Gray Lady Down (2 page)

This was very much a validation for Rosenthal, and for Arthur O. “Punch” Sulzberger, who also upheld the tradition of politically agnostic news reporting despite the shrill liberalism of the editorial page and, increasingly, the journalistic activism of a new generation of reporters touched by the lengthening shadow of the
counterculture. Indeed, Rosenthal would cite the
National Review
piece on other occasions when challenged by accusations of political bias at the
Times.
Even Joseph Lelyveld, who took over the top editor’s job in 1994 and was undoubtedly to the left of Rosenthal, saw need for vigilance. “Abe would always say, with some justice, that you have to keep your hand on the tiller and steer to the right or it’ll drift off to the left.”

It was a priority of the postwar
Times
to become a national forum for opinion-free, straight news—as has been noted in numerous definitive books about the paper, such as
The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times
, by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, and
Behind the Times: Inside the New York Times
, by Edwin Diamond. This goal was accomplished under a succession of larger-than-life editors who were granted great autonomy, as well as unparalleled financial resources, to produce what the Sulzberger family has always considered a quasi-public “trust.” The paper held fast to several principles: ideological agnosticism, a sense of intellectual rigor, moral seriousness, and a respect for neutral recitation of the facts, free of political cant. It was a “theology” of gravitas and objectivity that allowed the
Times
to ask probing questions and to report often-uncomfortable answers without regard for consequences.

The need to be “straight,” to report the news rather than drive it, was reflected in how the paper covered the Bay of Pigs. Like other news organizations, the
Times
had most of the details about the impending invasion; in fact, they had become one of the journalism world’s biggest open secrets. But the
Times
hesitated to print the information since it could endanger the lives of the men landing on the beaches, it would effectively aid Castro, and it would interfere with national policy. In the end, the
Times
ran a one-column story instead of the four originally planned. No date for the invasion was mentioned—only a CBS News report that it was “imminent.”

The lacerating political and journalistic self-assessment that followed the Bay of Pigs debacle was the backdrop for the
Times’
deliberations over whether to go into print with the infamous Pentagon Papers. “A tale of reckless military gambles and public
deceptions” according to Max Frankel, executive editor from 1986 to 1994, the papers showed that “the government had hidden the true dimensions of its enterprise and its abundant doubts about the prospects for success” at every stage “along a twenty year arc.” Yet far from being the journalistic no-brainer it might be considered today, the Pentagon Papers case provoked considerable agony and debate at the
Times.
For Punch Sulzberger, the idea of publishing live military secrets was anathema, and as the internal debate flared, he invoked the national interest to delay publication. Rosenthal, the managing editor, agreed with Sulzberger’s qualms. According to Frankel, he asked “Were we on an ego trip?” before finally agreeing to publish the papers after it was found that no
current
military secrets would be disclosed.

The
New York Times
took a similarly cautious approach to the subject of civil rights in the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, maintaining careful neutrality in explaining the historic shifts that were afoot, as well as the resistance these shifts were provoking. The paper was solidly behind most of the major civil rights developments—
Brown v. Board of Education,
the March on Selma, the protests in Birmingham. But it also gave positive coverage to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s now-famous 1965 report,
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,
while some media identified with the left excoriated it. The
Times
affirmed Moynihan’s insight that, as with immigrants at the turn of the century, “Negro upliftment” would come through programs that asserted the primacy of the mainstream culture and promoted the values needed to enter it. Moynihan was not “blaming the victims,” the
Times
took pains to explain, but was blaming three hundred years of white racism that had victimized them.

Another subject on which the
Times
showed far different leanings from today was cultural separatism, especially as associated with black militancy and the Black Power movement. An editorial in 1966 described Black Power as “racism in reverse” and said it “could only bring disaster to the cause of racial equality.” When Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, the editorial page called him “an extraordinary but twisted man, turning many gifts to evil purpose.” The editorial concluded: “The world he
saw through those horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and dark. But he made it darker still through his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone came out of the darkness he spawned and killed him.”

The
Times
was hardly quick to embrace the emerging counterculture either, or its radical critique of American consumerism, family structure and political authority. Rosenthal himself was appalled at some of the destructive excesses of the antiwar movement, particularly the 1968 takeover of Columbia University and the sacking of President Grayson Kirk’s office. He was dubious of the subjectivity and relativism inherent in the counterculture and its replacement of objectivity with political and cultural partisanship. “We live in a time of commitment and advocacy,” he wrote somewhat sardonically in one staff memo. “‘Tell it like it is’ really means, ‘tell it like I say it is, or tell it as I want it to be.’ For precisely that reason it is more important than ever that the
Times
keep objectivity in its news columns as its number one, bedrock principle.” A subsequent memo would tell the staff that the
Times
“shouldn’t stick fingers in people’s eyes just because we have the power to do so.”

As Edwin Diamond notes, Rosenthal was especially on guard against the counterculture’s reflexive anti-Americanism. In early November 1969, he wrote a memo about the “awry picture of America” that, he maintained, the
Times
was perpetuating. Drawing his examples from the November 7 issue, he cited a story on page 7 about a GI trial in Fort Dix, a report on an MIT sit-in on page 8, an account of the moratorium on page 9, a story on the Army memo of that antiwar protest on page 13, and a report on page 22 about the ongoing Chicago trial, flanked by two different stories about poverty and housing demonstrations. He ended his list with a story on page 27 about job discrimination, before declaring that “there were others.” November 7 was not even a particularly outstanding day for that kind of thing, Rosenthal went on.

Another time that Rosenthal’s nose for radical chic got out of joint was over a story by Robert Reinhold in 1979, marking the tenth anniversary of Woodstock. Reinhold had called Woodstock a symbol of national, cultural and political awakening, extolling it as the culmination of a decade-long youth crusade for a freer style of life, for peace and for tolerance. Rosenthal did not see the story until the Saturday evening before it ran in the Sunday edition. Livid, he ordered it out of all subsequent editions.

A hallmark of Rosenthal’s commitment to keeping the
Times
“as close to the center as possible” was his wariness of allowing culture critics to thread their political opinions into reviews of plays, books, movies and television shows. Political opinions don’t belong in cultural reviews, Rosenthal believed. Otherwise the
Times
“would have ten extra commentators on the paper.” The news columns would not be made “into a political broadsheet, period,” he insisted; there would be no “editorial needles.”

Throughout his tenure, Rosenthal was backed up by Arthur O. “Punch” Sulzberger, who had become publisher in 1963 somewhat accidentally after his predecessor, Orvil Dryfoos, a Sulzberger in-law, died unexpectedly. Punch Sulzberger brought a special temperament to the job: content to stay “out of the way of the hired hands” was how someone once described his idea of his role. He tended to take an editorial interest in things that might appeal to or alienate advertisers, such as restaurants,
movies and plays, and when he did choose to make his objections known, he did so within channels, complaining only to the top editor. Of course he would have general conversations with his editors, often at the end of the day, over a bottle of wine. Generally, though, he kept his power in reserve, like a “hidden hand.” It was no wonder that many at the paper likened him to the Wizard of Oz.

In 1976, however, Punch Sulzberger became uncharacteristically involved in the paper’s journalism. A World War II veteran with an abiding patriotism and a disdain for communism, he had long felt uncomfortable with the left-wing opinions on the editorial page, which was edited by his cousin John Oakes, a legacy appointment inherited from his predecessor. The editorial board had endorsed George McGovern for president in 1972. When Jimmy Carter ran in 1976, some on the editorial board were talking about backing Ramsey Clark. In addition, it appeared likely that the
Times
would lend its endorsement in New York’s U.S. Senate race to the strident left-winger Bella Abzug over Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Sulzberger’s preferred candidate.

Sulzberger’s concern about the leftist slant of the editorial board coincided with a drastic drop in share value and profit. In 1968, the price of
Times
stock was $53 a share; by 1976, it was $14.50. A cover story in
Business Week,
headlined “Behind the Profit Squeeze at the Times,” said, “Editorially and politically, the paper had also slid precipitously to the left and has become stridently anti-business in tone, ignoring the fact that the
Times
itself is a business.” An internal analysis conducted by the marketing and advertising departments of the
Times
a few years earlier found that the editorial page had become the principal reason why some people questioned the paper’s impartiality. Among those growing most impatient with the partisanship were members of “the Club,” a group of Wall Street bankers upon whom the
Times
relied for financing.

Phase One of “Punch’s Putsch,” as the effort to bring the editorial page to heel and oust John Oakes became known, was Sulzberger’s decision to overrule the endorsement of Bella Abzug and instead support Moynihan. This decision infuriated Oakes
and some of his editorial writers, especially Roger Wilkins. Phase Two involved the hiring of William Safire, a former Nixon speech-writer, as a conservative columnist to temper the monolithic liberal tone of the editorial page. Within several months Oakes had stepped aside and all but a few of his editorial writers were reassigned or retired.

But Sulzberger’s primary commitment was dealing with the alarming underperformance of the paper’s stock, especially since it was matched by severe losses in circulation and advertising. In a one-month period in 1971, daily circulation dropped by 30,000, down to 814,000. This is when Rosenthal began to have his nightmare about waking up one Wednesday morning and there being no
New York Times.

To help determine how to address this dire situation, the
Times
set up a network of in-house task forces and committees. Management also hired professional market analysts to survey readers and advertisers in order to gauge what was wanted—and what was wanting in the paper’s coverage. The analysts returned shocking news: the
Times
had very little readership under the age of thirty-five. More distressing yet was what the polls and surveys suggested the
Times
should do. Interest in foreign and national news was practically nil, the market researchers reported, while arts and entertainment scored significantly higher. If the
Times
was to engage the under-thirty-five reader, it had to focus on the two questions that members of that demographic found most compelling: what to do with their time, and what to do with their money. In short, “lifestyle,” embodied in special weekday sections devoted to leisure time, sports, home, fashion, popular entertainment and contemporary arts.

In a panic, the paper began looking around at publications that seemed to ring bells with younger, affluent urbanites. One was
New York
magazine, full of service features and celebrity profiles. The other was the
Village Voice,
with its radical-chic politics and hip take on the downtown scene. Still another was
People
magazine, which was demonstrating that a sensibility shaped in direct imitation of television could make for a winning format on the printed page as well.