Hard News (30 page)

“The business department sees how companies work,” Kramon said in an interview at the time. “I was just trying to get attention off of, ‘Will he or won’t he,’ and just move forward.” Even Raines himself seemed to be realizing he might not survive. That day, he told some newsroom staffers that his wife would love him whether or not he had the title of executive editor after his name.

N
EW
E
NDINGS,
O
LD
B
EGINNINGS

On Wednesday morning, June 3, Joseph Lelyveld contacted his old secretary and asked her if she would be able to come back and work for him for a couple of months. That afternoon, Raines canceled a dinner he had scheduled for the following night with a group of reporters. He left the newsroom early, telling colleagues he wasn’t feeling well.

The next morning, Arthur Sulzberger asked a group of the paper’s top editors to come to the fourteenth floor at 10:00 a.m. Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, Sulzberger said, were stepping down. At 10:30, an e-mail without a subject line was sent to the paper’s staff. It read, “Please gather in the newsroom on the 3rd floor at 10:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what the e-mail meant—the sur-real nightmare that had begun in late April was coming to an unexpectedly quick conclusion. When he stepped into the elevator that would take him down to the third-floor newsroom, Sulzberger spotted Bill Keller. “I want to talk with you,” Sulzberger said. “Sometime soon.”

On the third floor, Sulzberger told the hastily assembled crowd that he wanted to “applaud Howell and Gerald for putting the interests of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own.” He went on, “There is so much to say, but it really just boils down to this: This is a day that breaks my heart, and I think it breaks the hearts of a lot of people in this room.”

Raines’s and Boyd’s wives were in the newsroom, as was Punch Sulzberger, who stood off to one side. Jacques Steinberg stood just behind Arthur Sulzberger Jr. as he spoke, taking notes for the next day’s news story. When it came time for Raines to talk, he said, “It’s been a tumultuous month, twenty months, but we have produced some memorable newspapers.” He appeared calm as he talked of his next ventures. “I set out many years ago to live a life devoted to literature and the arts,” he said, “and I return to that calling with a wider set of interests in writing, the study of history, in painting and photography.”

“Remember,” he added, “when a great story breaks out, go like hell.” Raines seemed proud and even a little defiant and maintained the confident style that had marked his entire tenure.

Boyd, on the other hand, appeared deeply shaken, even unsure of exactly what he wanted to say. When he spoke, he said he was leaving “willingly and with no bitterness whatsoever, and in the firm belief that
The New York Times
will be in great hands no matter who leads.”

Raines grabbed his panama hat and walked out of the newsroom, making his way through an impromptu receiving line that included a number of veteran reporters as well as Punch Sulzberger. Less than a year before, basking in the glow of the paper’s seven Pulitzer Prizes, he had said of the
Times
’s newsroom, “It’s my place. It’s my home. And these are my people.” Now he was walking out for the last time.

After exiting the Forty-third Street headquarters, he got into his car and drove straight to his place in Pennsylvania—the same place he had been when the Jayson Blair story first broke.

The members of the newsroom, many of whom had campaigned publicly to have Raines and Boyd deposed, were in shock. Some wept openly. It was as if the paper’s staffers were surprised—even upset—by the effects of their open rebellion. More than one newsroom employee compared the situation to the one in
The Lord of the Flies.

After Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd had left the building, Sulzberger announced that Joe Lelyveld would step in as interim editor. The next morning, the sleepy-eyed Lelyveld, tieless in a yellow button-down shirt, stood in the same place Raines had stood the day before. Lelyveld had had a reputation for being an awkward public speaker, but on June 5, twenty-one months after Howell Raines had vowed to dust the cobwebs from the Lelyveld era, he disproved that reputation.

“I didn’t realize until this minute how much I missed you all,” Lelyveld said, smiling slightly, after receiving a sustained ovation. “So as I was saying,” he began, gently referring to his previous tenure. Then Lelyveld made a speech that repudiated Howell Raines’s leadership and newspapering philosophy even as he defended the paper’s staff and his own tenure as executive editor.

This is not a restoration in any personal sense. But I hope it’s a restoration of certain values we need to go on putting out the world’s best newspaper. I don’t mean that as a slight on the two admirable men who led you day after relentless day through the titanic story of 9/11 and then bravely stood here yesterday to say their goodbyes for the good of the paper and walked out of this place to start their new lives, their own
New York Times
recovery programs. My heart goes out to them and for conspicuous improvements like the way we now use pictures, my gratitude too. Like everyone here, I hope. I honor them for their contributions and truly wish them well.

No, I mean to be talking about us now, not them yesterday. The restoration of values I’m talking about has to do with civility and the way we talk to each other. Thoreau said something like this: It takes two to talk—one to speak and another to hear. The newspaper works best when editors listen, not as a matter just of civility but in a spirit of greedy opportunism. When they listen to the ideas and aspirations of their reporters and help them to get those ideas and aspirations into focus. It works best when we’re not talking about ourselves and venting and backbiting but when we’re talking about the world we go out to cover and explore for our readers.

I developed in my days here some old saws, a set of maxims from a sort of Poor Joe’s Almanac that I’d haul out too often as some of you will recall all too well. On it went this list: Newspapers don’t exist for the satisfaction of journalists. They exist for readers. The satisfaction of journalists is OK. It’s a fine thing. We’re not opposed to it. In fact, we’re strongly in favor of it. But it’s not the ultimate. We need to do our job for readers. And part of our job, traditionally, is to help set the news agenda for others . . . help set the agenda for this country. We cover what everyone else is covering competitively, aggressively, and yes with a high and heightened metabolism. But we also break our own stories. We cover what we know is important when others aren’t paying attention.

Since I’m not going to be here long, I’m a man in a hurry. There’s some tidying up to do. Some of our key departments are severely under budget in staffing. Some are way over. We’re going to get back on budget by our own efforts and where we can’t because of important new demands like the IHT, we’ll make our case to the publisher in an orderly, convincing, even forceful manner.

But mainly I’m going to focus on news and talent. That means I don’t intend to get much involved in the work of the committees that the publisher has set in motion to rethink our policies. They’ll report to him and your next editor. . . .

The cure for what has ailed us is called journalism. The only way to communicate is to speak up in an atmosphere where outspokenness is sometimes rewarded and never penalized. Wherever you are, whatever you do, take it in faith, you now work in that atmosphere. I need your support in this. It can’t work because I say it will. You have to make it true. Starting right now. We’ll get the new leadership team up and running as fast as we reasonably can. . . .

My beloved mentor, partner and friend Max Frankel used to end all his meetings, big and small, by saying, “Let’s go to work.” Let’s go to work. Let’s really go to work. Thank you.

The newsroom erupted into applause. “When Joe spoke that first morning, it was the closest I ever came to crying in the newsroom,” says Clyde Haberman. “That speech was marvelous. It was exactly what people needed to hear.” Just as gratifying, Sulzberger was at last indicating that he had learned the lessons of Raines’s tenure. “This is a newsroom of over 1,200 men and women,” he said in an interview that Friday. “Managing that is a complex task.”

“The atmosphere of the place changed radically [as soon as Raines left],” says Roger Wilkins, a former
Times
editorialist and columnist who served on the Siegal committee, an internal group that examined the Blair case. “If you looked at the newsroom the day before [Raines and Boyd] resigned and the day after Joe took over, it just felt like a very different place. It was more relaxed. . . . There was just this exhausted relief that now we can get back to journalism.”

Sulzberger still had to choose who would lead the
Times
into the future, and he was rapidly discovering the extent to which Raines and Boyd had run the newsroom in precisely the imperious manner Sulzberger professed to disdain: Years before, speaking of the time he served as an assistant metro editor while A. M. Rosenthal was leading the paper, Sulzberger had said, “We had the entire operation resting on the backs of two people. If you were to remove Abe [Rosenthal] and [deputy managing editor] Arthur Gelb from the equation, the place would have been without any sense of vision.” Now, with Raines and Boyd gone, there were no obvious candidates from within the newsroom to take over. There was lingering resentment over the role of Andrew Rosenthal, who had served as a third in command under Raines and Boyd. Jon Landman and Jill Abramson were both popular with their charges, but for Sulzberger to choose one of the editors seen as leading the coup against Raines might have been interpreted as an unacceptable reward for open revolt.

Speculation soon coalesced around three candidates: Bill Keller, who had been passed over for the top job two years earlier; Dean Baquet, managing editor of the
Los Angeles Times;
and Marty Baron, editor of
The Boston Globe.
All three had obvious advantages and disadvantages. Keller had experience running the newsroom as Lelyveld’s managing editor, and his stint as an Op-Ed page and
Times Magazine
writer showed he was a nuanced and flexible thinker. Choosing Keller, however, would mean that Sulzberger would have to admit both that Raines had been a mistake from the start and that there had been a better candidate all along.

Then there was Baquet, one of the most popular and successful editors of his generation. He’d been widely respected and admired while national editor at the
Times,
so much so that both Joe Lelyveld and Sulzberger had tried, over a weekend retreat at Lelyveld’s vacation house in Maine and a one-on-one lunch with Sulzberger, to convince him to stay when he was offered the Los Angeles job. With John Carroll, the executive editor of the
Los Angeles Times,
Baquet had quickly shored up a struggling paper. What’s more, Baquet is black. With Boyd’s resignation, the
Times
had lost one of its only high-ranking African American editors, and Sulzberger’s firmly held belief that the paper needed to diversify had not been diminished by the Blair scandals.

Baron, who had worked as an associate managing editor under Lelyveld, was coming off a string of enormously successful years editing other papers around the country. In 1999, he was hired away from the
Times
to become executive editor of
The Miami Herald,
a once great paper that had suffered mightily under owner Knight Ridder’s cost cutting. In 2001, the
Herald
won a Pulitzer Prize in the breaking news category for its Elián González coverage. On July 2, 2001, Baron was named the editor of the
Globe,
a newspaper owned by the New York Times Company. In 2003, the
Globe
won the public service Pulitzer for its coverage of the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

Over the next month, Baron and Baquet tried to reassure their staffs they weren’t about to bolt, while simultaneously meeting with Sulzberger and other
Times
executives. One afternoon, Baron was seen outside the Times building, a fact that was dutifully disseminated by local media scribes. Not long after, New York’s
Daily News
reported that Baquet turned down an offer from Sulzberger to serve as the paper’s next managing editor, regardless of who was named executive editor. (That wasn’t true: Baquet had merely said he wasn’t interested in considering a job as managing editor if and when that became an issue.)

Despite Baquet’s and Baron’s histories at the
Times,
it would have been unprecedented to appoint someone from outside the newsroom to lead the paper. So it became Bill Keller’s time. As June bled into July and the media world’s preoccupation with the
Times
dimmed, Sulzberger prepared to announce Keller as the man he’d selected to take hold of his family’s newspaper.

Howell Raines, however, wasn’t quite ready to cede the stage. On Friday, July 11, after being tipped off that Sulzberger was going to announce Keller’s ascension on Monday, Raines asked for time to appear on Charlie Rose’s PBS show. That night, he was the hour-long program’s only guest. He was brash and arrogant, combative and impetuous. He said that before he took over, the
Times
had been struggling. He refused to apologize for his management—“I’ve always believed if you are a fastball pitcher, you have to throw heat,” he said, apparently not realizing that even a dominating fastball pitcher needs to be able to occasionally throw other pitches well if he wants to have any success. He also told Rose that he had left involuntarily, contrary to what Arthur Sulzberger had been saying. He spoke of himself as a “change agent” sent in to increase the “competitive metabolism” of the newspaper gripped by a “lethargic culture of complacency.” He described the paper under his leadership as being embroiled in a kind of civil war, with Raines and his small cadre of adherents striving to make the paper better and struggling against many of the paper’s editors and reporters who resisted change because it would require more work. Finally, he said he’d model the rest of his life on William Butler Yeats and Pablo Picasso, great artists who achieved enormous successes after they had turned sixty.