Behind the Times (24 page)

The story did not end there. Roger Wilkins, the sole black member of the editorial board, wrote an article for the space sometimes reserved for editorial board members to speak under their own bylines. Wilkins attacked Moynihan’s views of black America, and called his supporters “misinformed and generally quite wrong.” He made no mention of the
Times
endorsement. Wilkins’s Op-Ed piece was turned in to Oakes on Monday and scheduled for the editions of Tuesday, primary day. Monday night, Sulzberger stepped in again, and ordered Oakes not to run the Wilkins column until the following day, after the votes were counted. Wednesday’s editions of the
Times
carried Wilkins’s piece on the Op-Ed page and news of Moynihan’s victory on page one.

The episode left a legacy of bitterness. Roger Wilkins decided that, as he put it, “I didn’t want to write editorials any longer.” He arranged with Sulzberger to do an urban affairs column under the jurisdiction of the news department and Abe Rosenthal (who had helped recruit him at the
Times
). Two years later, he decided to leave the
Times.
The paper’s search for consensus from Wilkins’s perspective as a black American looked less centrist than conservative. He was barely speaking to Rosenthal. Sulzberger and Wilkins continued to have a proper professional relationship; according to Wilkins, “If there was something serious to talk about, I could always go up to his office at the end of the day and he’d fix me a martini and we’d sit and talk.” The Hidden Hand proferred a healing cocktail.

Moynihan, for his part, paid back the
Times
for its support in a
particularly nasty passage in his memoir of his United Nations years, A
Dangerous Place.
As Moynihan told it, Oakes had run an “ethnic” editorial page that bore “the mark of German Reform Judaism.” After the memoir came out, Oakes and Moynihan shared the dais at a fund-raising dinner held in one of the New York hotels. Moynihan expansively tried to shake Oakes’s hand, as if nothing untoward had happened between them. Oakes refused to greet the senator. A decade later, Oakes still resented the reference. “I’ll never forget that slur,” Oakes said, with no trace of editorial-page politesse. “Moynihan was a drunk and a phony who had insinuated himself with Punch to get elected.”

The Sulzbergers overlooked the Moynihan slur. He became a respected, effective senator, and his speeches were applauded in editorials for their intellectual vigor. But relations were never the same again between the compatible cousins. Punch Sulzberger’s position, then and fifteen years later, remained consistent: “I wanted Moynihan to win.” Sulzberger said he believed that his cousin “overreacted”: “Johnny and I both knew the rules about the publisher’s prerogatives.” Narrowly, Sulzberger was right: The publisher makes the final call. But more than a senatorial endorsement was at stake. Sulzberger wanted to move the
Times
away from left-of-center stands. Oakes as well as Abzug no longer fit.

Sulzberger soon dropped the other shoe. Shortly after Frankel took over as editorial page editor, he purged Oakes’s board, arranging for the transfer of some editors to the news department and speeding up the retirement plans of others. Wilkins and Huxtable were among the handful of Last Puritans who were left untouched, a form of conspicuous tokenism widely commented on by the staff. Punch Sulzberger, to be sure, wasn’t sentencing Oakes and his colleagues to some Devil’s Island of
Times
journalism. One board member remembered Oakes’s new role as “a dream job: a column on the Op-Ed page, unlimited travel, generous expenses. The whole world as his beat.” Oakes’s assistant Fred Hechinger, the man at the other end of the Woods Hole telephone, returned to the news department and his old specialty, education reporting. Later, he was appointed president of the Times Foundation, administering the company’s grants for social research and community service (the post paid a comfortable $150,000 annually). Herb Mitgang became the book-publishing correspondent, the
first reporter any American daily had ever assigned to cover the publishing industry full-time. He traveled around the country to meetings of the American Booksellers Association and to Germany for the Frankfurt Book Fair, defining what became the “book beat” (and watching his work widely imitated when other quality newspapers created their own reporter-specialists). In 1981 Mitgang became a
Times
cultural correspondent, and in 1989 as he approached his sixty-ninth birthday, he was named a daily book reviewer. Mitgang wrote from home, seldom coming into the office; his reviews appeared regularly in the daily paper. He managed to keep his
Times
work in perspective; the purge of the Last Puritans served to remind him that
Times
people, whatever their stature in the eyes of outsiders, were still hired hands. “My books are my monument,” he said.

Abe Raskin—whose byline, A. H. Raskin, served as a reminder of the old days at the
Times
—proved to be a kind of secret sharer of John Oakes’s. In the spring of 1976, Raskin, like Oakes, was approaching the mandatory retirement age for
Times
executives. Sulzberger arranged a soft landing for Raskin, then marking his forty-fifth year with the
Times.
Raskin was asked to write a weekly labor relations column, to appear in the new Business Day section. The arrangement required Raskin’s formal retirement, to be followed by the signing of a new contract with the
Times
; he would be an outside writer selling his consulting services to the paper. Raskin was happily anticipating his prospective status as a contract writer when the Moynihan-Abzug dispute occurred and then the purge of the editorial board. They were, he later said, “the
most malign events in all my years at the
Times.
” Raskin did little to conceal his feelings of outrage around the office: “Management knew how I felt.”

As the date approached for Raskin’s formal retirement party, the atmosphere soured still more. Parties for retiring executives and senior editors were typically held in the reception room outside the publisher’s suite of offices on the fourteenth floor. The affairs brought one hundred or more
Times
people together at the end of the workday; there was a tradition of farewell remarks from the retiree, who was expected to be simultaneously witty and sentimental. Given the fact that there were usually large open bars at the publisher’s parties, host Punch Sulzberger could be pardoned for preparing with some prudence. Just before the Raskin party, Sydney Gruson, Punch Sulzberger’s chief aide, came up to Raskin, spoke of the festive nature of the occasion,
and said, with a knowing look, “We hope you’ll do nothing to spoil this affair.”

Raskin had a vodka mixed with orange juice. His face reddened under the neatly barbered white of his hair. Raskin began his remarks with a tribute to his host, Punch Sulzberger. Raskin recalled his 1963 article on the New York newspaper strike. That the
Times
should commission it in the first place and then run it “at such great length with its conclusions for all to see,” Raskin said, “well, that’s what the
Times
is all about, that’s what the First Amendment means.” And so, Raskin continued, “I salute Punch for his role in all that.” Then Raskin paused a moment, and continued in the same strong voice. “In the last few weeks,” he said, “we have seen another face of the
Times
: the manner in which the editorial board has been handled, the sense that there is punishment for their views. That is not in the spirit of the
Times.
…” As Raskin paused again, preparing to make his final good-byes, he thought to himself: I’m raining on my own parade! Later, Sulzberger confronted Raskin. In his polite way, the publisher told Raskin how terrible his remarks made him feel, how “my heart sank, low, lower than the subbasement, the machine room of this building.” Raskin remembers the publisher saying: “You let me down when I needed you.” Unnerved, Raskin still managed to reply: “No, you let us down.”

No more was said that day between the two men. They continued to smile and greet each other in the corridors in the months that followed. But Raskin sensed a change, a growing distance. The freeze is on, he told himself. Eight months passed; it was getting near the time to renew the labor-column contract. Raskin was eager to continue; he decided that because he had received so much praise for the column, he would ask for a raise. In the early negotiations, however, he was told “complications” had developed: The fact that Raskin had been allowed to stay on past the normal retirement date, even as a consultant, was causing “morale problems” among the staff. Raskin was told that others were angling for similar deals, both in the news department and on the business side, that there was a lot of “confusion and consternation.” Raskin’s journalistic ear detected a false note. He decided to check with Rosenthal, who told Raskin that he knew of no problems within the news department. Raskin made similar inquiries on the business side, speaking to Walter Mattson, the blunt and direct company president. While Mattson confirmed that some people
wanted the same deal, he could offer no specifics. Mattson’s uncharacteristic vagueness stirred Raskin to take his inquiries higher, to Sulzberger. Politely but firmly, the labor relations specialist put his question to the publisher: How come only the Raskin consultancy is causing “problems”? What about Scotty Reston, Raskin wondered. The columnist was well beyond sixty-five and continued to do his writing. Sulzberger, Raskin remembered, “looked at me with those lambent eyes of his, and said, ‘You know, I was asking my people that same question. Why is it that only Abe Raskin is causing comments?’ ”

Why indeed? Since the farewell party, Raskin concluded, “Punch had been biding his time.”

That was the end of the labor column, although Raskin managed to stretch out his contract another eight months, until the end of 1977. Good journalist that he was, Raskin continued to write free-lance articles and do reviews for the
Book Review
well into the late 1980s. In the fall of 1990, when the
New York Daily News
locked out its union workers and precipitated a long strike, a still vigorous Raskin returned to the labor beat; he reported and wrote a knowledgeable profile of Dennis Rivera, a rising young union leader in New York—not for his old paper but for
The New Yorker
magazine.

The
Times
never covered labor in quite the same way after Raskin’s retirement. Starting in 1979 his old beat was filled for a few years by William Serrin. Hired from the
Detroit Free Press
, where he had already achieved an excellent reputation for his reporting and writing, Serrin was pointedly told he would be covering
“work in America” rather than “labor.” In 1986 Serrin resigned from the
Times
, convinced the paper didn’t want to cover either work or labor with the same vigor it was devoting, for example, to the new life-style sections. “It wasn’t so much that the
Times
was antilabor or conservative as that it was oriented toward the ‘beautiful people,’ ” Serrin remembered.

John Oakes’s post–editorial-page career offered a curious parallel to Raskin’s experience. From 1978 to 1989, Oakes continued to supply occasional pieces for the Op-Ed page, under an agreement he had worked out with Sulzberger. In these pieces Oakes took up his familiar themes of conservation and social justice. He wrote feelingly, for example, of New York City’s neglect of Jacob Riis Park in Queens. Many readers, including one editorial page editor who had joined the board long after Oakes left, found themselves wondering, as this editor put it,
“where the
Times
news desks were on this one, and why it took
Johnny Oakes to blow the whistle” on the city’s dismal record of caring for its parks in the less fashionable neighborhoods outside Manhattan.

In May 1989, shortly after the parks article appeared, the cousins’ arrangement ended. “
Punch was making the transition to his son,” Oakes said. “I would have gone on beyond, but Punch felt I should go. He didn’t want any loose ends.” Oakes lost his once-a-week secretarial help and his office space, where he kept his files of four decades. He put a positive face on his last years at the
Times.
“What the hell,” he said. “I was there forty-four years. I have no regrets.”

The
Times
man’s spark remained. One winter morning, Oakes woke to see the Central Park trees outside his apartment window coated with ice, the aftermath of a storm. Without missing a beat, he called the
Times
photo desk to tell the editors of the lovely picture opportunity. In mid-January 1991, on the eve of the Persian Gulf war, as the deadline set by the United Nations for Iraq to leave Kuwait approached, the seventy-eight-year-old Oakes marshaled his editorialist’s thoughts; as if by habit, he composed an Op-Ed page article. The Congress was about to vote on the resolution authorizing the president to go to war, a course Oakes thought unwise. Oakes called the
Times
Op-Ed page editor, Mike Levitas, to offer his view that the Congress, “If it couldn’t say no, should say ‘not yet.’ ” Unfortunately, the pages were fully committed. “You and about ten thousand others are trying to get in the paper,” Levitas told Oakes. Oakes said he understood, hung up the phone, dialed the editorial-page editor of New York
Newsday
, explained what he wanted to say, and was asked to fax his piece over. It ran the next morning, January 11, two days before Congress’s vote. Though both Houses said yes to war, Oakes was satisfied that he had the opportunity to make his argument. “The
Times’
loss was
Newsday
’s gain,” he said jauntily.

Almost two decades after Oakes’s removal and the great massacre of the Last Puritans,
Times
people still debated Punch Sulzberger’s motives. Their explanations ranged from the silly to the grand, the practical to the political. Abe Raskin wasn’t yet prepared to say there was a rightward shift. “There was
a savaging of the board for its views,” he says, “but those views were not all that liberal progressive. Is it anticapitalist to call attention to abuses in the system?” Another witness to events favored a psychohistorical analysis. Punch, he claims, “never said
anything, but internalized the feeling that his family wanted him to be ‘more like Johnny.’ It obviously rankled and he waited his time.”