Behind the Times (62 page)

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There was a category of book-news chatter that the
Times
absolutely did not seek. In the mid-1980s, the press critic David Shaw of the
Los Angeles Times
compiled a list of forty episodes where, he was told, “
the fix was in” at the
New York Times.
Supposedly, in each case a book and a reviewer had been brought together by the
Times’
editors, to reward a friend or punish an enemy. Some of Shaw’s sources telephoned him with their “leads” in the middle of the night; these tipsters, as well as other informants, asked for anonymity, explaining that, as they were writers or editors whose books would someday come up for scrutiny, they couldn’t afford to offend the
Times.
Shaw checked through the list. He concluded that there was evidence of impropriety in about a half-dozen cases at most. And even then, the
Times’
assigning editors seemed less at fault than individual reviewers. Typically, the outside reviewers concealed their intentions to use the review to settle old scores or to provide a boost to a friend (or to someone who was a friend of a friend, or who shared the same publishing house). Two of Shaw’s examples conveyed a sense of how that part of the game was played. The veteran author and journalist Roger Kahn gave a bad review to Daniel Okrent’s baseball book,
Nine Innings.
Less than two years before, Okrent had panned Kahn’s baseball book,
The Seventh Game
, also in the
Book Review.
According to Levitas, no one on the staff remembered the earlier review. Kahn’s explanation put a much greater strain on credulity: Kahn said he didn’t disqualify himself from reviewing
Nine Innings
because he didn’t know Okrent had reviewed
The Seventh Game.
If true, Kahn belonged in the
Guinness Book of World Records
: first author
not
to read the
Times
review of his book. In the same period, too, the British author Margaret Drabble reviewed Mary Gordon’s novel
Men and Angels
on the front page of the
Book Review.
Gordon and Drabble were friends, and Drabble had earlier written a jacket blurb for the paperback edition of Gordon’s novel
Final Payments
(“Original, perceptive, highly intelligent and remarkably honest,” the blurb read). Again, the reviewer, the previewing editor, and the supervising editors all suffered from another spell of collective amnesia: “No one noticed.”

In at least one case, Levitas and the
Times
could hardly plead innocence. In 1985 Simon & Schuster published
Mayor
, the autobiography of the then New York City mayor, Edward I. Koch. Ed Koch received the
Times’
endorsement when he initially ran as well as for
each of the three times he was up for reelection. To review
Mayor
for the
Book Review
, Levitas chose Gay Talese. Although he was a former
Times
man and a celebrated writer, Talese was not known for any particular knowledge of City Hall or local New York politics. Talese was known, however, as the author of a history of the
New York Times.
In one passage, Talese described how the
Book Review
, when choosing reviewers, relied on “friends of the
Times
”—academics, authors, intellectuals, journalists, and people in public life who “greatly admired the paper, stood by its principles, and shared its traditional respect for the established order and solid middle-class values.” This passage came to mind when Talese’s page-one appreciation of
Mayor
appeared in the
Book Review
of February 12, 1984. A Simon & Schuster publicity woman told Shaw that the pairing of Koch and Talese was “a match made in heaven,” explaining that both men were “great friends of the
New York Times.
” She added: “we knew it would be a wonderful review, and it was even better than we’d hoped.” By contrast, in 1985, Arthur Browne of the
New York Daily News
, Michael Goodwin of the
Times
, and Dan Collins of the Associated Press—three journalists who covered the mayor and city politics, day to day, tribe by tribe, finagle by finagle—published a critical study of the mayor called
I, Koch.
The
Book Review
buried I,
Koch
on the “In Short” page.

The
Times
reemphasized its policy on conflict-of-interest reviews in the years since Shaw’s survey. Editors were formally prohibited from assigning books to reviewers with “close ties to anyone who is prominently mentioned in the book under consideration.” Unofficially, some assigning editors used a “names test”—checking the index of the book to determine whether a prospective reviewer was or was not mentioned. But the checking process sometimes broke down. The
Book Review
staff, like other desks in the news department, was under deadline pressures. Wrong assignments were made; friends got a chance to take care of friends, enemies to tuck it to enemies. An immaculately conceived
Book Review
, free of politics and intrigue, would have been a miracle of publishing. As the author and book editor Gordon Lish told Shaw: “There’s no way for even the
New York Times
to have an up-to-date registry of all the alliances and misalliances in the literary world. They proliferate almost hourly.”

Nevertheless, the
Book Review
did try. “
We bend over backward, we pool our communal knowledge,” Sinkler said. She was book editor of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
for five years and then served as a
previewing editor and deputy editor of the
Book Review
from 1985 to 1989, before becoming its editor. When Sinkler, her deputy, and her previewing editors met to chose books for review and decide on the reviewers, she said, “We share a body of experience and history. We remember a lot, we try to be aware of what the reviewer has done in the past. But we are human.” Sinkler wanted reviewers without conflicting interests; but she also wanted more stylish writing in the
Book Review
pages. Although hired during the A. M. Rosenthal era, she was promoted to
Book Review
editor by Max Frankel, the advocate of the livelier, brighter
Times.
Sinkler tried to navigate a middle course through the treacherous book territory of authors, editors, reviewers, and publishing houses. On one side, Sinkler explained, “If we pick someone with no connection at all to the book topic, then people will ask ‘Why pick him?’ There has to be some intuitive or imaginative connection.” On the other side: “We don’t want a predictable review. We look for a fair, interesting, informed, well written
and
entertaining review.” The ideal
Times
reviewer, Sinkler suggested, “was someone not altogether predictable, but not off the wall, either.” Pressed for a specific example of what she would try to avoid, Sinkler paused for a moment and then replied: “Where a public record exists, we try to avoid that reviewer as well.… We wouldn’t give the Steinem to Friedan.”

It was easy to understand why Sinkler did not ask Betty Friedan to review Gloria Steinem’s 1992 book,
Revolution From Within: A Book for Self-Esteem.
The most casual newspaper reader had heard of the barely civil relationship between two of the founding mothers of the modern feminist movement. A previewing editor’s check of the
Revolution from Within
index would have produced evidence of a remarkable omission: Steinem recommended some 140 books for further reading in her two appendixes—and managed to skip any mention of
The Feminine Mystique
, the book by Friedan that helped start the women’s revolution from without. The harder calls for the previewing editors involve less well known figures. “We can’t read every page of every single book,” Sinkler acknowledged. “And so we are vulnerable. We have to rely on the reviewer to make the process credible. We ask the reviewer, ‘Will the author have any grounds for objecting to you as a reviewer?’ ”

These procedures didn’t dissuade the conspiracy theorists. David Shaw concluded that “paranoia” about the motives of the
Book Review
was
the most common affliction among the congenitally jittery natives of the New York publishing world. The
Los Angeles Times
survey had minimal impact; it wasn’t hard for me to collect a fresh batch of “fix stories.” Three cases in particular offered rich details.

The first involved Joan Mellen, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. Mellen complained that the
Book Review
assigned her 1988 biography of Bobby
Knight, the Indiana University basketball coach, to a reviewer on the staff of
Sports Illustrated
—despite the fact that the magazine had conducted an “unrelenting vendetta” against Knight. Moreover, the
Book Review
’s identification box at the bottom of the review did not mention reviewer Rick Telander’s connection to the magazine. The review itself, which appeared in the
Book Review
of October 30, 1988, was hostile and gratuitously nasty. Mellen, who knew Sinkler from her days at the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, wrote to protest the way the book was treated. Three weeks later, on November 20, the
Times
ran both a formal letter from Mellen in the
Book Review
and an “Editors’ Note” in the main news section stating that Telander should not have been chosen to review Mellen’s book. But Mellen believed that by then all the damage had been done: “My book was on the
Times
best-seller list the week before,” she remembered. “After the review appeared, it did not get on again. It’s hard to prove that the review made the difference, but it sure had to hurt sales in the East. Indiana fans would laugh off such a review, of course.”

A second case involved Dan Moldea, an independent journalist based in Washington. Since 1974 Moldea has concentrated on investigating organized-crime influences on putatively legitimate enterprises. In his 1986 book
Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob
, Moldea explored Reagan’s Hollywood years and his relationship to the communications giant Music Corporation of America when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. In 1989 Moldea’s book
Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football
alleged endemic corruption and gambling throughout the National Football League. The book was well received in regional publications such as the
Dallas Morning News
and the
Boston Herald
, and Moldea was interviewed by Larry King on CNN. But in the
Book Review
of September 3, 1989,
Times
sportswriter Gerald Eskenazi dismissed
Interference
as “sloppy journalism.” Moldea complained to the
Book Review
, arguing that Eskenazi was not a neutral observer; rather, Eskenazi had covered the
NFL for more than thirty years and “was determined to protect his friends and sources in the League.” The
Times
refused Moldea’s request for a retraction or correction, telling him it was “standing by the review.” Meanwhile, according to Moldea, his publisher, Morrow, “withdrew support for the book, more than twelve thousand copies were returned from bookstores, reviews and articles in other newspapers virtually ceased, and there was no paperback book contract.” A year later, Moldea sued the
Times
for defamatory libel, asking $10 million in damages. In February 1992, Judge John Garrett Penn in the Federal District Court in Washington granted the
Times’
motion for summary judgment. According to Penn, “A book review is … the type of article which the reasonable reader knows is comprised of the reviewer’s opinion.… The statement at issue ‘too much sloppy journalism’ … is an unverifiable opinion and is thus not actionable under libel law.” The law, narrowly interpreted, was on the
Times’
side; but the editors’ decision to ignore Moldea meant that the antennas of the
Book Review
were attuned mostly to Big Noises like Mailer, and not to scuffling free-lancers or to small publishing houses on the fringes of mediaworld.

In a third case, however, a mainstream publisher stood together with its author against the
Book Review
—and won modest redress. In 1991 Sinkler and her editors assigned Stephen Ambrose, the historian and biographer of Richard M. Nixon, to review
Silent Coup
, an eccentric, revisionist retelling of the Watergate scandals.
Silent Coup
’s coauthors were two free-lancers, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin. Their book portrayed Nixon as the victim of Watergate rather than its villain. In the
Book Review
of June 23, 1991, Ambrose criticized Colodny-Gettlin for their research techniques and dismissed their “radical findings.” George Witte of St. Martin’s Press, the publishers of
Silent Coup
, received his advance copy of the
Book Review
earlier in the week. He immediately sent Rebecca Sinkler a two-page, single-spaced letter, detailing why he thought Ambrose should have been disqualified from reviewing Colodny-Gettlin. Among Witte’s assertions were the following: Ambrose shared a publisher (Simon & Schuster) and an editor (Alice Mayhew) with two principals in the book that Colodny-Gettlin had dealt with harshly; Ambrose had his own Nixon book coming out in three months; and perhaps most damning of all, Ambrose had written Colodny two years before and offered to trade “findings.” According to Witte, when Colodny refused, Ambrose supposedly said: “A historian like myself could make or break this type of book.” Witte asked Sinkler to run the complete text of his letter in the
Book Review
of June 30, “on the heels of the Ambrose review, when readers will still have it handy or in mind.” A
Times’
note of regret appeared on July 7, acknowledging that, if the editors had known of the Ambrose-Colodny exchange, the book would have been assigned to a different reviewer. The “Editors’ Note” did little to reverse the downward plunge of the sales of
Silent Coup
after the Ambrose review appeared.

In the Ambrose case, the
Book Review
assumed the role of injured party, ill-used by less-than-honest outside reviewers. But there was a special group of cases where the book editors could not plead victimization. These reviews involved
Times
people, as authors or as reviewers.