Behind the Times (33 page)

Rosenthal knew what materials pleased the publisher; but he was guided as well by his own instincts. He trusted his judgment. In Poland as a correspondent, he had found a way to write about Auschwitz with a fresh eye (Salisbury’s sniping to the contrary). Back in New York as metro editor, he looked at the city as a foreign correspondent might, and saw startling changes. One result was a long feature, commissioned by Rosenthal, on homosexuals in New York. It brought together in one story a fuller picture of homosexuality than had ever before appeared in any general daily paper. In 1971 Rosenthal argued for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. On the Op-Ed page of June 11, 1991, in a column marking the twentieth anniversary of the episode, he explained how he had come to his position: “If you know in your stomach” that government information stamped secret is essential to public understanding, then go ahead and print it. In January 1986, when the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded moments after launching, Rosenthal relied again on instinct. He cleared all advertising from the first ten pages of the
Times
, to give the story the “open” columns he felt it needed. Later, he detached a team of reporters to reconstruct the events leading up to the disaster. A half dozen reporters worked full time on the
Challenger
story for twelve weeks, traveling around the country, interviewing NASA scientists, visiting the builders of the rocket booster engines. “There was
a lot of head shaking in the newsroom; all this cost, all this waste of manpower,” recalled David Sanger, one of the reporters Rosenthal assigned to the story. But the reporting produced the
Times’
“O-rings” story, which pointed to the probable
cause of the rocket-booster explosion. “That won us a Pulitzer Prize,” Sanger said. “Rosenthal knew next to nothing about the space program or rocket technology, but he resolved to get ‘the story.’ He understood in his gut there was something there.”

Rosenthal’s stomach also enabled him to make decisions on the spot, often with excellent results. Anna Quindlen, who joined the
Times
as a general assignment reporter, flourished under Rosenthal—once past her first sentence-fragments story. In 1981, just four years after she was hired, she began writing the “About New York” column and building a loyal audience. In 1985, at the age of 35, she took a maternity leave. When the time came to return the next year, Quindlen wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Rosenthal heard that Quindlen had another offer. He called her to his office and asked her not to leave. As Quindlen tells it, “Abe said,
‘Why not do a new column? We need a column.… Let’s see … Thursdays we have something. How about Wednesdays? In the Living section? We need a name … Let’s see, how old are you?… 36? 37?… Good, we’ll call it Life in the 30s.’ ” Quindlen adds: “People later said to me that all kinds of market research must have gone into it. I tell them, ‘Abe did it in three minutes.’ ”

The supportive Abe could give way at any time to the furious Abe. Les Ledbetter, one of the handful of black reporters in the
Times
news department in the early 1970s, sent a memo to Rosenthal about the
Times’
longstanding policy of denying the honorific “Mr.” to anyone convicted of a felony. “I find this paper’s style of taking the title ‘Mr.’ away from convicted felons to be offensive, archaic, and snobbish,” Ledbetter began his memo to Rosenthal. “If nothing else, I would hope that the lesson learned from Attica and similar uprisings is that you only make men more bitter when you deny them their common claim to humanity.” Rosenthal replied to Ledbetter: “I find your note to be offensive, arrogant, and snobbish. I find that your tone appears to put you on the side of those who do not know the difference between discussion and aggression and who, having decided on the validity of their own point of view, regard others as not worthy of being treated with dignity and thought. Do you like that? I don’t suppose you do. Not any more than I like being addressed in a haranguing tone of typewriter.” Rosenthal went on to say that
Times
editors had for years discussed “this whole Mister business” and that he was still not happy with
Times
policies. Rosenthal added that he welcomed hearing from
his staff but “only on condition that you discuss things with me as you would wish me to discuss them with you.” Les Ledbetter was not the only black reporter to feel the heat of Rosenthal’s blast-furnace prose. C. Gerald Fraser, a
Times
reporter on the metro desk, obtained a wide-ranging interview with Roy Innis, the leader of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). Fraser’s article covered, among other things, Innis’s views on President Idi Amin of Uganda, on American Jews and their relations with Israel, and on racism in America. The article incensed Rosenthal; he told Mitchel Levitas, then his assistant, of his objections and asked Levitas to draft, in Rosenthal’s name, a memo to David Jones, Fraser’s editor. Levitas’s draft began: “The Fraser piece today was both incompetent and vicious and I’d like to know how it got into the paper. Let me itemize my objections.…” Levitas listed six criticisms and concluded: “The only germ of a story here, and the only justification for devoting three-quarters of a column to this claptrap is in the last paragraph.” Rosenthal edited out the first sentence, in order to begin, “let me itemize my objections.” He also pared Levitas’s conclusion to “The only germ of a story here is in the last paragraph.” Mostly, Rosenthal spoke in his own voice, without prompts. The Washington bureau became a regular target of his complaints after he was named managing editor in 1968. He was convinced that certain reporters tended to “editorialize” in their news stories. For example, they quoted congressional liberals more than conservatives, or more favorably. During the anti–Vietnam war rallies in October 1969, he complained of the “painfully loaded” words used by E. W. Kenworthy (Kenworthy described a speech as “portentous” in a story about the Nixon White House). A few weeks later, Rosenthal found what he called an “awry picture of America” in the
Times.
He singled out the editions of November 7: “On page 7 we have a story about the G.I. trial at Ft. Dix. On page 8 we have the MIT sit-in and on page 9 we have the moratorium. On page 13 we have the Army memorandum about the anti-war protest. On page 22, the Chicago trial. In between, two stories about poverty and housing demonstrations. On page 27 a story about job discrimination. There are others. This was not a particularly outstanding day for that kind of thing. But I get the impression, reading the
Times
, that the image we give of America is largely of demonstrations, discrimination, anti-war movements, rallies, protests, etc. Obviously all these things are an important part of the American scene. But I think that because of our own liberal interests
and our reporters’ inclination we overdo this. I am not suggesting eliminating any one of these stories. I am suggesting that reporters and editors look a bit more around them to see what is going on in other fields and to try to make an effort to represent other shades of opinion than those held by the new Left, the old Left, the middle aged Left and the anti-war people.”

From the reporters’ point of view, however, the editors were imposing their conservative views on the news. J. Anthony Lukas was the
Times
man assigned to the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial in the fall of 1969. Then thirty-seven, Lukas was already a Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting of the Greenwich Village “hippie murder” case (the only Pulitzer for local reporting that the
Times
won during the Rosenthal years). A painstaking reporter and a perfectionist, Lukas was unhappy with the constraints he believed Rosenthal’s editors put on his reporting. He complained that he couldn’t cover the trial with the same freedom Nicholas von Hoffman of the
Washington Post
had. From the start, von Hoffman treated the story as a political show rather than a criminal trial. The
Post
man called the trial “a shoddy parody of jurisprudence,” and he reviewed it as if it were street theater—produced by the country’s richest backer, the U.S. government, directed by Abbie Hoffman (“public relations genius”), and starring Judge Julius Hoffman (“an aged hobbitt … with the voice of a man reading horror stories to small children”) and Jerry Rubin (“free-lance wild man”). Von Hoffman, said Lukas, caught the trial’s “tone and flavor in a way that has been almost impossible for those of us operating under tighter editing restrictions.” While Lukas said that he understood Rosenthal’s demands, nevertheless the
Times’
doctrine of “objectivity” made it difficult to give a true picture of the judge’s erratic behavior in the courtroom. Lukas objected to the
Times’
display of his reporting—while page 22 was too prominent for Rosenthal, for Lukas it represented indecent burial. Moreover, the desk edited his copy with a leaden hand. One memorable day, Lukas reported, one of the defendants shouted “Chicken shit!” at Judge Hoffman. The desk deleted the “un-
Times
-like” language and substituted the phrase a “barnyard epithet.”

When Lukas returned to New York, he shared some of his discontent with other
Times
people. One result was a bit of street theater at the paper itself, a series of informal after-hours meetings in the early months of 1970, attended by some of the
Times’
better-known reporters,
critics, and middle-echelon editors. Part gripe session about the way stories were being handled and part social hour, the meetings involved at one time or another Tony Lukas, theater critic Clive Barnes, women’s news editor Charlotte Curtis, and reporters Joseph Lelyveld, Martin Tolchin, William E. Farrell, and Paul Montgomery. Barnes was unhappy with his editors, in particular, the cultural desk’s handling of his review of
Inquest
, a play about the Rosenberg “atom spy” case. Curtis thought the
Times
had failed to present a rounded picture of the Black Panthers (the group’s separatist rhetoric usually was reported and not its self-help programs). The
Times
people at the meeting called themselves, self mockingly,
“the cabal.”

Rosenthal heard out some of the cabalists later at a dinner meeting one of his assistants arranged; he liked a good argument, though he was unlikely to change any of his beliefs. Political opinions didn’t belong in cultural reviews, he argued, “Otherwise we would have ten extra political commentators on the paper.” He talked about how decision making at the
Times
had broadened over the years; but newsrooms weren’t democratic assemblies. Authority couldn’t be diluted: “The news columns will not be made into a political broadsheet—period.”

The cabalists didn’t actually disband; they were never banded in the first place. “At our big meeting, at Bill Farrell’s apartment on a Sunday, we went around the room airing our gripes, one after another, and found no two people had the same concerns,” Joe Lelyveld remembered twenty years later. “I was worried about how my beautiful, flawless prose”—he smiled here—“was being treated. Others couldn’t care less about me; they wanted to talk about their own troubles.” Curtis moved out of the news department to the Op-Ed page. Barnes left the
Times
to become chief drama and dance critic of the
New York Post.
Montgomery went to the
Wall Street Journal.
Lelyveld stayed. His
Times
career was not hurt by his cabalistic role; in 1989 he became managing editor, the number-two position in the news department. Tony Lukas left the
Times
to free-lance. He had a last word of sorts, incorporating the chickenshit episode into a book,
The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial.
He also became a founding editor of MORE, a journalism review that regularly monitored press performance, including the
Times’
, in the early years of the 1970s. When MORE ceased publication, Lukas became a full-time author, winning a second Pulitzer Prize for his book
Common Ground
, a thoroughgoing, humane study of the effects of school desegregation on three Boston families.

Post-cabal, Rosenthal remained vigilant, undeterred in his campaign to “keep the
Times
straight.” He complained that a Washington story by Warren Weaver was “politically loaded.” He thought metro reporter Frank Lynn injected an “editorial needle” into a City Hall story. He was preoccupied with the
Times’
coverage of student activism. Four years after his own Columbia bust story, he registered his dismay about a campus roundup story by Robert D. McFadden. The report was “editorialized in the extreme and terribly naïve,” Rosenthal complained to Gelb. “The whole thrust of the first few paragraphs is to equate lack of political action and demonstrations on the campuses with sleepy-headedness, social indifference, and boredom. Who says so? Did it not occur to McFadden that a great many people believe that the purpose of a campus is not political action at all, but study? I really couldn’t believe my eyes when I read those first three paragraphs.”

By the mid-1970s, the war in Southeast Asia had been pronounced “Vietnamized” by the Nixon administration. The Congress ended the military draft, and college students returned to their books (and beer blasts). Rosenthal still had to contend with “editorialization” by some of his reporters. For the Sunday paper of August 12, 1979, Robert Reinhold did a feature timed to the tenth anniversary of Woodstock. Rosenthal didn’t see Reinhold’s story until early Saturday night, when he received the first edition of the paper. He immediately called the news desk to order removal of some of Reinhold’s “vacuous politicalization.” Reinhold had called Woodstock a symbol of a “national, cultural, and political awakening,” and the event itself the “culmination of a decade-long youth crusade for a freer style of life, for peace and for tolerance.” In the decade of the 1970s, Reinhold continued, radical politics “reverted to more conventional politics and even apathy.” On Monday morning, Rosenthal did an exegesis of the story for his editors. Reinhold was implying that “there was a downward scale from radicalism to conventional politics,” Rosenthal said. The editor’s comment: “Good God!”