Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  It wasn’t long before some of the paper’s veteran editorialists began (anonymously) denouncing their boss in the press. “When you spend a lot of paragraphs bashing people, you don’t spend a lot of paragraphs making sound arguments,” one said to The Washington Post. “You sort of dumb down the page.” Another griped to the National Journal, “We sound like the New York Post, an editorial page of shrill braying as opposed to sound argumentation.” Even his predecessors on the page, Jack Rosenthal and Max Frankel, criticized Raines. In his memoir, Frankel wrote how Raines “did rattle the china for a while, but if he read more of yesteryear’s papers, he’d have recognized that mere invective is no substitute for vigor and verve.” And Rosenthal told George magazine, “I didn’t want us to undermine our reporting staff in the way The Wall Street Journal editorial staff undermines its reporters.”

  Although the complaints ostensibly concerned Raines’s philosophical approach to the editorial page, underlying them was a criticism of his managerial style. “He tended to lecture the board,” says one longtime editorialist. “He saw us as a group of very intelligent people who didn’t quite understand the importance of journalism or the positions of the paper as well as he did.” The grumblings echoed what had been said in Washington: Raines was autocratic; he didn’t have patience for anyone but his stars; he was unwilling to treat the board’s twelve members as partners. Before long, editorialists started leaving.

  In their place, Raines was able to install like-minded writers, and within a couple of years had assembled a close-knit group whose talents and careers he nurtured. “He made that editorial page so exciting,” says Gail Collins, whom Raines recruited from Newsday in 1995, where she had been a political columnist. “I imagined it as everybody sitting around a table having very boring discussions. He was hugely into doing things on deadline, being up on the news, traveling on assignment.

  “Howell had a vision of what the editorial page should be like,” Collins continues. “It should create talk, encourage this national conversation about the issues of the day.” The offices of the editorial page, located on the tenth floor of the Times, are some of the nicest in the building. There’s an extensive library with wood paneling. The tops of the doors are framed with small stained-glass windows, and the walls are trimmed with gothic moldings. It’s here that the fifty people involved in producing the two daily pages under the editorial-page editor’s control spend their days. Working with a relatively small group of people enabled Raines to develop a personal relationship with every member of his staff. Despite his truculence, he had always been a hugely charismatic figure, and he used that charisma to mold the editorial page to his vision. “There was a desire to get Howell’s attention, to convince him, to make him interested in your things,” Collins says. “It’s a very useful charisma. It drove things because you wanted him to dwell on you.”

  The press certainly dwelled on Raines, but their attention was often critical. In Slate, Timothy Noah wrote that Raines’s editorials “routinely attempt to hide simpleminded logic behind lapidary prose and promiscuous contempt. Such elegant smugness! Such magnificent indifference to nuance!” And Michael Tomasky wrote in The Nation, “Raines would do well, once this is over, to give thought to the legacy he’s left—extinguishing many of the Times’ nobler traditions while using the country’s most important newspaper as his personal soapbox.” Some writers within the paper thought Raines’s approach had more to do with marketing than conviction. “To me, it seemed like a business approach,” says one editorial writer. “Like, ‘Let’s put the Times in a place where we’ll be talked about.’ It seemed like part of the business model Arthur [Sulzberger] and Howell understood.”

  Other people thought Raines’s vitriolic tone—especially with respect to Bill Clinton—was fueled by nothing so much as personal rage. “That was a stormy time for the editorial page,” says one writer whom Raines hired. “The relentlessness, the savagery of those editorials [about Clinton]. There was no other subject on which we were more passionate, and it would have been good to at least have been that passionate about genocide.” Privately, Raines himself joked about the root of his animus for Clinton, riffing in conversation about a “certain type of person who reminds us of who we hated when we were kids.” For Raines, he said, it was “the fat kid in the band.”

  There were times, everyone agreed, that Raines used the editorial page to great effect. In Raines’s last eight months as editorial-page editor, the page ran thirty-six editorials on campaign finance reform, of which he was a fierce advocate. “[Campaign finance] is the most boring issue in the entire world,” says Gail Collins. “It was just hell on wheels to try to make it interesting. I swear . . . if God had meant for campaign finance to be reformed, he wouldn’t have made it so boring.”

  But Raines found a way to make it more exciting: by naming the senators and congressmen who were impeding passage. “He’d torture them,” Collins says admiringly. “And to not be afraid to run that many [pieces] when you’re the person who has this ‘exciting’ editorial page was sort of a great standard-bearing thing in itself.”

  In one two-week period between March and early April 2001, Raines ran nine campaign finance editorials, including two on the same day. That whole year, the headlines were similar to the point of redundancy: “The Battle to Save Shays-Meehan”; “The Battle for Shays-Meehan”; “New Peril for Campaign Reform”; “Perils for Campaign Reform”; “The Senate’s Next Test”; “Next Test for Finance Reform”; and “An Impending Test for Reform.” “He would not stop,” Collins says. “He was totally and utterly committed.” And Raines never worried about going overboard. “It wasn’t the sort of thing Howell thought about,” she says.

  Raines’s most famous editorial was written on the occasion of Robert McNamara’s 1995 memoir, In Retrospect. McNamara, who had served as secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was one of the main architects of the Vietnam War. Twenty years after its conclusion, he finally admitted it was a mistake. On April 12, 1995, Raines unleashed his fury in a 742-word piece titled “Mr. McNamara’s War.”

  Comes now Robert McNamara with the announcement that he has in the fullness of time grasped realities that seemed readily apparent to millions of Americans throughout the Vietnam War. At the time, he appeared to be helping an obsessed President prosecute a war of no real consequence to the security of the United States. Millions of loyal citizens concluded that the war was a militarily unnecessary and politically futile effort to prop up a corrupt Government that could neither reform nor defend itself.

  Through all the bloody years, those were the facts as they appeared on the surface. Therefore, only one argument could be advanced to clear President Johnson and Mr. McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, of the charge of wasting lives atrociously. That was the theory that they possessed superior knowledge, not available to the public, that the collapse of South Vietnam would lead to regional and perhaps world domination by the Communists; and moreover, that their superior knowledge was so compelling it rendered unreliable and untrue the apparent facts available to even the most expert opponents of the war.

  With a few throwaway lines in his new book, “In Retrospect,” Mr. McNamara admits that such knowledge never existed.

  Raines went on:

  It is important to remember how fate dispensed rewards and punishment for Mr. McNamara’s thousands of days of error. Three million Vietnamese died. Fifty-eight thousand Americans got to come home in body bags. Mr. McNamara, while tormented by his role in the war, got a sinecure at the World Bank and summers at the Vineyard.

  In both the newsroom and the editorial board, the reaction to Raines’s piece was mixed. Many felt it was just the kind of tough piece that the Times should be printing, that it behooved the most powerful paper in the country to take an impassioned stand. Others felt it unseemly. Editorial writer Leon Sigal, who at the time was writing on foreign policy for the page, thought the personal nature of the attack was beneath the Tim
es. “It was simply beating up a guy,” he said. Arthur Sulzberger, however, wasn’t ambivalent about the piece: He nominated it for a Pulitzer and wrote a personal letter to the Pulitzer board. (Bob Semple, another Times editorial writer, ended up winning the award for editorial writing that year.)

  Sulzberger’s gesture on Howell Raines’s behalf—and the intensely close relationship between the two men—did not go unnoticed by the staff. Indeed, some of the paper’s top editors felt their relationship bordered on the sycophantic. In a rare joint appearance with Raines on C-SPAN in 1997, Sulzberger was asked how editorial policy at the paper was set. “Howell and I talk all too frequently,” Sulzberger began.

  “Not too frequently for me,” Raines cut in, flashing a sly grin.

  At times, Sulzberger seemed dependent on Raines to let him know what was going on. At one of the annual State of the Times talks Sulzberger holds for employees, Sulzberger was asked if the paper had been “objective and unbiased” in its coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “Howell and his editorial colleagues, and me as well, felt that nothing we already knew warranted impeachment,” Sulzberger answered, before explaining that the Times had been an early advocate of . . . what? “I forgot the word,” Sulzberger said, looking out into the audience to find Raines.

  “Censure,” Raines called back to him.

  Raines, it became clear, was more than just a confidant of Sulzberger’s. And soon he’d be more than just The New York Times’s editorial-page editor.

  THE COMPETITION

  In early 2001, shortly after Joe Lelyveld announced his pending retirement, Arthur Sulzberger approached Raines and managing editor Bill Keller and told the two men he wanted to speak with them, separately and over a series of dinners, about becoming the next leader of the Times. For Sulzberger, it would be a defining choice. When Max Frankel had retired, Sulzberger was relatively new on the job, and there was no obvious candidate except for Lelyveld. What’s more, he remembered how A. M. Rosenthal had stymied his father’s efforts to groom a successor. This time, Sulzberger made sure there were two viable candidates. The two men presented a stark contrast. Keller, a onetime foreign correspondent, is rangy and has a slightly patrician air. He had had a privileged childhood—his father was a former chairman of Chevron—and attended Pomona College in California. He has small, deep-set eyes and a reserved manner. Raines, in contrast, is short and expansive. His dark, fierce eyes intimidated subordinates even when he wasn’t speaking, and his family and colleagues said he sometimes looked like an angry hawk.

  Raines has written about how he had prepared for years for these job interviews. “I thought the paper was becoming duller, slower, and more uneven in quality with every passing day,” he wrote in a May 2004 Atlantic cover article. In fact, the Times was coming off an overwhelming and fast-changing story—the 2000 presidential election and Florida recount—for which it had provided excellent coverage, an inspiring combination of daily reporting, and in-depth investigations and analyses. Late on Tuesday, November 7, as soon as it had become clear that Florida would decide the election, Lelyveld had dispatched the Times’s enormous resources into the state. On Thursday, the Times ran more than twenty stories about the recount, twice the number The Washington Post ran that day. The Times blanketed the story so completely that a special rubric—“Counting the Vote”—was adopted to guide readers through its coverage. Throughout November and into December, the paper’s combination of breaking news and investigative reportage led the pack. On November 17, for instance, Raymond Bonner and Josh Barbanel broke a story about the disproportionately high number of ballots cast by African American voters in Duval County that had been invalidated. Several weeks later, on December 8, a front-page story by David Barstow and Somini Sengupta broke news about the controversial history of a judge in Leon County whose ruling crippled Al Gore’s chances. Even Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler noted how completely the Times dominated the story. In an internally circulated memo, Getler wrote how “our rivals up the road” had won the ground war. “It seems to me that what must have been a big and well-organized commitment of resources to Florida by the NYT paid off in some important and enterprising stories and in raising the profile of the paper’s on the ground reporting,” he wrote. During his tenure, Lelyveld had also reinvigorated the paper’s metro and business staffs and created a top-notch investigative team.

  Another of Lelyveld’s lasting contributions to the Times was to break with a tradition in which those who hadn’t spent their entire careers at the paper were looked on with distrust. Lelyveld, like Frankel and Rosenthal before him, was a Times lifer, but he fought to bring outsiders into the fold. To this end, he recruited John Geddes and Jill Abramson from The Wall Street Journal to help run the business and Washington desks, respectively, and snared Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Dean Baquet from the Chicago Tribune. He actively promoted longtime Washington reporter Gerald Boyd, who had begun his career at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He tapped Adam Moss, a pop culture–savvy editor who had cut his teeth on New York’s magazine scene, to lead The New York Times Magazine, which Moss transformed into one of the best weekly publications in the country. “The period in which it became normal to have a paper run by people who knew how other folks did things, who had seen a competitive landscape from a variety of perspectives,” says Bill Keller, “was the Joe regime.”

  But to make a plausible argument for his ascension, Raines had constructed a narrative in which he was needed to rescue the paper from editorial and financial ruin. For a decade, Raines had been quietly preparing a file of the paper’s problems, so when he and Sulzberger sat down for the first of their dinner-cum-interviews, he was well prepared. Raines told Sulzberger that the paper was slow out of the gate, that the cultural coverage was in shambles, that the Times had ceded its traditional dominance by becoming lazy and moribund. He talked of wanting to dismantle the paper’s “old-boy network.” “The ingrained management habit of favoring seniority and networking skills over talent had its roots in a kind of Skull and Bones system in which people who came to the Times at an early age and advanced to high positions made sure that the guys with whom they had been clerks and cub reporters were taken care of,” Raines would write in 2004.

  This critique dovetailed nicely with what Raines knew was Sulzberger’s strategic belief that for the Times not only to survive but to continue to serve as the country’s, and the world’s, dominant news-gathering organization, it had to undergo a major overhaul. For the past several years, Sulzberger and Janet Robinson, the paper’s president and general manager,*18 and Russ Lewis, the Times Company’s chief executive officer, had sought to focus the paper’s growth on its national expansion. “We had to create a new newspaper for the next generation of readers and advertisers,” says Sulzberger.

  And Raines was prepared to argue that the Times was failing in exactly this endeavor. “Whether we liked it or not, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal were better than the Times at editing for a national audience that was, for example, interested in both foreign policy and the Super Bowl, both Medicare funding and the constantly shifting American youth culture,” he wrote, describing the Times at the turn of the century. It’s difficult to determine which newspapers Raines was reading. Under Lelyveld, the Times certainly dominated on all these topics, especially when compared with USA Today and the Journal. Even the Journal’s traditional domination of business stories had grown less secure. If there was an area in which USA Today beat the Times, it was in college and national sports—but amping up the Times’s sports coverage to make it truly a national page would be a hugely costly proposition. The Times did well with the resources it had. There was, of course, room for improvement, especially in the paper’s often stodgy culture coverage, and there were entire departments that could have been made more efficient. But any major overhaul would require a similarly major investment, and the advertising downturn of the early twenty-first century precluded that.

  Keller,
on the other hand, refused to articulate a vision for the paper that included a denigration of Joe Lelyveld’s work, despite the fact that he sensed Sulzberger was looking for just such a critique. And while Lelyveld was vocal in his praise of Keller, he refused to knock Raines. As the quiet, closed-door selection process progressed, it was becoming increasingly clear that Howell Raines had the upper hand. Significantly, Raines’s personality seemed more suited both to Arthur Sulzberger’s outgoing nature and to leading a large institution. Raines loved people. He loved socializing and was skilled at circulating through a room, glad-handing and making small talk. Keller, by con-

  trast, gravitated to the corners of parties. Raines always seemed to say just the right thing in large gatherings; Keller was the opposite, famous for cracking jokes that made people feel awkward. “My wife sometimes refers to me as socially autistic,” he would say later.

  At the time, even some of Lelyveld’s deputies felt that Raines might be the right choice to lead the paper. Raines is a dynamic and forceful presence—he can “fill a room,” as Dean Baquet, a Times national editor under Lelyveld, says. When Baquet left New York in 2000 to become managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, Sulzberger asked him who he thought should be the next editor of the paper. “Raines,” said Baquet, and after Sulzberger told some of the paper’s executives what Baquet’s answer had been, it was repeated, sotto voce, around the newsroom. Raines’s leadership of the paper’s editorial page, Baquet thought, proved he could be an energetic steward. Besides, Baquet said, Raines would need to retire in 2009, before he turned sixty-six. Keller would be only sixty and would still have almost six years to lead the paper on his own. What’s more, Raines had made it a point, while editorial-page editor, to invite to lunch members of the Times’s increasingly frustrated masthead. If he was in power, he assured them implicitly, things would be different. “Under Joe, I felt really marginalized,” says Al Siegal, a Times assistant managing editor. “Howell at the time was the editor of the editorial page. We would have lunch twice a year or so, and he was very understanding about how I felt in my working life. He was empathetic.”