Behind the Times (43 page)

Similarly, punishment for “bad”
Times
behavior is sometimes done so openly that the names might just as well have been posted on bulletin boards.
Times
people, after their trial period, have lifetime tenure; according to the Newspaper Guild contract, they cannot be
fired except if convicted of a felony, such as theft or possession of drugs, or for reasons of overwhelming economic need (in which case the Times Company would have to open its financial books to Guild lawyers to prove its case). But if it is hard to remove the “difficult”
Times
men, they can quite easily be moved around, or made so miserable that they resign. Prickly, stubborn Richard Severo challenged the hierarchy and was sentenced to the lowly obit desk. The Ray Bonner case shows how the “difficult” can be made to go on their own.

Raymond Bonner was one of the
Times
’ best and hardest-working, though most unorthodox, foreign correspondents. A lawyer by training and a Vietnam veteran, he worked for a time for Ralph Nader in Washington before going to Latin America to try his hand as a free-lance journalist. In December 1980 Bonner, then thirty-eight, was in El Salvador writing about the civil war between the rightist military government, backed by the United States, and the leftist opposition forces (supplied, the Reagan administration insisted, by Communist Cuba and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas). The
Times
, in a sharp departure from its institutional ways, hired Bonner in San Salvador—“in the field”—for a two-week tryout. It turned into a staff job, and a spectacular mismatch. Bonner, compact, intense, committed, had no rabbi/sponsors in New York; he had never “done lunch” with the editors. His stories from the battle zone earned him the enmity of the U.S. embassy people, the Reagan White House, and its supporters in the press—in particular the hard-conservative editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal
and a right-wing press watchdog group called Accuracy in Media. In the winter of 1981–1982, Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto of the
Washington Post
were escorted by the guerrillas to the village of Mozote, where, the journalists reported, they found the human remains of a massacre carried out by government troops. Bonner placed the death toll at between seven hundred and nine hundred men, women, and children. The progovernment right in the U.S. immediately smelled a Marxist plot, intended to undermine support for aid to the Salvador government. Accuracy in Media devoted two issues of its
AIM Report
to Bonner’s stories and his “suspect” background (Nader, and also for a time, Consumers Union!). In June 1982 Reed Irvine, editor of the
AIM Report
, arranged a meeting with Punch Sulzberger; Irvine told the publisher, according to the
AIM Report
, that “Bonner was worth a division to the Communists in Central America.” Two months later, Bonner received a call from the
Times
foreign desk, telling him he was being reassigned to the home office. (Later, responding to a reporter’s question, Abe Rosenthal scoffed at the idea that the
Times
“knuckled under” to the Reagan White House or to right-wing pressure; rather Bonner was “self-taught,” and so he needed desk work in New York to be a “totally trained reporter.”) Bonner took a leave to finish a book—and never returned to the newsroom. He has since refused to discuss his short, unhappy
Times
career, in part because that is his nature, and in part because his companion, later his wife, was a
Times
reporter on a good track at the paper. Friends of Bonner were not so circumspect. “The
Times
’s treatment just broke his spirit,” a friend remembered. “He seemed like ‘damaged goods’ after he left the
Times
—no newspaper would have him.” Bonner wrote books, contributed to
The New Yorker
, and did free-lance pieces. In March 1993, more than a decade after the Mozote story, a special United Nations commission of inquiry confirmed that Bonner and Guillermoprieto were correct: the massacre had taken place, though the Salvador military and U.S. officials tried a clumsy cover-up. The
Times
gave the UN report modest treatment; worse, it said nothing of Bonner and the Reaganauts or the AIM campaign of character assassination. “The
Times
just disappointed him again,” says the friend.

For every Bonner or Severo-like public spectacle, dozens of other men and women endured penance quietly. Robert Stock was one of them. Stock never was judged difficult or contentious by the senior editors—indeed, he was one of those editors for most of his first twenty-three years at the
Times
, in the Travel section, and at the
Times Magazine.
He was the editor of the
Times
supplement, Business World, in the summer of 1991 when his own world collapsed. Advertising pages fell as the northeast region’s recession deepened; the Sulzbergers decided for reasons of economy to discontinue the supplement. Stock declined to apply for the one of the so-called buyouts management offered in a related effort to lower operating costs.
Times
people over fifty-five and with a minimum of fifteen years’ service at the paper would receive as severance the equivalent of seventy-eight weeks of salary. For someone at Stock’s pay level, the buyout would average around $130,000. “We are offering a humane nest egg,” Punch Sulzberger claimed at the time. Stock thought otherwise. A fit, lively man whose taste in clothes ran to tweed sports jackets and chino slacks, Stock decided that, at sixty-two,
he was not ready to retire. A
few days after the deadline for applying passed, Stock was told to report to the metro copy desk, to work the 4:00 to 11:00
P.M.
shift. He had to learn story formatting and other computer operations that, in the past, he had left to his assistants. His shift permitted twenty minutes for dinner. The lesson of his transfer to the nightside was not lost on other
Times
men. But Stock, like Severo, took a certain pride in surviving his personal Siberia.

No one starts out to be “difficult.” They strive, as Robert Darnton did in his day, to be good
Times
men. Darnton quickly learned how to write to please his immediate editors. He grasped the process of fitting a story to the editors’ preconceptions, mastering what he calls “the standardization and stereotyping” of news. Working in the London bureau of the
Times
in 1963 and 1964, he produced copy that followed accepted journalistic clichés about England. As Winston Churchill lay ill, Darnton wrote about the crowds gathered outside the great man’s window. One man catches a glimpse of Churchill: “Blimey, he’s beautiful,” Darnton has a mythic average Londoner say. Whether or not the reporter actually heard the quote was beside the point. It was harmless enough, and it matched expectations. “The combination of cockney-Churchill could not be resisted,” Darnton remembered. The editors played the story on page one.

The reporter intent on being a good
Times
men understood both the breadth and limits of editor power. The desk men were sticklers for language and the enforcers of
The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage
, a 230-page handbook described as “the rules or guides to insure consistency” in such matters as spelling and abbreviations in the pages of the
Times
; but the manual went far beyond whether, in its own example, the word
martini
should or should not be capitalized. Several entries explained “matters of policy and objectives of the
Times
that members of its news staff are asked to keep especially in mind.” Under the heading “obscenity,
vulgarity, profanity,” for example, the manual noted that “a
hell
or a
damn
is really not offensive to a great degree. But if the paper is peppered with such words, the news report is cheapened.…” When a story left the good
Times
man’s typewriter—or today, the computer queue—it passed into the control of the copy editor. These desk editors, in Darnton’s words, treated stories as “segments of an unremitting flow of ‘copy’ which cries out for standardization.” The
Times
’ reporters were unhappy to see “their” work in the hands of such “humorless zombies.” Class, race, and
gender as well as the conflicting roles of writer and editor also contributed to the tensions. In Darnton’s day, the desk men were likely to be City College graduates, the sons of poor immigrants; the younger reporters, by contrast, just as likely came from Columbia, Harvard, or other private universities. By the 1990s, the older desk men were editing the copy of not only the sons of the affluent—as the editors saw it—but also the copy of younger women and blacks, who often had gone to the same Ivy League schools. These more recent hires perpetuated rather than weakened the paper’s class divisions. The
Times
’ efforts at
affirmative action, a national-desk editor complained to a friend in the fall of 1991, “had made the place more boringly homogeneous: All the ‘minorities’ seem to be the children of doctors and teachers.” (The editor asked that his name not be used; rather he suggested he be identified as a “
Times
veteran.”)

The resolution of reporter-desk conflicts depended on the top editor. In Turner Catledge’s newsroom, the values of order and hierarchy prevailed, and the copy editors’ authority went unchallenged. One Catledge-era hire, David
Halberstam, was a Harvard man and had worked at two other papers before joining the
Times.
Assigned to the Washington bureau, Halberstam supposedly was made to rewrite the first story he filed five times by bureau desk man Wallace Carroll. Halberstam has a different but equally telling memory. “The story is way off,” he says. In his recollection, “I was hired to the Washington bureau because Scotty Reston wanted reporters who could also write”—the Max Frankel quest thirty years later—“and I was judged to fit in that category. To my memory there was no rewriting [in the bureau] at all. The great obstacle was the New York desk system. In those days the power of the desk was immense, in comparison to the New York
Herald Tribune
and the Nashville
Tennessean
, where I had worked. The New York copy editors felt free to do anything to your copy that they wanted. The reporter was powerless to fight back and did not even see what had been done to his story until they next day.” As for Wallace Carroll, Halberstam said, the editor was “on the side of the reporters. I had no trouble with him, found him to be a considerable help and have no recollection of anyone else having a problem with him.” Halberstam adds: “Gradually over the years, in no small part because of the pressure from television, the paper’s definition of what constituted a story and what levels of freedom a reporter was given was expanded.” By then, it was too late for Halberstam. Though he went
on to report from the Congo and Vietnam as a
Times
correspondent, he eventually quit and became a best-selling author.

The good
Times
man, then and now, got along by going along. Catledge himself was the model of correct behavior. He said that he learned early in his career how to work harmoniously with others and “
get them to like me and listen to me.” When Darnton was at the
Times
, Abe Rosenthal was beginning to consolidate his power. Rosenthal wanted a staff in his own aggressive image: The good
Times
men of the Rosenthal era were the reporters who “hustled” and produced snappy, original stories. They got the best assignments and the promotions. In the
Times
of Max Frankel, the definition of a good
Times
man shifted again. The meditative Frankel rewarded the more writerly storytellers; he elevated the stylist—man or woman, black or white, Ivy or City College—over the stickler copy editor and the hustling street reporter. Through all the changes, the values of the top editor determined the ascendancy of one faction or another, as well as the tilt of the news. Because the shifts were gradual, the paper outwardly continued to appear in its familiar institutional shape, the eternal
Times.

The acculturation of the good
Times
man observed by Robert Darnton actually begins before the new hire enters the building. A good
Times
man, first of all, ought to feel that he has arrived at the top of his field on the day he joins the paper. The
Times
is highly selective in its hiring, and no one is allowed into its ranks casually. When a young journalist named Martin Levine left a well-paying position at
Book Digest
magazine to join the
Book Review
section, the discussion of his starting salary went quickly. Levine had been on the
Crimson
during his undergraduate years at Harvard; later he was a book critic at
Newsday.
The
Times
assistant managing editor dealing with Levine asked him what he was being paid at
Book Digest
, and more than matched it. According to Levine, “He told me, ‘
No one takes a pay cut to come to work for the
Times.
’ Even if it meant just a few hundred symbolic dollars, they were determined to underline the ‘importance’ of the
Times.
” The
Times
insisted on paying more to someone coming over from the competition and it also volunteered added benefits. The paper, for example, paid for language lessons for reporters and photographers prepping for new assignments, and in some cases for their spouses as well. In one typical calendar year, the news department
underwrote such training for sixteen correspondents and two wives. Later, when a reporter told his editor that he was unable to accept an assignment because the story required driving and the reporter had let his license lapse, a staff memo asked that everyone make sure their permits were current; the memo concluded, in the best paternal manner: “Let me remind any of you who don’t know how to drive that we will pay for lessons.”

Levine was hired in the Rosenthal era. In Frankel’s time the attitude was no different. A “stylish” writer that Frankel wanted to recruit bridled at the newspaper’s rules against writing for other outlets, even those not competitive with the
Times
, such as special-interest magazines. The writer calculated the rule would cost her $15,000 to $20,000 annually in “lost” earnings. Frankel was adamant about outside writing; but he agreed that the
Times
would make up the shortfall, by adding a “signing bonus” to her base salary. Similarly, in 1989, when the book critic John Gross was leaving the
Times
, the editors saw an opportunity for progress on the pledge Frankel made to hire more minority journalists. Margo Jefferson, a fortyish black woman who had been an editor at
Newsweek
and a contributor to
Vogue
, was being actively courted by the
Times.
Three senior editors took turns calling her, offering counsel, describing the part she could play at the
Times
and, by extension, in the cultural life of the country. At the time, she was teaching in the journalism department at New York University while continuing to write criticism and magazine articles. Jefferson was uncertain whether she wanted to continue as a free-lance journalist or become an “important” critic. Independence or prestige? Perhaps she could continue to do some outside writing? She learned that was not the thinking of a good
Times
man. “
This is a special place,” the senior man on the interviewing team told her. “Nothing in your career can be like being at the
Times.
All other assignments pale.” Jefferson and the
Times
remained apart. “I was unsure that I wanted to surrender to the institution,” Jefferson recalled. In the spring of 1991, she decided instead to accept a teaching post at Columbia University. But Frankel didn’t forget Jefferson, or his vow to make more minority hires. The editors kept sweetening the pot, promising her more money, prime display, and choice assignments. In June 1993, at the end of the spring semester at Columbia, the
Times
announced Jefferson’s appointment as its newest cultural critic.