Behind the Times (47 page)

The search for the perfect
Times
man ended in a roundabout way at Columbia University, in the office of Pamela Hollie. At the time she was director of the Knight-Bagehot Program, which offers fellowships for journalists to study economics and business subjects for an academic year. Hollie was an exemplar of what the modern
Times
said it wanted on its news staff. She is an African-American with a graduate degree, trained both as a business-news reporter—she worked at the
Wall Street Journal
for four years—and as a specialist in Southeast Asian history. In her career at the
Times
, Hollie moved up from metro and business desk assignments in 1977 to become a
Times
national business correspondent in the Los Angeles bureau for three years. She was the
Times
’ Manila bureau chief beginning in 1981; after four years
covering the Philippines and filing stories from Bali, New Guinea, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, she returned to the newsroom in New York to write a Sunday financial column for two years. In 1987 she resigned from the
Times
to take the Knight-Bagehot director’s job. According to Robert Semple, the
Times
man who hired her in 1977 when he was foreign editor of the paper, “Pam Hollie was terrific, but
she fell between the cracks.”

Hollie was interviewed not too long after she left the
Times.
She had just turned forty, a confident, vibrant, intelligent woman, tall and sturdy, with long straight hair (she grew up in Kansas, and among her ancestors on her mother’s side were Native Americans). Hollie was forthcoming about the
Times
and frank about how she did, indeed, fall between the cracks.

She began with praise for the
Times.
“
I got to do a lot of high-visibility big stuff. The
Times
does a good job of bringing you along. The problem comes at the senior level, in getting those promotions. That’s something it doesn’t do too well. I was an administrator. I ran a bureau. I was a national correspondent. I worked in the home office. But the
Times
couldn’t accommodate me. I couldn’t move up. And not just me. Look at Reginald Stuart, who just left after thirteen years.” Stuart is an African-American, too. Was Hollie suggesting racial discrimination at the
Times
? “Well, there was a minority suit,” she replied, “and the
Times
settled it out of court. As a result, I get
a check for $400 a year.” But had not Frankel publicly announced his intentions to hire more minorities? “I know what he announced, but I felt he didn’t make much of an effort to talk me out of departing. He told me, ‘I’ll miss your energy and great spirit.’ That’s fine, but I wanted to hear something else. I just wasn’t getting great stateside assignments. Overseas I was on a fast track. I’m not sure who derailed whom. Did I leave? Was I pushed? I just couldn’t be around another ten years without my managerial skills being used.”

Hollie had, in the
Times
newsroom phrase, “rabbis”—senior editors, such as John Lee, the Business Day editor, who advised her and helped her. “Bob Semple recruited me, and then he was gone from the foreign desk. No one is excluded from the screwing. At the time, I had an Asian Studies fellowship at the University of Hawaii. Early in 1977, the program administrators prepared an advertisement showing the photographs of the prospective graduates, me included. Three white males used it as part of their job applications to the
Times.
Semple saw
me in the others’ materials and arranged an appointment. Ask yourself, ‘How many Mandarin-speaking black women journalists, with business training, are on the market?’ ” The
Times
was just about to start its Business Day section, while the
Wall Street Journal
was starting its Hong Kong edition. “I would be a feather in someone’s cap, so a bidding war got under way between the
Journal
and the
Times.
I went to the highest bidder.

“Sometimes the
Times
makes promises it won’t keep, but they lived up to their promises to me. I wanted an Asia assignment and they eventually gave me one. I had a brief training program, I was only in New York for three months. I did the stations of the cross—you know, three weeks on the metro desk, three weeks somewhere else. Then, in May of 1978, I went to Los Angeles. It was an assignment where I could be a self-starter. I don’t need direction, and I was left alone with thirteen states to cover. I was used to being alone, and I was used to leading; in college in Kansas I was the student council president and the president of my sorority. I got to the office at 5:00
A.M.
Robert Lindsey was the bureau chief. We didn’t get in each other’s way. There were plenty of stories for both of us to break.

“I became bureau chief in Manila at a time when the Marcos regime was on the edge. Bob Semple sent me as promised but then Semple was replaced as foreign editor by Craig Whitney, who had different ideas about coverage. He was more Euro-centered. Each time a new foreign editor comes in, he has his own worldview, and the correspondents get shifted around. Of course the
Times
denies it, but the editors shape world coverage to conform to their vision. Whitney’s background was as a reporter in Moscow and Bonn, and so there were more Soviet stories and less about the Pacific Rim. Then, without any discussion with me, they decided to close the Manila bureau—this was right before the Aquino assassination in July 1983! Whitney wanted me out of there. The bureau was closed without so much as a phone call to me.”

(Because Hollie was dismissing out of hand one of the bedrock pretentions of “objective”
Times
journalism, it seemed appropriate to get other correspondents to respond to her charge about the importance of the “worldview” of the foreign editor to them. Three foreign correspondents agreed, separately, that the attention their beats received rose and fell depending on the home editors’ own foreign experience. As a Pacific Rim correspondent explained, “We worry that
the Far East is not ‘understood’ the way Russia is by the editors back home. Take Frankel, who has been stationed in Moscow. His knowledge of Japan, for example, is intellectual not emotional.”)

Hollie remembered telling herself, “If they don’t appreciate what I’ve done for them, then OK, fine. I’m transferred to New York, and guess what? Whitney’s out and a new foreign editor, Warren Hoge, is in. Next, he’s out. And each time they make these changes, a lot of other people get moved around. When Aquino was shot, I’m sitting twenty feet away from the foreign desk, but I’m not called or consulted. After all the expertise they invested in me, nothing. If the foreign desk is not thinking of me that day, then they’re not thinking of me, period. I’m pissed off. I’m tired. I’m buying a co-op. I went to the business desk, to do a financial column. But I made plans to leave. I was lost sight of.” Again, what about the
Times
’ investment in her, and in minorities in general? “I don’t blame ‘racism’ or the ‘system,’ ” she said. “Still, Max never made an effort to discourage my leaving, despite the fact that I hadn’t made any secret of it. I knew I was wasting my talents, and a lot of other people knew too.”

Hollie had no regrets about leaving “the big time.” “It was just a job,” she said. “I always had great jobs. This past year, I won two Fulbrights to return to Asia and lecture. I had no pangs. I hated that neighborhood.” The newsroom, she added, was not a friendly place either. “Not due to its bigness, not due to the dailiness, but I think perhaps because you are dealing with many people who worked their way up in life. The
Times
represents all the social status they have in their lives. Toughness is their badge. They had to be tough to leave their past behind.”

In the Frankel years, too, Pam Hollie’s experience was mirrored in the career of
Paul Delaney, an African-American who seemed to be a committed
Times
lifer. Through the 1970s and 1980s Delaney worked his way up to deputy national editor. In 1989 Frankel—signaling his commitment to “diversity” and more black hires—appointed Delaney senior editor for minority recruitment. Delaney accepted the job with the expectation that, in three years or so, he would be able to leave administration and move up to line responsibilities along The Wall, where the big rewards were. The Wall proved only marginally more responsive to Delaney than to Hollie, and Delaney quit the
Times
in 1992 to accept a journalism professorship at the University of Alabama.
Discouraged, he told the writer Robert Sam Anson: “We haven’t accomplished anything. The fight is the same we had thirty years ago.…” (Frankel was later quoted as saying that such charges by black staff people were “like a dagger in my heart …”)

Delaney and Hollie, in the end, did not qualify as good
Times
men. The same day Hollie was interviewed, that morning’s
Times
carried a full-column obituary on
Philip H. Dougherty, the paper’s advertising columnist, who had died of an apparent heart attack at the age of sixty-four. Phil Dougherty, Hollie said, lived and died in “pure
Times
style—he went to work in 1942 at the
Times
as a nineteen-year-old copy boy, straight from high school, and he never worked anywhere else, or wanted to do anything else except be at the
Times.
”

The obit, written by Dick Shepard, filled out the rest of the picture of a
Times
lifer. Dougherty was born in the Bronx in 1923 and raised in Manhattan. He left the
Times
for World War II service in 1943, and was discharged in 1946 with the rank of master sergeant in the U.S. Army Military Police. He returned to the
Times
as a clerk in the managing editor’s office and took night classes at the Columbia University School of General Studies. In 1949 he was promoted to the society news department and, later, to the metro desk. His advertising column began in October 1966, and appeared five days a week. “
It was the substance of his column that made Mr. Dougherty an influential figure in the advertising world,” Shepard wrote. Shepard also quoted Mark Stroock, a senior vice president at Young & Rubicam: “He gave everyone an absolutely fair shake, and he once told me that he knew if he was writing for the
Hoboken News
and not the
New York Times
, his phone might never ring.” Two weeks later, George Lois, at the time chairman of Lois Pitts Gershon Pon/GGK, offered his affectionate farewell. Dougherty, Lois said, “always arrived at our early morning appointments bearing a bagel and his own herbal tea. I finally put in a supply of chamomile and red zinger and made sure his beloved bagel awaited him. This was his only compromise with integrity.” One Christmas, Lois’s firm sent roses to Dougherty’s wife. The columnist called and angrily ordered Lois never to do it again.

Pamela Hollie added her own appreciation of Phil Dougherty. “He died in his sleep, having written his column for the next day,” she said.

He was the perfect
Times
man.

5:15
P.M.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an MIT seminar room, columnist Anthony Lewis decided he had made the right decision to attend the Al-Azm lecture. Lewis heard a brilliant, sarcastic interpretation of Islamic fundamentalism, an antidote to much of what he had been reading in the papers, including in the
Times.
The Ayatollah Khomeini’s brand of fundamentalism, Al-Azm argued, has not taken hold in the Arab world.

Mark Landler, the news assistant in New York, waited for his “good night.” The Terry Rakolta piece would run, without his byline.
Times
’ news assistants, during one month of their fourteen-month tryouts, did a reporter’s work for a reporter’s pay and byline. By the
Times
’ same rules, anything published outside that one-month period appeared unsigned, even on page one.

Free of the deadline-news crush in the Washington bureau, Barbara Gamarekian took a phone call from Lori Heise, a senior researcher at the World Watch Institute. Heise described a new report that gave a global overview of violence against women, from bride burning to female circumcision. Gamarekian asked Heise to messenger over the report, promising to read it within a day and discuss it with her editors. Another call came from David Chikvaidze, counselor at the Russian embassy on Sixteenth Street. He invited Gamarekian to a “Spring tea” with Mrs. Dubinin, the wife of the ambassador, on March 10 at 5:00
P.M.
No special reason was given, but Gamarekian had been trying to get the embassy to cooperate for the past three years on an article about how Soviet diplomats live and work in Washington. Gamarekian accepted the invitation, polished her redo of the women-diplomats story, and turned it in to her editor, David Binder.

Karl Meyer finished reading the Amnesty International report and began his “Topics of the Times” editorial for Sunday’s paper. “Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad dictatorship is one of the world’s most barbaric tyrannies,” Meyer wrote. The headline was also blunt: “Horror in Iraq.”

6:00
P.M.

David Jones laid out page one of the national edition, and gave the lead right-hand column space to the Tower nomination, demoting
the Shoreham story that was leading the “basic” paper. He phoned Frankel to inform him of the switch. Jones’s office, along the same wall as Frankel’s, was a little bigger than a broom closet. Overhead, half the acoustic ceiling tiles had been removed, exposing a large, white-plastic elbow pipe leading out of the old composing room one story above. A cold-water leak from a clogged drain had soaked through the ceiling; the new tiles, recently installed because of a previous leak, had been removed. Metal wastebaskets served as makeshift drip buckets to catch the water. Taped to Jones’s door, an oversize strip of computer printout paper carried the hand-scrawled warning: “Do Not Use This Room—Engineering Dept.”

At home, Anthony Lewis worked on his column until 7:30. The draft began with the Tower nomination and used the Suciu case as an example of how secret evidence, untested by cross-examination, led to injustices. Lewis was not satisfied with the draft, and broke off for dinner.