Behind the Times (38 page)

A half dozen other
Times
men were part of the next generation as
well, though not as it happened, Max Frankel. Some people thought Frankel was the logical choice to be the next editor by background, abilities, and length of service. But Rosenthal had organized the process for the editors in the news department. Frankel was in charge of the editorial pages, where the
Times
’ opinions are fashioned. According to one of the most frequently enunciated canons of the
Times
, the paper’s editorial-page staff had to be kept isolated from the news department. There was one notable exception: As we’ve seen, the Sulzberger family moved back and forth between the two departments, involving itself in
Times
fact and
Times
opinion to a greater extent than most
Times
people suspected. The news-editorial separation rule existed for everybody else at the
Times
, and it could be a convenient barrier if anyone wished to block off Frankel from the editor’s post. The editorial page editor was automatically excluded from a competition organized for the news department.

Other factors were working against Frankel, specifically, the baggage he carried from his days in Washington. Frankel had been the bureau chief in 1972 when the Watergate revelations began appearing in print and the public learned of the full extent of corruption in Richard Nixon’s White House. The stories appeared first in the
Washington Post
, the
Times
’ keenest competitor. Some
Times
people defended Frankel and the bureau, arguing, rather loftily, that Watergate began as a “police story” and that the
Post
, as the “local” paper, had a natural edge over the
Times.
The surface logic eased some of the sting, but the fact remained that on the biggest story during Frankel’s watch, his bureau was soundly beaten. The defeat might have been enough to sink the career of a news executive. Only Sulzberger could say how much permanent damage Frankel’s reputation had sustained in the publisher’s mind.

While Frankel’s editorial-page post conveniently excluded him from Rosenthal’s competition, other traditions of the
Times
narrowed the field still more. Potential candidates from outside the paper were excluded. This ruled out an admired former
Times
man named Eugene Roberts. Gene Roberts left the
Times
in the early 1970s, after chafing under Rosenthal’s rule for almost a decade, to become editor of the
Philadelphia Inquirer.
Roberts flourished at the
Inquirer
; the paper’s record of investigative triumphs, Pulitzer Prizes, and soaring newsroom morale led many
Times
people to conclude that they had lost the better man. Among Roberts’s fans, for example, was Tom Wicker, the
columnist. Wicker would have urged Sulzberger to pick Roberts, “if I had been asked.” But that wouldn’t have been the
Times
’ way, for it might have been perceived as a tacit admission of weakness within the paper. “The
Times
just doesn’t bring in people from outside, even if they worked here once, and are great editors, like Roberts,” Wicker said.

Though Roberts was beyond recall, Frankel remained very much alive as a possibility. The same wall of quarantine between the news and editorial page departments that excluded him from Rosenthal’s “process” also afforded Frankel some protection. The system designed by Rosenthal presented so many danger zones and dead ends that some candidates making their way through it ended up out of the running and gone from the
Times.
There was some question about whether Rosenthal—and more important, Sulzberger—would feel bound by the results. The choice of a new editor was not a minor occasion at the
Times.
There had been only five in the eighty years that the Ochs-Sulzberger family had owned the paper. Many signs flashed “go slow” to Frankel.

Not that Frankel needed much cautioning. He was by nature a careful man. He grew up in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, a German-Jewish refugee boy attending public schools. After bigger neighborhood toughs beat him up, he transferred to another school. Later, in his years as a Washington bureau chief and a senior editor at the
Times
, Frankel had learned how to survive in the
Times
’ tribal society. He understood the advantages of privacy as well as of accommodation. He knew how to stroke—to use a word heard frequently from
Times
people. He understood that journalists as a class possessed fragile egos. Artisans if not artists, they were nevertheless quick to perceive personal slights and shifts in status. Their insecurities were well known. They required stroking.

Individual hurts, thwarted ambitions, blasted careers—all classified under the heading “personnel matters”—often occupy the days of
Times
’ executives as much as the ostensible main business of collecting and printing the news. Turner Catledge spent forty-one years at the
Times
, through the Great Depression and three wars, serving as managing editor and then executive editor, from 1951 to 1968. Yet in his memoirs Catledge noted that his
hardest decisions were those within the
Times
“family”—another term frequently heard at 43rd Street. “I was not dealing with abstractions, but with people, talented, sensitive,
ambitious men and women,” Catledge recalled. “I had to work with and through them.” In a word, he had to know when to stroke the egos of his reporters and editors. In none of Catledge’s stroking did he exercise more care than in his relations with his superior, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Punch’s father and the publisher of the
Times
from 1935 to 1961. Catledge recounted in his memoirs how his future executive role at the
Times
was assured after he and the publisher traveled together, and drank Scotch together, across the Pacific during World War II. For good
Times
men, the personal bond was paramount.

As with Catledge in a more paternalistic time, so, too, with Frankel in our therapeutic age. A shortish man with a round, open face, in his earlier years he used to puff on a pipe at
Times
meetings: the good listener, picking up on the emotional clues. Indeed, he looked a bit like a respected psychiatrist with a successful Manhattan practice. Frankel knew how to deal with Sulzberger, and with the staff. By late 1985, Frankel had been part of
Times
management for almost two decades. His practice of asking staff members to listen to him in silence while he tried to address their concerns was only one of his techniques. Frankel had concluded from his own handling of personnel matters that people tend to listen more conscientiously when they know they don’t have to respond immediately. The general principle was clear: Hasty actions should always be avoided by
Times
people.

Frankel had learned that firsthand, and painfully, earlier in his
Times
career. In 1964 Frankel actually resigned from the
Times.
He was then thirty-four and a star correspondent covering the State Department. His letter of
resignation, addressed to Turner Catledge, then the paper’s editor, came shortly after Tom Wicker was named Washington bureau chief in one of the
Times
’ periodic reorganizations of the bureau. At the time, Frankel had an offer to write magazine articles and essays as national correspondent for
The Reporter
, a small-circulation, liberal-left fortnightly published in Washington. At the magazine, he would be doing
reportage
, rather than daily journalism. Frankel’s letter to Catledge linked the decision to a desire to get away from the demands of deadlines and the constricting forms of newspaper reporting rather than to any disappointment at being beaten out by Wicker. But Frankel soon had second thoughts. Unhappy as he was at the
Times
, he faced the prospect of trading its daily audience of over 800,000 readers for the relative handful of people who subscribed to
The Reporter.
In a matter of days, Frankel readily agreed to reconsider
when approached by his immediate superior, James Reston, who was turning over the bureau chief’s duties to Wicker in order to concentrate on his own twice-weekly column. Reston also persuaded Catledge and the other executives in New York to withdraw acceptance of Frankel’s letter. As it turned out, haste would have been waste for Frankel.
The Reporter
ceased publication in 1969.

Frankel was wiser in the ways of the
Times
when he opened his campaign for the editorship during his
lunch with Punch Sulzberger. He was fifty-five, and had spent two-thirds of his life as a
Times
man. He started as a campus stringer while still at Columbia University, joining the staff upon his graduation, reporting from Washington as well as overseas, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Nixon’s 1972 trip to China. His career at the paper had not suffered fatally from the bungled resignation episode, however immature—or worse, “disloyal” to the family—it may have seemed at the time. The bureau’s performance during Watergate was another matter. Sulzberger made Frankel editor of the Sunday edition of the
Times
while the Watergate scandals were still unfolding; that was read as a mixed judgment of Frankel’s status. The editorship was one of the top three news posts at the paper but it also meant he was running the softer, feature sections, such as the
Times Magazine
, the travel pages, and the
Book Review.
Four years later, Frankel suffered a terrible blow to his prestige and power. Sulzberger abolished the position of Sunday editor. Authority over both the daily and Sunday paper was consolidated in the hands of the new executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, eight years’ Frankel’s senior and always one step above him on the pyramid of
Times
power. Frankel moved laterally, in the best interpretation, out of the news department entirely, to become editor of the editorial page, succeeding John Oakes. This new post removed Frankel from the gritty world of day-to-day hard news coverage.

In late 1985 Frankel carried the burden of his decade removed from hard news. What’s more, Frankel’s own life was unsettled as the new year approached. His wife, Tobi, was ill with cancer (she died several months later). He was nearing his tenth year in the editorial page job, and had ten years more to go before the normal retirement age for executives at the
Times.
The executive editor, Rosenthal, was still two years away from the same retirement age. Once before, Frankel had thought the top job might be his. A decade earlier, when Frankel was still Sunday editor and Rosenthal had the title of managing editor, the
post of executive editor had not yet been filled. A few
Times
handicappers also thought Frankel had an outside chance to beat out Rosenthal. When Frankel lost out, there were no wounding moments of resignation and sudden regret, as there had been in Washington twenty years before. This time, Frankel had a strategy. He wanted Sulzberger to hear face to face how much he wished to be the top editor, and how “vigorous” he felt despite his private anguish. He also wanted the publisher to know that if he wasn’t made executive editor, he would consider “something else.” This could be a column on the
Times
’ Op-Ed page. Or it could be—the thought was left unspoken—moving on from the paper. The thrust of the lunch meeting was clear. Frankel explained how much he loved the
Times
and his editorial page job, but his time had come for greater things.

This was not unfamiliar ground for Sulzberger. However uncomfortable Sulzberger felt when making grand policy in his earlier years, especially decisions on the direction of the paper and its leadership, he had by 1985 been in similar situations before—in fact, several times before. Sulzberger had moved up, down, around, and aside a series of executives—men older, more imposing and experienced than he, journalistic titans such as Turner Catledge, E. Clifton Daniel, Lester Markel, and James Reston, among others. Sulzberger also had, again with a great deal of agonizing and demarches, closed off the rise of other
Times
eminences, such as Harrison Salisbury.

Through it all, one editor seemed immune from the laws of executive motion. Abe Rosenthal’s rise had been steady and undeflected. Other bodies colliding with him were destroyed as he bounded ahead. Through the years of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Rosenthal tightened his hold upon the
Times
’ lines of authority with a tenacity considered fierce even for that level of management. A series of stars had fallen in their turn: Catledge, the poor Mississippi country boy who learned to move easily within the journalistic establishment; Daniel, another small-town Southerner metamorphosed into elegant foreign correspondent, and son-in-law of a president of the United States; Salisbury, the quintessential hard-charging reporter, whose unimpeachable sources extended inside the Kremlin and the Chinese Politburo, or so he claimed; Markel, the imperious editor who ran the Sunday paper like a private fiefdom for thirty years. Each of them had been pushed from Rosenthal’s newsroom. Even Scotty Reston, merely the nation’s opinion-page conscience and confidant of whatever administration
was temporarily in residence at the White House, had gone reeling back to Washington as Rosenthal consolidated his power. In the summer of 1983, at a
Times Magazine
editors’ conference considering topics for the magazine’s new Sunday column, “About Men,” one participant suggested that the emotional trauma faced by some men when forced to retire at sixty-five might make a good subject. Rosenthal agreed that he wanted more such personal materials in “About Men.” Then he added: “By the way, I’m never going to retire.”

Seven years later, when Rosenthal was asked about the events of the succession, he insisted that the whole
“editor for life” story was a joke. “The most I was expecting was to stay on as editor for an extra year, until I was sixty-six.” At the time, however, not everyone waiting below Rosenthal was willing to laugh it all off. Frankel wasn’t at the “About Men” meeting, but Rosenthal’s punch line was repeated throughout the building. Rosenthal had been in charge for fifteen years, the gossipers around the office water coolers told each other, why not fifteen more?