Behind the Times (31 page)

The thunder from the left bothered Rosenthal. Another editor, with a different temperament perhaps, might have ignored the
Voice
writers, putting their criticisms down as one of the costs of being in charge of the journalistic standard by which other news organizations were judged. Rosenthal, however, thundered back. The
Village Voice
, Rosenthal told Jonathan Beaty, a reporter for
Time
magazine, “was an urban ill like dog shit in the street—to be stepped over.”

Rosenthal also attracted the attention of Joseph Goulden, a Washington-based investigative biographer. In the mid-1980s, Goulden conducted over three hundred interviews with present and former
Times
people in the course of his research for a book on the
Times
during the Rosenthal years (
Fit to Print; A. M. Rosenthal and the Times
). Rosenthal parried Goulden’s requests for an interview for over a year. Finally, in 1986, after Goulden reminded Rosenthal that two hundred people had already been interviewed, Rosenthal’s “curiosity apparently got the best of him.” Rosenthal sat with Goulden for four sessions totaling over twenty hours. The sum of Goulden’s efforts was less than the individual parts. Goulden hectored Rosenthal through 460 pages, describing the
Times
man’s alleged near-constant drinking and womanizing. Goulden’s Rosenthal was a tyrant, and a petty one at that. Goulden also said that Rosenthal did indeed keep a shit list of errant reporters. Once on the list, their careers were stalled: They could leave the
Times
, or keep a low profile and hope that Rosenthal would forget their offense.

Somehow the angry, profane, list-making Rosenthal described by Goulden also found the time to wield power “equaled by few in American journalism” and to affect “the course of his country’s history and the world’s.” But Goulden offered little evidence of how Rosenthal reached out and touched history. As one example of the
Times’
supposed national agenda-setting power, Goulden cited the
Bitburg episode—Ronald Reagan’s decision in 1985 to visit a German military cemetery where Nazi SS troopers were buried. Had it not been for “Rosenthal’s rage” over the president’s insult to the memory of the
Jews, and the
Times’
subsequent coverage, Goulden reported, the Bitburg story would have died in a day or two. To make that argument, Goulden had to ignore all the stories that appeared in the rest of the media. He also had to ignore all the public opinion polls. In the days after Rosenthal “raged” about Bitburg, one third of the public said it was in favor of the visit; another third said that it was indifferent whether Reagan went or stayed away. Only one third opposed the trip. If Rosenthal was so powerful, and if the
Times
did set the agenda, why then did Reagan go ahead with his Bitburg visit anyway? The journalist Lou Cannon, the definitive biographer of Reagan, provided the answers. Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, had pleaded with Reagan, telling him that cancellation would be a personal embarrassment and possibly cause his government to fall. Cannon also ran through the list of the important voices that opposed the trip; he included Senator Bob Dole, representatives of the American Jewish community, the Nobelist Elie Wiesel, and some of Reagan’s own advisers, such as Edward Rollins. Cannon did not mention Abe Rosenthal or the
New York Times.

The Reagan White House did attend to the
Times’
views—when they supported its own agenda. Rosenthal visited Manila in 1985 before the Marcos dictatorship was overthrown, and interviewed
Corazón Aquino. According to Raymond Bonner, a former
Times
foreign correspondent, Rosenthal was unimpressed; she was not sufficiently anti-Communist, and Rosenthal said so publicly. Reagan was soon quoting Rosenthal in White House conversations.

All the talk of national agendas was largely pro forma. Goulden wasn’t so much interested in public policy as he was in the private Rosenthal. When Rosenthal made the transition in 1987 from editor to Op-Ed page commentator, his initial column appeared under the headline, “Please Read This Column.” The head was written by Rosenthal. The unsuspecting Op-Ed page reader might regard this as a harmless, even larky, way to begin; not Goulden. “The pathos of Abe Rosenthal may be summarized in these sad words,” Goulden concluded. “The little boy on the center of the stage shouting for attention.”

Goulden had conducted an exercise in overkill. His relentlessly mean tone undermined his credibility. When alternative explanations for Rosenthal’s news decisions presented themselves, Goulden invariably chose the worst possible interpretation, and then presented it as if
self-evident. For example, on the same day that City Hall announced a multimillion-dollar city project for the renovation of Yankee stadium, it also announced cutbacks in funding for day-care centers serving working mothers. “The Yankee story ran [in the
Times
]; the day care story did not,” Goulden reported, and immediately added: “Rosenthal is a chum of George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ owner.” No evidence of this chumminess was presented. No mention was made of the background that made the stadium project newsworthy. Steinbrenner, a major league blowhard with a reputation for greedy self-interest, had pumped up public concern by hinting that he might move the Yankees out of New York unless the stadium was refurbished with help from the city—just as other team owners in other cities had threatened to move their franchises, without those inducements to stay that they regarded as their due. As for the
Times’
omission of the day-care cuts, no consideration was given to the possibility that such a decision might have been made not by Rosenthal but at a much lower level, by the
Times’
City Hall bureau or by metro-desk editors—or that no decision was made, that the story was simply missed by a large, imperfect news-gathering machine. Rather, a directive to suppress had come from the very top, the tyrant
Times
obliging the bureaucracy, while the poor suffered.

“
It didn’t do me any good to talk to Goulden,” Rosenthal complained when I interviewed him. “He had made up his mind about me. So I appear as a villain and a terrible person, whether that’s true or not.” Rosenthal added, almost softly: “I think of myself as a very successful editor, but I come across as a Hitler.” Two years earlier, at the time of publication of
Fit to Print, Time
magazine called Rosenthal for his comments on the book. “It’s like walking into a mess on the street,” Rosenthal said. “You step in it; you try to wipe it from your foot.” The quote echoed the “dog shit” line of six years before; this time,
Time
ran it.

Yet Goulden’s nasty account could not be casually stepped over as if it were a pile of dog litter. A. H. Raskin worked alongside Rosenthal for more than thirty years. Raskin’s career at the
Times
began in 1932, when he was the paper’s campus correspondent at City College (the same stringer’s job that Rosenthal had a decade later). Raskin watched admiringly when Rosenthal arrived at the
Times
during the war years and began his steady ascent up the newsroom hierarchy. Raskin thought he knew “almost everything there was to know about who did
what to whom on West 43rd Street and why.” But he said that he learned a lot of “
solid new information” from Goulden. For all of Raskin’s admiration of Rosenthal, and for all his distaste for Goulden’s decision to “sex up” the narrative with stories of Rosenthal’s extramarital affairs, Raskin concluded that Goulden’s interviews and research were too strong to shrug off. Given a chance to trash the Goulden narrative, Raskin chose instead to applaud its “provocative findings.”

Harrison Salisbury in his memoirs of his career at the
Times
left out the sexual tales about Rosenthal but not much else. Salisbury’s Rosenthal is, at heart, an angry, argumentative, supremely ambitious egomaniac. Salisbury’s view of Rosenthal the journalist was not much better than his opinion of the man. Salisbury concluded that Rosenthal was not really a reporter of, say, the stature of Harrison Salisbury; rather he was a writer, and an “overemotional” one at that. Salisbury praised with not-so-faint damns Rosenthal’s best-known journalistic work—his account, during Rosenthal’s tour of duty in Poland, of his visit to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Salisbury called it Rosenthal’s finest story, and then reported that the original theme was “suggested” to Rosenthal by a colleague; moreover, while Rosenthal’s superiors back in New York found the article moving, they judged it unsuitable for the news pages. The editors published it instead in the
Times Magazine
—as a feature.

Salisbury also added his version of the
Times’
rightward turn, even giving it a date: the students’ occupation of the president’s office at Columbia University on the night of April 29, 1968. Rosenthal, the onetime poor City College commuter student, assigned himself to the story of the rampage (as the
Times
told it) by the Ivy League children of the middle class. Rosenthal had been enjoying the beautiful New York earlier that night, sitting in the
Times’
house seats at the Broadway opening of
Hair
(like the Columbia student occupation, a celebration of the new Age of Aquarius, but put to music, and safely confined to the stage). On the campus, the editor turned reporter for a night surveyed the damage done to the office of Columbia president Grayson Kirk. Rosenthal’s account focused on Kirk’s books, “spines ripped and pages defiled.” Kirk was quoted: “My God, how could human beings do a thing like this?” Editor Rosenthal’s associates placed reporter Rosenthal’s story on the front page of the
Times
the next morning. According to Salisbury, however, Rosenthal’s Columbia reportage was more imagined than factual. He all but accused
Rosenthal of “piping”—making up—the story. Kirk, Salisbury reported, later said he had no recollection of the scene as described in the
Times
, or of seeing Rosenthal that night. Furthermore, a Columbia University investigative committee subsequently dismissed the office damage as “trivial.”

Salisbury called Rosenthal his “friend,” someone he knew “better than any man.” Yet no good Rosenthal deed went unpunished. His successes at the
Times
were explained—more accurately, explained away—as a by-product of obsessive ambition (to escape from poverty and his roots) combined with a nimble ability to borrow from others. Salisbury moved from the newsroom to supervise the start-up of the Op-Ed page in 1970. Rosenthal, Salisbury remembered, initially had nothing but ridicule for the graphics Salisbury introduced in the page, “but within a year, graphics, drawings, artwork blossomed throughout the paper. [Rosenthal] designed and redesigned section after section until the paper had an open and inviting aspect.”

One of Rosenthal’s often-stated credos involved the ideal of “objectivity,” and the need for the
Times
to present “both sides of issues.” “
We live in a time of commitment and advocacy,” Rosenthal wrote in a memo to his staff, later adapted and published as a full-page statement in the
Times.
“ ‘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.” Later, Rosenthal admonished his staff that the
Times
shouldn’t “use a typewriter to stick our fingers in people’s eyes just because we have the power to do so.” But the Rosenthal-watchers accused him precisely of misusing the power of the
Times
to reward cultural favorites and strike out at putative enemies. Rosenthal’s friendship with Beverly Sills was well known. A poster of the singer hung in Rosenthal’s outer office, moving Salisbury to wonder how this “affected the [
Times’
] music critics.” Salisbury didn’t follow up by asking the critics directly; nor did he consult their published reviews for any clues to whether their critical opinions were influenced by the editor’s choice of office decoration. In fact, the
Times’
files show that John Rockwell, the
Times’
lead music critic, did not hang back from negative reviews of Sills’s performances.

The critics also trashed Rosenthal for his role in the Kosinski affair, a bizarre episode that roiled the New York literary-social-media world
in the early 1980s. Salisbury suggested that Rosenthal’s friendship with Jerzy Kosinski inspired a “ponderous essay” about Kosinski which appeared in the
Times
in November 1982. The “essay” was actually an investigative report describing how the Polish-born writer, novelist, and celebrity-around-town had been victimized by a long-term disinformation campaign that apparently originated with the security services of Warsaw’s Communist regime. The campaign, the author of the
Times
article, John Corry, implied, eventually found an American outlet in the
Village Voice.
The
Voice
article stated, among other things, that Kosinski had invented many of the more dramatic details of his life in wartime Poland, that he had major “assistance”—uncredited—in writing his books, including his best-known novel,
The Painted Bird
, and that the Central Intelligence Agency may have been his “sponsor” in the United States. The
Voice
called its article “Jerzy Kosinski’s Tainted Words.” By implying that the
Voice
article was somehow “linked” to the Polish government, the
Times
all but announced that the real tainted words were those of the
Voice
writers, Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith.

In outline, the Corry story did look like a “
Times
editor’s special”—the Arthur-ized Version, as the newsroom wordsmiths liked to joke. Rosenthal and his chief deputy, Arthur Gelb, were much too smart to try to influence a critic to write a puff review; they knew what a scandal it would create. But they did not hesitate to push for favorable mentions of friends in the news pages. “Please make sure that we give some
decent quotes from Betty Friedan in our ERA series,” Rosenthal told James Greenfield, a senior editor. “For one thing she inspired us to do it, and secondly, she really is, still, a paramount figure in the woman’s movement and one who, I believe, is a bridge among many women and men.” Sometimes the back-scratching produced hilarious results. Gelb and his wife Barbara wrote a biography of Eugene O’Neill in 1962, nine years after the playwright’s death in 1953; ever since the Gelbs’ biography, the
Times
never seemed to run out of stories to tell about O’Neill. At the time of the centennial of O’Neill’s birth, the
Times
published a story about plans to demolish the New London, Connecticut, house where O’Neill lived one winter; five weeks later, the
Times
ran a picture of a plaque being dedicated in Provincetown, Massachusetts, site of the first performance of O’Neill’s play
Bound for East Cardiff.