Hard News (36 page)

Just as the hubbub over his rage-fueled diatribe was dying down, Raines began circulating a proposal for a book titled
Catch and Release,
a sequel to
Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis.
^*55
The book, as Raines described it in a nine-page letter to his agent, would weave an account of an “epic” seven-hour battle Raines fought with a marlin in the South Pacific with reminiscences and observations from Raines’s professional life, along with the story of how he met and married his second wife. The proposal was soon leaked to the
Daily News,
whose Paul Colford quoted Raines as writing that the book would feed “into the guiding metaphor of captivity and release that is at the heart of fly fishing and in each individual’s struggle to find happiness by discovering who we really are.”

The book, Raines promised, would offer an “inside” look at the
Times.
Colford quoted Raines as saying he would describe “the folkways of the place, the character and personalities of the people I worked with, the steady decline of quality journalism and its traditional values that I’ve witnessed.”

Raines included in his proposal a series of sample chapter titles for sections addressing the
Times
and journalism, including “The War of the Daddies’ Boys,” which would be about the “Oedipal subtext of succession battles at the
Times
”; “Murdoch and His Hirelings,” which would detail efforts to use the media as a weapon of “mass disinformation”; and “The Bear Bryant Rules of Journalism,” an attempt to cure the
Times
’s “woeful apathy” about getting beaten on big stories.

Raines’s letter-cum-proposal also dwelled at some length, according to Colford, on what it was like to be “caught up in a media hurricane.” The version of Howell Raines he read about in “mainstream publications like
Newsweek
or
USA Today
” was not “a person I recognized or wanted to know,” Raines wrote, adding that his book would “join imaginatively in the creation of this other Howell’s life.”

The proposal contains a passage in which Raines imagines this other Howell’s life. He imagines him as six feet tall instead of five-eight; wonders if he had been able to transform himself into the athlete the real Raines never was; questions whether this doppelgänger would have had more success with girls in high school; and ponders whether he would have had the willpower to stop drinking after two martinis. “What we’re up against here is the mutable nature of truth. . . . The human heart in conflict with itself,” Raines wrote. He hoped, he wrote, to examine the difference between the type of recreational lying that is necessary in both fishing and romance and the “permanent alterations in one’s life” that take place when one lies for effect. Elsewhere, Raines promised to address “the proper definition of masculinity in our time,” as viewed through the lens of the newspaper he once led.

Raines’s proposal went out to a handful of Manhattan publishing houses under a strict embargo. Some editors were asked to return their copy of the proposal to Raines’s agent. A year after the New York literary world buzzed with the possibility that Raines might score a multimillion-dollar payday for his memoir, many editors decided against bidding on the project, for which Raines was requesting at least $500,000. “We caught it,” one editor said, “and we decided to release it. After the
Atlantic
piece, I don’t know who has the stomach for that kind of stuff anymore.” When a handful of editors told Raines and his agent that they had no interest in his take on the newspaper he once professed to love, Raines recast his project to focus almost exclusively on fishing. The book was eventually sold to Scribner for less than the half-million dollars Raines had been anticipating.

—————

O
N
A
PRIL
19, 2004, Howell Raines made one of his first public appearances since his resignation almost a year earlier. The occasion was a reading from
Things Worth Fighting For,
a collection of the late
Atlantic
editor Michael Kelly’s work, which was held at an Upper West Side Barnes & Noble. Kelly, one of the most beloved journalists of his generation, had been killed covering the Iraq war, and Raines, Tina Brown, and former
New Republic
editor Hendrik Hertzberg, all of whom had edited Kelly over the years, were on hand to read from Kelly’s posthumously published book.

Raines’s participation was awkward. During Brown’s reading, she spoke of how, as the editor of
The New Yorker,
she frequently had to arbitrate disputes with the magazine’s Washington bureau, which at the time was staffed by Kelly and Sidney Blumenthal; Raines, doubtless remembering his own very public battles with the
Times
’s D.C. bureau, forced out an audible, and uncomfortable, bark of laughter. When it was his turn to speak, Raines, on several occasions, referred to the
Times
as “us” or “we.” He cracked about the “colorful ways of southern newspapermen, which I found are not as well understood as I thought at the time.”

After the reading, as Kelly’s two young sons signed copies of their father’s book, Raines, trailed by his wife, scuttled off to a spot behind a bookshelf, where Lloyd Grove, a gossip columnist for New York’s
Daily News,
briefly buttonholed him. As Raines was walking out, I approached him. Since I had begun working on this book the previous summer, I’d sent Raines letters, left messages with his friends and on his answering machine, and written numerous e-mails. He had never answered.

“I’m Seth Mnookin,” I said. “I know this isn’t the time to talk, but I just wanted to make sure I introduced myself. I’d love to speak with you under whatever conditions you’d be most comfortable with.” I extended my hand.

Raines stood there, his hands folded in front of him. I was stunned; I couldn’t remember the last time someone had refused to shake my hand.

“I’ve received your messages,” Raines said. And then he turned and walked away.

I watched him walk toward the store’s escalator with his wife. After a few moments, he disappeared from sight. Behind me, Mike Kelly’s friends, colleagues, and admirers were chatting happily. They were sharing bittersweet stories of a beloved writer and editor in chief, a man whose career was cut tragically short years before its time.

Endnotes

To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number or “Return to text.”

*1 The
Post
and the
Times
had co-owned the
IHT
since the 1960s.
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*2 In 2003, Sulzberger made an offhand offer to buy
The Wall Street Journal
from its owners, the Bancroft family, which shocked even executives at his own company, who worried that he hadn’t run the numbers.
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*3 The
Times
has approximately one thousand editorial employees (editors, reporters, photographers, designers, and so on) on its payroll and another two hundred nonprofessional staffers, including news clerks.
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*4 A full year later, the
Times
’s travails had so infused popular culture, they were the subject of an offhand joke in a May 2004 episode of
The Simpsons,
in which an elementary school reporter gets in trouble for datelining a dispatch from Baghdad when he was actually in Basra.
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*5 In 2004, the
Los Angeles Times
won five Pulitzer Prizes.
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*6 The Taylors sold
The Boston Globe
to the New York Times Company in 1993.
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*7 Perhaps not coincidentally, two of the country’s other three great newspapers,
The Washington Post
and
The Wall Street Journal,
are also family owned.
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*8 Punch’s lifelong nickname originated from a picture book his father made for him when Punch was an infant. Riffing on the fact that he followed three girls, the last one named Judy, his father wrote that, like the seventeenth-century English puppet, he was destined to “play the Punch to Judy’s endless show.”
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*9 In 1986, the Sulzbergers drafted a covenant that ensured the
Times
would remain in family control virtually until the end of the twenty-first century. Under the agreement, Iphigene’s four children and thirteen grandchildren agreed not to sell their Class B stock to anyone outside the family; if they wanted to convert their Class B shares to cash, they could sell them only within the family or to the New York Times Company. This agreement is binding until twenty-one years after the death of the longest-living descendant of Iphigene’s who was alive in 1986. Pamela Dryfoos, Marian Sulzberger Dryfoos’s granddaughter, was born in 1984.
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*10 Op-Ed stands for “opposite the editorial page,” not “opinions and editorials,” as many people think.
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*11 When Rosenthal was named managing editor in 1969, it marked the first time a Jew had sat atop the
Times
’s editorial hierarchy. The Sulzbergers, and Adolph Ochs before them, had always been concerned that if a Jew was running a Jewish-owned paper, readers would wonder about the religious influence on the news pages.
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*12 One of Punch’s interventions was credited with helping to change the course of modern American political life: In 1976, he insisted that the
Times
endorse Daniel Patrick Moynihan over Bella Abzug in the Democratic primary for U.S. senator. In a close race, that endorsement was seen as being a deciding factor, and Moynihan went on to serve as senator from New York until his retirement in 2000.
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*13 With some rare exceptions, Punch ended that practice in 1979, when Gail Gregg, his daughter-in-law, wrote a rebuttal to one of his letters that concluded, “Mr. Sock deserves a punch.” Sulzberger was convinced his cover had been blown.
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*14 Soon after becoming publisher, Sulzberger told
The New Yorker
’s Ken Auletta that he didn’t worry about those who thought he was pushing reform too quickly: “I’ll outlive the bastards!” he said.
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*15 In a 1994 interview with Charlie Rose, Max Frankel described a conversation he had with Sulzberger in which he first brought up Lelyveld’s ascension. “We’ve got to decide about Joe Lelyveld,” Frankel said he told Sulzberger during a March 1993 train ride to Washington. “Because he’s my choice and you’re going to hear from me soon about how I want to step down . . . and he’s my man. But if he’s not your man, we got a hell of a problem.”
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*16 It was this article that caused the formulation of “to pretend not to own slaves” as a definition for “to Raines.”
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*17 Raines was born on the same day—February 5—as Punch Sulzberger. Punch was born in 1926, Raines in 1943.
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*18 In February 2001, Robinson was named senior vice president in charge of newspaper operations, and in February 2004, she was named the company’s chief operating officer and executive vice president. At the end of 2004, she will take over as the company’s chief executive officer.
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*19 The race project, Behr says, was born out of her and Boyd’s frustration with the lack of responsibility they were given on the masthead under Joe Lelyveld. “We both felt wasted,” she says.
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*20 Years earlier, Boyd did note that his status as one of the few nonwhite reporters covering Reagan didn’t hurt his career. “There were just two minority reporters covering the White House back then,” he said. “So that brought me to Reagan’s attention. I got far more attention than I deserved, and I would always be called on by Reagan at press conferences.”
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*21 The Kerner Report was the result of President Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which was convened in 1967 to explain the riots that had plagued American cities every summer since 1964. The report concluded that the country was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
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*22 Another theory—that there are fewer minorities enrolling in journalism programs—is demonstrably false. Twenty-nine percent of students in American journalism programs in 2002 were minorities, and half of those were African American, according to University of Georgia journalism professor Lee Becker’s Annual Survey of Mass Communication and Journalism Enrollments.
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*23 In 1979, Roger Wilkins took part in a class-action suit against the
Times
alleging that black, Hispanic, and Asian American employees were paid less than their white counterparts. The suit was settled before trial without any admission of wrongdoing by the
Times.
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*24 Noble is currently an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Journalism. He did not respond to more than half a dozen e-mails and phone messages requesting comment for this book.
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*25 Sack lost his post on the campaign trail when Ross Perot dropped out of the race, and Michael Kelly, one of his generation’s best political writers, was assigned to cover Bill Clinton, effectively bumping Sack.
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*26 Tyler did not speak with me for this book; however, he did send me several “clarifying comments” after I wrote to him explaining his presence in this book.
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*27 Bragg said he would be “unable” to speak with me for this book.
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*28 Raines had proposed in Paris the previous December, just as the furor over the spiked Augusta National columns was breaking.
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*29
The Diamondback,
like some college papers, pays its reporters.
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*30 The
Times
also has an institutional tendency to exile undesirable staffers to unpopular beats or bureaus rather than fire them outright.
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*31 During this time, Blair also joked publicly about how Landman and another editor on the metro staff “hijacked a plane and flew it into my career.”
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*32 Blair would later disavow these comments and refer to his time with Landman as one that induced something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.
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*33 The story had initially been suggested by a
Times
researcher who had dug up the names of the two soldiers still missing in action. Before Blair began the assignment, one of the soldiers was confirmed as having been killed in action.
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*34 The
Times
’s journalistic integrity statement, issued in 1999, says that falsification of any part of a news report “will result automatically in disciplinary action up to and including termination.” A typical punishment for the first instance of plagiarism—assuming there was not a previous disciplinary record against the employee—would be an unpaid suspension. At this point in his
Times
career, Blair already had a disciplinary letter in his personnel file that warned him that his continuing problems with accuracy were putting his job in peril.
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*35 The fictitious award was the “Brett Award,” given “to the student who has worked hardest under a great handicap” and was given to “Jake Barnes.” The reference was to Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises,
in which the impotent Jake Barnes falls in love with Lady Brett Ashley.
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*36 For about six months in 2001, Manly served as my editor at Inside.com.
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*37 On the day the Bowman profile ran, the
Times
also published an unbylined story explaining that the paper “normally shields the identity of complainants in sex crimes, while awaiting the courts’ judgment about the truth of their accusations” but that the naming of Bowman in other news outlets, including a British tabloid, an American supermarket tabloid, and an NBC News report, “took the matter of her privacy out of [editors’] hands.” Nine days later, the editors’ note read: “An article on April 17 portrayed the life and background of the woman who has accused William Kennedy Smith of rape at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on March 30. The article drew no conclusions about the truth of her complaint to the police. But many readers inferred that its very publication, including her name and detailed biographical material about her and her family, suggested that The Times was challenging her account. No such challenge was intended, and The Times regrets that some parts of the article reinforced such inferences. . . . The Times regrets its failure to include such a clear statement of the article’s limits and intent. It remains The Times’s practice to guard the identities of sex crime complainants so long as that is possible and conforms to fair journalistic standards. In cases of major political or civic interest, that practice needs to be continually reviewed. . . . Whenever possible, The Times intends to continue its longstanding practice of withholding the names of sex crime victims while informing its readers in the fullest and fairest ways about major cases.”
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*38 In his May 2004
Atlantic
article, Raines would claim that he hadn’t bothered to read the story when it was first available on the Internet on Saturday, nor had he bothered to read it in that evening’s bulldog print edition of the
Times.
Instead, he wrote, he read the piece on Sunday, “in sections” while on a shad-fishing excursion on the Delaware River.
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*39 Raines went on to fault the article’s authors for his likely demise: “The article did not pursue the one area of reporting that might have worked in my favor—how and why critical information about Jayson never reached me,” he wrote, showing once again a total lack of understanding about the depth of anger and frustration in the
Times
’s newsroom.
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*40 Raines, in his
Atlantic
piece, wrote that the real reason he gave Blair extra chances was his history of drug and alcohol abuse: “Whatever slack I was cutting Jayson had nothing to do with his accuracy problems. I thought I was giving this apparently talented and engaging young man a second chance based on a different problem that had been brought to my attention around the end of 2002. That was when Gerald had informed me that Jayson had told him that he had gone to the
Times
’s Employee Assistance Program and requested treatment for alcohol and drug abuse.” Not only does that rendering not make sense—why would Boyd have told Raines about Blair’s substance abuse problems but not his performance record?—but it also differs from what Raines told the reporting team when it was preparing its May 11 report, when he said that he had been unaware of Blair’s drug and alcohol abuse before May 2003.
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*41 The Blair-authored profile—a simultaneously sycophantic and confusing piece—referred to Boyd as a man “with the well-known ability to shred a man’s ego and tie in the same softly spoken, understated sentence.” It ends on this garbled note: “A few years ago, Gerald attended a program called ‘Leadership at the Peak,’ . . . and there, he says, he learned to redefine success ‘in a collage of ways,’ including work, life, friends and family. And all that unleashed energy. Pretty picture.”
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*42 Keating had been dismissed by the
Times
for allegedly staging a news photograph.
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*43 At the time, Bragg was suffering from a medical condition that made it difficult for him to travel.
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*44 Raines, it turned out, had actually been aware of Bragg’s unusual working relationship with J. Wes Yoder. In May 2002, Bragg was dispatched to Birmingham, Alabama, to cover the trial of Bobby Frank Cherry, the last defendant in the 1963 church bombing that killed four black teenage girls. Raines had been living in Birmingham at the time of the bombings, but he said he hadn’t been “brave enough” to demonstrate at the time. He took an intense interest in the trial, traveling down to Birmingham and taking notes when Bragg needed to leave the courtroom. While in Birmingham, Raines met Yoder, who also took notes for Bragg when he wasn’t in the courtroom. Yoder wasn’t paid (although Bragg did pay his rent), and he had no official affiliation with the
Times.
At least once, Raines, Yoder, and Bragg ate dinner together.
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