Behind the Times (41 page)

In retrospect, too, Rosenthal acknowledged second and third thoughts about his succession process. “It became screwed up, a hodgepodge,” he said. “The reason was the overcomplicated attempt on my part to give everyone a chance, but there were too many people involved.” He continued to defend his handling of Frankel. “If I was intelligent enough to be the executive editor, I was intelligent enough
to know that the leading candidate was Max. He did not have to prove anything. He was not my choice or my non-choice.” Rosenthal now says that he did have a favored candidate, a “logical choice.” This editor was not Abe Rosenthal or Max Frankel but Arthur Gelb, Rosenthal’s longtime associate. It was not to be: “Arthur was too old, though in my mind, I suppose I was hoping for Artie to get a crack at it.” In Rosenthal’s recollection, “My biggest mistake was not to have a candidate. I should have picked one younger man.”

As the “process” actually played out, the power of selection did not belong to Rosenthal. While there may or may not have been two Rosenthals at the paper, there were certainly two Sulzbergers. One, of course, was the publisher, Punch, who had run the paper since 1963; the other, his son, Arthur Jr., born in 1951—the family heir already chosen to succeed his father. The formal transition from Sulzberger to Sulzberger didn’t take place until 1992, after the father marked his sixty-fifth birthday. But by the 1980s the younger Sulzberger was beginning to cast critical votes, if not to exercise explicit veto power. He was not reluctant to use his authority, tactfully, to be sure. From the heir apparent’s point of view, the best resolution of the succession would insure that the older generation of editors did not stay on too long, and that the younger generation did not move up too quickly. An interim arrangement would be ideal.

In early November 1986, the succession issue was resolved publicly. Rosenthal stepped aside, and Frankel, the
Times
man who never was a part of Rosenthal’s elaborate visiting editors’ program, became executive editor. Many
Times
people expressed their surprise, though not Tom Wicker, who believed that Frankel was always the front-runner. With the clarity of hindsight, it was easy to understand why Frankel was the perfect candidate. He had not been overly aggressive during the early Watergate days, or a bomb thrower later over Westway. His personal interests and tastes insured a continued comfortable course for the softer sections started in the Punch Sulzberger years. Frankel himself would later say that the publisher didn’t give him the job
“to make radical changes.” Rather, his assignment was “to make a good paper still better.” When changes did occur in content or format during the first years of his editorship—for example, the shortening of news stories and reviews, the use of more graphic signposts to entice readers into articles, revisions in the captions under pictures—they were so slight
that only the most attentive students of the
Times
noticed them. Frankel took that as proof of his success: “I’ve done things that I hope you haven’t noticed,” he told a visitor in late 1989.

The atmosphere in the newsroom remained much the same in the Frankel years. Supposedly, the Sulzbergers wanted their new editor to ease tensions and encourage calm after the turbulent Rosenthal years. Frankel did bring a different style to his dealings with people. His first memo to the staff upon being appointed acknowledged the turmoils of the past and suggested a new page was being turned; “We are hurtling into a time of new definitions of news,” he said. Expansively, he urged everyone to enjoy the “fun” of newspapering at the
Times.
The wordsmiths at the paper puzzled over that one; the newsroom had been called many things, but never a fun place. In fact, some of the old ways continued, with fresh variations. The
Times
reporter who had characterized the Rosenthal years as “the iron fist in the iron glove,” offered a mordant description of the new Frankel regime: “With Max, the fist is still iron, but the glove is velvet.”

Frankel was fifty-six at the time of his elevation. In the
Times
’ long view, he fit neatly into the family continuum. Frankel’s period in office until his retirement at sixty-five would be split roughly in half: four-plus years under the elder Sulzberger’s gaze, then four-plus years reporting to the younger Sulzberger. The son thus preserved some valuable options of his own in the course of moving up Frankel. In particular, young Sulzberger retained the authority to chose a successor to Frankel relatively early in his tenure—something that would not have been possible if an editor younger than Frankel had been chosen. Perhaps equally important, the younger Sulzberger could do so with a minimum of consultation: The interim Frankel would be hearing the ticking of his retirement clock, and the elder Sulzberger would no longer be the preeminent force on the premises. The next editor would be young Arthur’s man—or woman. All of Arthur Sulzberger’s talk about the value of “diversity” stirred the newsroom to speculate on the managerial future of, say, an Anna Quindlen. After Frankel’s term, it was said, Arthur Sulzberger would make sure that two white males would never again simultaneously occupy the positions of executive editor and managing editor.

When the
Times
in 1990 announced that Joe Lelyveld, forty-nine, was succeeding Arthur Gelb as managing editor, the younger Sulzberger had the best of all worlds. He could work with Lelyveld in
the remaining years of the Frankel regime, and take his time about the succession: Lelyveld, Raines, Quindlen, whoever. There would be no musical-chair charades in the newsroom. The
Times
people and the outsiders who watched the succession “struggle” at the paper in the Rosenthal years were caught looking in the wrong direction. The visiting editors’ program and the excitement created by Rosenthal distracted everyone in the way a magician’s assistant engages in side business while the master conjures the trick.

The entire Rosenthal selection process was a sideshow. To the extent that any of the participants believed that it mattered, they were fooling themselves. If Rosenthal, deep down, hoped to emerge from the process as the choice to stay, he was deluding himself as well. The Sulzbergers had their candidate, Frankel, in hand all along. There was no contest, because only the Sulzbergers made the rules. From beginning to end, Rosenthal was excluded from the real decision making, along with everyone else. Outsiders need not apply; Rosenthal’s men, older and younger, were never in the running; neither was Rosenthal. A publisher at a rival newspaper watched the succession with a mixture of interest and bemusement; he extracted a moral from the story. People in the newsroom think they “run” the
Times
, but they are mistaken. It is the Sulzbergers’ newspaper; the family does what it wants without staging popularity contests or collecting employee ballots.

From Moscow, Bill Keller was offering the paper a feature, datelined Kiev, about the Ukrainian leader, a Brezhnev-era holdover named Vladimir Schherbitsky. Unlike the majority of candidates for the new Congress of Deputies to be elected March 23, Schherbitsky was running unopposed. Also from Moscow, correspondent John Burns filed an eleven-paragraph story quoting Gennadi I. Gerasimov, the foreign ministry spokesman. Gerasimov said Moscow could play a part in resolving some of the tensions between Iran and the West brought on by Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses.
The bureau knew that the editors in New York had an appetite for stories involving free-speech issues;
they were also interested in stories about publishing, especially book publishing, a major industry in New York. Keller and Burns punched their copy into the IBM desktop computers in the Moscow office; the impulses sped over leased wires to
Times
computers in New York, where the copy appeared again on computer screens, ready for editing by the backfield.

In recent years an informal system had developed among the New York desks as evening deadlines approached. Backfield editors were instructed to address first the “difficult” stories; these might involve complex and/or sensitive materials—or, occasionally, writers and reporters with a reputation within the
Times
of being “difficult.” The difficult
Times
people were a mixed group: late filers, complainers, the overly stubborn, and so forth. Most were caring journalists zealous about their original copy. Correspondents who filed difficult stories, or were considered difficult themselves, were instructed to remain next to their computers for backfield editors’ questions. When the backfield was satisfied, the correspondent normally got a “good night”: a sign-off on the story, and permission to go home. Some reporters had their own variation of the nightly routine: They waited … to make sure the multiple levels of editors didn’t introduce errors or “corrections” that changed the thrust of the story. These reporters worried about “all the futzing around”—as they saw it—by the desk. They stayed to give a “good night” to the editing process.

Because of the time differences, the “good night” sometimes came for Keller and Burns after midnight Moscow time. Some reporters in New York or Washington often didn’t fare much better. Because the easiest stories were dealt with last by the desks, a “nondifficult” writer who had filed a straightforward piece of reporting was apt to get the latest “good night.”

Editors on the copy desk and in the backfield began glancing at their wristwatches, conscious of approaching deadlines. The computer age was supposed to ease the pressures of editing and printing; but at the
Times
a combination of factors instead forced
earlier
deadlines on the news staff.

Punch Sulzberger and his associates on the business side of the
Times
, desk editors came to realize, had tied the future of the paper to regional and national distribution. Since the 1970s, circulation had been growing beyond New York City, until only one third of the paper’s total daily circulation of 1.1 million came
from within the city. Another third was accounted for by the suburbs within a fifty-mile radius of the Times Building. The final third came from sales in the corridor—the Northeastern coastal strip, from Maine to Virginia—and from the National edition, printed at satellite plants in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and five other distribution points. The
Times
plants on 43rd Street and in New Jersey printed the corridor papers, and trucks delivered the bundles to New England and to Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. Computer technology may have shortened the printing process and made later closing possible, but the Sulzberger’ national ambitions—and the low-tech provisions of the drivers’ union contract with the
Times
—canceled out the gains.

As non-New York circulation grew, news deadlines were moved up. In the old linotype days, before the
Times
began its drive for national circulation, the filing deadline in the Washington bureau for the first edition was 7:30
P.M.
Now the rule was off the desk and to New York by 5:00
P.M.
That in turn meant reporters had to finish any interviews by early afternoon, begin writing, and, if necessary, hand in their copy in takes—one or two pages at a time. New York waived the 5:00
P.M.
rule occasionally for major news developments. More often, though, there were no dispensations. At the Oliver North trial, late-afternoon developments had kept Michael Wines, the
Times
reporter, in court following the testimony. He missed his deadline. The desk in New York ran an Associated Press account of the trial in the first edition. The embarrassment was palpable: Wines was taken off the story.

The Wines decision was made by the new bureau chief, Howell Raines, still in his first months on the job. Raines arrived from the
Times
London bureau in 1988, at the beginning of the presidential campaign. His predecessor in Washington, Craig Whitney, was sent to London—to unsuspecting outsiders, a straight exchange of dream assignments.
Times
people knew better: Whitney had been exiled. London was a step backward after Washington. Whitney had signed the bureau’s notorious “fishing expedition” letter to the presidential candidates on the eve of the 1988 primaries—the letter asking each candidate to supply the
Times
with his income tax forms, medical records, lists of contributors, and other personal data.

Once, the Washington bureau of the
Times
was among the leading cheerers of the candidates. Arthur Krock, Turner Catledge, James Reston, and Tom Wicker were all courtly men with
small-town newspaper backgrounds; they came to Washington and flourished in the
Times
bureau chief’s job. They enjoyed being drinking companions and, sometimes, confidants, of the political figures they covered. That was now a times past.

The page-one meeting, the key meeting of the day, began in the executive conference room along the north wall of the newsroom. Though it usually started at 4:45, it was still referred to as the 5:00
P.M.
meeting. Managing editor Artie Gelb conducted it, as he had the 11:00
A.M.
meeting. In his day, Gelb was a brilliant, fast-thinking M.E.; good as he was, his successor Joe Lelyveld, proved to be faster and brighter still. But true authority lay with the man at the opposite end of the table, the executive editor. Max Frankel was the arbiter of what the
Times
’ front page would look like the next morning. Page one of the
Times
, he once told a questioner, “is what I say it is.” He claimed that he valued collegiality; but the final decisions were his. The 5:00
P.M.
meeting also gave Frankel the chance to raise queries about the stories he had read and alert the backfield to pursue his questions in the next hour before deadline.

The page-one elements for March 1 offered no surprises: Chicago mayoral primary results, developments in the Tower nomination, the Shoreham nuclear reactor agreement. Summaries of these stories were in the computer directory, and available to senior editors. Because everyone at the meeting had read the factual summary, department editors used their time to argue why their stories deserved page-one attention. Usually, seven or eight department desks sent representatives, depending on what they had to offer for fronting. The sports desk attended only occasionally; the national and foreign desks showed up for every meeting.