Behind the Times (22 page)

Rosenthal and Frankel’s replies were instructive; their memos offered a window into the two men’s personalities as well as a display of their philosophies of the news. Rosenthal began defensively. He cited an article in the conservative magazine
National Review
, which declared, on the basis of an analysis of the
Times’
coverage of five major
news stories, that the paper set a standard for fairness worthy of emulation by other media. These findings, Rosenthal wrote, came as a surprise to the editors of the
National Review
, “who had assumed that the
Times
, since it has a liberal editorial policy, was presenting its news to suit a liberal bias.” Rosenthal added his own gloss: “And yet we all know that the
Times
is often attacked as biased. What is not generally known is that the attacks come at least as frequently from the left as from the right.”

He then offered nine reasons—most of them self-serving—for these attacks. In some cases, Rosenthal explained, the
Times’
critics were at fault; there were readers who couldn’t differentiate between fact and bias. Other critics—from “the business community” that had supported Nixon—hated the press for hounding their man. Still other businessmen-critics read the
Times
“even though they would prefer to read other papers that more suited their opinions and tastes.” Here he mentioned the old
New York Herald Tribune
—“one of the most openly biased newspapers … but a lot of people miss it precisely because its bias fitted in with their own.” Mainly, Rosenthal maintained, the
Times
was the object of criticism for the simple reason that it was so important, and so good: because the
Times
“almost always avoids editorialization” in its news columns, every slip in the
Times
stands out and provokes comment. “This attention is the price the
Times
must proudly pay for its own commitment to its own ethic.”

Rosenthal also wrote a second memo, three and a half pages in length, explaining to Sulzberger how the news department employed an “intricate plan of checks and examinations before and after a story is printed” to insure that stories were “objective.” Rosenthal detailed how every reporter’s work was reviewed before publication by layers of editors. First the story was read by a news editor assigned to each desk (national, international, business, metro, etc.). Then a “backfield” editor looked for factual holes in the material, unanswered questions, and matters of fairness. Next came the copy editor, who did the same checking and also looked for grammatical errors. Finally, a senior editor read every story designated for the front page as well as those “takeouts”—major stories—written in advance or running over twelve hundred words. As extensive as these editing layers were, Rosenthal acknowledged, “It all starts with the reporter.… The rewards the paper has to offer—promotion, assignments, merit increases—are based not only on the reporter’s ability as a writer and gatherer of
facts—but on his understanding of the paper’s objectives and ethics and his devotion to them. Many a reporter, obviously talented, has been stopped in his advancement because his editors felt that there were times when consciously or unconsciously he wrote stories that were subtly biased.” Rosenthal concluded on a self-satisfied note: “Virtually all reporters here are aware of the character of the paper and devoted to it—one reason why a slip stands out so vividly.”

Rosenthal, the commander in the trenches, had offered a ground-level analysis. Frankel, the intellectual and learned expert of world affairs, took an opposite tack in his memo. “There is, first and foremost, no need to feel or be defensive,” he began. Then came Frankel’s wide-lens view of a world in crisis. His tour d’horizon makes painful reading today, considering what actually happened during the following decade in the two Germanys, the Eastern Europe of Havel and Walesa, Gorbachev’s—and Yeltsin’s—Soviet Union, and Ronald Reagan’s United States. “Ownership is about to be redistributed in a major way,” Frankel predicted, his crystal ball hopelessly clouded. “Capitalist institutions around the world have been shown to be inadequate. Populations want to reinvest some of their excess capital in public services and facilities.”

Frankel then turned his attention to the
Times.
Given this atmosphere of change, he urged Sulzberger to remember that there would be demands for fresh ways to supply news and information. “If anything, as our more vigorous critics on the left have often contended, we have been more naturally and too easily ‘pro business’ and ‘pro government’ in our many routine and unquestioning reports on how politicians and corporate leaders define themselves and their works.” In the future, Frankel wrote,
Times
readers will be demanding more accountability, including corporate accountability: “If fairness is taken to mean that we report business the way it sees itself, we are going to disappoint the complainants.” Moreover, there are various definitions of fairness—first, “the definition of our grandfathers, handed down in the conventions and traditions of our business and of democratic debate in general.” And then there is the definition of fairness supplied by the community: “Where there is a consensus in the community about right and wrong, we tend to reflect that consensus in our approach; when there is controversy, the requirements for journalistic neutrality tend to grow.” Frankel concluded that homosexuals, blacks, the Pentagon, and the business community all were being treated
differently today in the “community”—and therefore, in the
Times
—than they were a generation ago. Underneath the rhetoric, Frankel was offering the pseudo-profound wisdom of the folk singer Bob Dylan: The times, they are a-changing.

The two memos had little direct impact on the day-to-day operations of the paper. Punch Sulzberger did not circulate them, and
Times
people were at most only dimly aware of the Rosenthal and Frankel essays. But Punch Sulzberger was not trying to influence the
Times
staff directly, through orders posted on newsroom bulletin boards. Instead, Ike-like, Sulzberger chose to cultivate a sense of his “concerns” in the minds of his two editors; their introspections were as much for their benefit as for his. Sulzberger didn’t have to “plant” any conservative or centrist ideas with his editors. The
Times’
system of hiring people when they were young and then selecting only from within for advancement to the top helped assure that no unknown quantities were promoted to senior editorships. The soil was familiar and well tested; exotic flora could not grow too high, or survive very long. “
I don’t believe in telling editors or reporters what to do,” Sulzberger summed up. “But I do believe in long, philosophic conversations with my editors about where the paper, the city, and the country are going. We had these discussions all the time.”

The constant discussions also had the secondary effect of sharpening the competition between Frankel and Rosenthal. At the time of the essay exercise, the two editors were roughly equal in stature. Both had worked all their adult lives at the
Times
—Rosenthal, older by eight years, had been at the paper longer. Although Rosenthal held the title of managing editor, he ran only the news pages of the daily paper—the editorial page editor reported directly to the publisher, as did the Sunday editor. The title of executive editor had not been used since James Reston returned to Washington in 1970 and was not given to Rosenthal until later, after he “won” the essay contest.

When Sulzberger decided to make Rosenthal the executive editor, he also gave him power over the Sunday paper. That left Frankel without a job. But Sulzberger did not want to lose a
Times
man of Frankel’s abilities. Frankel’s argument that the
Times
ought to reflect the “consensus of its community” suited Sulzberger’s temperament, as did Frankel’s cautious, centrist positions. Sulzberger decided to put Frankel in charge of the editorial page. To open up the editor’s job Sulzberger had to remove its occupant, his cousin John B. Oakes.

*        *        *

Perhaps in no other episode did the Hidden Hand reveal so much of itself than in the maneuvers to get Oakes off the editorial page. When Sulzberger asked his editors to respond to the question of
Times
“bias” he hadn’t bothered to solicit Oakes’s opinion. Yet Oakes, as the editorial page editor for the previous thirteen years, determined each day what the
Times
was saying about politics, business, and the state of the world. On the surface the decision not to involve Oakes in the discussions was bizarre. Considered from Sulzberger’s point of view, the omission becomes understandable, indeed, inevitable.

Johnny Oakes was thirteen years older than Punch Sulzberger. Seemingly everything Oakes put his mind to, he did well. At Princeton he was an editor of the
Daily Princetonian
, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, graduated magna cum laude, and was voted “most brilliant” by his classmates. He worked as a reporter on the
Washington Star
, served with distinction overseas as an army intelligence officer in World War II, and joined the
Times
after the war. By the mid-1950s, during the years when Punch Sulzberger was wandering the halls of the
Times
without any defined duties, Oakes was serving on the paper’s editorial board; he already had a secure reputation as a leading conservationist and the
Times’
specialist on environmental policies. In April 1961, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Punch’s father, named Oakes editor of the editorial page. A
Times
man who has known both Punch Sulzberger and John Oakes for his entire adult life says that Iphigene Sulzberger, for one, was acutely aware of Oakes’s achievements; “
Punch heard from his mother more than once the refrain, ‘Why can’t you be more like Johnny?’ ” this
Times
man claims. In the 1960s, when Sulzberger took over as publisher of the
Times
, and became Oakes’s boss, the two men had an outwardly correct relationship. But it was no secret that they represented different branches of the same family—the Ochs-Oakes side and the Sulzberger side.

Oakes’s father, George Washington Ochs, was the younger brother of Adolph Ochs. Ochs had, as the
Times
put it in its article announcing John Oakes’s appointment as editorial page editor, “Americanized the family name in 1917.” Six decades later, the writer
Stephen Birmingham suggested in a magazine article that George Ochs had changed the family name because the
Times
“does whatever it can to avoid creating the impression that it is Jewish owned.” John Oakes replied that Birmingham could have easily ascertained, if he had been
“interested in the truth,” the real story: George Ochs had acted out of horror of German atrocities during World War I, and “did not wish his sons to bear a German name.” John Oakes was justified in feeling aggrieved at the slur; as he pointed out, “It would not have been difficult for Birmingham to have discovered that I was brought up by my father as a Jew, was confirmed as a Jew as were my four children and have for years been an officer and trustee of my synagogue in New York.” George Ochs, for his part, did not conceal his Jewishness in a career as an editor and public servant—he was mayor of Chattanooga. Nor were there any apologies because the Ochs-Oakes branches were the poor relations of the family, relatively speaking.

While control of the
Times
belonged to the Sulzberger side, John Oakes nevertheless was a highly visible presence. With his impeccable grooming and liberal humanistic views, Oakes came to personify the
Times
for many outsiders. Oakes could be seen shaping the
Times’
editorial pages. Punch Sulzberger, meanwhile, was otherwise engaged; he was preoccupied with the gritty business details of publishing—the shutdown of the western edition, the
Times’
new status as a public company, the price of newsprint, the fractious New York craft unions, and his own contentious editors. While the publisher maneuvered the retirement of the managers he had inherited and put in his own team, cousin Johnny Oakes was left free to run the editorial page during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Most editorial pages in these years were dominated by white males, and the
Times
was no exception to this closed fraternity. When the seismic changes of the 1960s finally reached newspaper offices, Oakes shook up his page. The
Times
hired as editorial board members Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic and a writer of grace and intelligence, and Roger Wilkins, a nephew of the civil rights leader Roy Wilkins and a former official in the U.S. Justice department when Robert Kennedy was attorney general. At many newspapers, too, the editorial pages were regarded as a dumping ground for journalists adjudged burned out by the news side. At Oakes’s
Times
, however, the board attracted the best of the staff—for example, A. H. Raskin, the tall, angular specialist in labor relations, and Herbert Mitgang, who wrote on civil rights and constitutional law topics.

Raskin was born in New York City in 1913, the same year as Oakes; he grew up six miles north of Oakes’s Fifth Avenue neighborhood and light-years away socially. His parents were poor Russian Jewish immigrants.
Like many other young men of the era, he worked his way through the City College of New York, wangling the job of CCNY’s campus stringer for the
Times.
He joined the paper after graduation in 1931, as a reporter. Raskin was a loyal member of the American Newspaper Guild, the newsroom union, and liked to boast that he held an honorary Guild card even after he joined the
Times’
editorial board in the late 1950s, and became “management.” His affection for the ideals of the Guild did not prevent him from pulling together a stunning account of the New York City newspaper strike of 1962–63. The strike deprived readers of their papers for 114 days and ended in a “settlement” that settled little (it left unresolved, for example, the issues of work schedules and manning levels that had divided the unions and the owners in the first place). Raskin’s report, a model of explanatory journalism, filled two pages of the
Times
; it meticulously documented how both the unions and the managements at the city’s papers, including executives of the
Times
, had contributed to the disaster through incompetence and intransigence. “Both sides deserve each other,” Raskin quoted New York mayor Robert Wagner as saying.