Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  Curiously, Raines also got a number of facts wrong. He wrote he had met with the “seven” reporters responsible for the Times’s Blair report before deciding to hold the May 14 town hall meeting; in fact, only five reporters were assigned to the project, and he hadn’t met with even all of them by that date.

  Elsewhere, Raines wrote that he learned of Blair’s substance abuse issues “around the end of 2002” and that he viewed Blair’s apparent recovery as one reason to give him a chance on the sniper team: “I passed Jayson’s desk often after his return, and I saw in him a level of vitality and social engagement that I took to be evidence of recovery,” he wrote. But in September 2002, Blair was transferred from the paper’s metro department—where his desk was close to the front of the newsroom, situated where Raines would need to pass it en route to and from the elevator—to the sports department, located on the fourth floor. What’s more, Raines simultaneously maintains that Gerald Boyd did tell him about Blair’s substance abuse problems but that Boyd did not tell him about Blair’s performance issues, a rendering that strains credulity.

  Indeed, Raines’s entire account—which, due to its being mainly a personal account, was not fact-checked in The Atlantic’s normal manner—is peppered with inaccurate details and faulty recollections. While boasting about the extent to which he revitalized the paper’s culture department, he carried on about how the Times, under his leadership, had “beaten New York’s hip publications to the punch with a lead story on the rock group White Stripes.” The Times had, in fact, run an early feature story on the band, but in August 2001, the month before Raines took over, in the final days of Joe Lelyveld’s regime. It’s true, also, that under Raines Arts & Leisure had run a lead story on the band, but that was in April 2003, after it had crossed over to become a mainstream phenomenon. (Jon Pareles, who has been the chief rock critic for the Times since the late 1980s, wrote the April 2003 piece.) In this instance, Raines’s factual error didn’t show a will to deceive so much as a determined blindness to accomplishments that predated his tenure. It was unquestionably true that the paper’s cultural coverage was in need of revitalization. It was also true that Raines was an energetic champion of this reworking. Finally, it was true that things weren’t as bad as he made them out to be and that he didn’t make as much of a difference as he would like to think.

  Raines’s essay severed most of the few remaining ties he might have had with his former colleagues. Times employees e-mailed to one another the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (“has a grandiose sense of self importance”; “is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance”; “believes that he or she is ‘special’ and unique”; “requires excessive admiration”), and once silent allies felt newly burned. Some of Raines’s former colleagues and friends in the Washington bureau referred to the Atlantic essay as “The Passion of the Howell,” a reference to Mel Gibson’s sadistic Crucifixion epic.

  The same afternoon Raines’s piece was released to the press, editorial-page editor Gail Collins sent me an unsolicited e-mail. “I bet you’re getting lots and lots of input right now,” wrote Collins, who had been hired by Raines and was one of his staunchest defenders throughout the spring. “One part of Howell’s piece that particularly bothered me was his insinuation that the business side could have taken a bigger hit in expense-cutting to protect the newsroom. In fact, the business side has consistently taken the hit in order to protect the editorial product.” Collins, who had had lunch every Wednesday with Sulzberger, Janet Robinson, and Raines, went on to recount a meeting that occurred soon after September 11. “Janet Robinson was giving us all the bad financial news, the result of the combination of our ad base downtown and the national economic slump,” Collins wrote. “Then Howell said something along the lines of, ‘I’m sorry to hear that because we need another bullet-proof jeep for Afghanistan,’ and he went on listing the other stuff he wanted to do to support the coverage overseas. Janet cut him off and said: ‘Don’t even think about it. We’ll find the money. What you’re doing now is the reason we all work here. Spend whatever you need to.’ And Arthur nodded.”

  Even those journalists Raines tried to compliment sought to distance themselves from his revisionist history. In his article, Raines had compared his approach to that of Marty Baron, prompting Baron to send a letter to the Atlantic: “Having never worked for or with [Raines], I can’t speak from experience about his approach to managing a news staff. I imagine our styles differ quite a bit. My model (and mentor) is his predecessor, Joe Lelyveld, who is deplorably mistreated and inaccurately portrayed in Raines’s assessment of The New York Times.”

  Raines’s Atlantic article was, many felt, the final insult. But this time, the employees of the Times could choose to ignore Howell Raines’s bluster. Overwhelmingly, they did.

  Raines’s piece even had the effect of turning Gerald Boyd into a sympathetic character. Raines condescended to Boyd in the essay, both by saying his appointment was one prompted by the need to test Boyd’s mettle and in simply ignoring his accomplishments. Not long after Raines’s piece was published, Bill Keller invited Gerald Boyd into the Times newsroom for the paper’s annual Pulitzer celebration. He was given one of the biggest ovations of the afternoon.*54

  Just as the hubbub over his rage-fueled diatribe was dying down, Raines began circulating a proposal for a book titled Catch and Release, a sequel to Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis.*55 The book, as Raines described it in a nine-page letter to his agent, would weave an account of an “epic” seven-hour battle Raines fought with a marlin in the South Pacific with reminiscences and observations from Raines’s professional life, along with the story of how he met and married his second wife. The proposal was soon leaked to the Daily News, whose Paul Colford quoted Raines as writing that the book would feed “into the guiding metaphor of captivity and release that is at the heart of fly fishing and in each individual’s struggle to find happiness by discovering who we really are.”

  The book, Raines promised, would offer an “inside” look at the Times. Colford quoted Raines as saying he would describe “the folkways of the place, the character and personalities of the people I worked with, the steady decline of quality journalism and its traditional values that I’ve witnessed.”

  Raines included in his proposal a series of sample chapter titles for sections addressing the Times and journalism, including “The War of the Daddies’ Boys,” which would be about the “Oedipal subtext of succession battles at the Times”; “Murdoch and His Hirelings,” which would detail efforts to use the media as a weapon of “mass disinformation”; and “The Bear Bryant Rules of Journalism,” an attempt to cure the Times’s “woeful apathy” about getting beaten on big stories.

  Raines’s letter-cum-proposal also dwelled at some length, according to Colford, on what it was like to be “caught up in a media hurricane.” The version of Howell Raines he read about in “mainstream publications like Newsweek or USA Today” was not “a person I recognized or wanted to know,” Raines wrote, adding that his book would “join imaginatively in the creation of this other Howell’s life.”

  The proposal contains a passage in which Raines imagines this other Howell’s life. He imagines him as six feet tall instead of five-eight; wonders if he had been able to transform himself into the athlete the real Raines never was; questions whether this doppelgänger would have had more success with girls in high school; and ponders whether he would have had the willpower to stop drinking after two martinis. “What we’re up against here is the mutable nature of truth. . . . The human heart in conflict with itself,” Raines wrote. He hoped, he wrote, to examine the difference between the type of recreational lying that is necessary in both fishing and romance and the “permanent alterations in one’s life” that take place when one lies for effect. Elsewhere, Raines promised to address “the proper definition of masculinity in our time,” as viewed through the lens of the newspaper h
e once led.

  Raines’s proposal went out to a handful of Manhattan publishing houses under a strict embargo. Some editors were asked to return their copy of the proposal to Raines’s agent. A year after the New York literary world buzzed with the possibility that Raines might score a multimillion-dollar payday for his memoir, many editors decided against bidding on the project, for which Raines was requesting at least $500,000. “We caught it,” one editor said, “and we decided to release it. After the Atlantic piece, I don’t know who has the stomach for that kind of stuff anymore.” When a handful of editors told Raines and his agent that they had no interest in his take on the newspaper he once professed to love, Raines recast his project to focus almost exclusively on fishing. The book was eventually sold to Scribner for less than the half-million dollars Raines had been anticipating.

  —————

  ON APRIL 19, 2004, Howell Raines made one of his first public appearances since his resignation almost a year earlier. The occasion was a reading from Things Worth Fighting For, a collection of the late Atlantic editor Michael Kelly’s work, which was held at an Upper West Side Barnes & Noble. Kelly, one of the most beloved journalists of his generation, had been killed covering the Iraq war, and Raines, Tina Brown, and former New Republic editor Hendrik Hertzberg, all of whom had edited Kelly over the years, were on hand to read from Kelly’s posthumously published book.

  Raines’s participation was awkward. During Brown’s reading, she spoke of how, as the editor of The New Yorker, she frequently had to arbitrate disputes with the magazine’s Washington bureau, which at the time was staffed by Kelly and Sidney Blumenthal; Raines, doubtless remembering his own very public battles with the Times’s D.C. bureau, forced out an audible, and uncomfortable, bark of laughter. When it was his turn to speak, Raines, on several occasions, referred to the Times as “us” or “we.” He cracked about the “colorful ways of southern newspapermen, which I found are not as well understood as I thought at the time.”

  After the reading, as Kelly’s two young sons signed copies of their father’s book, Raines, trailed by his wife, scuttled off to a spot behind a bookshelf, where Lloyd Grove, a gossip columnist for New York’s Daily News, briefly buttonholed him. As Raines was walking out, I approached him. Since I had begun working on this book the previous summer, I’d sent Raines letters, left messages with his friends and on his answering machine, and written numerous e-mails. He had never answered.

  “I’m Seth Mnookin,” I said. “I know this isn’t the time to talk, but I just wanted to make sure I introduced myself. I’d love to speak with you under whatever conditions you’d be most comfortable with.” I extended my hand.

  Raines stood there, his hands folded in front of him. I was stunned; I couldn’t remember the last time someone had refused to shake my hand.

  “I’ve received your messages,” Raines said. And then he turned and walked away.

  I watched him walk toward the store’s escalator with his wife. After a few moments, he disappeared from sight. Behind me, Mike Kelly’s friends, colleagues, and admirers were chatting happily. They were sharing bittersweet stories of a beloved writer and editor in chief, a man whose career was cut tragically short years before its time.

  Endnotes

  To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number or “Return to text.”

  *1 The Post and the Times had co-owned the IHT since the 1960s. Return to text.

  *2 In 2003, Sulzberger made an offhand offer to buy The Wall Street Journal from its owners, the Bancroft family, which shocked even executives at his own company, who worried that he hadn’t run the numbers. Return to text.

  *3 The Times has approximately one thousand editorial employees (editors, reporters, photographers, designers, and so on) on its payroll and another two hundred nonprofessional staffers, including news clerks. Return to text.

  *4 A full year later, the Times’s travails had so infused popular culture, they were the subject of an offhand joke in a May 2004 episode of The Simpsons, in which an elementary school reporter gets in trouble for datelining a dispatch from Baghdad when he was actually in Basra. Return to text.

  *5 In 2004, the Los Angeles Times won five Pulitzer Prizes. Return to text.

  *6 The Taylors sold The Boston Globe to the New York Times Company in 1993. Return to text.

  *7 Perhaps not coincidentally, two of the country’s other three great newspapers, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, are also family owned. Return to text.

  *8 Punch’s lifelong nickname originated from a picture book his father made for him when Punch was an infant. Riffing on the fact that he followed three girls, the last one named Judy, his father wrote that, like the seventeenth-century English puppet, he was destined to “play the Punch to Judy’s endless show.” Return to text.

  *9 In 1986, the Sulzbergers drafted a covenant that ensured the Times would remain in family control virtually until the end of the twenty-first century. Under the agreement, Iphigene’s four children and thirteen grandchildren agreed not to sell their Class B stock to anyone outside the family; if they wanted to convert their Class B shares to cash, they could sell them only within the family or to the New York Times Company. This agreement is binding until twenty-one years after the death of the longest-living descendant of Iphigene’s who was alive in 1986. Pamela Dryfoos, Marian Sulzberger Dryfoos’s granddaughter, was born in 1984. Return to text.

  *10 Op-Ed stands for “opposite the editorial page,” not “opinions and editorials,” as many people think. Return to text.

  *11 When Rosenthal was named managing editor in 1969, it marked the first time a Jew had sat atop the Times’s editorial hierarchy. The Sulzbergers, and Adolph Ochs before them, had always been concerned that if a Jew was running a Jewish-owned paper, readers would wonder about the religious influence on the news pages. Return to text.

  *12 One of Punch’s interventions was credited with helping to change the course of modern American political life: In 1976, he insisted that the Times endorse Daniel Patrick Moynihan over Bella Abzug in the Democratic primary for U.S. senator. In a close race, that endorsement was seen as being a deciding factor, and Moynihan went on to serve as senator from New York until his retirement in 2000. Return to text.

  *13 With some rare exceptions, Punch ended that practice in 1979, when Gail Gregg, his daughter-in-law, wrote a rebuttal to one of his letters that concluded, “Mr. Sock deserves a punch.” Sulzberger was convinced his cover had been blown. Return to text.

  *14 Soon after becoming publisher, Sulzberger told The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta that he didn’t worry about those who thought he was pushing reform too quickly: “I’ll outlive the bastards!” he said. Return to text.

  *15 In a 1994 interview with Charlie Rose, Max Frankel described a conversation he had with Sulzberger in which he first brought up Lelyveld’s ascension. “We’ve got to decide about Joe Lelyveld,” Frankel said he told Sulzberger during a March 1993 train ride to Washington. “Because he’s my choice and you’re going to hear from me soon about how I want to step down . . . and he’s my man. But if he’s not your man, we got a hell of a problem.” Return to text.

  *16 It was this article that caused the formulation of “to pretend not to own slaves” as a definition for “to Raines.” Return to text.

  *17 Raines was born on the same day—February 5—as Punch Sulzberger. Punch was born in 1926, Raines in 1943. Return to text.

  *18 In February 2001, Robinson was named senior vice president in charge of newspaper operations, and in February 2004, she was named the company’s chief operating officer and executive vice president. At the end of 2004, she will take over as the company’s chief executive officer. Return to text.

  *19 The race project, Behr says, was born out of her and Boyd’s frustration with the lack of responsibility they were given on the masthead under Joe Lelyveld. “We both felt wasted,” she says. Return to text.

  *20 Years earlier, Boyd did note that
his status as one of the few nonwhite reporters covering Reagan didn’t hurt his career. “There were just two minority reporters covering the White House back then,” he said. “So that brought me to Reagan’s attention. I got far more attention than I deserved, and I would always be called on by Reagan at press conferences.” Return to text.

  *21 The Kerner Report was the result of President Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which was convened in 1967 to explain the riots that had plagued American cities every summer since 1964. The report concluded that the country was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Return to text.

  *22 Another theory—that there are fewer minorities enrolling in journalism programs—is demonstrably false. Twenty-nine percent of students in American journalism programs in 2002 were minorities, and half of those were African American, according to University of Georgia journalism professor Lee Becker’s Annual Survey of Mass Communication and Journalism Enrollments. Return to text.

  *23 In 1979, Roger Wilkins took part in a class-action suit against the Times alleging that black, Hispanic, and Asian American employees were paid less than their white counterparts. The suit was settled before trial without any admission of wrongdoing by the Times. Return to text.

  *24 Noble is currently an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Journalism. He did not respond to more than half a dozen e-mails and phone messages requesting comment for this book. Return to text.