Behind the Times (37 page)

Anthony Lewis finished half of a draft of his Tower column before leaving for MIT across the Charles River.

The
Times
editorial board heard from its second visitor of the day: the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador John Walker.

Ambassador Walker arrived on crutches. He had gone skydiving, broken his leg, and wound up in Walter Reed Army hospital in Washington—in the same wing where General José Napoleon Duarte, the president of El Salvador, was being treated for cancer of the liver. Walker gave the
Times
editors his reading of the political situation in El Salvador. The leftist guerrillas had proposed elections in September rather than March, the ambassador said, adding that he didn’t believe the guerrillas wanted elections at all. Duarte’s precarious health further complicated the outlook. Walker was told of the visit of Guatemala President Cerezo to the editorial board earlier in the day, and the ambassador added a small footnote about the president’s
entourage: The woman cabinet minister was Cerezo’s mistress; so was the other woman in the group (another gap, the editors realized, in the
Times Magazine
article).

Barbara Gamarekian read through the afternoon pile of press releases and invitations from, among others, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the National Capital Children’s Museum. She began her rewrite of the women-diplomats feature, interweaving the materials from her interview. Three phone calls interrupted her work. Her calls from the morning, seeking comment on the private lives of the Congress, were being returned. Gamarekian had begun as a journalist in Washington in the 1960s, and her contacts were excellent. She talked to Gary Hymel, a lobbyist who once worked on the staff of Representative Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House; to Horace Busby, a former assistant to Lyndon B. Johnson, and now a Washington consultant; and to Marty Davis, the high-profile wife of Congressman Robert Davis of California.

In New York, David Jones, the editor of the National edition, answered his phone. He wasn’t able to talk: “The afternoons are killers here,” he told his caller. The National edition of the
Times
was transmitted via satellite to eight plants around the United States, where the signals were reconverted into printed pages. Jones and his overworked staff were publishing a full-sized paper, every day. They took the copy and photographs from the “basic”
Times
—the four-section paper, available in the New York area and the Northeast corridor—and reedited the materials to produce the two-section paper for satellite transmission. It was no cut-and-paste job. Some days, several stories had to be recast, to make the materials “more national.” There were as well changes of position and display: What was judged of page-one importance for the “basic” paper might not be so judged for the national edition. Jones did the editing with the help of a full-time staff of four. The national paper reached almost one in every five
Times
readers, and was gaining circulation at a faster rate than the basic paper on sale in New York and the corridor.

Albert Scardino, a reporter specializing in stories about the media, finally accepted that Tuesday would be a lost day for him. He had just returned from Amelia Island, a pleasant resort on the Florida-Georgia border, where he had participated in the
Times’
Big Brother program. That was the newsroom’s somewhat mocking name for the
Times’
latest corporate management venture. In
1987 the Times Company had designated Seymour Topping, a former
Times
foreign correspondent and later an assistant managing editor, to be director of editorial development for the company’s thirty-five regional newspapers. Topping was supposed to help sharpen the journalistic skills of the news staffs at the regional papers. He had the idea of inviting
Times
reporters and editors to speak on their specialties to regular gatherings of the little brothers (and sisters). The
Times’
newspaper properties were located mostly in smaller towns with a heavy concentration in the South. Scardino once owned and edited a small weekly in Augusta, Georgia—and won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writings. He was invited by Topping to Amelia to speak on the topic of “enterprise reporting.”

Ordinarily, Amelia Island in February would be a welcome assignment for a transplanted Southerner, but a snowstorm hit Florida, bringing northern temperatures to the resort. Scardino faced rough weather on another front as well; the previous Big Brother speaker, an assistant editor on the metro desk, chose to talk about the
Times’
coverage of the Tawana Brawley case. The editor described how the metro desk assigned no fewer than eight people for a good part of 1988 to investigate the story of the black teenager (Brawley had claimed she was abducted and raped by a band of white men, some of them law enforcement officers; the
Times
team presented evidence to demonstrate that her story was a hoax). As the metro editor reprised the
Times’
handling of the case, a hand shot up. The questioner said he had to put out a paper every day, including Sundays, with a news staff of eight people. What possible relevance could the Brawley example have to his experience? Scardino was sympathetic. There is no way you
can
relate to the behemoth of the North, he told the little-brother editors when it was his turn to speak. “The
Times
is like the U.S. Post Office.”

Back in the newsroom on Tuesday, Scardino sprayed his desktop with Fantastik cleaner and swiped at it with a rag. Judith Miller was rejoining the paper as the new deputy editor for media, and she decided to set up shop in the cubicle until then assigned to Scardino. A former
Times
foreign correspondent and more recently a deputy news editor of the Washington bureau, Miller had been on leave to finish a book on the Holocaust (published in 1990 as
One by One by One
). Miller was now Scardino’s supervisor, and so he spent the day moving his files in order to turn over his desk to her. He was not a happy
Times
man. The paper ran a feature under his byline called “Press Notes,”
though not as regularly as he would have liked. “It appears as frequently as the
Scholastic Quarterly
,” he joked. Scardino complained that his last column sat in his editors’ computer directory for almost a month. “They ask, ‘Is this exclusive?’ If you reply, ‘It’s ours alone,’ then they hold it a few weeks.”

In the fall of 1985, Max Frankel decided he had to advance his bid to become executive editor—the top news post at the
Times
, and one widely described as the most important journalistic position in the world. He asked Punch Sulzberger to have lunch with him. Using a technique he had initially perfected in his years as the
Times
Washington bureau chief, Frankel during the lunch made it clear that, while he was making his case for the job, he wasn’t pressing for an immediate answer. When dealing with the ambitious, sensitive men and women who worked for the
Times
, Frankel found, words might be spoken in haste and later regretted, especially if the reporter had come to talk about career advancement. Frankel learned to include a cautionary preface: “Listen to me, but don’t reply; then go away and reflect on what I’ve said.” The implication was that the smart
Times
man or -woman ought not to say anything hasty, like “No” or “I quit,” that would close off options. A colleague grew to admire the editor’s approach to staff matters. “Max is always thinking, thinking. He has lots of
sachel
,” the colleague said, using the Yiddish word meant to convey shrewd common sense.

Sachel
was prized at the
Times.
In his Op-Ed page column, William Safire once admonished Secretary of State James Baker about his Middle East diplomacy; Baker, Safire wrote, has the “smarts” of a Texas lawyer and Washington insider but not the
sachel
that gives “a feel for
the way human beings react.” At lunch with Sulzberger, Frankel used his
sachel
, applying the same deft touch he had brought to dealings with his subordinates. Before making his case, Frankel lightly told the publisher that he had the right to remain silent. Sulzberger readily accepted the ground rules. Frankel put forth his arguments; Sulzberger listened in silence. Before they rose to leave, Sulzberger said he was glad to hear that Frankel was available. Furthermore, the publisher said, “You know I think the world of you.” That was it. Not another word was exchanged between the two men on the topic of the top editor’s job for the next eighteen months.

From Frankel’s point of view, his case was airtight. He had been at the paper all his adult life, almost thirty-three years; the executive editorship was, logically, the culmination of his life’s work. The
Times
, indeed, was his life: Not for Frankel the television talk-show circuit or the journalistic memoir for a book publisher. He had given the
Times
his full-time, seven-days-a-week devotion. But Frankel faced an obstacle to his quest, actually several obstacles. To begin with, the editor’s job that Frankel wanted was already occupied, and by the formidable Abraham Michael Rosenthal. After fifteen years of running the news department of the
Times
, Rosenthal seemed a part of the environment as fixed as the fluorescent ceiling lights that burned day and night in the third-floor newsroom. The newsroom denizens, at any rate, believed Rosenthal was ready to defend his authority to the end; they claimed to see no evidence that he wanted to relax his grip. For his part, Rosenthal gave every sign that he regarded the executive editorship as the most important journalistic job in the world, and one that he perhaps alone among men was qualified to do. In his early sixties, he still relished running the
Times
fortissimo.

In late 1985, Rosenthal seemed more energetic than ever. The
Times
was producing creamy profits for the Sulzberger family, its circulation was still growing, its reporters were regularly represented when the Pulitzer Prizes were awarded each spring. The story of what happened when the force of Frankel’s ambition collided with the entrenched authority of Rosenthal reveals a great deal about the workings of the
Times.
Moreover, the way the
Times
selected its new editor also suggests why the paper has come to look and read the way it does, and how misguided are some of our notions of “the news”—and of the eager, egocentric men and women who do newswork.

*        *        *

Frankel, as a good
Times
man, knew enough to keep word of the lunch with Sulzberger and, indeed, of his own plans, as quiet as possible. He understood that Sulzberger wanted it that way. Sulzberger’s family by temperament as well as tradition valued their privacy. It was somewhat awkward for Sulzberger to suppress all talk about the
Times.
He was, after all, in the news-gathering business, and his employees worked zealously to find out about other people’s affairs. But Sulzberger was not pleased with the kind of news the
Times
had made: the Washington bureau revolt against New York in the late 1960s; the ouster of John B. Oakes and his editorial board in the mid-1970s; the reporters’ cabal and the Kosinski and Severo episodes—the list went on. Sulzberger kept asking his executives to “calm down the place,” but to little avail. Abe Rosenthal had been at the center of many of these fights. The Red Hot Mama positively radiated danger to those who crowded his authority.

In late 1985 the
Times
was about to create more unwanted headlines. Although Rosenthal was approaching the
Times’
mandatory retirement age of sixty-five, there was speculation he would not willingly let go. Perhaps, some of the staff suggested, he wanted to be editor for life.

In the early 1980s, Rosenthal instituted an elaborate procedure to select, as he put it, “the next generation of
Times
leadership.” A baker’s dozen of top
Times
men—no women were included—became part of this next generation. At one time or another, the list involved: the imposing Hedrick Smith, a Pulitzer Prize–winner for his reporting from Eastern Europe and a frequent guest sage on public television’s “Washington Week in Review”; Sydney Schanberg, the impassioned correspondent whose Pulitzer Prize work in Cambodia was the basis for the motion picture
The Killing Fields
; Bill Kovach, the
Times
’ Washington bureau chief, with an unusual background—he was an Albanian-American from East Tennessee and, more improbably for the
Times
, an editor who was well liked by his staff; the metropolitan editor, John Vinocur, an aggressive former foreign correspondent brought back from Europe for bigger assignments; and Craig Whitney, a kind of composite of the
Times
senior editors on their way up in the mid-1980s: Ivy League scholarship boy (Harvard), major overseas experience (Moscow, though not yet a Pulitzer), and quite tall. All of the candidates in Rosenthal’s “next generation” seemed to be six feet or over.