Authors: Edwin Diamond
The scheme generated the expected attention, and more. Frankel and his editors decided to messenger the book to Maureen Dowd of the Washington bureau. “I got the book at midnight,” Dowd later told the journalist Jeffrey Goodell. “I stayed up all night and read it.” According to Dowd, her editors told her to “write it out straight”—no analysis or interpretation. Her story was placed on page one of the
Sunday Times
of April 7. The idea, once again, was fine in the abstract: A Kitty Kelley unauthorized biography was guaranteed to be an enticement-news
event. No matter how familiar and trashed-over the celebrities that Kelley chooses for her subjects, she usually manages to scrape up a few malignant specimens of scandal in the private recesses of their lives. In
Jackie Oh!
Kelley “disclosed” that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis received electroshock treatments for depression. And in
His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra
, Kelley replayed the old legends of the singer’s friendship with organized crime figures, while adding the indispensable “news” from yellowed newspaper clips that his mother, Dolly, was the neighborhood abortionist back home in Hoboken, New Jersey, a half century before.
Maureen Dowd seemed like the right person to handle the Kelley book. In the spring of 1991 Dowd was one of the
Times’
White House correspondents. She was a thirty-one-year-old reporter for
Time
magazine when the
Times
hired her as a metro desk reporter in 1983; three years later she joined the Washington bureau in time to cover the last years of the Reagan presidency. While working for the
Times
, she kept her hand in magazine work, contributing a satirical advice column to the monthly
Mademoiselle
(Dowd used the pen name “Rebecca Sharp,” after the plucky, scheming character in Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
). Dowd was a rising star of the Frankel era, much praised by the New York editors for what they regarded as her “stylish” writing and distinct “voice.” The editors encouraged her to do lively features; she didn’t disappoint with her Kelley article.
Frankel later told associates that he thought he had signed off on an article about the Kelley book that would stress the public policy angle—how the unelected Nancy Reagan tyrannized the White House staff and generally directed her actor-husband in the role of his lifetime, the President of the United States. The Dowd story started out high-mindedly, then jumped to innuendo. Kelley’s book described Nancy Reagan’s and Sinatra’s long, closed-door “lunches” in the White House private quarters, with quote marks around the word to imply what Kelley—and the publishers’ lawyers—weren’t willing to say directly: that Nancy Reagan and Sinatra were having an affair in the White House. Dowd’s article brushed by Kelley’s previous publishing history, as well as her habit of conflating rumor and fact. Mike Wallace, the CBS newsman (and Nancy Reagan friend), complained to the
Boston Globe
about Dowd’s complaisant treatment of the Kelley methodology. “If you’re going to be used the way the
Times
was, then you check your facts … or you take the five most scandalous stories
and check them out. You do not print the gory details in uncritical fashion.” Wallace thought that, at a minimum, the
Times
should have run a companion piece, exploring “Who’s Kitty Kelley and what’s her track record.” Wallace also said that he talked to Nancy Reagan and that she felt bruised by the book and “ticked off at the
Times.
”
Frankel appeared to side with Wallace and the other critics of the Dowd article. At the staff meeting protesting the Bowman story, Frankel said that the Dowd piece was “not up to
Times
standards.” Once again, good idea, bad execution. Some of Frankel’s auditors thought he was laying off responsibility too far down the line, to the writer who produced the lively copy expected of her and to the Washington desk editors who flagged the “New York Special” through, without slowing it down. Dowd certainly thought she was being unfairly treated. The protest meeting was relayed via speakerphone to Washington, where several bureau people, including Dowd, were listening. When Frankel’s comments came over the line, Dowd, flushed and angered, rushed out of the room. She had to be persuaded not to resign. She had done what she was asked to do—turned the story around in two days, in a lively manner, and for her efforts she was put down.
The argument that the editors didn’t know the contents of the Kelley story impressed no one.
Times
reporters contend daily with a huge, hierarchical, multilayered editing system: copy desks, department desks, “backfield” editors who oversee the work of the news desks, and behind them, the North Wall, or simply, The Wall, the collective of senior editors—and their deputies and assistants—sitting along the 44th Street side of the newsroom. “I can’t buy the story that ‘they bought it sight unseen,’ ” E. R. Shipp later said. A second reporter who spoke out at the staff meeting said flatly: “They wanted the titillation.” Even if Dowd didn’t finish her story until Saturday morning, she still had to run it by several editors. Frankel himself had created a news department structure to insure total control of what appeared on page one; star stylists were not excepted. There were special procedures for the Sunday edition, in part because the Sunday report sold 50 percent more copies than the daily and was something of a showcase for the
Times’
most enticing efforts, and in part because of the usual weekend slowdown in hard news. With fewer “yesterday” and “today” stories of Congress, government agencies, and City Hall, desk editors felt added pressure to find the trend stories Frankel wanted in the
paper. Consequently, each week on Wednesday, department desks circulated a list of the proposed Sunday page-one lineup to the senior editors. On Thursdays, the senior editors met to go over the list with the weekend editor, whose principal functions were to track trend stories already being developed and to commission new ideas. On Fridays, the weekend editor brought the lineup to the managing editor, Joseph Lelyveld, and to Frankel. On Saturdays, Frankel made it a point to call in and check the lineup with the weekend editor—several times during the day, if necessary.
All the layers, meetings, phone calls, and backup systems made the
Times
the
Times.
It was—had been for decades—an editors’ paper. Frankel talked up good writing, and introduced
more
supervisors. In hundreds of hours of interviews, I never encountered a
Times
reporter or writer who complained about the
under
editing of stories. How then did the experienced editors handling the Bowman case and the Reagan book manage to trip on their own cleverness? A
Times
woman with twenty-plus years at the paper offered one explanation. “
The
Times
is an elitist paper, and our editors have elegant, elitist minds,” she said. “When such minds try to think in popular nonelitist terms, they miss badly. We get ‘wild streaks.’ ”
No one editor, obviously, can control all the words and images that pour into the
Times
, daily and on Sunday. Frankel’s initial efforts with his midnight notepad were directed at “process” and “systems.” He gradually remade the centralized structure he had inherited from his predecessor Abe Rosenthal and worked toward a more collegial newsroom. The Sulzbergers didn’t want radical change on the third floor when they appointed Frankel. His assignment was to preserve the
Times’
position as a world-class newspaper and as a successful business enterprise—“to ensure the continuum,” in Frankel’s words. The paper’s image of respected authority, and its capacity for making money, had to be maintained. But the overly aggressive displays of power of the immediate past needed reigning in: The family, befitting the tradition of Our Crowd, wanted the news department to go about its business less noisily. Frankel more or less succeeded; he created the impression of collegiality. Frankel adopted the practice of beginning his regular memos to the staff with the salutation: “Friends.” He converted part of the spacious third-floor office he inherited from Rosenthal into a conference area for North Wall meetings. Frankel appointed Soma
Golden national editor, and promoted other women to positions of responsibility. The daily page-one meetings changed; “Frankel listened, and asked ‘ordinary guy’ questions, instead of hostile putdowns,” a participant reported. The shift in atmospherics reached the arts and culture desks far from The Wall. “
We sensed a flexibility and the chance for more cultural stories out front,” the film critic Janet Maslin said. “Page one was suddenly up for grabs.” Frankel ended the copy desk practice of not permitting a reporter to have more than one byline per edition (by the old reasoning, two bylines in the paper might cause people to conclude that “the stories were not reported carefully enough”—as if
Times
readers kept score). Frankel also encouraged the desks to be generous in crediting other publications when a
Times
story picked up materials that first appeared somewhere else. Thus, in the
Times
of August 4, 1992, the lead campaign story credited a
Washington Post
article for its account of the Clinton camp’s plans to deal with “bimbo eruptions.” Across the page, political reporter Richard Berke had two bylines for separate stories on George Bush’s sputtering reelection effort. Frankel’s “staff friendly” administration was an improvement on the Rosenthal years: The newsroom remained vast and impersonal, but the discord level was lowered.
Frankel’s efforts to make the
Times’
news pages more user friendly were less successful. Or rather, they sometimes succeeded too well. The bizarre behavior—the little wild streaks—of the Frankel years tended to break out when the
Times
strained to be less
Times
-like. Long before the Patricia Bowman and Nancy Reagan episodes, Frankel’s
Times
experimented with enticement journalism. It started tentatively enough, with a remarkable article by reporter Jane Gross. “
There is a single woman in New York, bright and accomplished, who dreads nightfall, when darkness hugs the city and lights go on in warm kitchens,” Gross’s article began. From page one onto the jump, or continuation, of the story, Gross required almost 2,400 words to tell a tale intended to touch thousands of
Times
readers. The “bright and accomplished” woman wasn’t homeless and sleeping in the dark streets; she could fill her refrigerator easily. Still, she suffered; she was unmarried, Gross explained, and nearing forty, and there were only so many straight, single men out there. In short, yuppie angst.
Frankel signaled that he wanted to run more such impressionistic, magazine-length articles, but the ideas came easier than the execution.
As far back as the 1988 presidential race, the
Times
decided to plumb the
candidates’ personal habits and private life. Presidential “character” had become a legitimate focus of press attention in Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam years and during the disgrace of Watergate in Richard Nixon’s second term. Every four years since, the
Times
and other news organizations took their Eagle Scout oath to offer coverage that was more thorough, more analytical, more comprehensive. In his turn, Frankel decided on a fresh way to get at character. The Washington bureau sent out a questionnaire to the active presidential candidates. Bureau chief Craig Whitney asked each man (no women were running) to waive his rights of privacy for any government or medical files that may exist on him, and to make this material available to the
Times.
The questionnaire also asked for birth certificates, marriage and drivers’ licenses, employment records, lists of friends and advisers, and financial and tax documents showing net worth. The prospect of a
Times
search of raw FBI files, with their pages of unsubstantiated, often malicious rumor and gossip, angered several of the candidates. Senator Paul Simon tartly reminded Whitney that “we are all candidates for the presidency, not for sainthood.” A candidate agitated by the questionnaire leaked it to the
Times’
competitors. They quickly pounced.
The ensuing uproar played out as a preview of the wild times of 1991. The Quindlen part of angry columnist was taken by A. M. Rosenthal, newly transferred to the
Times
Op-Ed page from the news department. Rosenthal noted the press’s new appetite for sexual candor. He suggested, though not by name, that Frankel, Whitney, and the other character police disclose more about themselves; “Correspondents and editors, have you ever committed adultery?” Rosenthal asked. “Homosexual experiences, any? Names, please.” Frankel played the Frankel part, avuncularly explicating the
Times’
case for the “valid pursuit” of character in a staff memo intended to allay concerns about the snooping
Times.
“Friends,” he began. “There’s been some lively debate about the extent of our interest in the personal lives and backgrounds of presidential aspirants.” Frankel acknowledged that “we have put some questions to candidates that reach a bit too far.” The
Times
would no longer seek FBI or CIA files, or those medical records that “do not bear on a person’s fitness for the Presidency.” Nevertheless the
Times
would continue to press for relevant medical records, such as information about diseases requiring heavy medication, as well as
financial and personal data. Frankel then brought up “the further question of social and sexual conduct.” Such conduct would continue to be relevant for the
Times
, he said, “mostly because the candidates themselves have paraded their wives and families and fidelity to family values before the public by way of claiming certain character and personality traits. Where these claims turn out to be fraudulent, they are as noteworthy as any other serious misrepresentation to the electorate. Reports on family life, or the lack of it, are not normally the stuff of front-page headlines, but they can have their place in rounded portraits of a politician’s character.”