Behind the Times (49 page)

The popularity of Letters and Op-Ed proved double-edged. As Barzilay explained, “All letters get a viewing”—a policy that reflected the
Times
’ good manners but one that put an awesome burden on the three-person Letters staff. The same was true of Op-Ed submissions. Levitas liked to boast that his staff brought a bracing diversity to the task of selection and editing, consisting as it did of “men and women, blacks and whites, and Jews and Christians.” The staff lost some of its diversity when Kathleen Quinn left in 1992 to write a novel; Quinn, an Irish Catholic, voted for the Reverend Jesse Jackson in the 1988 New York presidential primaries. Mostly, though, the staff was united by the unremitting pressure of 365 deadlines a year. Susan Lee, who served as deputy editor of the page after Bob Semple left, once offered would-be contributors
six rules of the “Op-Ed page game.” Only one of her rules dealt with substance: “Do not be too complicated, or too sophisticated,” Lee admonished. “Newspaper readers do not want to pause while they are reading.… The simpler the idea, the better.” Lee’s other rules all had to do with what the newspaper’s editors wanted. Contributors should keep in mind “one simple fact: the Op-Ed
editor only wants to fill his or her page efficiently and quickly.” Consequently, do not phone before submission (rule one), do not waste time getting to the point in the essay, and do not send messy, unstapled manuscripts (“loose pages make it difficult for the Op-Ed editor to stack your manuscript in the manuscript pile efficiently and quickly”). Her final rule reprised some of the earlier advice: Do not phone the editor after submission—you’ll get an answering machine, Lee explained, and if you do reach a live human, the response is likely to be, “Oh dear! I haven’t seen it yet. I hope it didn’t get lost.”

Lee intended her advice to be lighthearted. But her “amusing” sketch of beleaguered editors, checking for staples, behaving as if they were clerks in a substation of the U.S. postal service, rather than serious-minded professionals of the world’s best newspaper, squared with other accounts. As in any bureaucracy, an internal system for handling Op-Ed submissions had to be developed. It was the staff that informally let would-be contributors know outsiders were restricted to two Op-Ed appearances a year. Those manuscripts that survived the first
culling were coded and circulated to the Op-Ed staff. The circulating editor’s ballpointed red dot in the upper right-hand corner of a manuscript signified “good.” A six-pointed star meant “excellent.” (The publisher was not in the circulation flow, but as I was told by a member of the Op-Ed page staff, “after a while you know his causes and his dislikes.”) The volume of manuscripts and the unrelenting deadlines left no time for thorough fact-checking. After a six-pointed manuscript made the final cut, the editor handling it usually selected one representative idea or factual statement in the copy and picked away at it, calling the author, checking reference books. The final edited copy was faxed to the author—a last line of defense against error. The Op-Ed page operations fit Anna Quindlen’s broader description of the paper. The
Times
was like the Frank Morgan character in the
The Wizard of Oz
, Quindlen said. “We want you to pick up the paper every day and think of the wonderful Oz; we don’t want you to peek behind the screen and see the actual men and women involved.”

The modern
Times
’ decision to give new importance to market-pleasing, personality-driven columns made this amiable Ozian deception harder to sustain. With the shift to opinion and individual voice, it was only natural that some of the audience looked behind the curtain, at both the magicians and the smoke-and-mirrors operations of the editorial page, the Op-Ed page, and the columns.

*        *        *

Of all the departments of the
Times
, the editorial page editors tried hardest to hold up the institutional screen of their work. “
It is a great forum, a place for balance, consensus, and enlightened dialogue,” said Karl E. Meyer, a third-generation newspaperman and an editorial board member since 1979. Meyer acknowledged that the
Times
’ twelve-person editorial board was no democracy. The board reported to the publisher—Arthur O. Sulzberger, senior and junior, during Meyer’s time—and the publisher’s authority resided in his power to appoint the editorial-page editor and the board members, and review their work. Decisions about what subjects to take up and the shaping of views were made “collegially,” according to Jack Rosenthal, who became the editorial-page editor in late 1986, succeeding Max Frankel. Three times a week the Jack Rosenthal board met in its tenth-floor conference room to discuss topics for editorials and to divide up assignments. Rosenthal made the assignments, did his share of lead editorials, and also rewrote and edited the copy of his board. On the rare occasions when Punch or Arthur Sulzberger submitted editorials, Rosenthal edited their copy as well. One fall morning in 1991, just before he stepped aside as publisher to make way for his son, Punch Sulzberger arrived at the
Times
’ offices in an agitated state. He was appalled at the sight of overflowing garbage cans and trash left out overnight by two fast-food restaurants up the street, at the corner of 43rd and Seventh. He logged on his desk computer and wrote the draft of an editorial, which began: “Times Square vomited last night.…” The editorial ran, but not before Jack Rosenthal called up the publisher’s handiwork on the editing screen and changed the first sentence to read: “Times Square was a mess last night.…”

Much like Mitch Levitas on the Op-Ed page, Jack Rosenthal took pride in the “diversity” of his page. “The editorial board used to be a bunch of sixty-year-old white males,” he said over lunch at his club (Harvard) in the winter of 1991. “Of the dozen of us now, 4½ to 5½ are women, depending on leaves and their half-time schedules. Two are blacks. Our ages range from thirty-two to seventy-two. Roughly half of us are journalists, the others former academics recruited specifically for their specialties.” Still, it was a narrow kind of diversity. The editorial board’s middle-aged white men typically came from the same place—the third-floor newsroom. In some ways, Jack Rosenthal himself was a transitional figure.

His father was a judge in pre-Hitler Germany. Jack Rosenthal was born in 1935 in Tel Aviv, and grew up in Portland, Oregon. He was graduated from Harvard College and was a reporter for the
Oregonian
newspaper before going to the Department of Justice as an assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1961. Rosenthal regarded government as a detour; he always wanted to return to newspapers. He joined the
Times
in 1969. His mother had gotten upset at his choice of a career. “
It wasn’t a status occupation then and when I told her of my newspaper plans, she complained to me, ‘Why waste your Harvard education?’ To be a journalist then was like being a cab driver.” At the
Times
, Jack Rosenthal helped develop the coverage of urban affairs for the news department—this was the period following the ghetto riots—and began his career-long interest in “the problems of the cities.” In the years of the Bush administration, Rosenthal did not hold a high opinion of the news department’s treatment of his old beat. Some of his reservations were the usual ones that older hands often have about the work of their successors. In the Sunday, December 1, 1991, editions, for example, metro correspondent Sara Rimer wrote of suburbia’s split from the central city; Rimer quoted suburbanites who said that they lived, worked, and relaxed near their homes, never feeling any need to go into New York for its shops, plays, museums, restaurants, or other urban amenities. “Give me a break,” Rosenthal commented, “I did that story twenty years ago.” Rosenthal did offer some praise for the new Metro section. “I see the heading ‘Connecticut,’ I know I don’t have to read it.” Rosenthal lived at the time in Westchester county.

He was impatient with Metro’s coverage of the city as well, in particular of Harlem, and what he called the
Times
’ “Talk of 139th Street” story form. A “139th Street Story,” he explained, focused on the despair of the scene: corner drug dealers, crime, abandoned tenements, the homeless. “The message is, ‘Things are worse, worse, worse.’ The implication is that we’re pouring money down a rat hole, that nothing helps,” Rosenthal said. “So, while you may feel guilty, white America, you can’t do anything about ‘the problem.’ However, the truth of 139th Street is, many blacks are making it in America, and our journalism has to communicate that life is not hopeless.” Rosenthal recalled that the Harlem of the 1950s had a population of 1 million; by the 1990s, it was 600,000. If Rimer or other
Times
reporters bothered to check the cars parked outside the Abyssinian Baptist
Church on Sunday mornings, they would have observed a sea of New Jersey license plates. Old Harlemites had moved out and up; they were living the suburban life themselves: “The civil rights revolution worked.” But, Rosenthal concluded, the news department too often took the attitude, “We did that story, the one on the black middle class in Atlanta.…” The story of the parking lot, perhaps, was news from too far Uptown, not the sort of happening thing for the hot new Styles columns.

Jack Rosenthal left the urban beat in the early 1970s and began the ambitious
Times
man’s climb up the newsroom ladder to the top editing posts. In the classic pattern too, he was pushed out of the
Times Magazine
by Abe Rosenthal in one of the recurring coups of those years. The two men are not related, and while they often saw eye to eye on story ideas, Jack Rosenthal was not hired by Abe Rosenthal—and the executive editor wanted one of his own loyalists in the job. But Jack Rosenthal was deemed too valuable for the Sulzbergers to lose; by the Frankel-Lelyveld years he had been rehabilitated. A bright, intense man, Rosenthal shrewdly sized up the 1990s shifts. The
Times
’ editorial-opinion strategy was in step with its marketing plan—“elitist” and “specialized,” much like the audience it coveted.

“Once newspapers were a popular medium, directed to the general audience,” he said. “Now in my own time at the
Times
, the newspapers’ old role of provider of immediate hard news has been taken over by television.” There has been a change in the audience as well. According to Rosenthal, when he left Portland for Harvard in the early 1950s, only 20 percent of high school graduates went to college. The figure has more than doubled since. “The new audience is informed and sophisticated; it wants a selection of materials, it wants to use its judgment. It looks to the
Times
for expertise, in foreign news, arts criticism, whatever.” In 1966, Rosenthal said, “Clifton Daniel was mocked for hiring Craig Claiborne to write about ‘mere’ food. Now we have four food specialists, one writing on the culture of food, a second on nutrition, a third on restaurants, a fourth on food as food. The same with science. Twenty-five years ago, Walter Sullivan wrote about black holes. Today there are six science/technology writers; another writer covers psychology, exclusively; two more with M.D. degrees write about medicine. On the business staff one person specializes solely in medical economics.” The
Times
was elitist, Jack Rosenthal concluded, “in the best sense of that word.”

The changes on the editorial and opinion pages mirrored the overall changes at the
Times.
In the space of fourteen months beginning in the spring of 1989, two of the older, journalistically trained board members stepped down, and Rosenthal hired specialists in their place. Michael Weinstein, a younger (41), white male, had a Ph.D. from MIT and was chairman of the economics department at Haverford College; Rosenthal recruited him to comment on business, finance, and public policy. In June 1990, the
Times
announced that the veteran foreign correspondent and Op-Ed columnist Flora Lewis, then sixty-seven, would retire by the end of the year. Lewis was a generalist of the old school. She worked for the Associated Press and the
Washington Post
before joining the
Times
in 1972. For two decades, she covered foreign policy, mostly from her home base in Paris, but also moving around, filing from two dozen different countries. Her replacement on the Op-Ed page, Leslie Gelb (no relation to Arthur Gelb), was a Harvard Ph.D. and Washington insider (less politely, bureaucrat). Gelb had worked on Capitol Hill, at the Departments of State and Defense, and at public-policy think tanks; he joined the
Times
in 1973 as a diplomatic correspondent and eventually became Jack Rosenthal’s editorial-page deputy. Gelb’s move to the Op-Ed page opened up room on the board in the summer of 1990 for Brent Staples, a thirty-eight-year-old African-American with a Ph.D. (in psychology, from the University of Chicago). Staples was brought in to write about politics and culture.

Staples’s hard-news experience came in Chicago at the
Chicago Sun-Times.
At the
New York Times
, he spent his first years on the
Book Review.
His stay on the editorial board surprised some
Times
lifers familiar with the paper’s “values system.” The senior editors of the news department, like Frankel and Lelyveld, had come up through the reporter ranks. Those who remain on the board, in its university-like setting, are far removed from the third floor. They hold a comfortable chair, perhaps until retirement; but they could never aspire to the best posts—in Washington, as a foreign correspondent, or as a senior editor. The truly ambitious among
Times
lifers still needed to get their career tickets punched in the newsroom. Staples, however, chose to stay on the board, and publish his memoir about growing up African-American.

Fortunately, too, for “balance” there were some well-trained journalists on the
Times
editorial board. The board’s public-education specialist, Diane Camper, grew up in Flushing, Queens, and attended
city public schools before going away to Syracuse University, where she majored in journalism and political science. Camper was hired by
Newsweek
in 1968 as a fact checker; only one other African-American woman was on the magazine’s editorial staff at the time. Camper went to
Newsweek
’s Washington bureau in 1972 as a general assignment reporter, just in time to cover the Watergate scandals. She took a year’s leave to earn a Master of Studies of Law degree from Yale Law School in 1977. Six years later, Jack Rosenthal hired her (they first met while both were serving on a journalism-awards committee). Another experienced board member, Joyce Purnick, had New York City roots as well. A 1967 graduate of Barnard College, she covered politics for the
New York Post
, wrote on urban affairs for
New York
magazine, and later became one of the
Times
’ best City Hall reporters. She married Max Frankel, the
Times
’ executive editor, in December 1988 (theirs was an autumn romance, after the death of Frankel’s first wife of three decades). Frankel, acting as agent for the institutional
Times
, deemed it improper for Purnick to work under his jurisdiction, and she moved out of the news department to the editorial page. Her editorials concentrated on city politics; occasionally, she contributed to “Editorial Notebook,” writing about herself as well as public policy. When “Mary Richards,” the TV character played from 1970 to 1977 by the actress Mary Tyler Moore, was the subject of a CBS retrospective a few years ago, a Purnick “Notebook” observed: “
Mary Richards made it all OK—OK to be a single woman, OK to be over thirty, OK to be independent … a gentle role model, someone for the shaky career woman to identify with in the transitional 1970s.” Unfortunately, the career of the real-life woman, Purnick, suffered because of the
Times
’ institutional position on her marriage; the fictional Mary Richards fared better.