Behind the Times (52 page)

Semple acknowledged that he “took a more conservative tack than Harrison.” Semple said his favorite Op-Ed article during his time was a short essay on women and the “tyranny” of high-heel shoes. The most talked-about Semple-era article was William Buckley, Jr.’s, unironic proposal to tattoo an identification mark on people carrying the AIDS virus. In 1989, when Semple was replaced by Leslie Gelb, the page benefited from Gelb’s extensive diplomatic contacts, and his Washington “perspective.” “He knew all the players,” Semple said. “He was one himself.” Much less was expected of Mitchel Levitas, the editor who replaced Gelb in October 1990. A
Times
lifer and third-floor loyalist, Levitas was only a few years from retirement when he came up to the tenth floor; supposedly, he would quietly serve out his time—the bland leading the bland. Instead Levitas livened up the page, sometimes breaking genuine news. In April 1991, for example, Levitas published an article by Gary Sick, the former Carter administration national security analyst who accused Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign team of an “October Surprise” (briefly, a plot to delay the release of U.S. hostages in Iran in order to insure Reagan’s election). In August 1991 James H. Billington, a leading historian and the Librarian of Congress, happened to be visiting Moscow during the hardliners’ attempted coup; his Op-Ed page account presented a better eyewitness picture of events than could be found in the news pages.

For a while a few years ago, the
Times
’ quest for Op-Ed diversity seemed to be answered, as if from demographic heaven. When the Sulzbergers announced
Anna Quindlen’s appointment as an Op-Ed columnist, she had a husband, three children, and more than twelve years’ experience as a reporter, editor, and writer for the
Times.
Quindlen had contributed to the “Hers” feature in the
Times
, then wrote the “Life in the 30s” column. She began appearing on the Op-Ed page in January 1990: the
Times
’ signal at the start of the new decade that a fresh voice—young, female, and personal—was going to be heard among the old, familiar public-policy pundits. Quindlen was
at home,
Newsweek
said, “in the rocky emotional terrain of marriage, parenthood, secret desires, and self-doubts.” According to the magazine, her columns were the kind that other thirtysomethings tacked to their refrigerator doors, to be read and reread. A profile of Quindlen in
Elle
noted she had been named “one of the outstanding mothers in America.” The magazine added that her readers were the ones the
Times
was trying to attract: “young, well-to-do women.”

Quindlen’s columns made her admirers feel that they had been invited into her house, to look at her refrigerator door and everything else. Readers came to recognize her from television appearances, university lectures, and book tours. In her columns, she described herself for them: small, dark, “no longer a size eight.” She wrote in intimate terms of growing up in suburban Philadelphia in a large Irish-Italian family; the father, a management consultant; her mother, a victim of cancer when Anna Quindlen was nineteen. Her fans knew she went to Barnard; knew how at the college baby-sitting service, she looked through the files to find
Times
reporters who needed sitters, and how after a few months, she could turn to them, the Habermans, the Van Gelders, for career guidance. Then up the journalism ladder: the Brunswick, New Jersey,
Home News
, the
New York Post
, the
New York Times
to be a general-assignment reporter. Marriage to criminal lawyer Jerry Krovatin. The birth of their sons Quin and Christopher, and then daughter Maria. The story of her job interviews at the
Times
were recounted by admirers. Asked what she wanted to do at the
Times
, she squared her shoulders and declared that she wished most of all to be a street reporter for the Metro section. The editor gave her a stricken look: “I realized that was not the ‘correct’ answer.” Sent on to the metro editor, John Vinocur, for her next interview, she remembered that he was a former foreign correspondent; he had worked in the
Times
’ Bonn bureau, not in Brooklyn or the Bronx. “I want to work abroad, I want to cover Germany,” she told him brightly.

By 1981 Quindlen was writing “About New York,” the column that Meyer Berger once did. At the age of thirty-three, in 1983, Quindlen was named deputy metro editor, and became the highest-ranking news-woman at the
Times.
“A group of us at the
Times
call ourselves the ‘class of ’78,’ ” she liked to say. “We directly benefited from the women’s discrimination suit [settled in 1978].” Now she reached out to a new generation of women at the
Times
, to smooth their path. “Women hit
the glass ceiling later,” she said. “It used to be at nineteen, now it’s
thirty-two. A generation ago, I would have tried to blend in with the men at the
Times.
Now I speak up on women’s issues.” Quindlen, the storyteller, could turn the account of how she named her Op-Ed column into a bright anecdote for her audience. She and Jack Rosenthal considered such titles as “Out of Bounds” and “Persuasions”—“I’m an admirer of the novels of Jane Austen,” she said—but a data-base search disclosed that “Persuasions” was already being used for a column in an S&M magazine. The pair agreed on “Public & Private.”

In many ways “Public & Private” was a dream assignment. Quindlen had complete freedom to write about any topic she wanted, with no editor looking over her shoulder (the column was read before publication solely by a copy editor, who checked for grammar and for conformity to
Times
usage). Her relationship with the Sulzbergers was ideal. She counted herself among the friends of Arthur Sulzberger and his wife, Gail Gregg; Punch Sulzberger took a fatherly though more distant interest in her work.

Initially, “Public & Private” worked. Quindlen told wonderful stories, mixed the serious and the personal, reporting and opinion. She visited a city shelter rather than telephoning some expert to talk about “the homeless.” Quindlen, a practicing Roman Catholic, announced she was pro-choice on abortion; her column, too, quirkily blended liberal and traditional attitudes. The Pulitzer Board awarded her its prize for newspaper commentary for 1991. Then, curiously, the storytelling qualities that made the early columns so successful disappeared; there were fewer visits to shelters, the phone calls seeking expert information dropped off as well. Weeks went by, then months, with Quindlen having little fresh to say. In the late spring of 1992, the columnist Nat Hentoff said in public what a number of Quindlen readers were thinking in private: “Anna Quindlen … writes as if she were giving a dinner speech at a fund-raiser for one of a number of very worthy causes. There is less reporting and much more proclaiming.” An Op-Ed column is supposed to be the place for a point of view; but absent reporting, Quindlen’s proclamations became predictable. Name the cause and the reader knew the Quindlen position: Anita Hill versus Clarence Thomas, Hillary Clinton’s career and marriage, the family values of Dan Quayle and “Murphy Brown.” At times she reduced her column to a recitation of positions; at the height of the H. Ross Perotmania in the spring and summer of 1992, Quindlen wrote: “Fact is
that on many current issues
I’m in agreement with Mr. Perot. Opposed Gulf war, favors legal abortion. Thinks Anita Hill was treated shabbily, hawks early childhood education. Too much lobbying, too little listening. Wrestle that deficit to the ground. Hear, hear!” Trite, trite!

If Quindlen no longer offered any surprises on the Op-Ed page, there was always the
Times
’ other “personal” columnist, A. M. Rosenthal. After all his years as the fearsome hard-news man, Abe Rosenthal revealed a new persona. He called his column “On My Mind,” to signal he would speak his thoughts directly to the reader. The topics on his mind had little to do with the city he lived in or the work of his professional life. Consider a random sample of ninety-five Rosenthal columns published from July 1988 to March 1990, a period that included the U.S. presidential elections, the New York City mayoral race and, abroad, the penultimate days of the Soviet Union. Some of the topics overlapped; a column on the collapse of communism was as much about Washington as Moscow. But on a scale of frequency, George
Bush was the most popular single subject; 34 of the 95 columns focused on or mentioned Bush. Abe Rosenthal was the second most frequent subject: More than a third of the columns (32) were written in the first person. Approximately a third of the columns (31) dealt with Israel and/or American Jews (four were about anti-Semitism). The Soviet Union and Gorbachev were the next most frequent topic (29 columns). At the other end of the scale, only two columns focused on or mentioned the New York governor, Mario Cuomo. The two New York mayors, Edward Koch and David Dinkins, combined receive fewer mentions than either the Israeli leaders Shamir or Peres (Dinkins succeeded Koch in 1989).

Jewish matters did not weigh so heavily on Rosenthal’s mind when he was running the news department in the 1970s and 1980s. The
Times
archives contain scores of letters written to Rosenthal over the years from the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish organizations; many of these letters complained of the
Times
’ inattention to stories that the writers considered worthy of coverage. Editor Rosenthal invariably upheld the
Times
’ news judgments on “Jewish stories,” as he did when black- or gay- or Irish-activist groups complained about coverage. Columnist Rosenthal, however, became a defender of the faith. Over several weeks in early 1992, he engaged in an acrimonious dispute with the Washington columnists Roland Evans and Robert Novak about whether Israel shared classified U.S. missile technology
with China; earlier, Rosenthal took on the commentator and sometime Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan for his “pattern” of remarks (among other things, Buchanan accused Israel and its “amen corner” in the U.S. of “beating the drums” for war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein). Abe Rosenthal’s late-life embrace of his Jewish roots became material for the gossip writers, especially when, in the spring of 1992, Rosenthal decided to be bar-mitzvahed. The religious Jew’s passage to manhood, the bar mitzvah involves biblical study, Hebrew lessons, and prayer; it is normally undertaken when a Jewish boy nears his thirteenth birthday. But as Rosenthal explained to Deborah Mitchell of the weekly
New York Observer
, his father died a few months before the usual bar mitzvah time, making any ceremony impossible; moreover, the father, Harry, was a socialist-agnostic who had lost his faith in organized religion and had stopped going to temple. Through the years, the son was angry and upset, and “as he worked to free himself of those emotions, he realized he could finally release them by partaking of the ritual he had missed decades ago.” The bar mitzvah took place at the time of Rosenthal’s seventieth birthday, on a Saturday at the Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue. The celebratory party afterward was held in the L’Orangerie at Le Cirque, the East Side restaurant. The guest list included Rosenthal’s wife, Shirley Lord, several
Times
people, Elie and Marion Wiesel, and some of New Society’s most indefatigable partygoers, such as Henry Kissinger, Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg, and Robert and Georgette Mosbacher. The monologuist Jackie Mason would be hard-pressed to top this social comedy of “real life.”

The Op-Ed page continued to evolve. Les Gelb said he aimed for “more liveliness.” Jack Rosenthal described the need for a “variety of features.” From time to time, an old rumor kept resurfacing; the
Times
was said to be considering an Op-Ed page political cartoon, in the style of Herblock of the
Washington Post
or Doug Marlette of
Newsday.
Publicly, the Sulzbergers continued to resist proposals for a full-time cartoonist. According to Robert Semple, “The official answer is ‘an in-house political cartoon would be read as reflecting the
Times
’ point of view’ ”—and the Sulzbergers were not yet prepared to accord any one cartoonist that much “authority.” That position began to evolve, too, slowly. In the mid-1980s, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau—fearful that the
News
, the New York City outlet for his “Doonesbury” comic strip, might go out of business as a result of strikes and inept management—made
private inquiries about the possibility of switching the strip to the
Times.
He was told through intermediaries that the
Times
wasn’t interested in “Doonesbury.” But Trudeau had admirers at the paper, including Jack Rosenthal, and in the spring of 1990, Trudeau formally became an “occasional contributor” to the Op-Ed page. His Op-Ed work combined text and drawings, offering sardonic commentary on such topics as Richard Nixon’s paranoid style (inspired by the publication of a new volume of Nixon memoirs), the Oliver Stone film
J.F.K.
, the prevalence of spin doctors in politics, and the marketing of the singer Madonna. By the time of the 1992 presidential campaign, Trudeau was appearing monthly, though always described with the bland ID, “occasional contributor.”

Perhaps the greatest Op-Ed shift of all occurred about this time, with no public hint that anything on the page had changed. The retirement of the veteran Flora Lewis and, a year later, the departure of Tom Wicker after almost three decades on the page, marked more than the end of two long-running Op-Ed columnists. Lewis and Wicker had a lifetime assignment: It was understood that they would write their columns until the normal age-range for retirement (Punch Sulzberger’s sacking of Syd Schanberg was the exception that proved the tenure rule). With Lewis and Wicker gone—and with Russell Baker, A. M. Rosenthal, and Anthony Lewis to follow, relatively soon—the old University-style tenure system was dead. Though very few of the newshounds on the third floor knew it, the Op-Ed rules seven floors above had been rewritten, in stealth fashion: the two newest columnists, Les Gelb and Anna Quindlen, received three-year appointments only, with a provision that the agreements were renewable, although not automatically.