Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  After joining the Times in 1994, Bragg, a native Alabamian, was quickly promoted to the paper’s national desk. (“It was my dream to do this someday, but some things even I was afraid to dream,” he wrote later.) He specialized in colorful stories about the American South, stories more lyrical and quirky than what the Times usually ran. He delighted in painting himself as the ultimate outsider: In an online autobiography, he described his appointment as one of Harvard’s Nieman fellows as being made so the university could “fill . . . their white trash quota.” From his early days at the paper, Bragg inspired wildly divergent opinions. Some readers—and some of the paper’s other writers—loved his writing and felt it brought a dose of much-needed humanity and liveliness to the paper’s pages. (The Pulitzer board agreed and in 1996 awarded Bragg the prize for feature writing.) Others decried what they saw as overwrought sentimentality. “I stopped reading him long ago,” blogger and journalist Ana Marie Cox wrote in 2003, “about the time I realized that any article carrying his byline would, more likely than not, be the Platonic ideal of Timesian condescension. More specifically, they would be about people who lived in trailer parks (or some such lower-class milieu) but had the kind of stubborn dignity—or precocious skill—the middle class folks find so quaint.”

  In 1997, Bragg published his bestselling memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’, a highly acclaimed book that celebrated his mother’s iron will. From then on, Bragg was a marquee writer, one of the few journalists at the Times who was better known for his accomplishments away from the paper. By the time Raines demanded Roger Cohen send Bragg overseas, Bragg’s insistence on special treatment was more the rule than the exception.

  Bragg’s stories from Pakistan occasionally embarrassed the paper’s more seasoned correspondents. An October 1 story headlined “Pakistan Is 2 Worlds: One Urbane, One Enraged” struck some staffers as simplistic and reductionist. Bragg’s conclusion—that there was a divide between the country’s upper classes and Islamic militants—was already obvious to anyone who had read anything about Pakistan. Three weeks later, a dispute over one of Bragg’s stories all but led to the removal of Nicholas Kristof as the assistant managing editor in charge of the Sunday paper. The story, about a deformed Pakistani woman who was treated by her fellow villagers as if she had divine healing powers, was just the kind of soft-news tale Bragg specialized in. It began:

  Surrounded by caged birds and blessings, touched in reverence by throngs of people who believe that she is touched by God, the young woman with the startling deformity sat at the door of a place of miracles and pawed clumsily at the women and babies who bowed for her favor. The gatekeeper of a shrine to health and fertility, she has a shrunken head that is too small for her body, her words are nonsense and screams, and even her face, with its pointed forehead and wide, round jaws, is in the shape of a tear.

  Raines wanted the piece on the front page of Sunday’s paper. Kristof disagreed. Raines shot back, “What’s wrong with putting on page one a story everyone will talk about?” In the end, of course, Raines got his way, and Bragg’s story ran on the front page of the October 28 paper. By the end of November, Kristof was pushed out of his job and given a twice-weekly Op-Ed page column, a position that can be appointed only by the publisher. It was another signal of the close relationship between Arthur Sulzberger and Howell Raines.

  By February 2002, other news outlets were beginning to report on the discord among the Times’s national staff. Correspondents told media reporters that they feared the paper was becoming antifamily and that Raines was rumored to be looking only for “unencumbered” writers for the national desk. “He’s looking for 30-year-olds with no spouse and no children, people who can file from four datelines in five days,” one correspondent told New York magazine. Another said, “There’s suddenly this whole issue of what it means to be a reporter at the Times. It used to be if you were a star, you either went national or foreign. What do you do now when you’re 40 or 50 years old?”

  In response to these public reports, Raines sent out an e-mail on February 15, 2002, to the Times staff; it was addressed to “friends and colleagues.” “I know that inaccurate reports have stirred anxieties among some of you about how people will be treated as we pursue this energetic vision,” Raines wrote. “There will be no anti-family attitudes or actions at The Times. . . . Cooperation and personal respect in the service of quality journalism are the first principles at The Times. I do ask your consideration of the fact that in an international organization with over 1,100 staffers, orderly management and fairness of opportunity are necessary to achieve that journalism.”

  But Raines’s actions seemed to belie his words. What’s more, Raines hadn’t bothered to try to gain the respect of his staff in his crucial first months on the job—and now, when he faced turmoil in the newsroom, his reporters and editors were more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the colleagues they had been working with for years than to a man who’d spent the last decade secluded in the offices of the editorial page, seven floors up and a world away from the newsroom. Sack received over a hundred phone calls and e-mails from fellow Times reporters and editors, all bemoaning his treatment at the hands of Raines. “What seemed to happen,” says Soma Golden Behr, “was as we got more kudos, [Raines] got more full of himself. And by this time he knew where the men’s room was, he knew how to sub out a picture at the last minute, things he didn’t really know when he walked in the door. . . . And as it went on, his resistance to criticism grew and grew, until finally it became this sense that to criticize [Raines] is to betray [him]. And then you’re really in deep.”

  PUSHING BACK, MOVING ON

  By the spring of 2002, Raines seemed positively obsessed with the Times’s Washington bureau. For one thing, he was frustrated that Pat Tyler, the old fishing buddy he hoped to install as bureau chief, wasn’t flourishing. For this, Raines blamed Jill Abramson. Soon after Tyler moved back to the bureau from London, there was a protracted dispute over the office space he would get. When Tyler arrived, only Abramson and Washington editor John Broder had offices. Raines wanted Tyler to have one as well, so Abramson suggested converting an empty office that was used for the daily page-one meetings.

  Office space—indeed, any private space—is a rare commodity at the Times, as it is at most newspapers. The vast majority of reporters and midlevel editors work on open floors, sitting cheek by jowl with their co-workers. In New York, even masthead-level editors make do with windowless offices that open onto newsroom hallways. But Raines was determined that Tyler have a bigger office than Broder. Abramson considered just giving Tyler her office to keep the peace. “I didn’t know what to do. I said to Howell, ‘There is no other office,’ ” says Abramson. Raines replied that it was up to Abramson to solve the problem “creatively.” Raines also asked former managing editor Arthur Gelb—who was one of Abramson’s mentors on the paper—to talk to Abramson about Tyler’s office. Eventually, Raines agreed that it would be acceptable for Tyler to remain in the former page-one office even though it was slightly smaller than John Broder’s office. But the damage had been done: Raines had made it clear he was willing to undermine Abramson’s authority over something as petty as office space for one of his favorites.

  Word was starting to circulate in Washington’s close-knit journalistic community about Abramson’s difficulties with Howell Raines and Pat Tyler’s apparent installation as the bureau chief–in-waiting. That was a perception Tyler disagreed with. “Far from being a shadow bureau chief, I was an adjunct to her management of the bureau on her initiative,” Tyler wrote in an e-mail. “She said to me on a number of occasions that she was delighted to have someone with my experience on her team. Of course, I was aware of the tension between her and Howell Raines, but she and I had had two long dinners about how determined we both were to overcome it.”

  Abramson, on the other hand, remembers feeling frustrated and humiliated. “I went from [being] the first woman ever to be Washington bureau chief of the T
imes to going to book parties in Washington and having people ask me, ‘How are you?’ like I had cancer,” she recalls. In the spring of 2002, Steve Coll, the managing editor of The Washington Post, asked Abramson to meet him for a drink. Coll told Abramson what she was quickly realizing: She was in an untenable position. He asked her to join his staff.

  Abramson didn’t dismiss the offer out of hand, and she told Coll she’d need to think seriously about her situation. Without making any decisions one way or the other, she kept on pushing forward. By then, even Raines had realized he had to address the tensions with his D.C. bureau. He decided the way to do this was to essentially promote Abramson out of Washington, much as he had orchestrated Kristof’s promotion out of his way. Later that spring, Raines asked Abramson to come to New York and meet him for dinner at Aquavit, a Scandinavian restaurant on West Fifty-fourth Street.

  The meal was over three hours long. Raines spent the first half of it discussing the symbolic importance of the meeting place. Aquavit, he told Abramson, was where he had made his pitch to Arthur Sulzberger about becoming executive editor of the Times. He explained his campaign: how he had argued that the Times was losing a step, how the culture report needed to be reinvigorated, how he wanted to fight against complacency. He described how he had mapped out a campaign that included individually wooing members of the Times’s board of directors and how, at each step along the way, he was amazed that Bill Keller wasn’t doing the same thing. Then, finally, Raines told Abramson that he wanted her to join the paper’s masthead. Abramson wasn’t sure how to react.

  “It’s very hard for me to evaluate your offer,” she remembers telling him. “Part of the reason is that I feel I have to disclose to you I’m in very, very serious talks with The Washington Post to go work there.” Raines was thunderstruck. The meal concluded soon after. Before they departed, Raines said, “If you’re not coming to the prom with me, I need to know.”

  Abramson might have actually left the paper were it not for the intervention of the two men who were widely seen as Raines’s biggest supporters. Shortly after she told Raines she was considering the Post’s offer, she met Gerald Boyd for lunch at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. The two briefly discussed the situation and Abramson’s offer from the Post. After listening to Abramson, Boyd looked across the table and said, “Don’t you be afraid to fight Pat Tyler for your job.”

  “It never occurred to me I could do that,” says Abramson. “I just assumed Gerald was totally with [Raines] and with the plan of putting me in the icebox and making Pat bureau chief.” Abramson, it seems, did not realize the extent to which many in New York also viewed Raines’s preoccupation with Tyler as something attributable more to Raines’s personal relationship with him than to Tyler’s journalistic merit. “A lot of people did not see in Pat Tyler’s work a vindication of Howell’s position on him,” says Al Siegal, a Times assistant managing editor.

  Then, soon after her lunch with Boyd, Abramson got a call from Arthur Sulzberger.

  “What would it take for you to be able to be happy at the Times and remain here?” Sulzberger asked.

  “It would take removing the sole of Howell Raines’s shoe off my ass,” Abramson replied.

  Sulzberger didn’t miss a beat: “Do I tell him or do you?”

  Abramson said she would do it. “That was amazingly empowering,” she says. That afternoon, she called Raines to tell him she would remain at the Times—but as the paper’s Washington bureau chief.

  Raines was angry. Immediately, he began to focus on Tyler. “He was saying that meant I had to make sure Pat flourished and that Pat was a star,” Abramson says.

  —————

  BY THE SPRING OF 2002, it wasn’t just journalists in the Washington bureau who were frustrated. The situation in the newsroom had grown outright hostile. Now even the assistant managing editors were being cut out of the loop. Raines had by then stopped attending the 10:30 a.m. meeting he had instituted during his first week on the job, because, he told people, he was sick of listening to their ridiculous ideas. Things got so bad that current and former Times staffers began complaining directly to Arthur Sulzberger, who is said to have laughed them off. “I’m hearing Abe’s back!” Sulzberger was quoted as saying in Ken Auletta’s June 2002 New Yorker profile of Raines. Sulzberger was referring to former executive editor A. M. Rosenthal, who had ended his seventeen-year tenure at the head of the paper in a state of bitter isolation.

  Auletta’s piece was a landmark moment for Raines. It was his first major profile as executive editor, and one with which he had enthusiastically cooperated, to the point of once suggesting that Auletta be permitted to sit in on company retreats and strategy sessions. Auletta quoted a thirty-year veteran of the paper as saying, “There is enormous resentment, the likes of which I’ve never seen.” But overall, the piece was largely positive and dwelled at considerable length on the Times’s triumphs after September 11. Raines, however, thought the piece was an “unsophisticated” analysis of the situation. It was foolish, Raines complained, not to expect there to be friction when a new leader tries to implement his vision.

  It became increasingly clear that that vision would mean both the loss of some valued Times staffers and complaints about favoritism. By March, Kevin Sack had left The New York Times after more than a decade at the paper. Dean Baquet, the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, hired Sack and told him he could stay in Atlanta for as long as he liked. (Soon after, Sack set to work with the Los Angeles Times’s Alan C. Miller on a large, in-depth investigative project examining a military aircraft nicknamed “the Widow Maker” for its high number of fatalities. Sack—and the Los Angeles Times—would win a 2003 national reporting Pulitzer for that work, beating out The New York Times’s entry on the country’s business scandals.) By the end of the year, a number of other national correspondents had also either retired or left to work for other papers, including Gustav Niebuhr, who became a visiting fellow at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School; Evelyn Nieves and Blaine Harden, who both joined The Washington Post; James Sterngold, who was hired by the San Francisco Chronicle; and Sam Howe Verhovek, who left for the Los Angeles Times.

  Rick Bragg, on the other hand, wasn’t going anywhere. Copy editors were again explicitly instructed to lay off his work, and Raines gave the general impression that his stories, no matter their topic, were invariably destined for page one. In fact, of the twenty-three stories Bragg filed in the first six months of 2002—for an average of less than one story a week—fourteen ran on the front page. “Florida Town Finds Satan an Offense Unto It,” was the headline for one Bragg front-page dispatch; “Key West Is Tiring of Chickens in Road,” read another. In Salt Lake City, where Raines dispatched Bragg to write about the 2002 Winter Olympics, Bragg had boasted to other Times writers about his relationship with the paper’s executive editor; at one lavish dinner, he insisted on picking up the check, explaining, “Howell won’t mind.”

  It’s easy to see why the unabashedly literary, confident Bragg appealed so strongly to Raines, a man who still hoped one day to be known as a great novelist. The author’s bio in Raines’s 1977 novel, Whiskey Man, reads, “Howell Raines grew up among great storytellers from the hill countries of northern Alabama,” just the kind of self-conscious detail Bragg favored in his writings. In many ways Whiskey Man, which centered on a young man living in Prohibition-era Alabama, struggling to break free from his Scripture-quoting father while falling under the influence of a bootlegger named Bluenose, was filled with the kind of down-home flourishes that Bragg used to strong effect in his newspaper work.

  As Howell Raines continued to indulge his favorites, he also maintained his dismissive attitude toward those whose opinions and perspectives differed from his own. Investigative editor Stephen Engelberg, who had clashed with Raines over the September 11 coverage, was beginning to find the Times’s new order unbearable. By the spring of 2002, he had become quite vocal in his dissatisfaction with Howell Raines. Raines, Engelberg wrote
later in a March 2004 article for Portland’s The Oregonian, was a “boss from hell” and had made the atmosphere at the paper “ugly.” He disagreed, too, with the quick turnaround Raines was demanding for full-page stories on the hot topic of the week, whether it was the Olympic ice-skating scandals or the controversies in the Catholic Church. On November 1, 2001, after polishing off two successive, Raines-assigned 3,500- and 4,000-word stories, Engelberg turned to Matthew Purdy, a colleague who was helping to edit the stories. “This can’t work,” Engelberg said. “It will end in tears.” The first piece, an examination of anthrax, actually had worked: It was insightful and contained new information. But the second story, about the risks of biological and chemical attacks, was hardly impressive. “It was embarrassingly bad,” says Engelberg. “I went to Gerald and said, ‘Give us one more day and we can do something worthwhile.’ But for Howell, the story was just a means to an end to the buzz it created. What the stories said weren’t important; it was just important that there were stories.”