Behind the Times (32 page)

The Kosinski affair was far more tangled. Rosenthal and Gelb were
both friends of Kosinski. Abe and Ann Rosenthal dined with Jerzy and Kiki Kosinski on the Rosenthals’ Central Park West terrace; the Kosinskis in turn entertained the Rosenthals at dinner. Barbara Gelb wrote a glowing literary appreciation of Kosinski in the
Times Magazine
four months before the
Village Voice
attack appeared. Her article included a quotation, from an unnamed “friend,” describing how Kosinski had visited the friend as he lay sick and despondent in the hospital. The anonymous admirer quoted by Barbara Gelb was Abe Rosenthal. There were other complicating circumstances. The writer of the
Times
article, John Corry, was not the original reporter assigned to look into the
Voices
“Tainted Words” story. Gelb initially gave the assignment to Michiko Kakutani, a young Yale graduate who joined the
Times
as a cultural reporter in 1979. Kakutani worked on the story for six weeks, growing increasingly anxious about her abilities to do the investigative journalism her editors expected (at one point she thought Kosinski was following her). Corry, sitting a few desks away, watched in silence as Kakutani struggled. She finally asked to be taken off the story. “She didn’t understand the assignment,” Gelb later said. (Kakutani’s career at the
Times
didn’t suffer from the episode; she became one of the
Times’
regular book reviewers.) Corry said that he then volunteered for the assignment. He had been at the
Times
twenty-six years; like Rosenthal and Gelb before him, he was energetic, ambitious, a working-class boy of the outer boroughs. Corry sensed a “big story” and hurled himself into the reporting.

A few
Times
people believe that Rosenthal had second thoughts about his conduct in the Kosinski story, given all the charges that he used the
Times
to play favorites. (In a
Newsweek
article about the Kosinski affair, an anonymous “senior
Times
critic” was quoted as saying: “It’s real Louis XIV time. It’s ‘I am the newspaper and the newspaper is me.’ ”) When I asked Rosenthal if he regretted his part in the Kosinski episode, he quickly acknowledged that he did. “
Kosinski was raped by the
Voice
,” he said. “The only thing I’m ashamed of is that we didn’t do the story sooner.” Only later, said Rosenthal, after other newspapers took up the
Voice
story, did the
Times
weigh in. “I walked away from Kosinski at first. I was afraid to be seen coming to the aid of a friend. But then I decided that I wouldn’t be a ‘thirty-ninth witness.’ ” This last was a reference to one of the major stories of Rosenthal’s tenure as metropolitan editor of the
Times.
In 1964 a young Queens woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in
her Kew Gardens neighborhood; according to a
Times
reporter’s reconstruction of the murder, thirty-eight people heard her screams or glimpsed the attack but failed to come to the young woman’s aid.

Rosenthal often used explosive words in conversation, and in his writings: Critics treated him like “a Hitler,” Kosinski was “raped.” Emotional language aside, Rosenthal’s facts were accurate. The Los
Angeles Times
and the
Chicago Sun-Times
, among others, critically examined the Voice’s “Tainted Words” article before the
Times
did. Without question, the story had news value: celebrity scandal, literary politics, international intrigue, and a strong narrative line. It was a New York story; it belonged in the
Times.
The extraordinary length of the Corry piece—some 6,500 words, running through sixteen columns of the Arts and Leisure section—may have warranted some of the critics’ hand-wringing. But the defense of a friend, however belated, didn’t make Rosenthal an editor unique in the annals of journalism; it did undercut his public declarations about the
Times’
purity. As with Kakutani, so too with Rosenthal and Gelb: They somehow failed to “understand the assignment.” Perhaps Punch Sulzberger should have advised them to remove themselves from all aspects of the
Times’
coverage, as Kakutani did. He might have started with the suggestion that Barbara Gelb’s profile not be published in the
Times Magazine
; she easily could have gone elsewhere to get it into print. But the lit-crit world didn’t interest him (as did, say, Macy’s designer windows). Sulzberger was the publisher who asked his book editor John Leonard to recommend cruise-ship reading he could toss overboard when done. He left Rosenthal’s authority unchallenged in such matters.

Salisbury thought he knew why Rosenthal became blind to the ways he used that authority at the
Times.
“Once ambition began pounding in [Rosenthal’s] veins, it was ambition unlimited,” Salisbury concluded. “Lord Acton, I think, was right.” Goulden employed “Geraldo!”-style talk-show analysis to “explain” Rosenthal (the editor as attention-craving little boy). Salisbury spoke in the more measured cadences of MacNeil-Lehrer. Both critics ended up with the same ugly picture. Not surprisingly, Rosenthal thought Salisbury’s account to be as untrustworthy as Goulden’s. “
Harrison was a part of some of these events, yet his reminiscences are wrong time after time,” Rosenthal said. Rosenthal had his own behavioristic explanation for Salisbury. “Harrison is an intelligent man who grinds axes at all times. We all do that to some extent. But not as he does, as a way of life.”

*        *        *

Outsider Goulden and insider Salisbury, for all their fascination with Rosenthal’s personality, never conclusively demonstrated how the man shaped the paper. They credited Rosenthal for livening the news report, bringing in writerly reporters (and requiring critics and writers to do reporting), and creating a more magazine-like
Times.
In short, they applauded him for trying to keep the
Times
up to date with the times. Did Rosenthal’s changes make the
Times
in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s measurably different from what it might have been in the hands of another editor, operating under the same competitive media pressures and in the same volatile New York marketplace? Was its conservative turn “because of” the editor? Or did it have more to do with the wishes of the Sulzberger family, and with the general political climate as well?

Editors can put their unmistakable imprint on publications—depending on the editors’ abilities and the size or frequency of publication. Magazines appear weekly, or monthly; the chief editor is responsible for “only” sixty thousand words in any one issue. Book editors normally supervise perhaps ten to twelve titles a year for their publishing houses. And so it has been possible to speak of “Harold Ross’s
New Yorker
” and, for a time, of an “Alice Mayhew book” at Simon & Schuster. At the
New York Times
, however, almost one thousand journalists deal with millions of words a week, collecting, sorting, editing, and printing 240,000 words a day, and three times that many on Sundays. Can any one editor direct this Niagara of words, channeling them toward desired goals? If so, how? Was there, in fact, the Rosenthal
Times
?

The evidence that Rosenthal sought iron control of the news pages exists, in abundance. He has never been a guarded person, or modest about his accomplishments. The interviews he gave to Goulden and Salisbury, despite his misgivings about their intentions, testify to a combative openness—the Last of the Red Hot Mamas, as he described himself. In 1988 Rosenthal deposited his office memos, personal letters, and working papers in the Times Archives on lower Fifth Avenue. He placed no restrictions on their use. By contrast, all the files of Punch Sulzberger and Walter Mattson, including those dating back to the 1960s, were still classified as “active” in 1991, and not made made available at the Archives. The Rosenthal materials fill thirty linear feet of boxes. They reveal Rosenthal’s unceasing efforts to involve himself
in every aspect of the
Times’
news operations. They also show the gap between intention and accomplishment in an institution the size of the
Times.

No detail of the
Times’
news report was too small to attract Rosenthal’s eye. After the new Weekend section appeared, Rosenthal worried that the picture rules—the hair-thin, black lines around photographs—were unnecessarily heavy: “If it is a light, up section, it seems to me that too much blackness is contradictory,” he told the
Times’
graphics designer Lou Silverstein. Nor was any subject too trivial for a Rosenthalian postmortem. “I have enjoyed reading your pieces in the past few months, and I have said so,” he told fashion writer John Duka. “I didn’t enjoy the second paragraph of your last story. It used a stylistic device that is quite outmoded … staccato, repeated, short sentences. ‘Blass, that is. Bill Blass. William Ralph Blass, to be exact.’ Et cetera. John, that is not writing, that’s stuttering.”

Variations on the theme of control occur through the years. Before 1976, when the news and Sunday departments were separate, with Rosenthal in charge of the former, and Max Frankel the latter, Rosenthal became convinced that “his” reporters were not working as hard as they should for “his” daily news report. “We sent Frank Lynn around the country with [Mayor John] Lindsay. Why hasn’t he done the sum up for us that he did for the Review of the Week?… We must not be in a position where the reporters begin saving the meaning of their stories for the Review and giving us the scattered detail.” Later, when the work of feature writer Jean Hewitt appeared in the
Times Magazine
, Rosenthal ordered an assistant to find a bookkeeping method to charge Hewitt’s salary to the Sunday department. Five months later, Rosenthal asked one of his deputies if “our” Washington bureau reporters, in particular, John Herbers and R. W. Apple, Jr., were “being forced to do too much work for the Review or are kind of saving up their best thoughts and writing for the Review.” Two weeks later, an article by Robert Reinhold in the Review, on a new approach to the teaching of physics, angered Rosenthal. The article was “precisely the kind of piece that I have been asking Reinhold to do for years,” Rosenthal complained. The story “should have appeared in the daily before it appears in the Review.… As far as I’m concerned, Bob Reinhold appears to have disappeared from the
Times.
” Reinhold was not the only
Times
man who, in Rosenthal’s opinion, was not
contributing enough. After a Supreme Court analysis by Warren Weaver of the Washington bureau ran in the Review, Rosenthal wondered what had “happened” to Weaver as far as the daily news report was concerned. Was Weaver “coasting”? Rosenthal asked.

None of these complaints matched Rosenthal’s explosive reaction when, in the spring of 1975, he learned that Harrison Salisbury was trying to get a visa to go to North Vietnam and to Cambodia. Salisbury was by then working as a Sunday special correspondent, no longer under Rosenthal’s control. Salisbury was “stupid” to apply before checking with the news department, Rosenthal informed Max Frankel. “Salisbury knows damn well that this is not permissible.” Hanoi was on the verge of victory in Vietnam and, as Rosenthal explained, he was trying through Washington, Paris, and other diplomatic channels to get visas for one of his own reporters (either Seymour Hersh, Flora Lewis, or Fox Butterfield). Rosenthal found out about Salisbury’s encroachment onto news department turf only by accident; an alert foreign-desk clerk brought Rosenthal the cables that Salisbury wanted sent to his various Cambodian and North Vietnamese contacts. Worst of all in Rosenthal’s view, Salisbury sent effusive personal greetings to the neutralist Prince Sihanouk “in the name of the
Times.
”

Rosenthal’s elbow-in-the-eye managerial style affected lower-echelon editors. When his assistant Allan Siegal was detached to study the plans for the
Times’
new computer system in early-1975, Siegal reported that the Sunday Arts and Leisure staff wanted an electronic device in the system “for hiding their stories from Rosenthal’s departments.” Sunday editor Frankel disowned the request, calling it
“silly and destructive,” the result of “a childish playing out of normal competitiveness.”

The merger of the two departments with Rosenthal in control in 1976 settled who was working for whom. Rosenthal quickly turned to the planning of the new C sections, trying to shape each daily magazine to appeal to leisure-minded younger readers. The first Weekend appeared in April 1976; Rosenthal liked it. The tone was just right, “sophisticated but not nasty,” he told the supervising editor, Arthur Gelb. Still, Rosenthal fussed with the details, asking that one of the shorter reviews on the Books of the Times page regularly be about arts or leisure activities, “since this is an entertainment and leisure section.” When the Living section appeared in November 1976, Rosenthal advised editor Joan Whitman: “As we are aiming for wider
audiences in the suburbs, could we not … in the future (1) Indicate where possible the branches that sell the items. Bloomingdale’s, Altman’s, Macy’s all have such branches. (2) Spread the joy a little by trying to select some suburban stores where some of these items may be purchased.”

Home came next, in March 1977. At a Manhattan party in late 1976, Rosenthal met the author Lois Gould; she talked about what people usually talk about when they have the attention of the editor of the
New York Times.
The
Times
, Gould said, needed a “special forum” where intelligent, involved women could be heard. From that conversation, Rosenthal developed the “Hers” column. Gould helped in the planning and was the first “Hers” columnist. Following Gould, “Hers” writers were rotated periodically from among a pool of women not on the
Times
staff.

Ideas as well as people caught Rosenthal’s eye; he distributed to his editors copies of
The Good-Natured Gardener
and
The House Book
, the latter by Terence Conran of Conran’s (a major home furnishings advertiser). After the first Home section appeared, Rosenthal conducted a postmortem. He instructed his editors to make sure that a Letters column always appeared in each Home (as well as in Living and Weekend). He wanted a minimum of three items in every Joan Kron column, “About The House.” He changed the page position of the “Design Notebook,” and ordered a New Haven dateline on a column by contributor William Zinsser, a former book editor of the
New York Herald Tribune
and a visiting professor at Yale. Three weeks later, the column still did not have a dateline and Rosenthal repeated his order. He fussed at Home editor Nancy Newhouse for allowing Kron and food writer Mimi Sheraton to have double bylines—two stories carrying their names in one edition of the paper. He pounced on a minor feature about the disruptions created by the building of the East 63rd Street subway tunnel. The story, he informed his editors, was not right for Home, the headline was wrong, and the writing bad. The writer, Tony Kornheiser, used “repeated gimmicks,” Rosenthal complained (Kornheiser left the
Times
in 1979 and became a much-praised columnist for the
Washington Post
). In June, Rosenthal ordered Zinsser dropped; the three-month-old column wasn’t “leading us anywhere.” In September, he admonished Newhouse for hiring a free-lance writer to cover a topic that “an ordinary [staff] reporter” could handle. Later that month, he protested the use of a double
byline again. In Home, right before the Thanksgiving holiday, he was dismayed to see a “Design Notebook” column on a cemetery; at the same time he complained that Linda Bird Francke, in residence as the “Hers” columnist, had become funereal herself, writing constantly about the trials of divorce and separation. Couldn’t she give all the female depression a rest? Rosenthal asked Newhouse for stories more “appropriate” for Home, specifically, a feature on winterizing plants and shrubs for the suburban gardener and for apartment-house dwellers who have their own terraces (one percent of the city’s population—at most). Three weeks later, Rosenthal complained to Newhouse that Home was too “Manhattan-oriented.” He asked her to include more references to suburban shops and services in stories, repeating the request he had made of the Living editor, Joan Whitman.