Behind the Times (25 page)

Among the most thoughtful witnesses was Tom Wicker, the
Times
columnist. His office was on the same floor as Oakes’s, but Wicker was reasonably detached from events (
Times
columnists of his era came close to having lifetime tenure on the Op-Ed page). Wicker put Oakes’s ouster in the context of Sulzberger’s efforts to unify the paper under Rosenthal, rather than as a strict left-right split. “But
there was a rightward shift, and not only at the
Times
,” he says. “After the 1972 [McGovern-Nixon] presidential election, it was easy for all of us to read the direction of country. In the 1980s, Reagan’s election and reelection confirmed it all. My mail told me where the country was going, and I’m sure Punch’s did too.”

Punch Sulzberger blandly turned aside the suggestion that he, like the Supreme Court, was following the election returns. Every so often between elections, however, the Hidden Hand publisher picked up his own pen, or in more recent years, switched on his computer screen, to compose something for publication: Sulzberger speaking in his own voice in the pages of the
Times.
The occasions were rare. A Nexis data-base search of the decade of the 1980s produced three articles on the editorial pages carrying the byline Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. All three were in the format called “Editorial Notebook.” All three related to jury duty; Sulzberger had been called to duty and the experience made an unfavorable—and patently lasting—impression on him.

The first “Editorial Notebook” with his byline appeared on May 7, 1983, under the headline “Why Try the Jurors?” Sulzberger’s immediate point of departure was the New York State assembly’s failure to pass a bill that would have reformed the jury selection process by speeding it up. He writes, from personal experience, of the “bitterness that the present system creates among the unfortunate jurors who must sit for countless, needless hours, waiting to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens.” The waiting around continues to the point of numbness, “taking two days to seat a jury for a two-bit trial. If the legislature and legal profession want twelve good and true clothing-store dummies to grace the jury box,” Sulzberger concluded, “Macy’s would surely be glad to cooperate.”

Less than a week later, on May 12, Sulzberger returned to the topic of juror selection and to his own experience: “It took more than eight
hours to impanel a jury to determine the guilt or innocence of an alleged purse snatcher”—the two-bit crime. A juror is “treated like a schoolchild, [one’s] time wasted and intelligence insulted.” Sulzberger proposed three reforms: fewer juror challenges during the impaneling process, smaller juries, and once the trial begins, tighter rules about plea bargaining and out-of-court settlements (the first “Notebook” offered no suggestions at all). Five years later Sulzberger returned to the subject of jury duty again, this time in cases involving civil trials. He was still bothered by the two-bit stuff. “One would think, if the mind hadn’t already glazed over, that the trial of a century was about to begin, rather than a dispute about whether Mr. Jones deserves some money after slipping on the pavement,” he observed in the “Editorial Notebook” of February 7, 1988.

Punch Sulzberger sometimes used one other way of getting his words into the paper. He wrote letters to the editor of the
Times
, signing them with a pseudonym. The
Times’
news standards explicitly prohibit any resort to fakery or fiction-writing techniques. But the pseudonymous letter was something of a family tradition. Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger used the names of deceased relatives to write letters to the editor of the
Times
in her day on some of her favorite topics, such as the need to care for the treasures of Central Park. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, her husband, used the phonetic “A Haitchess.” Their son’s chosen nom de plume was “A. Sock.” “That’s for Punch,” he explained, making a fighter’s right hook motion.

A. Sock appeared in the
Times’
letters column on October 3, 1989. The headline over his letter read, “A Modest Proposal for Presidential Visits.” Because it was obviously written from personal experience—and offers a window into the writer’s mind and his sense of humor—it is worth quoting in full. A. Sock was responding to a
Times
editorial on a visit by President George Bush to the United Nations in New York. The editorial had noted that speeding motorcades, closed-off streets, diverted traffic, and the other security arrangements intended to insure the president’s safety tied up the city and inconvenienced New Yorkers. A. Sock suggested:

“The President should fly to La Guardia Airport and immediately enter a yellow cab. As there are usually hundreds of such cabs there doing nothing more useful than waiting in line, he will be completely secure. No one will know which one he is in. As the driver is likely to be Russian, Israeli, or Ethiopian, he will likely have no idea of how to
find the United Nations, and the President will be able to do no end of useful work on his way to town.”

If A. Sock had engaged these amusing greenhorn drivers in conversation, he might have learned a little more about the time that they spent “doing nothing more useful than waiting” for high-powered executives to appear. The cabbies’ long idle time at La Guardia and other area airports was one of the curses of cab driving in New York. As any number of drivers will willingly explain to anyone who asks, the time spent waiting in line—fareless and tipless, frequently for two hours or more—makes a tough way to earn a living a bit tougher.

A. Sock was never much of an investigative reporter, from that long-ago weekend in Le Mans to the present. He wasn’t very curious about the taxi business, either. The proprietor of the
Times
had isolated himself from a lot of the grittier life of the city, as many wealthy New Yorkers do. These other super-rich don’t publish the
New York Times
, of course. But then Sock/Sulzberger was able to hire people who knew somewhat more than he did about New York—and about the newspaper business.

Barbara Gamarekian finished a phone call from a public relations woman representing Clairol, the makers of hair shampoo. The company was holding its Seabreeze Award ceremony in the U.S. Senate caucus room on March 10, to honor teenagers doing volunteer work. Gamarekian told the Clairol woman that the Washington bureau of the
Times
“didn’t cover that sort of thing.” But this stood “heads and shoulders above other awards,” the PR woman said, with no sign that she was aware of her pun. Besides, Gregg Petersmyer, the White House official in charge of promoting President Bush’s “1,000 points of light” volunteers’ program, would be on hand. Gamarekian made a perfunctory note to herself, and hurried outside to hail a cab to go to her appointment with Ambassador Margaret McDonald of the Bahamas. Gamarekian had turned in a feature article about Bushra Kanafani, the ambassador from Syria; but the Washington desk editors felt the piece should be broadened to include a second woman holding down an important job in the male-dominated
world of diplomacy. Gamarekian arrived for the McDonald interview, and it went well.

In Boston, a Federal Express package was delivered to Anthony Lewis from David Runkel, an assistant to U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. Lewis had asked for Justice Department comment on the case of a Romanian exile named Emil Suciu, who had come to the United States as a student, graduated from MIT, married an American—and then was ordered expelled from the country. The Immigration and Naturalization Service claimed Suciu was “a risk to national security,” but the INS would not elaborate on the charge. Runkel offered citations from court decisions as the statutory authority to withhold information of the government’s basis for expulsion. Runkel did not, in Lewis’s view, deal with the question the columnist had raised, specifically, “Why did Justice use an unfair process just because it had the discretionary power to do so?” As Lewis was turning over in his mind Justice’s reasoning, he received a call from MIT; Sadik al-Azm, a Syrian scholar, would be giving a 4:30 lecture on Islamic revivalism. Lewis was pressed for time, but al-Azm was a critic of the mullahs, and had been a good source when Lewis was last in Damascus. The subject was timely as well: A few days before, the Ayatollah Khomeini had called for the holy murder of the novelist Salman Rushdie, author of the newly published
The Satanic Verses.
Lewis decided to eat lunch at his desk, to save time.

The 43rd Street newsroom emptied, as if a whistle had blown: lunchtime. Carolyn Lee, the
Times
picture editor, had worked on papers in Houston and Louisville before coming to the
Times.
The eating habits of her
Times
colleagues reminded her of factory workers: “Everyone goes to lunch at one and comes back at 2:30.”

Along culture gulch in the third-floor newsroom, where the
Times’
critics and arts and entertainment writers sit, no more than ten of the seventy desks and cubicles were occupied. Walter Goodman, one of the
Times’
two television critics, planned a week of TV-viewing around the Tower hearings. The place was a jumble of cabinets, bookshelves, piles of magazines and newspapers, computer terminals, chairs and desks jammed too close together.
Wastebaskets overflowed with empty coffee containers and wads of discarded press releases. The desk of Larry Van Gelder, a
Times
veteran, looked as if it hadn’t been cleared in the twenty-two years he had worked at the
Times.
The computer screens of Grace Glueck and Richard Shepard were separated by no more than thirty-six inches, and Glueck and Shepard talked into their phones in lowered voices, trying not to be distracted by each other’s interviews. The door to the women’s rest room was three paces from Shepard’s desk. Directly overhead was the scratchy loudspeaker used by the editors to summon reporters to the metro desk—and by the
Times’
part-time fire marshal for periodic safety messages. Glueck, in pearls, covered the art world; Shepard, in sweater, was the ace cultural features writer. Between them, they represented over seventy years of
Times
service. Jim Morgan’s tour came by, clogging the narrow aisles. Shepard smiled as Morgan embellished a few newsroom legends. The writer saw the bright side of the noisy, crowded word factory: It had been worse in the old days. In the late 1980s, the New York City ban on smoking in indoor spaces helped freshen the stale air a bit, and forced Shepard to break his cigarette habit. “Before,” he said, “this was Pittsburgh in the 1940s here.”

Two aisles over, Albin Krebs bent over his computer keyboard. For the last twelve years, Krebs had been a
Times
obituary writer—not the most joyful assignment. But because his obits set down a man’s or woman’s final record of achievement, Krebs felt moments of celebration as well. All morning he had been bringing up to date the stand-by obituaries of the television personality Alistair Cooke and the critic Malcolm Cowley. Early Tuesday afternoon, the paragraphs on his glowing green screen recounted the career of Walter Thayer, the long-time executive of the Whitney Communications Company, and a guiding light of the old
New York Herald Tribune.
The seventy-eight-year-old Thayer had been admitted to New York Hospital three weeks earlier. No announcement was made. All in all, these were the right circumstances for Krebs to update Thayer’s obituary. At any given time, the obit bank at the paper held hundreds of appreciations of people who, in the editors’ opinion, mattered to
Times
readers. These stories lacked only a few paragraphs on the cause of death, the immediate survivors, and the funeral arrangements.

Although just three miles separated the
Times
and New York Hospital, word of Thayer’s illness had come to Krebs by way of the
Times
news bureau in Paris. In 1989 the
Times
owned a one-third
interest in the
International Herald Tribune
, published in Paris and bearer of the name and logo of the
Times’
great morning rival in the first half of the century. Whitney Communications owned a second third of the paper; the third owner was the
Washington Post.
The three partners came together after the old
Herald Trib
vanished from New York City newsstands in 1966. It had been a strained union at first: the victor and the vanquished from the New York newspaper wars now business partners in Paris. But it worked, and Krebs’s appreciation of Thayer deftly referred to the old days. In the nineteenth paragraph of his twenty-six-paragraph draft, Krebs quoted Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the
Times
publisher and chairman: “Since the moment Walter Thayer and I shook hands on the merger, there have been no problems that the partners haven’t been able to resolve through open and friendly discussion.… [Walter Thayer] was blessed by a good nose for news and high standards of journalistic excellence.” Krebs also quoted Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company: “We enjoyed a long, beneficial and harmonious partnership.”

Before sending on the copy to his senior editors for their approval, Krebs allowed himself a small exercise in self-interest. Deep in the draft, he recounted the history of the labor-management disputes that hastened the death of the
Herald Tribune.
After the Newspaper Guild strike of April 1966, Krebs wrote, “Many of the
Herald Tribune
’s best journalists found other jobs.” Krebs was one of them; he left the
Herald Tribune
to join the
Times
in mid-1966. The line survived the final editing. It appeared in print more quickly than Krebs expected. Thayer died on Saturday, March 4; the obit ran in the
Times’
Sunday editions (two years later, Whitney Communications dropped out of the IHT consortium).

The next day, Krebs announced to his editors that he had decided to take early retirement. Krebs had worked as a journalist since his student days at the University of Mississippi; he had never married and he was about to turn sixty. He decided to keep his Manhattan apartment but return to the South, to live at least half the year in the congenial resort town of Key West. He was fully vested in the
Times
pension plan, assuring him a comfortable monthly retirement check at 80 percent of his $65,000 annual salary. Krebs made his final decision while updating the Thayer obit. His work at the
Times
lived on, in a manner of speaking, as one after another of the men and women who were the subjects of the copy he had prepared succumbed to age or
illness. A week after Krebs left the
Times
and the city, his obit of Malcolm Cowley appeared, up-to-date and literate.