Behind the Times (19 page)

During all the changes at the
Times
, Punch Sulzberger was himself an adjudicator, the final authority when disputes couldn’t be settled by his associates. No matter that he often took years to render his decisions. After Argyris packed his tape recorder and left, the
Times
—like many other news organizations in the 1970s—debated the usage of “Ms.” as an alternative to the then-current style of designating women by Mrs. or Miss. Other publications, magazines as well as newspapers, adopted “Ms.” with a minimum of fuss. At the
Times
, the Ms. question was studied like the Talmud. Max Frankel, then the editor in charge of the Sunday paper, was a proponent of change, and the right of women to be defined by something other than their marital status. Rosenthal, speaking for his news department, favored continued use of Miss and Mrs. The memos flew back and forth. The
Times
had to be consistent throughout, daily and Sunday: Frankel couldn’t use “Ms.” as long as Rosenthal forbade it in the news pages. Months, then years, went by, with no change in
Times
style. Each year, Sulzberger would side with tradition. In December 1974, in a one-sentence memo to Frankel and Rosenthal, Sulzberger wrote: “At the end of the year, like Solomon,
I cast my vote ‘No’ for Ms.”

The 1970s gave way to the 1980s, and Sulzberger remained unmoved. Not until 1986 did “Ms.” become accepted
Times
style. The day of the change the writer and feminist Gloria Steinem showed up in the
Times
newsroom carrying the gift of a bouquet of flowers to mark the great event.

Another megastruggle of the 1970s centered on the so-called 6-on-9 decision. Like many established American dailies, the
Times
had for decades printed its pages in an eight-column format, the standard for broadsheet papers. Beginning in the early 1970s, a number of newspapers
switched to a six-column format and a slightly narrower paper width. The difference in width per single page was microscopic, but the cumulative savings when tons of newsprint were consumed quickly added up. Walter Mattson, with his eye on costs, became the leading six-column advocate; he argued that the
Times
, printing a million copies a day, would save $2 million a year in newsprint expenses. Rosenthal opposed the six-column format, for all the expected reasons: It violated tradition, it meant fewer words per page, it “didn’t look right.” Mattson’s figures at last convinced Sulzberger; he approved the project (long after both the
Washington Post
and the
Boston Globe
, among other broadsheet papers, had changed to six columns). As the day for the change neared, Sulzberger addressed a memo to Mattson and Rosenthal, urging them to get together and “close any open holes” on the six-column project. “I will be
happy to play Solomon if you need me,” he added. The Solomonic image pleased him: “I threaten my editors,” he later said, smiling broadly. “If I can’t get them to decide on their own, I tell them I’ll cut the baby in half, and that moves them.”

Sulzberger’s air of judiciousness was admirable. But sometimes Solomon nodded when reading the
Times
, even as ordinary
Times
subscribers did. Nancy Newhouse, a serious and accomplished journalist, was the first editor of the Home and Living sections. In the early days, she was the recipient of the Punch Sulzberger memos about home furnishings and design—although she never realized it. Rosenthal, it turned out, redid the publisher’s lists of story ideas for Home and Living. For example, in the Sulzberger memo listing eighteen suggestions, Rosenthal moved suggestion number one, urging coverage of the new rooms at the department stores, to suggestion number fourteen, thus burying—to some extent—the request for attention to major
Times
advertisers. Then the editor removed the publisher’s name from the memo, and Rosenthal’s secretary retyped the memo to make it a list of suggestions from Rosenthal to Newhouse. With a new addresser and addressee, the publisher’s original list was sent on, “AMR” to “Nancy Newhouse.”

Newhouse had no way to know who the actual source was. “Thank you for your recent memo giving me your thoughts about the Home section,” she wrote Rosenthal.

Perhaps it was just as well that Newhouse and her staff were not
apprised of the publisher’s involvement. If Rosenthal had, in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the new sections’ start-ups, appropriated someone else’s ideas for his own, the theft was no more than petty larceny. “Many of the story suggestions on the first list of eighteen stories actually have run,” Newhouse wrote Rosenthal, “fourteen of them in Home and two in Living.” She pointed out, for example, that the news about “awnings making a comeback was a page-one story in June.” Furthermore, medical specialist Jane Brody had done “a definitive piece on medicine cabinets in Living.” As for the big advertisers’ promotions, “model rooms we cover regularly when they open.”

The publisher and his editor were not reading Living and Home very closely, for why else did they miss all the stories that had run? Perhaps the two sections’ presentation was so muddled that Sulzberger and Rosenthal, the two readers with the greatest possible incentives to follow the
Times’
coverage, quickly forgot what they read. Either way, the
Times’
efforts to be friendly required further work.

The sun burned away the clouds in Honolulu. Bob Reinhold began the first of his interviews on a feature he had been thinking about for weeks, should he ever get to Hawaii. The story revolved around the question of who owns the land under the buildings in Honolulu, a dispute with roots in Hawaii’s feudal past. Reinhold interviewed people on both sides of the dispute, the landlords who owned land, and the leaseholders of the condominiums and apartments built on top of the land. Tuesday afternoon, his interviews finished, Reinhold flew back to Los Angeles, blocking out the story in his mind, organizing his notes so he could begin inputting the story on the office computer. But the article lacked a “today” angle—no court decision had been rendered. The national desk decided to hold Reinhold’s copy a week. It ran as a “Honolulu Journal” on the national affairs page, A-14, Friday, March 10. Apartment Owners Live/On Time-Bomb Leases, the two-line, two-column headline read. The lead paragraph began: “A century and half after King Kamehameha III, under pressure from newcomers, declared the great division of crown lands, land ownership remains the ugliest issue in this most feudal of American states.”

On the fourth floor of the
Times
, Stewart Kampel laid out the
Long Island weekly section. LI Weekly was one of the
Times’
four zoned sections for Sunday; the other three were for New Jersey, Westchester, and Connecticut. Like Sunday Main Part 2, the zoned sections represented a part of the
Times’
response to post-1960s changes in the New York area, specifically, the middle-class migration away from the city. Television not only claimed readers’ time; these same readers had put down roots now in the suburbs, and developed new local interests and loyalties.

Kampel and the other zone editors worked against a midweek deadline. By Thursday, the sections were preprinted and delivered, along with other Sunday advance sections, to suburban distribution points to be “married” on Saturday night with the news sections of the paper. The fourth floor was once the
Times’
composing room, where twenty years before, in the era of linotype machines and hot type, 1,200 printers labored through around-the-clock shifts. When the press run was over at 4:00
A.M.
, apprentices stripped the forms used to print the paper, breaking up the metal type, throwing the lead-alloy pieces into receptacles called hell boxes; the type was molten, the room noisy, the air reeked of fumes from hot metal and ink—hence, the name. Later, hell-box type was melted down and used again.

Now the composing room was empty, save for Kampel, the two editors who assisted him on LI Weekly, and a half-dozen makeup people working on the other zoned sections. They were in shirts and ties, grouped around long, waist-high tables, similar to an architect’s drafting board. They conferred softly as they pasted up the cold type—copy that has been set electronically. The stories came out of computer-run phototypesetting machines on white, sticky-backed paper, with one-column width settings. The editors used X-acto knives to cut and paste together the pages, making boards for the page-plater machines. The metal type long gone, the heavy fifty-pound plates that used to whirr on the presses had been replaced by thin aluminum sheets. But the computers of
Times
editors still have a “hellbox” command, to make a story disappear, and Kampel still refers to the photographs in his section as “cuts”—from the days when engraved plates were sliced with a bandsaw and placed by hand between rows of type.

The news department’s regular 11:00
A.M.
meeting began, as usual, a few moments late. Section editors described what they would offer for their dress fronts—the opening page of each section. The meeting lacked fire. The man nominally running it, managing editor Arthur Gelb, was in his final months in the news department; he was sixty-five, the normal retirement age for
Times
executives. The department editors from Metro, Sports, Business Day, and the Living section spoke, hurrying through their presentations. Max Frankel, the executive editor, did not attend the 11:00
A.M.
meeting. He came instead to the 5:00
P.M.
news meeting, when page one was laid out and the strong pitches made to get stories fronted.

In Boston, Anthony Lewis received a phone call from Menachem Rosensaft, head of the organization Children of Holocaust Survivors, and one of the participants in the recent meeting of Jewish leaders with Yasir Arafat in Stockholm. Rosensaft invited Lewis to a meeting to be held in Israel to follow up the Arafat opening. Rosensaft spoke feelingly about the ferocity of the attacks on him for advocating Israeli talks with the PLO leader. After Rosensaft rang off, Lewis phoned Andrew Rosenthal, a reporter in the
Times
Washington bureau (and a son of A. M. Rosenthal). The younger Rosenthal had been covering the Tower nomination story, and Lewis wanted the exact wording of a comment by Senator Bob Dole on the right of accused persons to cross-examine their accusers. Rosenthal relayed the quote to Lewis. That established, Lewis turned to a related matter. He had received a letter from a Cleveland woman who believed she was being persecuted because of her past “radical” views. Lewis talked about the letter with David Cole, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York; Cole said he would look into the Cleveland woman’s case.

The interviews that Sam Roberts wanted to arrange with Cuomo and Koch both came through. Roberts put aside the research for his backup column.

The Noon List, those stories considered probable candidates for page one, was assembled by desk editors and input on the Harris computer system. Senior editors scrolled through the list. Each story had a shorthand name, or slug—Tower, North, SCOTUS (for the U.S. Supreme Court), Caracas. Slug was another vestige of the old days when a small rectangle of metal was inserted in the linotype machines to create a title at the top of galley sheets.

At the entrance to the Times Building, a group of twelve teenage boys, yarmulkes on their heads, gathered to take a tour of the
plant. They were from the J.E.C. yeshiva in Englewood, New Jersey. Jim Morgan, tall and graying, a paper cup containing coffee in his hand, introduced himself as their guide from the
Times’
Office of Public Tours. To the east, two hundred feet down 43rd Street, a middle-aged woman huddled in the doorway of an empty office, formerly used by the Traveller Service company. Her possessions were stuffed in a shopping bag; she held out a cup similar to the one Morgan was carrying. She demanded of passersby, “a dollar, in change.” Two hundred feet to the west, near the entrance of the scabrous Times Square Motel at the other end of the block, a second woman stood on the sidewalk, arms folded, not begging for anything. She was thin and pale, no more than thirty years old. She wore a cotton dress and a stocking cap; her legs were bare in the thirty-eight-degree chill.

Three rented limousines carrying Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo, the president of Guatemala, together with his entourage of guards and aides, drove past the panhandlers and the yeshiva boys and pulled up to the entrance of the
Times.
The delegation was met by Joseph Lelyveld, then the
Times
foreign editor. President Cerezo, forty-six, was a lawyer by training; he had been elected almost four years before to head Guatemala’s first civilian government “after 30 years of bloody and discredited military cliques,” to quote a
Times Magazine
article, by reporter Stephen Kinzer, going to press that week (it appeared on Sunday, March 26).

Lelyveld escorted Cerezo to the tenth-floor conference room for a meeting with the editorial board. Rebecca Sinkler, the editor of the
Book Review
, had also been invited, as well as editors from the foreign desk. Sinkler was interested in Guatemalan literature. Lelyveld wanted Cerezo to understand the importance the
Times
placed on access for its foreign correspondents. Cerezo’s security men, and two women with the Cerezo party, also crowded into the room. One of the women was introduced as a cabinet minister.

Kinzer’s article described Cerezo as “the handsome young leader who was swept into office in December 1985, with two-thirds of the votes cast.” The president lived up to his billing in his talk to the board. Cerezo animatedly explained his idea for a Central American peace plan built around a regional parliamentary body, something like the European Parliament. He complained that the United States had done nothing to help his project, that there was no firm Bush administration policy in the region as yet. He hoped the
Times
could begin to shape a sympathetic U.S. posture. He needed the
Times’
help. Cerezo explained
that he believed he was being undercut by Oscar Arias Sanchez, the president of Costa Rica and author of his own peace plan for the region. Two
Times
editors exchanged glances; the Kinzer article, then on its way to the composing room, carried no mention of this infighting.