Gray Lady Down Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  one - Abe Rosenthal and the Golden Age

  two - The Rise of Arthur Jr.

  three - Bullets over Arthur Jr.

  four - Race

  five - immigration

  six - Culture Wars

  seven - Gays

  eight - War on Terror

  nine - War

  ten - Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  index

  Copyright Page

  for Louise Salerno

  Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated, the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served.

  —“is it True What They Say About the New York Times?” National Review, 1972

  if you think The Times plays it down the middle on [divisive social issues], you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

  —Daniel Okrent, Times Public Editor, “is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” 2004

  Prologue

  I am not one of those people “who love to hate the Times,” as the paper’s executive editor Bill Keller has phrased it. I’ve read the New York Times since I was a kid, and I am proud to have been published prominently in it very early in my career. (The first things I ever published appeared in the Times Magazine and on the op-ed page.) I still consider the Times an important national resource, albeit an endangered one, and I confess to being one of those New Yorkers who refer to it simply as “the paper.” Pre-Internet, I would find myself wandering to the corner newsstand late at night and waiting like a junkie for a fix in the form of the next day’s edition. If I was out of town and couldn’t find it, I would jones.

  But sadly, those days, that young man and that New York Times are long gone.

  My aim is not to embarrass the Times or to feed a case for “going Timesless,” as some subscription cancellers and former readers have called it. Some may think the Times to be irrelevant in this age of media hyperchoice. I think it’s actually more necessary than ever. But if “These Times Demand The Times,” as the paper’s advertising slogan goes, they also demand a better Times than the one we are getting, especially at this fraught point in our political, social and cultural history.

  William McGowan

  The Writers Room

  New York City

  September 2010

  one

  Abe Rosenthal and the Golden Age

  Back in the seventies, during an alarming downturn in stock price, advertising sales, revenue and circulation at the New York Times, the famed executive editor A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal confessed to having a recurrent nightmare: It was an ordinary Wednesday morning and “there was no New York Times.” Rosenthal outlived his nightmare. Along with the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and a group of skillful news executives, he put the paper back into the black. In the process, this team revolutionized the way the paper reported the news and set an example that transformed newspaper journalism in the rest of the country.

  Rosenthal retired from the executive editor position in 1986 and then wrote a twice-weekly column on the op-ed page until 1999. Along with James Reston and a handful of others, he is identified with the New York Times’ golden age, a time when the paper spoke to—and for—the nation. In May 2006, Rosenthal died after a massive stroke at the age of eighty-four. He had worked fifty-three years for the Times, after coming aboard as a copyboy in 1946 in his early twenties.

  Rosenthal’s death prompted a week’s worth of published tributes and flattering obituaries, describing how, as his Times obituary put it, “he climbed on rungs of talent, drive and ambition to the highest echelons of the Times and American journalism.” The salutes culminated in the passionate eulogies delivered at his funeral, held at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. An estimated eight hundred people attended the service, representing a Who’s Who of New York’s business, media, political and cultural elite, including figures as diverse as Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Beverly Sills, Charlie Rose, Midge Decter and Rudy Giuliani. The honorary pallbearers were led by the former mayor Ed Koch and William F. Buckley Jr. They were followed by a half-dozen men who had worked with Rosenthal at the Times, including his former boss, Arthur O. Sulzberger. That week, Buckley had hailed Rosenthal as the commanding figure in the evolution of serious daily journalism, which he had influenced as decisively, in Buckley’s opinion, as William Randolph Hearst had the tabloids, and Henry Luce the weekly newsmagazines. Sulzberger, by then the former publisher, had told the New York Sun that “It was the golden age of journalism when Abe was at the Times.”

  Some of the tributes focused on Rosenthal’s impoverished and tragic background. He was the son of a Byelorussian immigrant who became a Canadian fur trapper before coming to America to work as a housepainter. Abe’s father died after falling off a ladder, four of his five sisters passed away before he was an adult, and Abe himself was afflicted with osteomyelitis, a rare bone disorder. The medical care he received was substandard. At one point an operation was performed on the wrong part of his leg, and as he was lying in a full body cast he was told that he would never walk again. It was only after being admitted to the Mayo Clinic as a charity case that he recovered, but he still experienced lifelong pain.

  Other tributes focused on his remarkable career trajectory. Beginning as the Times stringer at New York’s City College, he was formally hired as a copyboy without even graduating. He was a reporter for nineteen years, covering the fledgling United Nations before becoming a foreign correspondent in 1955, assigned to cover India, Japan and Poland. He was expelled from Poland for reporting that was “too probing” for the Communist government there, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for international reporting. In 1963 he returned to New York to assume a new title, “metropolitan editor.” From there he climbed up the editorial hierarchy, becoming assistant managing editor, managing editor and finally executive editor of the entire paper in 1977.

  Although a fierce protector of Times tradition, Rosenthal shook up the Metro staff, encouraging better, brighter writing from talented reporters like Gay Talese and rotating beat assignments that had previously been regarded as set in stone. He emphasized investigative reporting and broke precedent by assigning trend stories on controversial subjects like interracial marriage and homosexuality. Believing he had suffered some measure of career bias as a result of anti-Semitism, he upended the informal caste system at the Times, which had traditionally favored Ivy League WASPs over New York-bred Italians, Irish and Jews.

  As executive editor, Rosenthal steered the Times through the coverage of the Vietnam War, the rise of the counterculture, the Watergate scandal and various Mideast crises. He played a central role in the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, bucking up Sulzberger and other executives who feared that printing the government’s own classified history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam would appear to the public as treasonous, expose the paper’s executives to federal prosecution, and lead to financial ruin. Rosenthal himself was not a dove; at his funeral, his son recalled him putting on a cowboy hat at home and singing “I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee.” But as a Times editorial after his death noted, he believed that “when something important is going on, silence is a lie.”

  Many of the tributes dwelled on Rosenthal’s role in rescuing the paper from financial peril and journalistic irrelevance in an age when television was killing off newspapers right and left, which was just as important as the big-ticket news stories he shepherded. Facing declines in ad revenue and circulation, as well as charges that the paper’s writing was dull, Rosenthal spearheaded efforts to broaden the paper’s appeal and liven up its pages. The result was the “S
ectional Revolution,” expanding the daily paper from two sections to four, which encouraged a rebound in circulation along with ad sales and revenues.

  At the same time, Rosenthal’s legendary bad temper did not go unmentioned. The newsroom atmosphere was suffused with his “tempestuous personality,” said the Times obituary writer Robert McFadden, “leading to stormy outbursts in which subordinates were berated for errors, reassigned for failing to meet the editor’s expectations or sidetracked to lesser jobs for what he regarded as disloyalty to The Times.” Some recalled Rosenthal as a vengeful man who kept a “shit-list in his head,” as one writer put it, and as “a shouter and a curser” who would make or break careers on a whim.

  The one theme that resounded through almost all the obituaries and tributes was Rosenthal’s “tiger-ish” defense of high standards in reporting and editing, his call for “fairness, objectivity and good taste in news columns free of editorial comment, causes and political agendas, innuendo and unattributed, pejorative quotations,” as McFadden phrased it. This sense of journalistic integrity perfectly embodied the Times’ founding motto of delivering the news “impartially, without fear or favor, without concern for party interest or sect.”

  The reason why Rosenthal was obsessed with keeping editors and reporters from putting their “thumbs on the scale,” wrote the Times columnist Thomas Friedman, was because he believed a “straight” New York Times was “essential to helping keep democracy healthy and our government honest.” Rosenthal kept the Times “straight” by battling what he saw as the ingrained left-liberal tendencies of the newsroom, particularly the Washington bureau. He scolded reporters and editors he thought were romanticizing the sixties counterculture, which he viewed as a destructive force. While encouraging reporters to write with more flair, Rosenthal eschewed the subjectivity of the New Journalism, seeing this genre as substituting reportorial ego for a commitment to fact. He was vigilant about conflicts of interest, once firing a reporter who was found to have been sleeping with a Pennsylvania politician she covered while working for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I don’t care if my reporters are fucking elephants,” Rosenthal was said to have declared, “as long as they aren’t covering the circus.”

  A tribute of sorts to the ideological neutrality of Times news reporting under Rosenthal had come from a rather unusual source: William F. Buckley’s National Review, the very bible of American conservatism. In 1972, as Spiro Agnew railed against the “elitist Eastern establishment press,” and Richard Nixon was livid over the Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers and its looming endorsement of George McGovern, the National Review produced an article examining the charges of left-leaning bias. Conservatives had long dismissed the Times as “a hopeless hotbed of liberalism, biased beyond redemption and therefore not to be taken seriously,” the magazine observed, asking, “But to what extent was this impression soundly based?” A subheadline telegraphed its findings: “Things on 43rd Street aren’t as bad as they seem.” The National Review audit examined five developing stories, which it said had a “distinct left-right line,” and concluded: “The Times news administration was so evenhanded that it must have been deeply dismaying to the liberal opposition.” It went on to state that conservatives and other Americans would be far more confident in other media—specifically newsmagazines and television networks—if those media “measured up to the same standard” of fairness. “Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated,” National Review said, “the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served.”

  This was very much a validation for Rosenthal, and for Arthur O. “Punch” Sulzberger, who also upheld the tradition of politically agnostic news reporting despite the shrill liberalism of the editorial page and, increasingly, the journalistic activism of a new generation of reporters touched by the lengthening shadow of the counterculture. Indeed, Rosenthal would cite the National Review piece on other occasions when challenged by accusations of political bias at the Times. Even Joseph Lelyveld, who took over the top editor’s job in 1994 and was undoubtedly to the left of Rosenthal, saw need for vigilance. “Abe would always say, with some justice, that you have to keep your hand on the tiller and steer to the right or it’ll drift off to the left.”

  It was a priority of the postwar Times to become a national forum for opinion-free, straight news—as has been noted in numerous definitive books about the paper, such as The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times, by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, and Behind the Times: Inside the New York Times, by Edwin Diamond. This goal was accomplished under a succession of larger-than-life editors who were granted great autonomy, as well as unparalleled financial resources, to produce what the Sulzberger family has always considered a quasi-public “trust.” The paper held fast to several principles: ideological agnosticism, a sense of intellectual rigor, moral seriousness, and a respect for neutral recitation of the facts, free of political cant. It was a “theology” of gravitas and objectivity that allowed the Times to ask probing questions and to report often-uncomfortable answers without regard for consequences.

  The need to be “straight,” to report the news rather than drive it, was reflected in how the paper covered the Bay of Pigs. Like other news organizations, the Times had most of the details about the impending invasion; in fact, they had become one of the journalism world’s biggest open secrets. But the Times hesitated to print the information since it could endanger the lives of the men landing on the beaches, it would effectively aid Castro, and it would interfere with national policy. In the end, the Times ran a one-column story instead of the four originally planned. No date for the invasion was mentioned—only a CBS News report that it was “imminent.”

  The lacerating political and journalistic self-assessment that followed the Bay of Pigs debacle was the backdrop for the Times’ deliberations over whether to go into print with the infamous Pentagon Papers. “A tale of reckless military gambles and public deceptions” according to Max Frankel, executive editor from 1986 to 1994, the papers showed that “the government had hidden the true dimensions of its enterprise and its abundant doubts about the prospects for success” at every stage “along a twenty year arc.” Yet far from being the journalistic no-brainer it might be considered today, the Pentagon Papers case provoked considerable agony and debate at the Times. For Punch Sulzberger, the idea of publishing live military secrets was anathema, and as the internal debate flared, he invoked the national interest to delay publication. Rosenthal, the managing editor, agreed with Sulzberger’s qualms. According to Frankel, he asked “Were we on an ego trip?” before finally agreeing to publish the papers after it was found that no current military secrets would be disclosed.

  The New York Times took a similarly cautious approach to the subject of civil rights in the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, maintaining careful neutrality in explaining the historic shifts that were afoot, as well as the resistance these shifts were provoking. The paper was solidly behind most of the major civil rights developments—Brown v. Board of Education, the March on Selma, the protests in Birmingham. But it also gave positive coverage to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s now-famous 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, while some media identified with the left excoriated it. The Times affirmed Moynihan’s insight that, as with immigrants at the turn of the century, “Negro upliftment” would come through programs that asserted the primacy of the mainstream culture and promoted the values needed to enter it. Moynihan was not “blaming the victims,” the Times took pains to explain, but was blaming three hundred years of white racism that had victimized them.

  Another subject on which the Times showed far different leanings from today was cultural separatism, especially as associated with black militancy and the Black Power movement. An editorial in 1966 described Black Power as “racism in reverse” and said it “could only bring disaster to the cause of racial equality.” When Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, the editorial page called him
“an extraordinary but twisted man, turning many gifts to evil purpose.” The editorial concluded: “The world he saw through those horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and dark. But he made it darker still through his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone came out of the darkness he spawned and killed him.”

  The Times was hardly quick to embrace the emerging counterculture either, or its radical critique of American consumerism, family structure and political authority. Rosenthal himself was appalled at some of the destructive excesses of the antiwar movement, particularly the 1968 takeover of Columbia University and the sacking of President Grayson Kirk’s office. He was dubious of the subjectivity and relativism inherent in the counterculture and its replacement of objectivity with political and cultural partisanship. “We live in a time of commitment and advocacy,” he wrote somewhat sardonically in one staff memo. “‘Tell it like it is’ really means, ‘tell it like I say it is, or tell it as I want it to be.’ For precisely that reason it is more important than ever that the Times keep objectivity in its news columns as its number one, bedrock principle.” A subsequent memo would tell the staff that the Times “shouldn’t stick fingers in people’s eyes just because we have the power to do so.”

  As Edwin Diamond notes, Rosenthal was especially on guard against the counterculture’s reflexive anti-Americanism. In early November 1969, he wrote a memo about the “awry picture of America” that, he maintained, the Times was perpetuating. Drawing his examples from the November 7 issue, he cited a story on page 7 about a GI trial in Fort Dix, a report on an MIT sit-in on page 8, an account of the moratorium on page 9, a story on the Army memo of that antiwar protest on page 13, and a report on page 22 about the ongoing Chicago trial, flanked by two different stories about poverty and housing demonstrations. He ended his list with a story on page 27 about job discrimination, before declaring that “there were others.” November 7 was not even a particularly outstanding day for that kind of thing, Rosenthal went on.