Behind the Times (3 page)

Fox Butterfield, the senior writer of the “Wild Streak” article, had been a
Times
foreign correspondent as well as author of a superb book about China,
Alive in the Bitter Sea.
He was a star reporter for the metro desk when the
Times’
investigative team discredited Tawana Brawley’s story (it was Butterfield who later explained to me the strategy of the
Times’
blockbuster approach). In April 1991, when Patricia Bowman made her charges of rape, Butterfield was chief of the Boston bureau, doubling as a “swing reporter” available to the national desk for big stories. Butterfield was well connected socially (the industrialist Cyrus Eaton was his grandfather) and he knew the various Kennedys of Massachusetts and Washington. Soma Golden assigned the team of Butterfield and Mary Tabor, a news assistant in the Boston bureau, to Palm Beach a week after Bowman made her accusations. Golden later told the staff meeting that Butterfield and Tabor received the assignment because the
Times’
Miami bureau man, Roberto Suro, “was away for the week.” A
Times
woman who heard the explanation thought it incredibly lame. She wanted to ask Golden: “What week was that?” Another
Times
woman did confront Golden, asking about the wisdom of giving the Palm Beach assignment to a “well-known friend of the Kennedy family.” Golden said she knew of no such connection.

Other staff members wanted to know if Butterfield and Tabor had lifted the smarmier scenes from the life of Bowman out of the files of Kennedy staff investigators. The official reply, that “
all the reporting was the
Times’
,” was an exquisitely Talmudic answer. Conceivably, all the information could have come from shoe-leather reporting and from computer data bases accessed from Palm Beach: the woman’s grades from her high school in Ohio; her driver’s record from the Florida department of highway safety; her mother’s sexual history from
divorce court proceedings; the barhopping stories from other barflies; the sales price of the three-bedroom house from deeds registered in county files. Palm Beach is a small resort community, where gossip is the second major occupation, after good living. But Butterfield and Tabor, for all their presumed skills, joined the story in progress, well after a blockbuster team of lawyers and private investigators hired by the Kennedy family was on the case. Narrowly, it was possible that “all the reporting” was the
Times’
—developed from knowledgeable leads and photocopied materials proffered by good sources.

The
Times’
strategy of revealing the name of the woman was less artfully explained. Frankel said that he had been wrestling for some time with the question of the
Times’
“obligation” to print what it finds out in stories of wide public interest. The case of the jogger raped in Central Park just a year before had bothered him: the biographical details of her life laid bare, her name spoken in court and printed in the
Amsterdam News
, a small-circulation weekly intended for black New Yorkers, but not carried in the
Times.
Frankel formed a committee of editors to think about the policies the
Times
ought to follow. While the committee pondered, as committees do, reality intruded. Tuesday afternoon, April 16, Al Siegal, the custodian of
Times
style and correct usage, was doing a final edit on the Butterfield-Tabor copy. Siegal made extensive changes, with Golden at his side; later she told the staff meeting that almost a third of the story—“the racier copy”—was cut. Shortly after 6:30
P.M.
“NBC Nightly News” broadcast Bowman’s name as part of an NBC report on whether news organizations should broadcast (!) the name of
rape victims. Siegal and Golden inserted Bowman’s name in the story; a seven-paragraph explanatory “policy sidebar,” to run next to the main article, was quickly written under their supervision. “The
New York Times
ordinarily shields the identities of complainants in sex crimes, while awaiting the courts’ judgment about the truth of their accusations,” the sidebar said. Then, shifting into a third-person voice, Siegal-Golden quoted themselves: “The
Times
has withheld Ms. Bowman’s name until now, but editors said yesterday that NBC’s nationwide broadcast took the matter of her privacy out of their hands.”

The chain of helplessness didn’t begin there. NBC offered for
its
excuse the fact that
The Globe
, a supermarket tabloid, ran Bowman’s name and a grainy photo of her the day before. And
The Globe
, in its prim turn, pointed to the
London Sunday Mirror
, which had identified
Bowman and published her picture the week before. Several
Times
people found the Siegal-Golden citation of television laughable: “When have we ever given a shit what NBC said before,” I was told by a reporter who attended the staff meeting. Michael Gartner, the president of NBC News and a law school graduate, at least stood on half-firm ground when he made his decision. A First Amendment absolutist, Gartner had for years made the argument that press accounts ought to treat rape victims like other victims of violent crime, “to take the stigma out of being raped.” After the rape-beating of the Central Park jogger, Gartner argued both publicly and within NBC News for the use of her name on principle (“specifics add credibility to the story”). There was also the matter of fairness, pending a jury’s verdict: during the Central Park arraignments and trial, the accused rapists, blacks and Hispanics from the projects, were named. The jogger, white, Wellesley- and Yale-educated, an investment banker, was not.

The
Times’
editors could make no such claims of consistency. During the jogger case, the editors withheld her name. Then, Al Siegal pushed off responsibility onto the
Times’
readers, as Golden later did in the Bowman case. “News organizations don’t function
in a vacuum,” Siegal said in April 1990. “Society would find it repugnant to add to her obloquy. If we faced a similar degree of revulsion from our readers at revealing defendants, we’d consider it.”

What changed for the
Times
when the scene of the alleged rapes moved from Central Park to Palm Beach? Some of the protesters detected class bias at work: the community college drop-out accorded less consideration than the Yale MBA and Wall Street banker (the perfect
Times
reader, demographically).
Times
columnist Anna Quindlen made just such a charge in her Sunday Op-Ed page space two days after the staff meeting; as far as the editors of the
Times
were concerned, Quindlen wrote,
women who have prestigious jobs will be treated more fairly than “women who have ‘below average’ high school grades [and] are well known at bars and dance clubs.” Others wanted to know why the
Times
hadn’t produced a similar investigative profile of the well-connected man in the case, William Kennedy Smith. They were told, “one is in the works.” (When it eventually appeared, there were new outcries. A
Washington Post
profile of Kennedy Smith quoted several women, most of them anonymously, who described his loutish and sometimes violent sexual behavior; the
Times’
Kennedy
Smith article, produced by the Washington bureau, didn’t include these alleged episodes. Bureau people later said they were unable to confirm the accounts to the editors’ “satisfaction.”)

If not social standing as a determinant of
Times
treatment, then perhaps some cultural gap separated the buttoned-down, over-fifty senior
Times
men from the barhopping Palm Beach woman, and from some of their own junior reporters. The heaviest applause during the staff meeting came when a
Times
woman, age thirty, told Frankel and Siegal: “
I go places at night with people you might find questionable, and God forbid anything should happen to me, because I’m sure you could find someone that I went to high school with who’d be willing to say anonymously that I had a ‘wild streak.’ ” There was considerable intellectualizing about why the male editors “didn’t get it,” or seemed punitive about a woman involved in date rape (Palm Beach) as opposed to stranger rape (Central Park). More than anything, though, the staff overlooked a practical explanation for the Bowman story: the editors had already made an investment of the
Times’
prestige in the Palm Beach story. A team of investigative reporters and supervising editors had produced a “competitive” story over several days of high-profile effort, and the editors wanted it out. NBC provided the opening to detonate the blockbuster, and permit the
Times
to settle the case that “everyone was on.” The use of Bowman’s name made it possible for the
Times
to introduce the stepfather’s name and complete the social drama: the House of O’Neil against the House of Kennedy.

All the talk of “deadline pressures” made it sound as if the Butterfield-Tabor story somehow slipped through the system, when actually everyone involved knew what was expected from them. The “little wild streak” quote was so attractive that the copy editor repeated it in the subhead. Moreover, the story appeared in the editions of April 17 together with an article on Edward M. Kennedy filed by correspondent Robin Toner from Washington. The Toner story reported on the commencement address Senator Kennedy had given at American University the day before; it went on to describe how Kennedy was the senate’s “most visible standard bearer for liberal causes,” despite all the tab headlines and, seemingly, a persistent drinking habit. The Toner story began on page one and continued on page 17, allowing the
Times
to present the narratives of Bowman and Kennedy as a package. At the top of page 17, the headline informed readers: “Woman in Florida Rape Inquiry Fought Adversity and Sought Acceptance.” Below, readers
learned: “Torn by His Roles on Life’s Stage, Kennedy Can’t Avoid Dark Cloud.” It was a neat twinning of the traditional public-policy
Times
and the contemporary enticement
Times
, the old Journal of Record and the new homage to
People
magazine.

When Patricia Bowman testified during the Kennedy Smith trial, the TV networks used electronics to project a blue dot over her face, to keep up the pretense of anonymity. After the Florida jury returned a not-guilty verdict on the rape charge, Bowman decided to defend her version of the encounter. She appeared, sans dot, on national television with Diane Sawyer of ABC News. One year later, Frankel was asked to reconstruct the
Times’
handling of the Bowman story—to remove the dot, so to speak, obscuring the
Times’
processes. He agreed. “There were several days of great tension because of two
Times
policies,” Frankel recalled. “First, the policy of protecting the anonymity of victims of sex assault. Second, a similar policy of not naming the accused until there are official charges. The accused being a Kennedy Smith, the
whole thing got out of control.” Frankel remembered that he grew increasingly upset. “We were doing something very unfair to the accused, and we did not have the slightest suggestion in print as to who the accuser was: a Palm Beach socialite? A whore? Or what? So I pressed very hard for every biographical detail that we could get, even if we weren’t going to name her. The reader was entitled to know who was making these accusations. Then we ran into trouble: the stepfather and his wealth, and his hiring of fancy lawyers. If we couldn’t name her, we couldn’t name him. His company was one of the Fortune 500. We were absolutely bound up in a mess. We had no way to tell the true story of who was attacking Kennedy Smith as long as we stuck to the policy of anonymity. I said, ‘OK. So we can’t name her and we can’t name her stepfather. Let’s do the best we can.’ That very night, we’re working on the biographical sketch, and NBC pushed the name out. I said, ‘That solves our problem.’ It never occurred to me that after twelve million people knew the name, the press would still pretend that anonymity existed. NBC not only solved our problem, but it forced us to rush our biography into print that night, when we might have wanted to work on it another day or two. In the rush, that story was not as deftly done as it should have been.” Frankel concluded: “We got it in the neck both ways. The rest of the world still pretending that the name was private and the press attacking us—with some cause—about aspects of the story we printed.”

I asked Frankel his reactions to the Anna Quindlen column criticizing his decisions, and whether the
Times’
policy on the anonymity of rape victims had changed. “If she wants to debate our policy, fine,” he replied. “I think she’s wrong. I still don’t think it was a mistake to name the victim, under the circumstances. I think the story could have been written better. What I resented was that Quindlen didn’t come to me first to find out what she was disagreeing about. But that’s her business.”

The uncritical handling of Kitty Kelley’s
Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography
resulted from another conjunction of old
Times
and new
Times.
Normally, major publishing houses send review copies of new books to newspapers and magazines well in advance of publication date. No one worries much about reviews that “break” the news-release date because 999 out of one thousand new books contain no stop-press news worth breaking. Not so with the oeuvre of Kelley, “America’s premier slash biographer.” Simon & Schuster had a major investment in the Nancy Reagan book, paying Kelley a reported $3.5 million advance against royalties. Together, author and publisher devised a clever promotion plan to insure that everyone would get a big payday. To build early suspense, the publishers tightly controlled the book’s galleys and held back all review copies—except two. The week before the official Monday, April 8, publication date, one of these copies was, in the press’s patois, “made available” to the
Times.
The second advance copy went to Garry Trudeau, the creator of “Doonesbury,” which at the time was syndicated to seven hundred newspapers around the world. The pairing was exquisite. Kelley and her publishers stood to get a
Times
news story over the weekend, which meant highroad exposure for the book. The next week, when Simon & Schuster shipped books to the stores, millions of “Doonesbury” readers could check out a series of Trudeau’s strips based on materials in the book. It was the kind of masterly manipulation of the media that Michael Deaver, Ronald Reagan’s publicity specialist, would have appreciated.