Behind the Times (23 page)

Herb Mitgang was also extending a distinguished journalistic career on the editorial board. During World War II, he was managing editor of
Stars
&
Stripes
, the Army newspaper. He joined the
Times
in 1945 and managed to produce a series of well-regarded books on his own time—novels, biographies, reportage, criticism, and a play,
Mr. Lincoln
(produced on Broadway). Mitgang left the
Times
in 1964, lured away by CBS to be its executive news editor. But Mitgang soon concluded that, as he later put it, “TV isn’t a writer’s medium.” He returned to the
Times
three years later when Oakes asked him to help get the planned Op-Ed page started. When
New York
magazine profiled the Oakes board, it illustrated the article with the board members posed as “The Last Puritans,” after the painting of the Flemish master Van Dyck. Mitgang, Raskin, and the other board members were zealous in their application of the notions of the good, the true, and the pure; but John Oakes was the foremost Puritan. The board members, Mitgang remembered, “always referred reverently to their editor as ‘Mr. Oakes,’ just as it was always ‘Mr. Shawn’ at
The New Yorker
magazine.”

Like any editor of strong tastes and originality, Oakes had his blind spots. He could be stiff-necked; he became convinced that the news department had sided with farmers and hunters in a story about the
killing of coyotes in Florida, and he refused to accept Abe Rosenthal’s explanation that the overall Florida ecology was benefiting from control of the coyote population. Oakes also had a healthy ego, one that required stroking as much as other
Times
people’s. Many executives, for example, later took credit for the Op-Ed page. Oakes did indeed first suggest the Op-Ed idea, but he was bothered by the prospect of “mixed voices” in proximity to his editorial page, and he worried that readers would think it was the
Times
speaking on the facing page, rather than an outside contributor. Punch Sulzberger went back and forth on the Op-Ed decision—one reason it took a decade to produce—but then so did Oakes.

Certainly, each man had plenty on his plate to occupy him in those first years of their collaboration: Sulzberger concentrating on business-side decisions, Oakes dealing with
Times
policies on Vietnam, civil rights, and the economy. They didn’t crowd each other. “The compatible cousins,” the trade magazine
Editor & Publisher
called them in 1970. “When we disagree, I’m in the fortunate position that I can win if I want to,” Sulzberger explained to the magazine. “But I don’t want to.”

A few years later Sulzberger wanted a “win”—and badly enough to expose himself and his cousin to just the kind of public attention the family had so earnestly tried to avoid. The presumptive occasion for their highly publicized disagreement was the Democratic Party senatorial primary in New York during the summer of 1976. Sulzberger’s choice was the centrist candidate Daniel Patrick Moynihan; John Oakes and the majority of his editorial board wanted to endorse the liberal Bella Abzug. Sulzberger got his way, but in a manner suggesting that Moynihan and Abzug were both somewhat incidental to the larger purposes of the publisher.

At the beginning of 1976, Oakes was still more than two years away from his sixty-fifth birthday. Sometime around that date, April 23, 1978, he would step down from his editor’s job, if the
Times’
retirement policies were strictly applied to him. But the number sixty-five had no magic during Punch Sulzberger’s reign. Specific departure times for senior men were—typically—left flexible: It could be any time in the calendar year, or in the case of one of Punch Sulzberger’s latter-day favorites, the editor James Greenfield, more than a year after his sixty-fifth birthday date. (Punch Sulzberger himself stayed past his
sixty-fifth birthday in 1991, as his own son tried to look patient.) In 1976 Oakes was a vigorous, healthy sixty-three-year-old, dedicated to the outdoors; on pleasant workdays, he liked to walk briskly some two miles through Central Park, East Side to West Side, before taking a bus to the
Times.
He didn’t feel ready to retire when, one day in the spring of that year, his cousin called him in for a talk. Sulzberger, Oakes remembered, told him that he would have to step aside at the end of the year, a full sixteen months before his sixty-fifth birthday. “Punch forced me to quit,” Oakes says. “I asked him, ‘Is there anything in my editorials that you disapprove of?’ He answered, ‘Absolutely not.’ Rather, Abe had gotten the job that Max competed for, and wanted. And now Punch told me, ‘I’m afraid I’ll lose Max.’ ”

The date of January 1, 1977, was picked for Frankel to assume control of the editorial page. The prospective move was doubly painful for Oakes. He had given his cousin a list of those editors that Oakes thought would make worthy successors. It was culled from the ranks of the Last Puritans. Fourteen years later, Oakes would not reveal his choices, though it’s not hard to guess that Raskin and Mitgang were high on the list. Oakes did say, however, that the list did not include Max Frankel: “He was not my choice, and I said so to Punch. But I also said that if you reject my choices, I want you to know that Max is the next best qualified person, though he could use a year or more of training for the job.” Sulzberger not only rejected the idea of more seasoning for Frankel, the publisher moved Frankel into Oakes’s job well in advance of the ostensible changeover date. The editorial-page endorsements for the Democratic party primary became a handy vehicle for the publisher’s putsch against Oakes.

The senatorial campaign that summer of 1976 had turned into pure New York theater. After the national shame of the Republican Nixon during Watergate, the 1976 general election was considered a walkover for the Democrats. New York Republicans were never numerous to begin with, and in the post-Nixon era, their party was in disarray. The incumbent Republican, Senator James Buckley, the decent, pedestrian brother of the writer William Buckley, Jr., had meager support. Punch Sulzberger and John Oakes agreed, along with everyone else, that victory in the Democratic primary would be “tantamount” to election. But the Democrats couldn’t agree among themselves on their candidate; neither could the two cousins. Four men and a woman emerged as possible candidates: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former
Harvard professor and midlevel official in the Nixon administration; Abzug, the congresswoman from a left-liberal Greenwich Village district, and a leading figure in the woman’s movement; Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general in the Lyndon Johnson years; Paul O’Dwyer, brother of William O’Dwyer, the former mayor of New York City; and the parking lot magnate Abe Hirschfeld. Abzug, Clark, and O’Dwyer clustered on the ideological left of the party, while Moynihan positioned himself as the candidate of the democratic majority (fifth candidate Hirschfeld was, and remained, a loose toy-cannon). The race, then, came down to whether the liberal-leaning Democratic electorate could unite on one candidate to oppose Moynihan. Practically speaking, that meant uniting behind Abzug, who was running well ahead of both Clark and O’Dwyer.

Moynihan had angered many New York liberals, and Oakes’s editorial page, for a number of reasons. As the author of the “benign neglect” memorandum during his service in the Nixon administration, Moynihan was considered insensitive to the plight of blacks in America. Oakes saw in the memo a cynical retreat of government from its social obligations: a policy with the emphasis on “neglect” rather than “benign.” Oakes also faulted Moynihan for his performance as Nixon’s ambassador to the United Nations (“He spent his time bullying and baiting Third World countries,” Oakes explained); for his military hawkishness; and for his general “florid adulation” of the disgraced president. Abzug, Oakes believed, “was a serious legislator of proven ability, a spokesman for urban liberalism and social humanitarianism.”

Oakes, the lame duck editor, understood that the
Times’
endorsement of Abzug could swing wavering centrists and uncertain liberals to her line on the ballot. His predecessors, he recalled, had hung back from involvement in intraparty politics, considering the
Times
an “independent paper.” “I was the guy who went against ‘tradition’ and first instituted the idea that the
Times
should take sides in every election,” Oakes says. Even then,
Times
editorials were finely tuned—“judicious” assessments rather than clarion calls to party or faction. In the close Democratic primary race of 1976, however, even a mild
Times
endorsement—of either of the two leading candidates—could determine the outcome. But Sulzberger was not a fan of the assertive, “feminist” Abzug; he was leaning toward the brassy but “moderate” Moynihan. Knowing that his cousin had the final authority, Oakes
tried a change in strategy. “Because this was a primary election and not the general election,” he argued, “the
Times
could pass on its endorsement without violating its own rules.” In Oakes’s recollection, “Punch definitely agreed with me that there was no need for the
Times
to take sides. We had a clear understanding.” Reassured that there would be no endorsement, Oakes remembered that he left in early August with his family for a month’s vacation at their summer home in Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard. The primary was on September 14, the second Tuesday after Labor Day.

In Sulzberger’s memory, the cousins’ conversation takes on a sharply different shading. “I don’t know what Johnny thought when he went off to the Vineyard,” Sulzberger said. “But the rules we had then are the same rules as now. Generally we don’t endorse in a primary unless—” he paused and laughed “—we want to.”

Oakes’s vacation was not restful. On the August 30, 1976, cover of
Business Week
, he saw a picture of his cousin Punch, looking grim. The headline read: “Behind the Profit Squeeze at the New York Times.” The reading inside was grimmer still. The article described how the Times Company’s stock was down from $53 a share in 1968, the year public shares began to be traded on the American Stock Exchange, to $14.50 a share in the summer of 1976. The second paragraph of the story repeated a refrain that Sulzberger had grown tired of hearing: “Editorially and politically, the newspaper has also slid precipitously to the left and has become stridently antibusiness in tone, ignoring the fact that the
Times
itself is a business.…” The article angered Sulzberger. Three years later,
Times
economics writer Leonard Silk found Sulzberger still in an angry mood;
Business Week
, the publisher complained to Silk, “did a hell of a job on us. It hurt. It was not fair.” Yet the magazine didn’t say anything about the
Times’
politics that Sulzberger hadn’t heard from some of his business friends.

A few days after the
Business Week
article appeared, Oakes opened a copy of the September 5 edition of the
Times
, delivered by ferryboat to the Vineyard. On the Op-Ed page, he read a sporty column by James Reston in praise of Moynihan. Reston likened Moynihan to a baseball pitcher of the moment: “Moynihan is to the Democrats what Catfish Hunter is to the Yankees—a flamboyant hardball, sometimes beanball, pitcher whose fastball is better than his control.” Reston also called Moynihan “a hawk who sings like a lark.”

Unknown to Oakes, at the same time that Reston was promoting
Moynihan for the U.S. Senate, Sulzberger was playing some hardball of his own. Sulzberger called in Max Frankel and gave him some notes that the publisher had jotted down in praise of Moynihan. The two men also discussed the shape of an editorial endorsement of Moynihan. Frankel had the job of putting the notes and the conversation into final editorial-page form (according to
Times
man Silk, Frankel at the time was “leaning toward Bella Abzug”). Neither did Oakes know that the Sulzberger-Frankel editorial was scheduled to run in the
Times
of Friday, September 10. On the morning of September 9—“the beginning of the worst day of my life,” Oakes says—the Oakes family was packing to catch the ferry from Vineyard Haven back to the mainland at Woods Hole. The departure was hectic; Oakes’s wife was having back problems, Oakes himself sensed that he ought to be back in New York as soon as possible. The phone rang. Sydney Gruson, Sulzberger’s number-two man, told Oakes of the Moynihan editorial, by then ready to go to the composing room. Then, Oakes’s deputy, Fred Hechinger, was on the line. “Fred read the endorsement to me,” Oakes remembered. “And I damn near died. Aside from the choice of Moynihan, it was badly written.”

The key passage in the editorial read to Oakes began: “We choose Daniel P. Moynihan, that rambunctious child of the sidewalks of New York, profound student and teacher of social affairs, aggressive debater, outrageous flatterer, shrewd adviser—indeed, manipulator—of Presidents, accomplished diplomat and heartfelt friend of the poor—poor people, poor cities, poor regions such as ours.” Hechinger had been given the copy that morning, with a note from the publisher saying he wanted it to run in the next day’s editions. “I like it the way it is,” Sulzberger had written. Hechinger immediately interpreted that to mean, no changes at all, from anyone. Oakes nevertheless wanted to stop the editorial; and, if he failed at that, he would try to blunt its effects. “I protested, obviously. Yes, the publisher has the final say, but I thought to myself: I can’t countenance this.” He considered, and dismissed, the idea of a dramatic public resignation over the “forced” Moynihan endorsement: “Since I was already committed to leave, it would have been a silly gesture to quit.” On the forty-five-minute ferry ride to Woods Hole he tried to compose his anti-Moynihan thoughts on a memo pad. Then, from a pay phone at the dock, his car parked alongside, his fourteen-year-old in the back of the car waiting for him, Oakes talked to Punch Sulzberger. “I told him, ‘It’s my responsibility
to be heard.’ ” Oakes then asked Sulzberger, “ ‘What about me writing a rebuttal to appear on the page along with the endorsement?’ ” Punch thought about it for a moment, and then agreed. “Later I dictated a long rebuttal to Hechinger, giving Moynihan what for.” (Candidate Moynihan, the rebuttal acknowledged, “is charming, highly articulate, and certainly intelligent; but then so are many other opportunistic showmen.”) Hechinger sent Oakes’s copy to the composing room; it was set for eight paragraphs, and ran just over 450 words. On orders of the publisher, it never appeared in the
Times.
Instead, the next day’s edition, dated September 11, carried a one-paragraph, forty-word version of the original. It was signed by Oakes and appeared in the letters-to-the-editor column—Oakes writing to Oakes. The note simply expressed “disagreement” with the Moynihan endorsement. On Tuesday, Moynihan won the primary with 36 percent of the vote, to Abzug’s 35 percent, a difference of around nine thousand votes.