Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  “There was a feeling on the masthead that Howell was a good idea,” says Soma Golden Behr. “Bill was fine, but he seemed kind of quiet and subdued. Howell seemed exciting and daring. He took risks. I thought we could use a little of that.”

  Sulzberger agreed, and on Monday, May 21, 2001, he announced that Howell Raines would be The New York Times’s next executive editor. “Howell will continue to improve the news report of the Times and build on Joe’s outstanding accomplishments,” Sulzberger said in a public announcement, praising Lelyveld for “shepherd[ing] The Times through one of the most momentous periods in its 150-year history.”

  Raines, for his part, publicly disavowed much of what he had been saying privately in his conversations with Sulzberger. “My first and foremost responsibility will be to protect and build upon The Times’s tradition of quality journalism,” he said after being appointed. “I also feel great joy at the prospect of working again with my talented colleagues in the newsroom and our bureaus.” The newsroom greeted the announcement with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. Keller was known and respected, but he was not considered a particularly warm leader. Raines, on the other hand, was a mystery. There was concern about Raines’s reputation as an autocrat and a tyrant: Written in an open comment book in the Times’s newsroom on the day of Raines’s appointment were two telling entries. Under the heading of “I would like to see in the new building” (into which the Times was planning to move later that decade) were scrawled two anonymous comments: “No tyrannical executive editors,” someone had jotted down. “No Howell Raines,” wrote another. But for the most part, Times staffers were ready to be optimistic—maybe Raines would be a pleasant surprise.

  Over the next several months (Raines wouldn’t take over the newsroom until September), Raines went on a listening tour, getting acquainted with a 1,200-person news operation he had been removed from for almost a decade. Some staffers appreciated the gesture—Raines spent a shift with each section’s copy desk, sometimes sitting with them until midnight, when the pages closed. Other times, Raines seemed to be doing more shouting than listening. He was vocal in expressing the low regard in which he held the business report and publicly criticized Glenn Kramon, the section’s editor. He was outspoken in his criticism of the paper’s culture department. And he was dismissive of the paper’s sports coverage, which he deemed parochial.

  “The first lesson of management should always be, it’s a mistake for the new administration to come in trashing the old administration,” says Baquet, who arrived at the Los Angeles Times in 2000, at the tail end of a period in which the paper had been rocked by scandal and then sold to the Chicago-based Tribune Company. “The reality of a newsroom is that it’s the same population from editor to editor, especially at a place like The New York Times. The new administration shouldn’t spend too much time dwelling on what the predecessors did, because eventually the reporters and editors will start thinking you’re talking about them.”

  Raines, though, was in too much of a hurry for such niceties, and he began to lay out a vaguely defined vision: The paper would have a “higher competitive metabolism”; business would push harder on breaking stories; sports coverage would trend more national. Meanwhile, Joe Lelyveld was still running the newsroom. The tension between the two men grew. In August, when invitations were sent out for a gala fete celebrating Lelyveld’s career, the gatefold invite featured dozens of datelines that Lelyveld had filed from, including Kashmir, South Africa, London, Nairobi, Geneva, and Burma. Some thought the design was intended as a barb to Raines, who, with the possible exception of Scotty Reston, was the least-traveled executive editor in the history of The New York Times.

  THE DEPUTY

  On July 26, 2001, Raines made his first, and most significant, appointment, naming as his managing editor the fifty-one-year-old Gerald Boyd, the paper’s deputy managing editor for news. Boyd’s elevation to the newsroom’s second in command was not a surprise: Raines had made Boyd’s ascension, which would make him the highest-ranking African American in the history of the paper, part of his campaign to win the executive editorship. But it did little to soothe those looking for a counterbalance to Raines’s imperious ways. Boyd had a reputation for being cold and caustic—“No more Mr. Gruff,” he told the newsroom after his appointment was announced. Boyd had worked with Raines in Washington and had been at the Times since 1983, when he was hired from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a political reporter. After a period spent covering the White House, Boyd had been an editor in Washington and had served time on the national and metro desks as well. He also did a stint as metro editor in the early 1990s.

  Gerald Boyd grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. His early life was difficult. His mother died when he was five, and he was raised by his grandmother, whose only income was her pension. During high school, he worked full-time bagging groceries and won a University of Missouri scholarship sponsored by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. At the university, he helped found and edit Blackout, a black student newspaper. He began reporting for the Post-Dispatch after graduating in 1973, working his way up from the city desk to land in Washington during Ronald Reagan’s first term as president. From 1983 until 1990, he covered the White House for the Times, where he soon earned a reputation for being contentious, even with his sources. “He was extremely aggressive in the way he handled politicians,” said Andrew Rosenthal, a Times reporter and editor who worked with Boyd in both Washington and New York. “He was famous for calling the White House and getting [former presidential spokesman] Marlin Fitzwater or whoever on the phone and starting out the conversation, ‘What in the hell is going on over there?’ He had this idea that aggressive behavior was useful in dealing with the White House.”

  “Gerald is not your biggest book-learned guy,” says Soma Golden Behr, who was one of Boyd’s closest friends on the paper. “He’s not like all the card-carrying Ivy League liberals that run around The New York Times. He’s had a different life, and he has a way of zigging and zagging. He’s not always going to tell you what he thinks. He might kid you. He might razz you.”

  Sometimes, Boyd seemed not to know exactly what it was he was looking for from his reporters, which made getting assignments from him a notoriously dicey process—he’d gather reporters around his desk, and they’d speak to fill in his awkward silences, trying to discern what it was he wanted. But although Gerald Boyd was never a widely beloved figure in the newsroom, there were those staffers in whom he inspired a fierce respect. He was loyal to his troops and had a deep love for the Times. “He was very proud to be a part of The New York Times,” says Deborah Sontag, a Times Magazine writer who worked for Boyd as a reporter on the metro desk. “He had a huge belief in its power, its importance. In those days, he was charming and very avuncular.” Early in her career, Sontag was mugged coming out of a subway station in Brooklyn. She was knocked down and bloodied in the process, and Boyd came to the hospital to see her that same night. “He treated it like it was a moral thing to do: ‘These are my people, I’m responsible for them.’ And he wanted to make sure the authorities knew how important this was, that the metro editor of the Times was coming out.” At one point, as Sontag was in her hospital bed, she heard two cops talking. “Who’s the black guy in the suit?” one asked. When told it was the metro editor of the Times, the response was, “No shit.”

  “I realized that must be what he hears and feels all the time,” Sontag says.

  Boyd’s best work was on large projects that needed extensive coordination. He guided the Times staff on its coverage of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and in 2000 worked with Behr to lead a team of reporters on a fifteen-part, Pulitzer Prize–winning project on race relations in America. “He’s got incredible journalistic sensibilities,” says Behr. “These projects would not have been half of what they were without him.”*19

  “Gerald really showed me a lot during the race project,” says former Times reporter Kevin Sack, whose story about an
integrated Pentecostal church in Decatur, Georgia, led off the series. “That was a massive undertaking, and he made very good decisions.”

  As he rose up the paper’s masthead, Boyd seemed to pride himself on adopting the Times’s hard-nosed swagger. When prospective reporters came in to meet with Boyd during their extensive job interviews (all candidates for positions at the Times go through a battery of one-on-one interviews), Boyd was famous for staring down the new recruit from across his desk and booming out, “So what makes you think you deserve to work at The New York Times?” According to people who worked for and with him, Boyd became increasingly thin-skinned the higher up the ladder he climbed.

  In 1993, Gerald Boyd was promoted to assistant managing editor. His time as assistant, and then deputy, managing editor was frustrating. In 1997, when Gene Roberts retired from the managing editor post, Joe Lelyveld spent a series of dinners and weekends with Boyd as he tried to decide whom he should appoint as Roberts’s replacement. When, over dinner one night, Lelyveld told Boyd he had decided on Bill Keller, Boyd was so angry that he almost left the restaurant.

  If on paper Gerald Boyd seemed a questionable fit for the second most powerful and important editorial position at the paper, he was also in some ways a smart choice, and Raines knew it. Boyd may have had a mixed record as a manager, but Raines knew full well of Sulzberger’s deep commitment to diversity, of how much he wanted to be known as a publisher who aggressively diversified the Times. Raines quite explicitly made Boyd part of his pitch for the job during the interviewing process. “I wanted to see, as Arthur himself needed to, what Gerald Boyd could do in a high-demand situation,” Raines would later write. It was a condescending slap. Boyd, Raines implied, hadn’t been chosen as his deputy on the merits; instead, the managing editor’s job would serve as a sort of audition, one that would determine for Sulzberger whether one day Boyd might be able to become The New York Times’s first nonwhite executive editor.

  Over the years, Boyd came to keep his opinions on race in the newsroom more to himself; a lot of time had passed since the days in Missouri when he sported an Afro and an array of dashikis and sometimes affected the pseudonym Uganda X. What’s more, Boyd had, as a friend noted when he was named managing editor, spent a career as a “first black.”*20 On the day he was promoted, he told a Times reporter, “I hope tomorrow, when some kid of color picks up The New York Times and reads about the new managing editor, that kid will smile a little and maybe dream just a little bigger dream. That’s all I’ll say about firsts.”

  RACE IN THE NEWSROOM

  For the media world, the industry’s sorry record on diversity has been cause for embarrassment going back for decades, ever since the Lyndon Johnson administration’s 1968 Kerner Report described how “the journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training, and promoting Negroes.”*21 Ten years later, in 1978, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) would propose an ambitious goal: By 2000, the percentage of minorities in newsrooms, it announced, should mirror the diversity of the general population. At the time, minorities made up only 4 percent of newsroom staffs around the country. By 2003, that number had risen to 12.9 percent—still far short of the 31 percent of the American population that is nonwhite. (ASNE recast its goals and is now aiming for parity in American newsrooms by 2025.)

  There are many theories as to why minorities are underrepresented in American newsrooms, most common among them the pervasiveness of an old-boy network.*22 For decades, the Times has fought to diversify its reporting ranks, with mixed results. Too often, the paper’s efforts to hire minority staffers have come across as tokenism to those being wooed and as clumsy quota-filling to the rest of the newsroom. “The culture is such that a lot of people feel in their guts that when they see a minority colleague, they feel a little jolt of unfamiliarity, and some may even feel that the person doesn’t really belong,” says Roger Wilkins, who worked for the Times in the 1970s and early 1980s as an editorial writer and columnist.*23 “I know that greeted me when I joined the editorial board in 1974. We’re geniuses at reading white people’s faces.”

  A semiformalized effort in the early 1990s to increase minority representation in the newsroom didn’t help matters. That year, Max Frankel instituted a one-to-one quota for newsroom hiring: For every white reporter who was hired, a non-white reporter had to be hired as well. It was a crude and inelegant solution and fostered complaints from both whites and African Americans. Whites, of course, felt they were suffering from reverse discrimination, and African Americans who were hired complained that they were looked at askance. What’s worse, some of the hires that resulted were journalists whose talents were not up to the Times’s standards.

  Frankel would later speak of the problems that resulted from his campaign. He wrote in his memoir of a “senior black editor” who was promoted above his abilities and ended up suing the Times for discrimination. And in 1994, just after stepping down as executive editor, he spoke to Charlie Rose about the troubles he had encountered when he tried to diversify the staff: “There was a real problem, and the word was getting out that this was not a place that was entirely hospitable to blacks because they weren’t [being promoted] fast enough.” Attempts to counter that perception, Frankel said, “created some mistakes”: “In the years when we were all practicing affirmative action on the first round and looking very hard to diversify, we grabbed at some people so fast that they were not always the right people. . . . At a certain point, you cannot compromise just for the sake of appearances with the quality of the people you bring in. So those failures, those disappointments, created a certain disillusionment, and they were confused with racism or inhospitality.”

  Sulzberger hadn’t been publisher when Frankel instituted his one-for-one hiring quota, but he was a vocal champion of the need to alter quickly the makeup of the Times’s newsroom. In Lelyveld, however, he found an executive editor who questioned what he viewed as simplistic solutions to intractable and complex problems. “Joe was all for Arthur Jr.’s efforts to promote blacks, gays, and women,” Tifft and Jones wrote in The Trust, “but was slow to release money in the newsroom budget earmarked for diversity training because he thought the approach naÏve and vaguely degrading.”

  Raines, the author of an oral history of the civil rights era, had no such qualms. If anything, he took the opposite approach. He spoke often about the need to further diversify the Times’s ranks, and he served as a sympathetic sounding board when Gerald Boyd complained about Lelyveld.

  The industry’s and the Times’s well-documented history with affirmative action, coupled with Raines’s and Sulzberger’s public pronouncements on increasing the paper’s diversity, must have made Boyd’s position a little uncomfortable. His own impressive record at the Times was understood to be at least partially the result of the paper’s in-house affirmative-action program: At several steps in his career, his superiors had made it clear that he was being promoted in part because there was such a dearth of qualified minority candidates. To take one example, at the same time that Frankel laid down his newsroom edict on hiring, he set out what he described as a “special, fast-track training program” by which Boyd “could prove himself capable of leading a department, and perhaps more.”

  In public, Boyd was careful to not be seen as giving black reporters special treatment, but behind the scenes he fought to make sure they were considered for top postings. Often, Boyd’s private lobbying ended well for his protégés, who were sometimes unaware of his efforts. But occasionally the results were disastrous. In the summer of 1994, a black reporter named Kenneth Noble returned from his stint as West African bureau chief. At the time, Linda Mathews was a year into her difficult tenure as the paper’s national editor; she had joined the Times from ABC News and never quite gained traction at the paper. Noble’s return to the United States coincided with the opening of the paper’s prestigious Los Angeles bureau chief job. From Africa, Noble had expressed interest in the job, but he
had a reputation in New York for being an uninspiring correspondent, and Mathews wanted instead to assign him to San Francisco’s one-person bureau. “But Gerald went and visited Ken in Africa and offered him the job in L.A. without even consulting me,” says Mathews. “And when I complained, [Boyd] said the paper had a responsibility to bring along young, talented blacks.”

  According to Mathews, other Times senior editors, the L.A. bureau’s other reporters, and reporters from other news organizations based in Los Angeles at the time, Noble had great difficulty from the moment he arrived in California. He came to the office infrequently. When he did appear, he was often dressed inappropriately, in sweatpants and T-shirts. He had trouble meeting the Times’s East Coast deadlines, and instead of attending the O. J. Simpson criminal trial, he occasionally wrote his copy off of Associated Press reports. Several times, copy editors noticed that stories Noble had filed seemed to contain multiple paragraphs lifted verbatim from the AP or a local California paper. “We had a couple of incidents,” says Mathews. “It became clear to the editing staff that we had to be alert to the possibility that he was filching stuff.” (Mathews says she didn’t tell Boyd or the masthead about these incidents, because she assumed they didn’t want to hear it.)