Behind the Times (34 page)

Rosenthal, clearly, tried to control the outputs of the
Times
word factory. A phone call from him could excise a displeasing phrase in a story; a note could insure the inclusion of a friendly name. He had the power to reward his favorites, someone like Quindlen, with prized assignments, while the force of his anger could drive a Lukas to consider another line of work. The pattern was unpredictable. The editor had powerful weapons to achieve consent; many of his staff were convinced
that he had a shit list, and kept all the names fresh in his mind. Even if the paranoia was justified, Rosenthal was constrained by the tenure system of the
Times
, mandated by its contracts with the Newspaper Guild. Once beyond a relatively short probation period, news department people could not be fired absent clear criminal behavior, such as a conviction for drug possession. Les Ledbetter and Ned Kenworthy, both tenured, resigned on their own; Gerald Fraser and Robert Reinhold remained in the newsroom long after Rosenthal had left. Both the reach and the limits of Rosenthal’s office were never better demonstrated than in the editor’s long, painful dispute with Richard Severo, a member of the news department and a first-class reporter and writer.

If Rosenthal was a list keeper, then so was Severo. The descriptions applied to Rosenthal could just as well be applied to Severo: intelligent, determined, energetic, quick to anger, sensitive to slights (Severo said he discerned anti-Italianism in the attitudes of
Times
editors toward him). Severo and Rosenthal were, in many ways, more alike than either man would acknowledge. Each characterized the other with words eerily the same. Severo on Rosenthal: vindictive, stubborn, a bearer of grudges. Rosenthal on Severo: difficult to work with, argumentive, enjoys feeling persecuted. Their dispute eventually became a formal arbitration procedure, and engaged lawyers, the Newspaper Guild, and the
Times’
senior management and outside counsel. It stretched on for seven years, longer than World War II. The arbitrator took ten thousand pages of testimony. Severo’s attorney died shortly after the decision was announced. So did the arbitrator, who was suffering from cancer during the hearings.

Severo joined the
Times
in 1968, after working at the
Washington Post
, the Associated Press, the
New York Herald Tribune
, and CBS News. A science specialist, he had little to do with Rosenthal for twelve years, other than working in his newsroom. That all changed in December 1981, when Severo did a two-part article on Lisa H., a young woman suffering from the disfiguring effects of neurofibromatosis, popularly known as the Elephant Man’s Disease. Severo decided to write a book on Lisa H., and share part of his earnings with her family (“I want to help Lisa, she is the bravest woman I have ever met,” Severo said he told Rosenthal; the young woman had taken terrible abuse because of her looks, and yet remained “a bright, cheerful, well-adjusted person.”) Severo’s agent conducted an auction for the book
rights. One of the auction participants—a losing bidder, it turned out—was Times Books, then part of the New York Times Company. From this point on, the narrative grows murky, clouded by lawyers’ obfuscations. Rosenthal, both sides acknowledged, ordered the auction stopped on the grounds that the Lisa H. story was the
Times’
“intellectual property”—less pretentiously, Severo had collected the facts on company time. The point was narrowly correct but without real meaning: Scores of books written by
Times
men and -women developed out of
Times
assignments (including Rosenthal’s own two books, compilations of
Times
reporters’ published work). Severo’s agent went ahead with the auction. Harper & Row’s bid was accepted. According to Severo, Rosenthal then struck back: “He kicked me off science and sent me to the gulag of the metro desk, where I was given only cub reporter assignments.” Severo’s union, the Newspaper Guild, brought a formal grievance action against the
Times
, charging the editors were using the assignment process to punish the reporter for taking his book elsewhere. For three and a half years Severo was on an unpaid leave of absence while the case lurched forward. To him, the fight was about principle. He spent much of his free time reporting and writing a new book, on the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

During the arbitration hearings, Rosenthal acted by turns provocative and bemused. On several occasions, he responded to the questions of Severo’s lawyer, Philip D. Tobin, by calling Tobin “boy” (“Get on with your questions, boy”). Other times Rosenthal played the part of the busy executive inconvenienced by the proceedings. “The book story was a pure concoction. Severo’s transfer had nothing to do with the book,” Rosenthal testified. “They were two separate episodes.” The
Times’
science editors felt they could not work with Severo, Rosenthal explained. Severo was endlessly adversarial. He argued about being edited. He took too long with stories. Further, how Rosenthal’s editors dealt with Severo was their business; as executive editor of the
Times
, he didn’t have time for such newsroom minutiae. The
Times
also said principle was involved; its counsel argued that any limit the arbitrator put on management’s right to assign its employees where it wished would be a violation of the freedom of the press provisions of the First Amendment.

In September 1988, the arbitrator ruled for the
Times
, accepting the argument that Severo’s transfer was within management rights by the terms of its Newspaper Guild contract. The next month, Severo exercised
his rights of tenure, and returned to the
Times.
“I fought the good fight,” he said later. “It would have been cowardly not to return.” Rosenthal, too, remembered himself on the barricades of personal honor. “Severo was disruptive, and his editors begged me to get him out of science,” Rosenthal said. “If the editor of the
Times
doesn’t have the right to move a reporter from one desk to another, then that’s the end of the paper.” By then, Rosenthal had left the newsroom, and was enjoying his new life as a columnist.

Severo’s story did not end as happily. Four years after the arbitrator’s decision, Severo said he was still being punished. In the new regime of the “benevolent” Max Frankel, Severo said, he finally got transferred from the metro desk … to the job of preparing death notices for the obituary desk, a gulag colder and more demeaning than metro. He also had another bitter fight with the
Times
, again over a book, his study of Agent Orange. The book, praised by reviewers around the country, was dismissed in the
Book Review
, as we will see. Severo believed he was being pursued by his doppelganger from beyond the grave. His victim’s fantasy was understandable. Rosenthal reacted to the Lisa H. deal all out of proportion to the “offense”— though consistently with his behavior through the years. The issue, as usual, was doing things his way.

The legend of Rosenthal’s infamous shit list still left unresolved the more compelling narrative. Was the product of the word factory different in significant respects in the Rosenthal years than it might have been under the control of another editor? Broadly put, the question defied answers. Limited to a specific example of coverage, it became more manageable. The
Times’
treatment of the subject of homosexuality, and later, of AIDS, has been amply documented. It was said, on the record and off the record, by the staff and by outside critics, that Abe Rosenthal was a homophobe. Supposedly, the newsroom explicitly understood this, and as a result, the
Times
initially “ignored” the AIDS epidemic. Supposedly, too, the
Times’
AIDS coverage didn’t measurably improve until Rosenthal was succeeded by Frankel (an executive praised by the same staff and critics for his enlightened attitudes). If an editor can be said to make a difference, then the evidence should emerge in the contrasting ways the
Times
dealt with AIDS in the Rosenthal and Frankel years.

*        *        *

“Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” read the headline over the first
Times
report in its coverage of the AIDS pandemic. The story appeared on July 3, 1981, on page A-20; it ran for the length of a column and carried the byline of Lawrence Altman, the
Times’
chief medical reporter. Altman had an M.D. degree; before coming to the
Times
, Altman had been on the staff of the Centers for Disease Control, part of the U.S. Public Health Service. His specialty was epidemiology, and the July 3 story was written from materials in
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
, a CDC journal for which young Dr. Altman once wrote. Noting the appearance of Kaposi’s sarcoma—the “rare cancer,” hardly ever seen in otherwise healthy young men—Altman approached his first story from the point of view of the medical epidemiologist-detective: the sudden onslaught of Kaposi’s “could have as much scientific as public health importance because of what it may teach us about determining the causes of more common types of cancer.”

Altman’s theoretic frame for the story served to downplay its human interest aspect. Yet one of the principal efforts of the Rosenthal years was aimed at getting more such stories in the
Times
news report. Typically, the old, pre-Rosenthal
Times
stressed “policy” over “people.” Rosenthal received his first major attention as an editor when he ordered up the front-page feature of December 17, 1963, on New York’s homosexual community. That story talked of the “problem” of homosexuality, and explicitly spoke of homosexuals and other “degenerates” (in the spirit of the early 1960s). While the story quoted police officials who had to deal with such “outlaw” behavior, homosexual spokesmen received a sympathetic hearing. Seven years later, Rosenthal’s metro staff reported on the growing militancy of homosexuals, again with a degree of empathy, and again on page one.

Rosenthal experienced that militancy directly, beginning in the early 1970s. Representatives of gay and lesbian groups complained to him that the
Times
did not give adequate coverage to Gay Pride parades, that it neglected to carry news of violence directed at homosexuals, and that it routinely turned down story suggestions from gay and lesbian groups. An exchange between Rosenthal and Ronald Gold, communications director of the National Gay Task Force, was typical of the back-and-forth correspondence of the 1970s. Gold faulted the
Times
for a reference to a “homosexual torture ring” in a news story from Houston in the editions of July 1, 1974. (A “heterosexual torture ring,”
Gold told Rosenthal, “is a big circle of editors all telling fag jokes.”) Gold also criticized the
Times’
coverage of the Gay Pride Parade two weeks before. According to Gold, the
Times
reporter assigned to the story counted the number of marchers at the beginning of the parade rather than at the end, thus underrepresenting the size of the parade by a factor of four. Gold thought the
Times
should have done an article summing up the events of Gay Pride week; further, the
Times
missed a good story about a Solemm High Mass held by gay Roman Catholics at an Episcopal church. Then, adopting a conversational tone, Gold told Rosenthal of “my three-year-old dream. Perhaps it was too much to think you’d print a schedule [of the gay community’s plans for the week] like the free ad you ran for the Newport Jazz Festival. Just a nice compressed local feature.…”

Rosenthal replied brusquely, waking the dreamer from his reveries. Gold just didn’t understand how the
Times
was edited; “You are balancing your desires in coverage as against what we do and deciding that since your desires are not fulfilled there must be something wrong with us.… We will not substitute your judgment for ours any more than we would substitute the judgment of any industry, community, or special interest group.” Rosenthal did concede Gold a point on the Houston story. “I agree that the expression ‘ring’ is an unfortunate one. This is a large paper with a great many people writing under a great many pressures of time, and occasionally expressions get through that we would prefer not to see.”

The Gold-Rosenthal exchange was typical. Through his years as editor Rosenthal kept sounding the theme of “news judgment.” While he talked in public about the need for objective standards in the
Times
, he made clear to his editors that such judgments were, in the end, personal. Homosexuals, and later AIDS, were treated as news stories, he said, “no more, no less.” But because “it did come down to what goes in and what stays out,” only the editor can make those decisions. Rosenthal exercised that power whenever he could. In the fall of 1977, for example, Sydney Schanberg, his distinguished overseas service behind him, was back in New York, on a senior editing track, and being talked about as the “next Abe Rosenthal.” Like Rosenthal a decade before, Schanberg was running the
Times
metro desk and seeing New York with the fresh eye of a foreign correspondent. In a memo to Rosenthal, Schanberg proposed major new treatment of the homosexual community of New York, which he described as “large
and increasingly middle class.” According to Schanberg, “many people still think of homosexual life in terms of interior decorators, Fire Island, and leather bars, but increasingly it’s also very much a world of lawyers, physicians, teachers, politicians, clergymen and other upper-middle-class professional men and women who, aside from their sexual preference, live like their ‘straight’ counterparts.”

Rosenthal replied that while he would always give attention to Schanberg’s ideas, he didn’t “want a whole bunch of stories or a series. A great amount of coverage at this time would simply seem naïve and déjà vu.” It was “a question of perspective” for the
Times
: “Yes, there are many homosexuals, just as there are many of almost everything in New York. I have a gut feeling that if we embark upon a series for now or a bunch of pieces, it would be overkill.” And here he set down his principle of inclusion-exclusion, old hand instructing the new man: “There is also the question of exactly what it is we want to do with our space. Space is gold. The proper use of space is the essence of our existence, because it reflects our taste and judgment.… It is the areas of taste and judgment that, in the long run, are our most important areas of responsibility.” Schanberg’s ambitious series never appeared.