by Seth Mnookin
As the national correspondents were writing one another, other reporters were sending open letters to Jim Romenesko’s website, a one-stop shop for media-industry news and gossip. At 2:00 p.m., David Firestone, who had been a national correspondent in Atlanta before being moved to Washington, wrote, “The reporters that I know don’t simply beautify the notes of stringers, interns, news assistants and clerks; they take most of those notes themselves, and they take pride and pleasure in doing so. They want to see the faces of the people they interview. For Tuesday’s Washington Post story to present such an unchallenged picture does a disservice to an immensely talented staff of hard-working reporters.” Just before 5:00 p.m., the Times’s New York City Hall bureau chief, Jennifer Steinhauer, wrote: “If my colleague, Rick Bragg, feels compelled to tell any reporter who will listen that he is being punished for engaging in standard practices of stringer abuse at The New York Times, that is his constitutional right. But I for one am not going to sit by and let those statements go unchecked.” And at 5:15 p.m., Alex Berenson, the reporter who had asked Howell Raines at the staff-wide meeting if he was going to resign, added his thoughts. “I wish I didn’t feel the need to get caught up in this mess,” Berenson wrote to Romenesko. “But if Rick Bragg is going to impugn the reputation of every reporter at the Times, some of us are going to have to respond.”
Bragg, meanwhile, was growing more incensed, according to friends. He’d told several people close to him that immediately after his suspension, Arthur Sulzberger had called him personally and thanked him for “taking one for the team.” Now, instead of dealing with the continued vitriol of the paper’s staff, he quit.
At 7:32 that night, Howell Raines sent out a three-sentence message from Al Siegal’s e-mail account. This one was addressed “to the staff.” “Rick Bragg has offered his resignation, and I have accepted it,” Raines wrote. “We know this has been a difficult period. We have full confidence in our staff and we will be talking with you more in short order.”
The next morning, Raines and Boyd sent out a longer message to the staff. “In the last several days, we have all been seeing our great corps of correspondents . . . depicted unfairly in various news accounts,” they wrote. In regards to Bragg’s claims that many Times staffers relied on stringers for their reporting, Raines and Boyd wrote, “We didn’t believe, and we don’t believe now, that the facts can sustain an ‘everybody does it’ attitude.” The two editors also said they wanted to “thank our staff for being worthy of our confidence and our readers’ trust.”
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IN THE WEEKS following the May 11 report on Blair, Raines had begun meeting again with the paper’s top editors, this time to brainstorm about ways to save his editorship. Meanwhile, after a year in which he had remained willfully removed from the turmoil overtaking the newsroom, Arthur Sulzberger rushed in to try to stanch the revolt, sitting in on meetings, orchestrating sit-downs between Raines and people he had made his enemies, and generally trying to find a path out of the paper’s seemingly never-ending mess.
The week of the Bragg revelations, there was a meeting in the executive dining room, on the paper’s fourteenth floor. At one point, members of the masthead, one by one, told Raines what they viewed as his problems. It was nothing that hadn’t been said before, but Raines and Sulzberger were both learning that there was no corner of the paper that didn’t feel abused and overworked by Raines.
Raines bristled at the meetings. He thought assistant managing editor Soma Golden Behr was trying to organize people against him. “He said he was afraid of me,” says Behr. “I think it’s ‘My way or the highway’ for him, and I’m not like that. I’m gonna go in and tell him what I think is wrong, and I want to be listened to. Because otherwise, what am I doing with my life? I told him at one point, if he felt like [I was working against him], he should get me off the masthead.” Finally, in the middle of the meeting, Raines stood up and stormed out of the room.
“Howell, Howell, come back here,” Sulzberger cried out. Raines came back in. “Nobody hates you. We all really value you. But I think a lot of people are angry at you right now.”
“We all know what this is about,” Raines said. “This is about one man trying to destroy me for the last two years, and that man is Jon Landman.”
The masthead was nonplussed. Raines launched into a litany of the paper’s accomplishments, each one preceded by “I.” “I won seven Pulitzer Prizes,” “I led the paper on the September 11 coverage.”
Mike Oreskes, the assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s television and Internet divisions, cut in. “I actually agree with how impressive those accomplishments are, except for five words: ‘I, I, I, I, I,’ ” he said. “It’s ‘us.’ ”
As bleak as things were inside the newsroom, it was in public that the embarrassment was most acute. On May 29, Arthur Sulzberger, Howell Raines, and Gerald Boyd gamely trekked uptown for the annual Pulitzer luncheon at Columbia University. When the Pulitzers had been announced in early April, the Times found itself the winner of only one award, the investigative prize for a series on state housing of the mentally ill; the Times’s main rivals, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, had won three apiece. Adding insult to injury, Kevin Sack, the man Raines had drummed out of the paper’s national staff the previous spring, was in town to collect the award he won for work he did for the Los Angeles Times.
Times Op-Ed page columnist William Safire and Dallas Morning News editor-at-large Rena Pederson, the co-chairs of the Pulitzer board, spoke to the assembled crowd. Both alluded to the troubles at the Times. “I would also like to add a special congratulations to the winning journalists today,” Pederson said from the stage of Columbia’s Low Library, “for upholding standards of integrity at a time when journalistic standards are being challenged, challenged by personnel scandals as well as increasing corporate pressures that too often sacrifice quality for the bottom line.” Safire began his talk by addressing what he called “Topic A” in the world of journalism: “The subject of trust. Trust among reporters and editors. Trust among newspapers and their readers.”
From their table, where they were joined by Jon Landman, the editor of the Times’s winning entry, Raines, Boyd, and Sulzberger looked grim and pained. “It wasn’t a happy place,” says another journalist who was at the luncheon. “There was a perverse interest in watching their reactions—every time anyone made reference to the scandal, all eyes kind of immediately shifted over to their table. It was like a deathwatch.”
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ON FRIDAY, MAY 30, Arthur Sulzberger asked Jill Abramson to come to New York to meet with him and Raines. Before their meeting with Sulzberger, Raines and Abramson met for breakfast.
Earlier that week, Abramson, in an effort to purge herself of her anger toward Raines, had bought his fly-fishing book. “You’re going to be surprised at what I’m reading,” Abramson said. When she told Raines she was reading his book, he asked, “What did you learn?”
Abramson told Raines she had been struck by Raines’s evolution from being a self-described subscriber to the “redneck way” of fishing, where the fisherman tries to pull in as many fish as humanly possible, to being someone who cared more about the craft of fishing than the result.
“I took that as a heartening message,” Abramson said. “If you could learn not to fish the redneck way, then maybe you can change.”
“We had a friendly breakfast,” says Abramson. At eleven o’clock that morning, Raines and Abramson sat with Sulzberger and discussed what they’d both need to move forward. Raines said he needed Abramson to stop talking behind his back and fomenting discontent among the Washington bureau staff. “I thought that was a fair criticism, and it was a fair thing to need from me,” Abramson says. She told Raines she needed Pat Tyler removed from the Washington bureau. “I needed to be his bureau chief,” Abramson says. “We couldn’t go on with this shadow chief anymore.”
The meeting went well, and both editors agr
eed the other one had made valid points. At the end of the day, before she went back to Washington, Raines asked Abramson to come to his office.
“He closed the door and hugged me,” says Abramson. Recounting the episode the following April in the lobby of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Abramson starts to cry. “He said, ‘I know I haven’t always been good to you. I know I’ve sometimes treated you badly. And I apologize.’
“I thought we were actually moving to an okay place,” Abramson says, wiping the tears from her eyes.
But in all likelihood, the die had already been cast. Lorne Manly had heard enough rumblings to convince him it was time to ask Jacques Steinberg to start preparing “B matter”—the industry term for supporting material that will be used to round out a breaking news story—for a piece on Raines’s resignation. Steinberg was supposed to give a speech in Atlanta on Tuesday, June 3; the day before, he canceled the trip and appeared instead by teleconference. “I knew there was a chance that I was going to need to be here,” Steinberg says.
Raines, however, still seemed to have no clue about what the future likely held. After a determined campaign to woo the paper’s business executives, he seemed not to realize they had lost faith in him. And after a year and a half in which Raines had studiously avoided taking the temperature in the newsroom, he had no feel for what reporters and editors were looking to hear from their leader. The Blair and Bragg incidents had both served as illustrations for many of the very frustrations the newsroom had been voicing since September 2001, frustrations Raines seemed almost proud of ignoring. “One of the mysteries of Howell is how such a terrific political reporter and writer could be so blind to the politics of the newsroom,” says one reporter who worked under Raines. Now, as Raines scrambled to meet with smaller groups of staffers, he didn’t even have secure enough relationships in the newsroom to approach people on his own; indeed, if he had, he likely wouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place. Sadly, Raines found himself having to rely instead upon emissaries. Once again, he approached Clyde Haberman, Joyce Purnick, and Floyd Norris and asked each to find three reporters for a small group dinner on Monday night, June 2.
That dinner was held in the publisher’s dining room on the fourteenth floor. “I tried to get a range of experience, people of different ages and parts of the department, in part because I wanted to get people whose own set of friends was varied enough so you’d have more dissemination of whatever was said,” says Norris. “Howell was very open. He said he wanted to explain what had happened. And he wanted advice.”
“We were all confused,” says Haberman. “It was clear he didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
“Howell kept promising to change his style,” says Al Siegal of the meetings and discussions that occurred during the weeks after the town hall meeting. “He said he was going to be more collegial, less top-down. And it gradually became clear to me that what he was talking about was something that he was not constitutionally capable of doing. He was talking about becoming a different person.” Raines during this time reminded Siegal of Peter Sellers’s portrayal of Dr. Strangelove in the classic Stanley Kubrick film of the same name. Toward the end of the movie, Strangelove proposes to the U.S. president that they set up an underground bunker populated with a select group of genetically desirable people. As he is speaking, Strangelove’s lame right arm involuntarily makes the “Heil, Hitler” salute, and Strangelove tries to force his arm back down to his side. “As you watched him struggle, it became clear that [becoming less autocratic] was alien to him,” says Siegal. “He’s brilliant, but he’s not a nice man.”
Arthur Sulzberger, meanwhile, was trying to get intelligence directly from the newsroom instead of having it filtered through his executive editor’s lens. On Tuesday, he flew to Washington for a lunch with the paper’s bureau. It was an unusually frank discussion, and Sulzberger was told repeatedly that the paper couldn’t recover as long as Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd remained in charge. When Sulzberger pointed out that the Washington bureau had complained of feeling disenfranchised for almost as long as the paper had had an office in the capital, David Leonhardt, a New York–based business reporter who was in town for the day, spoke up. Actually, Leonhardt said, the feeling in New York was pretty similar.
“Even I was taken aback by the level of bile that was expressed by my colleagues,” says Abramson. “How badly they felt about Pat [Tyler] came pouring out. Everything was blamed on Howell.” Sulzberger told the bureau that Raines would be staying on as executive editor, then rushed off to return to New York. That afternoon, Abramson gathered the entire bureau in her office and opened a bottle of wine. She told her staff how she had read Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, how she and Howell had met for breakfast. She said she thought Raines could change and that the bureau had to get “rid of this poison and get through this.” People should, Abramson said, heal and move on instead of obsessing over what they all hated about Raines.
“I felt like the lunch had been an unhealthy thing,” Abramson says. Sulzberger, Abramson thought, seemed particularly shaken, and Abramson e-mailed him that night to tell him she thought she could help the bureau move forward more constructively. But it was likely already too late. Before heading to Washington, Sulzberger had called Joe Lelyveld, the man Raines had replaced in September 2001, and asked him if he could return to work for a few months. “[The Washington bureau] seemed to put exclamation points on hints,” says Lou Boccardi, a former president of the Associated Press and one of three non-Times members of the committee Al Siegal assembled to investigate the Blair fiasco.
What the Washington bureau articulated was the extent to which the implicit contract the Times has always had with its reporters and editors—that in return for the long hours and the relatively modest pay, employees would get a sense of ownership at the premier news-gathering operation in the world—had been undone by Raines. “Howell destroyed that,” says Jack Rosenthal. It was this, more than questionable news judgments or undeserved promotions, that ended Raines’s career.
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BACK IN NEW YORK, Gerald Boyd was walking in Times Square with another member of the masthead. He seemed to realize he wasn’t going to last. For several days he’d been telling people all he was trying to do was survive, and he knew that never worked. Now even he was opening up about his frustrations with Raines. He had tried to tell Raines that he was boxing himself into a corner, Boyd said. He had struggled to let him know that he was isolating the newsroom. But Raines, Boyd said, didn’t want to listen. It was one of the few times Boyd had spoken to anyone at the paper about his frustrations with Howell Raines.
“Gerald feels that Howell gave him his big chance,” says Soma Golden Behr. “Howell’s the guy who made him managing editor. And so Gerald found it extremely difficult to articulate his feelings about this whole thing. He kept his relationship with Howell absolutely private, even though it hurt him in the newsroom. Nobody saw how much he argued with Howell, how much he won and how much he lost. Only Gerald knows about that.”
That afternoon, Sulzberger began talking with Raines and Boyd about the possibility that the two men would need to step down. Increasingly, other Times employees as well seemed to understand intuitively that this was a possibility. On the third-floor newsroom, Glenn Kramon convened a meeting of his demoralized business staff. There was, Kramon said, a real possibility that Raines wasn’t going to survive. But that didn’t mean the paper should stop producing great journalism. Gardiner Harris, a reporter who had recently been poached from The Wall Street Journal, tried to remind the reporters just how great they were.*45 “Let’s seize the initiative,” said Kramon. “We’ve been worrying about what the masthead was going to dictate. Now we have some space to play with.”*46
“The business department sees how companies work,” Kramon said in an interview at the time. “I was just trying to get attention off of, ‘Will he or won’t he,’ and just move forward.” Even R
aines himself seemed to be realizing he might not survive. That day, he told some newsroom staffers that his wife would love him whether or not he had the title of executive editor after his name.
NEW ENDINGS, OLD BEGINNINGS
On Wednesday morning, June 3, Joseph Lelyveld contacted his old secretary and asked her if she would be able to come back and work for him for a couple of months. That afternoon, Raines canceled a dinner he had scheduled for the following night with a group of reporters. He left the newsroom early, telling colleagues he wasn’t feeling well.
The next morning, Arthur Sulzberger asked a group of the paper’s top editors to come to the fourteenth floor at 10:00 a.m. Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, Sulzberger said, were stepping down. At 10:30, an e-mail without a subject line was sent to the paper’s staff. It read, “Please gather in the newsroom on the 3rd floor at 10:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what the e-mail meant—the sur-real nightmare that had begun in late April was coming to an unexpectedly quick conclusion. When he stepped into the elevator that would take him down to the third-floor newsroom, Sulzberger spotted Bill Keller. “I want to talk with you,” Sulzberger said. “Sometime soon.”
On the third floor, Sulzberger told the hastily assembled crowd that he wanted to “applaud Howell and Gerald for putting the interests of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own.” He went on, “There is so much to say, but it really just boils down to this: This is a day that breaks my heart, and I think it breaks the hearts of a lot of people in this room.”
Raines’s and Boyd’s wives were in the newsroom, as was Punch Sulzberger, who stood off to one side. Jacques Steinberg stood just behind Arthur Sulzberger Jr. as he spoke, taking notes for the next day’s news story. When it came time for Raines to talk, he said, “It’s been a tumultuous month, twenty months, but we have produced some memorable newspapers.” He appeared calm as he talked of his next ventures. “I set out many years ago to live a life devoted to literature and the arts,” he said, “and I return to that calling with a wider set of interests in writing, the study of history, in painting and photography.”