Behind the Times

Weeknights at ten, a driver leaves the New York Times Building on West 43rd Street and carries two copies of the first edition of the next day’s paper to the West 67th Street residence of Max Frankel, the paper’s executive editor. If Frankel is at a business dinner or social engagement, he may excuse himself to be home soon after the driver arrives. For the next two and a half hours, he reads the paper from front to back: news, features, reviews. Some nights, he pushes himself to look at the food recipes in the Living section, at the wedding notices, at the copy in the department stores’ advertising. As Frankel explains it, he is trying to see the Times as its readers do, in finished form. He asks himself the traditional
Times
questions about whether the reader is reading a “
Times
kind of story” handled in a “
Times
way.” But shortly after he took over the top editing job in late 1986, he added a fresh requirement: The
Times
, he concluded, must be made “user friendly” and inviting to read. Frankel keeps a memo pad beside him for writing notes to one or another of the nine hundred men and women who report, write, illustrate, edit, and lay out the paper. While some of his notes praise or criticize what he’s just read, Frankel comments to his editors mostly on the overall product: Were there too many long pieces, or writing that was too wooden? Did the pictures and headlines invite readers into stories? The
Times
, he explains,
reaching for an analogy, “is like a
supermarket of news.” The paper has to “keep all its shelves richly stocked.” As readers hurry down the aisles, “We’ve got to tell them what’s there.” Frankel’s exercise each night with newspaper and memo pad is designed to offer “systemic comments”—manager to staff—so that customers keep patronizing the supermarket. Ever the wordsmith, he’s also likened the
Times
to a symphony orchestra, and himself to its conductor.

Frankel was fifty-six years old when he became the eleventh editor of the
New York Times.
Given the normal retirement age of sixty-five for news department executives, he can expect to run the
Times
until 1995. Just halfway through his tenure, however, he found that the
Times
all too often ran him.

The most public breakdown in the system occurred in the early spring of 1991. The news staff was coming down from the high of the Gulf war. The paper’s extensive coverage of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm was an affirmation of the way the
Times
really saw itself: not a folksy marketplace but the world’s greatest news-gathering organization—the institutional
Times
, balanced, thorough, authoritative, a colossus astride the globe. The allies’ one-hundred-hour ground campaign over, George Bush riding high in the polls, Saddam Hussein beaten if not bowed, the
Times
took stock of its own performance.
Winners & Sinners
, an in-house bulletin used at the time by Frankel and his top editors to pass on comments about the staff’s work, noted that it wanted to call an honor roll for the paper’s coverage of the Gulf war—but it didn’t have the space. “The men and women who have yet again made the paper mandatory reading for the country and the world at a time of crisis could not possibly be listed here without glaring omissions and distortion through truncation,” the bulletin declared. “Just a list of those who have worked six- and seven-day weeks since the gulf crisis began would fill these pages and spill over. Our correspondents in the Middle East have been magnificent, their work supplemented splendidly by reporters in Washington, around the country and New York.” Once again, the editors concluded, “to work at our newspaper
is to experience awe.”

Within a matter of weeks, the air of self-congratulation evaporated. Frankel’s talk about “a
Times
kind of story” told in “a
Times
kind of way” took on new meaning. In the editions of Wednesday, April 17, 1991, the
Times
ran a profile of the woman who said she was raped by William Kennedy Smith at the Kennedy family estate in Palm Beach,
Florida, during the Easter holiday two weeks before. The story carried the double byline of Fox Butterfield and Mary B. W. Tabor. It disclosed that the woman’s name was Patricia Bowman and offered, in numbing detail, particulars of her life, beginning with her birth date, August 11, 1961, in Akron, Ohio. Noting that she had a “poor academic record” at Tallmadge High School, the article went on to quote a school acquaintance who said Bowman was popular socially and “had a little wild streak.” The
Times
helpfully explained that meant she “liked to drive fast cars, go to parties and skip classes.” The profile reported that Bowman had been seriously hurt in a car crash, had attended a number of small colleges without graduating, and that she had a daughter born out of wedlock (“She had a brief affair with Johnny Butler … the father of her child, friends say. It is unclear why the couple did not marry”). Two paragraphs were devoted to her adult driving record, and the information that she received seventeen tickets for speeding, careless driving, and being involved in an accident between 1982 and 1990. An account of Bowman’s barhopping nights on the Palm Beach “club scene” required another four paragraphs. A chef, interviewed by the
Times
, described how Bowman came by the restaurant where he worked late one night, ate a special meal he cooked for her, accompanied him to a bar, and then fell into a conversation with some other men—leaving him, the story said, “disappointed.” The profile also took up the fast times and marital history of Bowman’s mother. Jean Bowman, it seems, worked her way up from the secretarial pool of an Akron machinery company to a corporate position, divorced Bowman’s father, and eventually married Michael G. O’Neil, the chairman of the General Tire and Rubber Company—“one of her company’s largest customers,” the
Times
noted. (In case anyone missed that point, the article included the information that Jean Bowman was named as the “other woman” in O’Neil’s divorce.) In 1989, the
Times
reported, Patricia Bowman’s stepfather O’Neil bought her a house near his retirement home, paying $161,800 for a “new contemporary three bedroom with pale peach walls.” O’Neil was “successful,” “blunt spoken,” and “used to getting his way,” the
Times
said, hinting at the theme that the two principals in the forthcoming rape trial were actually surrogates: the real story “pitted” one powerful, wealthy Irish Catholic against another powerful, wealthy Irish Catholic family, perhaps the most prominent in the country. The
Times
version presented Bowman as an unstable barfly looking for something
more than a one-night stand, while the oafish Kennedy-Smith wanted only a little consensual fun. She was used and discarded, and Michael G. O’Neil didn’t intend to take that lying down. (A
Times
man later told me O’Neil was a conservative who “hated” the Kennedys since the days of John and Robert Kennedy, but that the
Times
chose not to develop “the political angle” in the story.)

The
Times
ran the woman’s profile on page 17. The story immediately became page-one news—in a dozen other papers. Frankel and the
Times
were excoriated for breaking with past practices and publishing the name of a woman involved in a rape case. The overall tone of the story was mocked in low and high places. The editor of the checkout-counter sheet,
National Enquirer
, piously noted that he chose not to print the woman’s name: “I think we took a more ethical standard than the
Times
did.” The president of the United States slyly announced at a Washington correspondents’ dinner that while he no longer had the freedom to slip out of the White House and pick up one of the supermarket tabloids, “I can still read the
New York Times.
” The loudest cries of pain came from the
Times
staff. A petition of protest expressing “disgust” at the story collected over one hundred names. Frankel, assistant managing editor Allan M. Siegal, and national editor Soma Golden appeared at an extraordinary staff meeting to explain to three hundred upset people the editors’ handling of the story. “Hold your applause to the end,” Frankel began lightly, in an attempt to lower the level of anger.

From the start, Frankel sought to frame the discussion at the meeting around the ethics of using rape victims’ names and whether or not secrecy adds to the shame—a legitimate exercise of the kind that keeps graduate journalism classes going for a week or so. Several of his questioners, offended by the
Times’
attention to the nudge-wink details of Bowman’s—and her mother’s—life, tried to refocus on less philosophic matters. In its salacious tone and in the selected frissons of Bowman’s life—leading on the chef for dinner, for example, then not giving him the gratuity he expected—the
Times
narrative came across as the journalistic equivalent of the men’s locker-room verdict, “she’s a tease who’s asking for it.” The
Times
rape story, from conception through final editing, in point of fact was largely a male enterprise, and a young
Times
woman, a recent hire from a smaller paper, rose at the meeting to express her bewilderment at some of the article’s assumptions. “This isn’t the
Times
I thought I was joining,” she told Frankel.