After the Tall Timber (63 page)

February 1999

IN JANUARY of this year, Simon & Schuster published my book
Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker
. I had been at
The New Yorker
since 1963—with an absence of about fourteen months, during which I was Bosley Crowther’s successor as the film critic of
The New York Times
. Though I had written for other publications, I thought I knew the magazine pretty well.
The New Yorker
, I wrote, is dead. I did not expect everyone to agree or to welcome my account of what happened to the magazine. Perhaps not surprisingly, the colleagues whom I had loved and admired through the years tended to share my views. Those of whom I thought less highly, and whom I portrayed less admiringly, did not.

Throughout the book, I referred to matters in the outside world, politics, travels, issues, assignments taken and not taken, discussions with William Shawn, the great editor, who, over that period of more than thirty years, naturally grew old, declined, and lost control of his magazine. A young editor whom I met in January said he thought I had treated
The New Yorker
as though it were the proverbial canary in a mineshaft. Its death meant something about the capacity of any living creative enterprise to survive within the culture. The thought had not crossed my mind. It has crossed my mind now.

On November 11, 1999, when my book was still in galleys, Charles McGrath, the editor of
The New York Times Book Review
, wrote to Simon & Schuster. Mr. McGrath had for many years been an editor at
The New Yorker
. I had described his tenure there in less than admiring terms. I had also raised questions about what seemed to me an inherent conflict of interest in his having assigned to himself, when he became editor of the
Book Review
, the review of another book in which he figured. “The other day,” Mr. McGrath now wrote, “I received the galleys of Renata Adler’s forthcoming book,” and “as is my custom, I read through it prior to assigning it for review.” He described as a “complete fabrication” an account of a lunch at which he had speculated to his cousin Laura (“who is not my cousin but, rather, my cousin-in-law”) that he was, at that very moment, being designated successor to the editorship of the magazine. The lunch had, in fact, been described to me by several people. My account of it was harmless; it certainly had no legal implications. (Mr. McGrath’s letter had ended with “cc:” to an attorney.) But I had also written that “no one, at least no writer in his right mind, wants to antagonize the
Book Review
.” I thought, what the hell. I wasn’t
at
the lunch. I had written, several times, about my distrust of journalism that relies, in quite this way, on “sources.” So I replaced the passage with an account of a conversation in which Mr. McGrath spoke directly to me. I framed his letter, and hung it on my wall, as a little distillation of what I thought an editor of a major publication ought never to do.

The New York Times
subsequently published no fewer than eight, arguably nine, pieces about my book. The first four (on January 12, January 16, February 6, and February 13, 2000) appeared in four sections: Arts, Sunday
Magazine
, Sunday Letters, and Sunday
Book Review
. They were unfriendly, but, apart from their sheer quantity, not particularly striking. The Arts piece, by Dinitia Smith, did mention Mr. McGrath’s letter in approving terms (“The material to which he objected,” Ms. Smith wrote, “was removed”), but added that Mr. McGrath said “he had decided to distance himself from reviews about current
New Yorker
books.” What form that distancing would take, Ms. Smith did not say.

The next four pieces (April 3, April 5, April 6, and April 9, 2000) were dispersed among four more sections (Business/Media, Editorial, Op Ed, and Week in Review), treated as serious news, in other words, from Monday through Sunday of a solid week. It might have been, even as an episode of institutional carpet bombing, almost flattering. It seemed unlikely that the
Times
had ever devoted four, let alone eight, polemical articles to a single book before. There is perhaps an explanation and a story here for both waves of articles. Let me begin with the second wave.

In mid-February, Jack Sirica, a reporter at
Newsday
, wrote a letter to Simon & Schuster, calling attention to a sentence, at the end of a passage on page 125 of my book, in which I wrote about having been assigned, by Mr. Shawn, and deciding not to review,
To Set the Record Straight
, the autobiography (published in 1979, by Norton) of Judge John J. Sirica, Jack Sirica’s father. The sentence in question said I had found that “contrary to his reputation as a hero, Sirica was in fact a corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest figure, with a close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy and clear ties to organized crime.” Jack Sirica challenged me to produce “any evidence whatsoever” that his father was a “corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest figure”
or
“had clear ties to organized crime.” He demanded that Simon & Schuster “issue a public, written retraction” and “remove the references” from all future editions of the book. He distributed his letter widely to his colleagues in the press. A reporter from the Associated Press called me and asked, in highly professional and neutral terms, whether I planned to document my remarks in any way. I said I did. The reporter asked when. I said soon. The reporter asked where. I said in any place that seemed appropriate.

Some days later, I had a call from Felicity Barringer, a media correspondent of
The New York Times
. Ms. Barringer, I knew, is married to Philip Taubman, a member of the
Times
editorial board and an assistant editor of the editorial page. From the outset the conversation had nothing of the tenor of an “interview.” Ms. Barringer did not even pretend to any interest in Sirica, only in “ethics in book publishing.” Would I give her my “sources”? “Come on. Yes or no. Up or down?” Her deadline: forty-eight hours. No. Why would I not disclose my evidence, if any, to her? Because, as the AP had reported, I was writing a piece of my own. Why wait? I was not waiting; I was writing.

Had I no concern meanwhile, she asked several times, about what I had done to Judge Sirica’s reputation? I said I didn’t think most people relied for their information about Judge Sirica on a sentence in a book about
The New Yorker
. In fact, none of the reviews, in the
Times
or elsewhere, had so much as mentioned the passage. Before Jack Sirica’s letter, no one had apparently noticed it. “Well, that raises the old question, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to notice,” Ms. Barringer said. A think piece, evidently.

If I did not wish to “disclose” my “sources” to her in an interview, Ms. Barringer said, “Why don’t you post it on the Internet?” “You post a lot of your own pieces on the Internet, do you, Felicity?” It must be said that, although I was not, as far as I know, discourteous, I was not particularly deferential or awestruck, either. This was, it was true, the
Times
. It was also an unusually repetitive and mindless interrogation. The game, and its rituals, anyway, are fairly set. The reporter will write what she chooses—not infrequently regardless of what is said. It is one of the many reasons I have always preferred to work with documents, including depositions. They can be verified and checked. Ms. Barringer had a final question: Was my source G. Gordon Liddy? No.

The following Monday, April 3, Ms. Barringer’s piece appeared on the front page of the Business section. On Wednesday, April 5, a piece, by Eleanor Randolph but unsigned (I had mentioned Ms. Randolph unfavorably in my book), appeared as an editorial. On Thursday, April 6, there was an op-ed piece, written by, of all people, John W. Dean. On Sunday, April 9, the
Times
published the last (at least so far) of these pieces in its Week in Review.

Ms. Barringer’s article was, in its way, exemplary. In my “off-handed evisceration of various literati,” she reported, not many people had noticed “Ms. Adler’s drive-by assault on the late Judge Sirica.” She deplored the lack of “any evidence” and managed to convey her conviction that none existed. Ms. Barringer’s own “sources,” on the other hand, were the following: Jack Sirica (whom she did not identify as a
Newsday
reporter); John F. Stacks, who co-wrote Judge Sirica’s autobiography (and who said Sirica “didn’t have the imagination to be anything but straight all his life”); “those who have read just about all books about the Watergate” and “those most steeped in Watergate lore” (whether these “those” were coextensive was not clear); two lawyers, who confirmed that “the dead cannot sue for libel”; an editor, who did not claim to know either me or anything about Sirica, who “explained” (not, for Ms. Barringer, “said”), in five paragraphs of a bizarre fantasy, what I must have said to my editor and he to me (“It is, ‘Love me, love my book.’ If that’s what she wants to say  . . . it’s either do the book or don’t do it”); and Bob Woodward, coauthor of
All the President’s Men
, who “absolutely never heard, smelled, saw or found any suggestion” that Sirica had ever had “any connection whatever” to organized crime.

An impressive roster, in a way. I had once, as it happened, unfavorably reviewed, on the front page of
The New York Times Book Review
itself, a book by Mr. Woodward, but he was certainly the most impressive of Ms. Barringer’s sources in this piece. Mr. Woodward could of course have crept into Judge Sirica’s hospital room, and elicited from him on his deathbed the same sort of “nod” he claimed to have elicited from CIA Director William Casey on
his
deathbed, and then claimed, as he did with Casey, that to divulge even the time of this alleged hospital visit would jeopardize his “source.” And when asked, as he was in an interview, what color pajamas the patient was wearing, he could, as he did in the instance of Casey, express a degree of outrage worthy of the threat such a question poses to the journalist’s entire vocation. That is evidently not a kind of “sourcing” that raises questions for a media correspondent at the
Times
.

Ms. Barringer, in any case, did not conceal her views or quite limit her account to a single issue. “The attack on the basic honesty and decency of the judge,” she wrote, “is of a piece with the whole work.” Then came a memorable line. “What she writes and when she writes it, she said,” Ms. Barringer actually wrote, with all the severity of the bureaucrat deep in a Politburo, “is for her to decide.” Who else, I wondered, at least in our society, could possibly decide it? Her essential formulation, however, was this:

Jack Sirica merely demanded “any evidence whatever.” Ms. Barringer wanted evidence (to her standards, presumably, and Mr. Woodward’s), with “urgency,” and “establishing accuracy.” Otherwise, in spite of that lamentable “legal impunity,” a retraction. An interesting position, from a reporting, First Amendment, or even a censorship point of view. I will return to that, and even get to the evidence about Judge Sirica. But first a bit more about conditions in the mineshaft.

The editorial, two days later, entitled “A Question of Literary Ethics,” ran immediately below a slightly shorter piece, “Justice in Bosnia.” “In an irritable little book published late last year about The New Yorker,” it began. Why the
Times
would address an entire editorial to a “little book,” “irritable” or not, was not entirely clear. One might have thought that, almost thirty years after the Watergate and more than sixty years after some of the events in question, the country really does turn for its information about Judge Sirica to a passage in a book about
The New Yorker
magazine. “Since Judge Sirica is dead,” the editorial again pointed out, “he is unable to sue for libel.” True enough. “But that does not lift the ethical burden from Ms. Adler to support her charges with evidence that she says exists,” but “that she and her editors at Simon & Schuster, for some unfathomable reason, omitted from her book.” Then, a new standard, not just “evidence” but a cognate of “proof” crept in. “If Ms. Adler was referring to allegations about Judge Sirica’s father  . . . she will need to document that unproven contention and show how it relates to the judge himself.”

It was interesting to learn what I needed to document and show. I found it difficult, however, to see in what sense my “burden” was (as Ms. Randolph, writing anonymously for the
Times
, put it) “ethical”—or how the passage in my book could have raised an issue of “ethics,” “literary” or other. Professional issues, perhaps. Issues of fact, history, judgment. Ethics, no. I was either right or I wasn’t, and I either had evidence or I hadn’t. (The questions were, by no means, the same.) The
Times
, as it turned out, had not the slightest interest in Sirica or his history. No reporter for the
Times
, or as far as I know any other publication, made any effort to investigate the nature of the connection with Senator McCarthy—let alone the basis for an assertion of clear ties to organized crime. This lack of curiosity seemed to me extraordinary. The sole preoccupation was with a kind of meta-journalistic question—not what happened, but what were my sources and my obligations. As to what was, however, “for some unfathomable reason omitted,” the
Times
had only to look at its own op-ed piece the following day.

That piece, entitled “A Source on Sirica?,” consisted of John Dean’s speculation about something the
Times
had reason to know not to be the case: that my “source” was Dean’s old enemy, and current adversary in an embittered lawsuit, G. Gordon Liddy. What was remarkable, however, was less the content of the piece than the words with which the
Times
identified its author. The caption, in its entirety, read as follows: