington bureau chief. In late January 2002, Raines’s son’s funk band, Galactic, was playing at New York’s Irving Plaza, a standing-room-only concert hall just east of Union Square. Abramson’s son Will is an aspiring musician, and Raines invited Abramson and Will up to New York for the show. He cooked a lamb dinner and then got a backstage pass for Will. By that time, Raines and the D.C. bureau were almost at open war, but both Howell Raines and Jill Abramson managed to put aside their professional animosity for an evening. “It was so nice,” Abramson says wistfully, remembering that night more than two years later. “Actually lovely.”

  A GROWING MANDATE

  The September 11 coverage put Howell Raines’s plans to overhaul the paper temporarily on hold. “This story was so consuming that there wasn’t a lot of time to think about organizational issues, staffing issues, and long-term strategy,” Raines said in August 2002. “This was a matter of total immersion.” By January 2002, he was ready to move again. One of his first decisions involved what to do about Kevin Sack, who had yet to hear a word from Raines since their contentious meeting in Atlanta the previous August. Raines dispatched Jill Abramson to Atlanta to meet with Sack and David Firestone, the paper’s Atlanta correspondent. Abramson told Sack that he could have a national beat based out of D.C. Firestone was being asked to move to Washington as well. “I felt in the case of Kevin, it was clear they didn’t really care whether he stayed or went,” Abramson says. “But I cared a lot.”

  Sack asked Abramson if he’d be able to return to Atlanta on the weekends. Occasionally, she said. Abramson was sympathetic to Sack and told him she’d do her best to make sure he could return more often than not, at
least every other weekend. Sack asked if any arrangement he made with Abramson would be binding to the next Washington bureau chief. Abramson said it wouldn’t be. The next Monday, Sack declined the offer. He e-mailed Raines and Boyd to ask what he should do next.

  Boyd shot back a terse e-mail declaring that Sack’s next job for The New York Times would not be in Atlanta. Raines didn’t even bother replying. “I just thought that was awful,” says Mike Oreskes, who had worked extensively with Sack over the years. “I understand that Howell didn’t want people staying in places forever, but Kevin is a rare talent, and I thought we should do whatever we could to keep him. And besides that, the way Howell dealt with the whole thing was so bullheaded and wrong.”

  Throughout the process, Raines never called Sack to discuss the situation. “He let Gerald carry all the water,” says Sack, “to the point where I was getting e-mails and calls because other people were so outraged. Finally, after this had started leaking out he called and [we] had a very perfunctory conversation.”

  Sack began to look for another job. Meanwhile, word of the incident began to trickle through the Times’s newsroom. Raines’s few public declarations—that national correspondents should expect to travel more, that he was looking to respond more quickly to the news—only heightened tension. At one meeting in Washington, Raines told the staff that he hadn’t worked long and hard to get to his post just to sit back and passively watch the paper’s staff do whatever they wanted. San Francisco–based Evelyn Nieves, Los Angeles–based James Sterngold, Denver-based Michael Janofsky, and Seattle-based Sam Howe Verhovek—longtime bureau chiefs or correspondents all—were told they’d be relocated or moved back to New York.

  Particularly galling to the correspondents was the fact that while Raines was unwilling to compromise with Sack, he bent over backward to accommodate his personal friend Rick Bragg, who seemed to be permanently parked in New Orleans, a city where the Times didn’t traditionally even have a bureau. Ever since Raines had been named executive editor, Bragg had frequently reminded other reporters how close he was to the paper’s new boss. Bragg also appeared to get better play than virtually any other reporter on staff. In Raines’s first six months on the job, ten out of Bragg’s twenty-one stories ran on page one. From the time he was hired by Joe Lelyveld, Bragg had always been a difficult writer to handle, but Raines’s coddling made things worse. Raines put out word to Bragg’s editors that his copy shouldn’t be edited unnecessarily; in fact, he said, he viewed any substantial editing of Bragg’s work as unnecessary. When, immediately after September 11, Raines had insisted Bragg be sent overseas to Pakistan, he did so over objections from acting foreign editor Roger Cohen and members of the masthead. Bragg had little foreign experience and was known for being intractable. This was too important a story to assign to someone like Bragg, they felt.*27