Behind the Times (51 page)

He had said the same thing about the
Times
choice in the Abzug-Moynihan race of 1976.

A year after Bush-Dukakis the choice facing the board was between two other “good men”—New York City’s three-term mayor Edward I. Koch and the African-American challenger,
David Dinkins. Koch was in a close race with Dinkins in the September 1989 primary (two other candidates, Richard Ravitch and Harrison Goldin—like Koch, white, Jewish men—were also on the Democratic ballot, but were not given much chance of winning). The
Times
editorial page had endorsed Koch for a third term in 1985, though with a mild warning that he ought to work harder “in advancing harmony”—editorialese for saying that the city badly needed better relations among its contentious black, white, Hispanic, and Asian racial and ethnic groups. After four more years of Koch, such harmony seemed as elusive as ever. But the
Times
’ endorsement of Koch for a fourth term did not appear to be in doubt, certainly as far as reporters seven floors below in the newsroom were concerned. Two of the
Times
’ best political reporters privately pointed to the Sulzbergers’ long-standing relationship with Koch. “If
there is any way they could see to endorse, I knew they would,” the first reporter said. The second reporter said he understood why outsiders thought the
Times
might back Dinkins, but they didn’t really know the Sulzbergers: “Punch and Arthur think Dinkins is ‘too liberal.’ That’s not to say they are racists. Actually, Dinkins never made a good case for himself, except to say ‘I can heal the rift between the races.’ While that’s powerful, it’s not complete.”

Again, the way the
Times
made its Koch endorsement called as much attention to the process as to the result. The editorial ran on September 3, with the headline “The Case for Ed Koch—and His Duty.” It made a case for genetic engineering. According to the
Times
, Dinkins was “measured, highly likable, dignified, decent.” Koch, while provocative, “has proved his ability to run the city.” Each man, said the
Times
, offered what the other most lacks. “The ideal outcome would be both.” And so it went, as the
Times
laid out the pluses and minuses of both men, before recommending Koch. The choice was presented so diffidently that Dinkins supporters carved a primary-day flier out of it. As the flier put it: “ ‘The city might be well served by a Mayor Dinkins.’—
The New York Times.
”

The
Times
derived benefits from its exquisite even-handedness. Dinkins won the primary race, and the editorial page endorsed him against the Republican Rudolph Giuliani in the general election. The
Times
had it both ways, casting its vote first for “moderation” (Koch) and then for “progress” (Dinkins): for past and present, for white and black. In the spring of 1992, halfway through the presidential primaries, readers began looking for signs of what the
Times
was thinking about the fall election. Richard Harwood, then the press critic for the
Washington Post
, wryly noted that the
Times
recommended that the Republicans renominate George Bush (“a prudent player”) and that the Democrats choose Governor Bill Clinton (he has “sensible priorities”). The recommendations appeared weeks after the outcomes of the two campaigns were settled. “
The daredevil
Times
,” Harwood joked.

An editorial at the time of the
founding of Op-Ed explained that the page was intended to provide a forum for social, personal and political expression by writers “with no institutional connection to the
Times.
” The page itself, as well as the new prominence accorded columns and opinion journalism throughout the
Times
, was offered as evidence of the Sulzberger family’s desire to promote the principle of free speech,
to honor
Times
“traditions” and “better serve its readers by welcoming a variety of views.” It takes nothing from “tradition” to point out that the
Times
borrowed the idea of an Op-Ed from elsewhere. A version of a page devoted to opinion appeared in the
Chicago Tribune
as early as 1912; in 1921, Herbert Bayard Swope, editor of the
New York World
, conceived of a full page of columns. Swope spelled it
Op. Ed.
and invited some of the best newspaper writers of the day, including Heywood Broun, Alexander Woollcott, Deems Taylor, Harry Hansen, and Franklin P. Adams, to contribute (Swope didn’t publish unsolicited manuscripts). Thirty years later, the
Times
began talking about an Op-Ed page, as we saw; ten more years passed before Punch Sulzberger agreed to move the obituary notices—a major part of the old Paper of Record—from their prominent position on the page across from the editorial page. There was no journalistic loss in this shift; it is the nature of obits that their regular audience will find them, wherever they run in the paper.

Times
purists, like Clifton Daniel, had made the rearguard case against Op-Ed, arguing that outsiders’ opinions would “dilute” the
Times
’ authority, and appear to give its imprimatur to who-knows-what views. But Punch Sulzberger had good practical reasons to do just that. He knew exactly what views he wanted, worried as he was about the “perception” that the
Times
’ editorial page was “too liberal” for the country in the post-Vietnam years. The publisher signaled as much in 1973, with his first big Op-Ed column hire, William Safire. Talk about abandoning the old purity: Safire was an outsider, spectacularly so, by
Times
standards. He had never worked for the
Times
, and his newsroom experience was minimal—actually, he was not a journalist at all but a public relations man and a speechwriter for the enemy, Richard Nixon. Nor was Safire the
Times
’ first choice to be its house conservative.

The opinion explosion at the
Times
brought immediate payoffs to the paper, too. From the start, the bottom right-hand space on the Op-Ed page was available to advertisers with messages of a public policy nature. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Fortune 500 corporations, labor unions, and lobbying groups paid premium prices to the
Times
for the privilege
“of renting space on the inside of the paper’s cranium,” in the writer Robert Sherrill’s words. The Mobil Corporation, for example, was a longtime advertiser and sole sponsor for the
Times
’ special supplement commemorating the twentieth anniversary
of the Op-Ed page. On September 30, 1990, Mobil paid $300,000 to run eight pages of ads in the twenty-page section. Representative Op-Ed articles from 1970 to 1990 appeared interspersed with Mobil’s views on entrepreneurial capitalism and ad copy proclaiming the oil company’s devotion to the environment.

The
Times
had other practical reasons for promoting “diversity.” The Sulzbergers were not the first press proprietors to discover that the essay form—five hundred to one thousand words of opinion by one writer, whether staff person or contributor—could be cost effective. A column was less expensive to produce than an equivalent amount of hard news, which required the time, legwork, and processing talents of a team of reporters and editors. The column form was also attractive as a management tool. The columnist’s chair could serve as a prize to reward the deserving: Anna Quindlen became an Op-Ed columnist at the age of forty, in 1990, when—her celebrity assured—she was about to quit the
Times
and become a writer of novels and magazine articles. The publisher talked her out of leaving by making her a columnist. A generation before, the publisher similarly arranged a column for a thirty-seven-year-old named Russell Baker, after he received an attractive offer from the
Baltimore Sun.
Columns also were used as consolation prizes for the losers of bureaucratic wars—Tom Wicker became a columnist after his removal as the
Times
’ Washington bureau chief—and to provide a soft landing for superannuated editors (veterans that the publisher, for whatever his reasons, wanted to move out of their posts). A. M. Rosenthal left the news department at the age of sixty-five to become an Op-Ed columnist, and Leslie Gelb went from Op-Ed page editor to Op-Ed columnist. But perhaps most important of all from the perspective of the publisher’s office, the new array of columns, “Notebooks,” and first-person opinion helped make the
Times
a friendlier read. The daily run of hard news was, inevitably, depressing: war, riot, crime, recession, bank failures, crumbling roads and bridges, the constant fraying of the social fabric. Sometimes stories were so discouraging that the reader wanted to put the paper down, and absorb no more (including the advertisements). Such hard news couldn’t be controlled; it happened, and a news organization reacted. On the other hand, opinion was manageable; editors had it in their power to create pages with an up feeling. Columns provided an antidote to grim news; they were good for business. The night before Arthur Sulzberger was named publisher of the
Times
on January 16,
1992, he was in Washington, inaugurating a series of lectures about the
Times.
According to Arthur, people should read the
Times
, “not only because it is the best newspaper in the world, but also for the
fun of it.” Arthur specifically mentioned the joy of reading Russell Baker and Anna Quindlen.

For a variety of reasons, then, the
Times
changed the balance of news and opinion in its pages during the decade of the 1980s. The earlier sectional revolution had been accomplished with wide publicity; the
Times
trumpeted Weekend, Home, and the other new specialized services—there was no reason to conceal what was going on. The
Times
’ shift to opinion in the 1980s was engineered gradually, with little public comment. Before anyone noticed, the
Times
’ venerable word factory underwent a top-to-bottom conversion; the old, heavy-industry assembly line gave way to a kind of automated, post-industrial facility: opinion manufacturing. Operationally, the production of opinion was more efficient than the old, cumbersome techniques of hard-news gathering. The “Campus Life” news section required a staff of editors and dozens of stringers (albeit hourly-wage workers); one talented professional operator smoothly turned out “The Arm Fetish” for the hipper-than-thou pages of the new “Styles” section.

The opinion product proved popular with consumers. The modern
Times
shrewdly understood its niche in the contemporary marketplace.
Times
people explained patiently to outsiders that “Op-Ed” meant no more than “opposite the editorial page”—and not, as Clifton Daniel had feared, “contrary to the editorial policies of the
Times.
”

The purists never should have worried. While quantitatively more opinion appeared in the
Times
, the qualitative differences along the contributions grew less and less discernible. The overall voice was unmistakable: measured, safe, conventional wisdom. Readers could remove the columnists’ bylines on top, or the line at the bottom identifying the contributor, and know that, whatever the specific topic, they were reading the
Times.
The market success of the new
Times
suggested that the core audience wanted, at most, the appearance of diversity, and not riotous, subversive diversity itself.

Bill Safire, of all the
Times
’ house columnists, managed to remain contrarian and consistently interesting over the years. He had obvious blind spots and played favorites; but his collection of pets had an eclectic charm: Richard Nixon, Israel, White House speech writers,
Roy Cohn. Safire had an original turn of mind, and created a repertory of recurring themes for his column—fashioning a speech that he wanted the president of the United States to give, or peering into the thoughts of one or another foreign leader, stream-of-consciousness fashion. In part, too, Safire stayed fresh because he worked hard at the column form, and cultivated a wide range of contacts. But Safire’s columns also looked good by default: He was the only Washington-based writer on the page. Russell Baker, nominally a member of the Washington bureau, rarely came into the office, or the city. He preferred to stay at home in suburban Virginia, spinning out twice-weekly columns remarkable for their detachment. Many of these light essays—Baker, thirty years before, named the column “Observer”—took off from what he read in the morning newspapers or saw the night before on television. There was no pretense of reporting or research. Still, Baker usually managed to slip a needle into the received wisdom of the day, occasionally deflating some of the
Times
’ own more self-serving editorial stands. In a column on New York City redevelopers’ plans for the West Side, for example, Baker chided megadevelopments in language reminiscent of the deposed Sydney Schanberg (the radical Schanbergian thoughts that had so offended the Sulzbergers were offered with Baker’s signature ironic touch).

Safire and Baker weren’t pompous. Neither man was totally consumed by newspaper work; their energies also went into their books—Baker’s multivolume memoirs, Safire’s novels and series on grammar usage and etymology. Neither man took his Op-Ed status too seriously, either. When Abe Rosenthal started his column, Safire advised the new Op-Ed man, “Don’t be objective.”

At the very start, there was some talk about making the Op-Ed page more provocative. “
I had a rule of thumb,” Harrison Salisbury, the first Op-Ed-page editor, remembered in an interview a few years before his death in 1993. “I wanted people to pick up the paper each day, shake their head, and ask, ‘What’s that horse’s ass done this morning?’ ” In the interests of shock, he ran a contribution by a father who shot his son after discovering the young man was a drug abuser. But the measure of Op-Ed “provocation” could be judged by what Salisbury cited as the most quoted contribution during his time—a slight turn by the writer J. B. Priestley, who argued the superiority of British civilization because of the English preference for eating brown eggs. Not surprisingly, Salisbury was happy to move on from the page after
three years: “An editor has a few ideas, he runs through them, and then begins recycling them. The shorter tenure, the better. I don’t mean to be invidious,” he added, “but after my regime I think the page lost its zip.” His successor, Charlotte Curtis, struggled through a losing battle with cancer. Her successor,
Robert Semple, reported to Max Frankel, at the time the editorial-page editor and, Salisbury said, “a too predictable journalist: Max was not given to controversy.”