Behind the Times (39 page)

Why not, indeed? These had been grand years for the
Times.
A major editorial make-over brought in fresh advertising revenues and readers. Rosenthal deserved credit for the new daily sections; but he also had to take responsibility for the petty, tyrannical atmosphere in the newsroom, the Severo episode, the reports of homophobia, the departure of so many journalists during his drill-instructors tenure. One of the best of the departees did a two-year hitch in the U.S. Army before working at the
Times.
Compared to Rosenthal’s
Times
, this man remembered, military service was like toddlers’ day care (in fairness, his was peacetime service). A second
Times
man, still at the paper, offered another metaphor: Rosenthal, he said, was “the iron fist in the iron glove.”

Did Punch Sulzberger want the authoritarian, though successful, regime to continue? It all seemed at odds with his public persona: the polite proprietor with a lively sense of humor. Sulzberger had grown up in a Jewish family whose ancestral roots were in Germany. They lived as privately as a wealthy family could in New York. The Sulzbergers were old money. One conducted one’s affairs quietly, avoiding public attention and, in particular, shunning the kind of ostentation endemic among some of New York’s new monied class. Sulzberger was conservative in his social attitudes, and moderately progressive in
his politics. As might be expected, the
Times
’ editorial positions on policy issues and its endorsements for public office over the span of the 1970s and 1980s reflected that outlook. Yet Sulzberger was still something of a puzzle to his own newshounds, with their sensitive noses for story angles and hidden agendas. Few people in the newsroom could honestly claim to know him. If Sulzberger the man was as open-minded as claimed, then why was the place run in such an authoritarian fashion all those years? If the old ethos valued decorous quiet, why was there so much vulgar noise? A plausible answer gradually occurred to a number of
Times
people: Sulzberger was not deaf, dumb, and blind to the
Times
’ newsroom atmosphere. That was how he wanted it. The
Times
’ support of civil rights, economic equity, and liberal Democratic candidates across the land was one thing. Inside the building, he was management, and the staff the hired hands.

This didn’t prevent the worker class in the newsroom from exercising its rights of speculation. Years in advance of the date for Rosenthal’s prospective retirement, succession scenarios were widely discussed and written about. The
Washington Post
ran a three-part series on “the twilight of the Rosenthal years.” Rosenthal had barely turned sixty-two when the
Washington Journalism Review
examined “The Royal Succession” in its issue of January 1985. Two years before that, the free-lance writer Craig Unger, in
New York
magazine, offered a very early morning line on Rosenthal’s likely replacement. Frankel was described as a “bitter rival” of Rosenthal’s. His appointment would “drive Abe crazy.” Because Frankel was the oldest of the prime candidates, closer in age to Rosenthal than to most of the others, he was treated as an afterthought.
New York
magazine returned to the story frequently during the mid-1980s, its Intelligencer section carrying a string of items about one or another of the
Times
“princes” who were, as one 1986 headline put it, “Running Hard for the
Times
Crown.”

The royal trope was overwrought. Still, the particular editor who wore the
Times
“crown” had the power to control directly an impressive dominion. While a weekly magazine, or a smaller newspaper or a television news program, often bears the individual mark of its editor or producer, the
Times
tries to present itself as a collective. The institution, the
Times
, is supposed to be too big and too serious to be the extension of any single mind or ego. Yet readers, when they think about it, recognize that one editor’s
Times
may be different from another’s,
however many bows are made in the direction of the institution and its “objectivity.” The personality of the editor shapes the paper through allocations of resources, hiring choices, decisions about coverage, and, equally important, the decisions not made.

Turner Catledge, the good old boy and establishment insider, ran a congenial
Times
, one that dawdled on many stories—though it did make major contributions to the coverage of the paramount domestic news event of the postwar years, the civil rights struggles of black America. Catledge’s successor, James Reston, envisoned a lofty “intellectual”
Times
, where good writing and clear thinking on the big issues of the day would be enshrined. Reston’s successor, Abe Rosenthal, created a third kind of
Times.
The Monday-through-Friday life-style sections begun in the 1970s moved the paper away from the mean streets of the city—away, interestingly, from Rosenthal’s own roots. Rosenthal also took the paper in search of the political and cultural consensus of the country during those same post-Vietnam years, effectively moving the
Times
to the right. The individual editor mattered to readers as well as to staff.

With the power of the editor came the prestige attached to the
Times.
Not so incidentally, the salary was good as well; the position paid around $350,000 a year, plus generous benefits, stock options, and bonus incentives. Rosenthal was a rich man by 1985.

The candidates for the
Times
editorship would have wanted the job at a half or a third of the pay. They were all hugely ambitious as well as upwardly mobile. The editor’s job would be the only fitting cap to their careers. They were similar in other ways as well: middle-aged, of middle-class origins, and each typically with Washington or foreign reporting experience. They were all, finally, white males. Eileen Shanahan, a
Times
reporter with extensive Washington experience, was in the opinion of many
Times
people, men and women, extremely well qualified to lead the paper. But the
Times
wasn’t moving women ahead then, and she had left in the early 1980s to become editor of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Her departure still rankled her supporters.

Underneath the apparent professional conformity of the leading candidates, however, were some striking differences of ideology and temperament. Sydney Schanberg, born in 1934, appeared possessed by the zeal and idealism of the Roosevelt New Deal. “By nature,
I identify with an underdog,” he once offered, by way of explaining his work. Lean, intense, bearded, Schanberg in 1985 was writing a twice-weekly
column for the
Times
’ Op-Ed page, concentrating on New York City affairs. He had been in Cambodia for the
Times
covering the bloody Khmer Rouge years (the experiences that won him a Pulitzer). Schanberg came from Massachusetts, from a family of modest circumstances. His voice grew sharp and his eyes blazed when he worked up his columns on the latest development schemes of New York landlords, as if he was witnessing again the destruction of Cambodia. The Schanberg
Times
would never lack for targets, many of them among the establishments that ran the city.

Bill Kovach, less than a year older than Schanberg, ran the
Times
’ Washington bureau with distinction. He was an apostle of tough reporting and investigative journalism, and in the bargain, an excellent manager of people. With his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and pleasant down-home drawl, Kovach conveyed a sense of integrity. Daily journalism was his life. He looked the way the editor of a distinguished newspaper should look: tall, graceful, with a direct gaze.

Another possibility, John Vinocur, had been brought back from his foreign correspondent’s post by Rosenthal and soon was supervising the
Times
’ metropolitan coverage. The way Vinocur pushed reporters for more “exciting” stories and more “vivid” writing reminded
Times
people of the younger Abe, who came back from abroad and stirred up a somnolent metro staff in 1963. Vinocur had the wide shoulders of a football player; his large hands looked as if they could easily throttle any reporter slacking from Vinocur’s standards for metro coverage. He was, without doubt, the hard charger among the candidates.

A fourth possibility, Hedrick Smith, would have easily won the job if appearance and energy alone were the determining factors. Rick Smith was the same age as Kovach and was Kovach’s predecessor in the Washington bureau. Smith possessed the knack for the grand Restonian phrase. He could sit in his office in Washington and write about “the mood of the country.” He also could claim a Pulitzer for his reporting from the Soviet bloc and a best-selling book,
The Russians
, to back up his amour-propre. In addition to his accomplishments in Moscow, Smith already had earned a small place in journalistic history, literally a footnote. During the American presidential campaigns of the 1970s, bureau chief Smith frequently appeared on the candidates’ planes or in the press bus, dropping in for a few days to do interviews and write a “mood of the primaries” analysis for the
Times.
A big man, well over six feet tall, Smith would drape his size-13D
shoes over an armrest or aisle seat, in the self-assured pose of a man who owned the plane and the story. The regular reporters assigned to the campaign were known to resent such intruders. They hit upon a name for Smith that became generic, applicable to other high-powered chiefs who rode for a time on the political trail with the pack. Since Smith, they have been designated “Big Foot.”

Schanberg, Smith, Kovach, and Vinocur all could boast strong reporting experience, as well as considerable personal presence. Together these “hard news” men contrasted strongly with Max Frankel, who had been away from the daily grind since 1973. They promised excitement and change. Frankel suggested stability, the timelessness of
Times
tradition. Not only had he been at the paper longer than any of the others, Frankel’s whole demeanor—the Talmudic mind, the compact body, the pipe he puffed on—helped contribute to the image of the journalist-scholar. Possibly he had been too slow to pick up on the Watergate story, perhaps he was too thoughtful to run the news operation; but he seemed perfectly cast for the editorial page.

While Frankel calculated his chances of succeeding Rosenthal, one after another of the hard-news candidates stumbled. Schanberg’s views were not trimmed to the shifting political
direction of the
Times
, which had grown increasingly conservative in the later Vietnam years, and he fell hardest. His first post-Cambodia assignment, the job of metropolitan editor, did not work out. He clashed with Rosenthal; the two strong-willed men could not learn to get along. Schanberg left the news department entirely, for the Op-Ed page, where his opinions appeared for four increasingly contentious years. One Monday in August 1985, the day after he returned from a two-week vacation, Schanberg was notified by Sydney Gruson, the chief assistant to Sulzberger, that the publisher had “not been happy with the column for some time” and had decided to “discontinue” it. A two-paragraph story in the
Times
the next day informed readers of the end of the column, in the noncommittal manner of a communiqué from the Chinese Politburo.

The immediate cause of the column’s demise was hardly mysterious. Before Schanberg went on vacation, he had written scathingly in the
Times
of July 27 about the Westway Project, a $4 billion plan to redevelop real estate and the highway on the West Side of Manhattan along the Hudson River. Schanberg called Westway a “scandal” and “a megaboondoggle.” Westway had been pushed by the city’s developers,
and supported on Frankel’s editorial pages. Sulzberger was a Westway enthusiast. Schanberg also criticized the news columns of New York’s newspapers, including by implication the
Times
, for being “strangely asleep” in their coverage of the “shame of Westway.” Sulzberger’s decision ended Schanberg’s twenty-six-year career at the paper. He rejected an offer to be a roving correspondent for the
Times Magazine
, and early in 1986 left the
Times
and became a featured columnist for
New York Newsday.
(
New York Newsday
, now separate from the Long Island edition, was trying to be the fresh, liberal voice in the city.)

Rick Smith also left the
Times
, pursued by rumors of a scandal of his own—the story of a married bureau chief having a torrid love affair on the bureau premises, during office hours, with his secretary. Smith went on to appear on public-television documentaries and to write a book,
The Power Game: How Washington Works
, published in 1988 and dedicated “to Susan, and the spark of renewal.”
The Power Game
ran on for 793 pages and managed, astonishingly, to avoid any mention of the
New York Times
as a player in Washington, while devoting two long sections to the power of the television networks’ news shows and to the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on public TV. Ingenuously, Smith gave more space in
The Power Game
to Bill Regardie, publisher of
Regardie’s
, a Washington monthly with a circulation of forty thousand, than he gave to the
Times.
(“Powerful”
Regardie’s
ceased publication in 1992.)

Schanberg and Smith may have been too smart to see themselves as realistic choices for the editorship. Bill Kovach, however, was not the kind of a candidate who would take himself out of the competition. Like Frankel, Kovach wanted the job and wanted Sulzberger to know that he wanted it. Like Frankel, too, Kovach met privately with the publisher. Kovach talked mainly about his views of the paper in the years ahead. Kovach wanted to point the
Times
toward a future consistent with his career as an advocate of news-driven journalism. The
Times
, he argued, should not be soft and featurized. It should aggressively pursue investigative stories. Sulzberger heard him out and made no comment. Kovach now says that while other people may have considered him a strong choice, he soon came to realize that Sulzberger was not going to give him the job. “The direction I wanted to take the
Times
was not the direction it was going in,” he recalled, diplomatically.