by Seth Mnookin
“Remember,” he added, “when a great story breaks out, go like hell.” Raines seemed proud and even a little defiant and maintained the confident style that had marked his entire tenure.
Boyd, on the other hand, appeared deeply shaken, even unsure of exactly what he wanted to say. When he spoke, he said he was leaving “willingly and with no bitterness whatsoever, and in the firm belief that The New York Times will be in great hands no matter who leads.”
Raines grabbed his panama hat and walked out of the newsroom, making his way through an impromptu receiving line that included a number of veteran reporters as well as Punch Sulzberger. Less than a year before, basking in the glow of the paper’s seven Pulitzer Prizes, he had said of the Times’s newsroom, “It’s my place. It’s my home. And these are my people.” Now he was walking out for the last time.
After exiting the Forty-third Street headquarters, he got into his car and drove straight to his place in Pennsylvania—the same place he had been when the Jayson Blair story first broke.
The members of the newsroom, many of whom had campaigned publicly to have Raines and Boyd deposed, were in shock. Some wept openly. It was as if the paper’s staffers were surprised—even upset—by the effects of their open rebellion. More than one newsroom employee compared the situation to the one in The Lord of the Flies.
After Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd had left the building, Sulzberger announced that Joe Lelyveld would step in as interim editor. The next morning, the sleepy-eyed Lelyveld, tieless in a yellow button-down shirt, stood in the same place Raines had stood the day before. Lelyveld had had a reputation for being an awkward public speaker, but on June 5, twenty-one months after Howell Raines had vowed to dust the cobwebs from the Lelyveld era, he disproved that reputation.
“I didn’t realize until this minute how much I missed you all,” Lelyveld said, smiling slightly, after receiving a sustained ovation. “So as I was saying,” he began, gently referring to his previous tenure. Then Lelyveld made a speech that repudiated Howell Raines’s leadership and newspapering philosophy even as he defended the paper’s staff and his own tenure as executive editor.
This is not a restoration in any personal sense. But I hope it’s a restoration of certain values we need to go on putting out the world’s best newspaper. I don’t mean that as a slight on the two admirable men who led you day after relentless day through the titanic story of 9/11 and then bravely stood here yesterday to say their goodbyes for the good of the paper and walked out of this place to start their new lives, their own New York Times recovery programs. My heart goes out to them and for conspicuous improvements like the way we now use pictures, my gratitude too. Like everyone here, I hope. I honor them for their contributions and truly wish them well.
No, I mean to be talking about us now, not them yesterday. The restoration of values I’m talking about has to do with civility and the way we talk to each other. Thoreau said something like this: It takes two to talk—one to speak and another to hear. The newspaper works best when editors listen, not as a matter just of civility but in a spirit of greedy opportunism. When they listen to the ideas and aspirations of their reporters and help them to get those ideas and aspirations into focus. It works best when we’re not talking about ourselves and venting and backbiting but when we’re talking about the world we go out to cover and explore for our readers.
I developed in my days here some old saws, a set of maxims from a sort of Poor Joe’s Almanac that I’d haul out too often as some of you will recall all too well. On it went this list: Newspapers don’t exist for the satisfaction of journalists. They exist for readers. The satisfaction of journalists is OK. It’s a fine thing. We’re not opposed to it. In fact, we’re strongly in favor of it. But it’s not the ultimate. We need to do our job for readers. And part of our job, traditionally, is to help set the news agenda for others . . . help set the agenda for this country. We cover what everyone else is covering competitively, aggressively, and yes with a high and heightened metabolism. But we also break our own stories. We cover what we know is important when others aren’t paying attention.
Since I’m not going to be here long, I’m a man in a hurry. There’s some tidying up to do. Some of our key departments are severely under budget in staffing. Some are way over. We’re going to get back on budget by our own efforts and where we can’t because of important new demands like the IHT, we’ll make our case to the publisher in an orderly, convincing, even forceful manner.
But mainly I’m going to focus on news and talent. That means I don’t intend to get much involved in the work of the committees that the publisher has set in motion to rethink our policies. They’ll report to him and your next editor. . . .
The cure for what has ailed us is called journalism. The only way to communicate is to speak up in an atmosphere where outspokenness is sometimes rewarded and never penalized. Wherever you are, whatever you do, take it in faith, you now work in that atmosphere. I need your support in this. It can’t work because I say it will. You have to make it true. Starting right now. We’ll get the new leadership team up and running as fast as we reasonably can. . . .
My beloved mentor, partner and friend Max Frankel used to end all his meetings, big and small, by saying, “Let’s go to work.” Let’s go to work. Let’s really go to work. Thank you.
The newsroom erupted into applause. “When Joe spoke that first morning, it was the closest I ever came to crying in the newsroom,” says Clyde Haberman. “That speech was marvelous. It was exactly what people needed to hear.” Just as gratifying, Sulzberger was at last indicating that he had learned the lessons of Raines’s tenure. “This is a newsroom of over 1,200 men and women,” he said in an interview that Friday. “Managing that is a complex task.”
“The atmosphere of the place changed radically [as soon as Raines left],” says Roger Wilkins, a former Times editorialist and columnist who served on the Siegal committee, an internal group that examined the Blair case. “If you looked at the newsroom the day before [Raines and Boyd] resigned and the day after Joe took over, it just felt like a very different place. It was more relaxed. . . . There was just this exhausted relief that now we can get back to journalism.”
Sulzberger still had to choose who would lead the Times into the future, and he was rapidly discovering the extent to which Raines and Boyd had run the newsroom in precisely the imperious manner Sulzberger professed to disdain: Years before, speaking of the time he served as an assistant metro editor while A. M. Rosenthal was leading the paper, Sulzberger had said, “We had the entire operation resting on the backs of two people. If you were to remove Abe [Rosenthal] and [deputy managing editor] Arthur Gelb from the equation, the place would have been without any sense of vision.” Now, with Raines and Boyd gone, there were no obvious candidates from within the newsroom to take over. There was lingering resentment over the role of Andrew Rosenthal, who had served as a third in command under Raines and Boyd. Jon Landman and Jill Abramson were both popular with their charges, but for Sulzberger to choose one of the editors seen as leading the coup against Raines might have been interpreted as an unacceptable reward for open revolt.
Speculation soon coalesced around three candidates: Bill Keller, who had been passed over for the top job two years earlier; Dean Baquet, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times; and Marty Baron, editor of The Boston Globe. All three had obvious advantages and disadvantages. Keller had experience running the newsroom as Lelyveld’s managing editor, and his stint as an Op-Ed page and Times Magazine writer showed he was a nuanced and flexible thinker. Choosing Keller, however, would mean that Sulzberger would have to admit both that Raines had been a mistake from the start and that there had been a better candidate all along.
Then there was Baquet, one of the most popular and successful editors of his generation. He’d been widely respected and admired while national editor at the Times, so much so that both Joe Lelyveld and Sulzberger had tried, over a weekend retreat at Lelyveld’s vacation house in
Maine and a one-on-one lunch with Sulzberger, to convince him to stay when he was offered the Los Angeles job. With John Carroll, the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, Baquet had quickly shored up a struggling paper. What’s more, Baquet is black. With Boyd’s resignation, the Times had lost one of its only high-ranking African American editors, and Sulzberger’s firmly held belief that the paper needed to diversify had not been diminished by the Blair scandals.
Baron, who had worked as an associate managing editor under Lelyveld, was coming off a string of enormously successful years editing other papers around the country. In 1999, he was hired away from the Times to become executive editor of The Miami Herald, a once great paper that had suffered mightily under owner Knight Ridder’s cost cutting. In 2001, the Herald won a Pulitzer Prize in the breaking news category for its Elián González coverage. On July 2, 2001, Baron was named the editor of the Globe, a newspaper owned by the New York Times Company. In 2003, the Globe won the public service Pulitzer for its coverage of the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.
Over the next month, Baron and Baquet tried to reassure their staffs they weren’t about to bolt, while simultaneously meeting with Sulzberger and other Times executives. One afternoon, Baron was seen outside the Times building, a fact that was dutifully disseminated by local media scribes. Not long after, New York’s Daily News reported that Baquet turned down an offer from Sulzberger to serve as the paper’s next managing editor, regardless of who was named executive editor. (That wasn’t true: Baquet had merely said he wasn’t interested in considering a job as managing editor if and when that became an issue.)
Despite Baquet’s and Baron’s histories at the Times, it would have been unprecedented to appoint someone from outside the newsroom to lead the paper. So it became Bill Keller’s time. As June bled into July and the media world’s preoccupation with the Times dimmed, Sulzberger prepared to announce Keller as the man he’d selected to take hold of his family’s newspaper.
Howell Raines, however, wasn’t quite ready to cede the stage. On Friday, July 11, after being tipped off that Sulzberger was going to announce Keller’s ascension on Monday, Raines asked for time to appear on Charlie Rose’s PBS show. That night, he was the hour-long program’s only guest. He was brash and arrogant, combative and impetuous. He said that before he took over, the Times had been struggling. He refused to apologize for his management—“I’ve always believed if you are a fastball pitcher, you have to throw heat,” he said, apparently not realizing that even a dominating fastball pitcher needs to be able to occasionally throw other pitches well if he wants to have any success. He also told Rose that he had left involuntarily, contrary to what Arthur Sulzberger had been saying. He spoke of himself as a “change agent” sent in to increase the “competitive metabolism” of the newspaper gripped by a “lethargic culture of complacency.” He described the paper under his leadership as being embroiled in a kind of civil war, with Raines and his small cadre of adherents striving to make the paper better and struggling against many of the paper’s editors and reporters who resisted change because it would require more work. Finally, he said he’d model the rest of his life on William Butler Yeats and Pablo Picasso, great artists who achieved enormous successes after they had turned sixty.
After almost two years in which he could instantly command media attention, Raines’s appearance on Charlie Rose’s show elicited barely a shrug outside the insular world of the New York media. The attention it did get was almost universally negative. The next week, at a cocktail party hosted by former New Yorker and Talk editor Tina Brown, several other magazine editors spoke of how they had considered asking Raines to write for them until his appearance on Rose’s program. “I felt like I was watching a man unraveled,” one editor said to a chorus of assents. “And frankly I’d be scared to trust him with the pages of [the magazine].”
On Monday, July 14, Sulzberger announced that Bill Keller would become the seventh executive editor of The New York Times (or the eighth, if you were inclined to count Lelyveld twice). Once again, Jacques Steinberg recorded the scene for the next day’s paper. Keller’s ascension, Steinberg wrote, was “portrayed by the company’s management . . . as a reaffirmation of The Times’s core journalistic values.”
Standing in the same spot where Raines had made his good-bye speech six weeks earlier, Keller said there was no reason to treat working at the Times as “an endless combat mission.” He told his staff to “do a little more savoring” of life. “That will enrich you and your work, as much as a competitive pulse rate will.” Sulzberger looked on approvingly, and he followed with a direct refutation of the criticisms Raines had laid out on Charlie Rose’s show. “There’s no complacency here,” he said. “Never has been. Never will be.”
Keller was only fifty-four years old, younger than Raines (fifty-eight), Lelyveld (fifty-seven), and Frankel (fifty-six) had been when they took over the paper. That meant he potentially had over a decade in which to make his mark, significantly longer than Raines would have had even if he had served out a complete term. In one of his first interviews, with Newsweek, he worked to show his staffers that he was on their side.
“I don’t want to dwell on my predecessor,” Keller told me. “But I will say this: The one thing that made me a little sick watching [Raines’s Charlie Rose appearance] was the collateral damage. I don’t mean me and Joe and the publisher, or even Gerald, who was kind of sideswiped in the course of that. I mean the whole staff of this place, all these people who worked their hearts out for him. There he was saying, ‘Before I came on the scene, you were a bunch of slackers.’ All the people who covered a couple of Balkan wars and the presidential election and the recount were part of a culture of complacency and lethargy. I thought that was insulting and wrong.”
Keller also made sure to say something positive about Raines and about Arthur Sulzberger’s decision to name him as the paper’s executive editor in 2001. “After the Times did what it did on September 11,” Keller said, “you would have had to scour the country to find someone who was questioning Arthur’s judgment. You can’t erase from memory the fact that [Raines] led one of the most prodigious feats of journalism in American history.”
Now that Raines was gone, even articulating his legacy seemed difficult. What, exactly, staffers wondered, had he wanted to do? Cover more pop culture? That was a battle that had been fought for decades; for years, it had been common to see stories about teen idols on the front page of the Times. Feature lively writing? Raines couldn’t claim credit for that, either: The Times had been making a concerted effort to hire and promote writers with robust narrative voices since the 1960s. Run more of Rick Bragg’s stories on the front page? Joe Lelyveld had also favored Bragg’s stories; besides, that hadn’t worked out so well.
“Doing a lot of college football coverage is a change, but it’s not a profound cultural change,” says Jon Landman. “Doing the ‘all-known-thought’ pieces, that wasn’t even really a new genre. What was new was that he routinized them and he liked the sensation of making everybody run around at the last minute to make everybody produce them. The exercise of pulling the puppet strings seemed very important. And bizarre. . . . The problem is the substance [of Raines’s changes] was a little obscure. It was change, but from what to what? Moving faster is not a transformation—it’s an adjustment. He really greatly exaggerated the level of innovation he put into the place. And unfortunately some of the change really was transformational, but bad.”
In the end, the catalog of Howell Raines’s systemic contributions to the Times—increased coverage of college football; the all-known-thought pieces; a year and a half of advocacy journalism; an exhausted and resentful newsroom—seemed a sad legacy for a man whose tenure had begun with so much hope and enthusiasm. Raines, of course, had also assured his place in history as the executive editor who presided over the paper while it gracefully and compassionately covered the biggest story of his generation. But that was only one part of his legacy. The
other part told a vastly different, darker story. Raines’s obsession with his own place in history—and his compulsive need to see himself as the central force in the Times’s universe—would, in the end, translate to a legacy that was dominated by hubris, narcissism, scandal, and failure.
Part Three
AFTER
“ALL ABOUT HOWELL”
In the wake of Howell Raines’s abrupt departure, media pundits and Times staffers alike were left struggling to make sense of his brief, chaotic tenure. The answer, they realized, didn’t lie within Jayson Blair’s troubled psyche; ultimately, the former reporter was little more than a catalyst, the Times’s own Gavrilo Princip, the Serb nationalist whose murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had set off World War I. The real causes of the tumult that gripped the paper could be found in the ways in which Raines’s narcissistic personality had manifested itself in his leadership.
In his twenty-one months atop the Times’s masthead, Howell Raines had attempted to centralize power not around the position of the executive editor—that had been done before—but around himself personally. Raines loved being the center of attention, loved the entrée his job gave him. He wore an eye-catching white panama hat, even as he rode the subway to work. He was, in all likelihood, the first executive editor ever to have his picture taped up on the mirror of his local hair salon next to cutouts of Elvis and postcards of topless women. He loved seeing his name in boldfaced type in other papers’ gossip and society pages. He loved making grand entrances at cocktail parties and book soirees, holding court in a corner in a seersucker suit.