Behind the Times (46 page)

Homestead stayed in Serrin’s mind. He began considering alternative futures to the
Times.
Though he was married, with two children and a mortgage, he realized that he didn’t want to move up in the newsroom “to become an editor and control people.” He liked reporting, but he doubted his desire to sustain indefinitely the output of a
Times
hotshot. He produced the kinds of workplace stories he thought the
Times
should run—for example, a profile of the acclaimed artist Ralph Fasanella, a painter who worked in a United Electrical Workers local. The story sat for weeks in the editors’ queue, and then, says Serrin, it was buried in the Sunday paper “back with the truss ads, as they used to say.” In October 1986, three months after his Homestead story appeared, Serrin resigned from the
Times
, started a book on the collapse of the American steel industry for Random House, and began a new career as a university professor. Looking back, he explains: “What bothered me about the
Times
 … and what bothers me today, is that I think I have been forced out of my own profession, and this saddens me to this day. The bureaucracy, the old-boys network—the Harvard guys, the guys who started as clerks—whose members can almost never do any wrong, the terrible in-fighting between desks, the concentration on reporting high-level government and the establishment: All this combines to force one out.” Serrin adds: “The strange thing is, I still miss the place immensely and sometimes wish I were back.”

Still, competition helped make many people good
Times
men, and they were grateful. Steven R. Weisman joined the
Times
in 1968, right
after graduation from Yale. Quickly, his
Times
career stalled. “
My writing was considered too soft, I was judged not productive enough,” he says. “They put me on the rewrite desk, banished me there for three years, not only to rewrite, but on the night shift, until 3:00
A.M.
” Help arrived from an unexpected direction; John Leonard, the
Book Review
editor, asked Weisman to review the new Theodore White book detailing the author’s disenchantment with Richard Nixon. “Leonard could have assigned the review to a heavyweight, but he liked to make some waves,” Weisman says. “He wanted to get something unpredictable into the
Review.
” The review stirred things up for Weisman; he was noticed. The editors moved him off the night desk and sent him to the City Hall bureau. He became the number-four reporter in the four-man bureau, just as the public was becoming aware of the extent of the municipal fiscal crisis in New York. “I had paid my dues,” Weisman says, with pride. He was back on the good
Times
man’s fast track. The rewards followed. His explanatory coverage of the fiscal story received prominent play and wide praise. He became, in succession, Albany bureau chief, a Washington correspondent, the New Delhi correspondent, and then was posted to Tokyo as the chief of bureau for four years beginning in 1989. His tour of duty coincided with the period of heightened tensions in the U.S.-Japanese trade relationship. Weisman’s dispatches made page one regularly. In his early forties, he achieved visibility inside and outside the
Times.
The parallels in his career with another former foreign correspondent were not lost on his peers; Abe Rosenthal had also been stationed in New Delhi and Tokyo before returning to New York to begin his ascent to executive editor.

High-pressure workplaces are not easy on people already under great stress, and the good
Times
men understood that personal demons couldn’t be brought in to work. If they forgot it, the short unhappy life of reporter
Fay Joyce served to underline that lesson. Joyce began her newspaper career after graduation from college in 1970, when she was hired by the
Savannah Morning News.
She later worked for the
Atlanta Constitution
, covering the Jimmy Carter campaign. She joined the
Times
in 1983, the year after her marriage broke up. The
Times
assigned her to cover national politics during the 1984 presidential races, and she reported on the campaigns of Walter Mondale and Jesse Jackson. Joyce had made the big time journalistically, but she was developing a reputation among her editors for being—yes—“difficult.”
She initially asked that her byline be “Fay Joyce,” using her former husband’s name. Then she suggested “Fay Smulevitz,” her name before she married. After a series of arguments with her editors, everyone agreed on the byline, “Fay S. Joyce.” An affair begun with a married man during the political campaign ended badly. Joyce grew more depressed after her editors moved her from the national desk and assigned her to local stories. In the summer of 1985, she applied—using the stationery of the
New York Times
—for a job on her first paper, the
Savannah Morning News.
“The
Times
is not what you think it is,” she wrote Wally Davis, her first editor fifteen years before. “Nobody around here ever smiles.” She eventually accepted a reporter’s position at her old Atlanta paper. On November 15, 1985, Fay S. Joyce resigned from the
Times.
Two weeks later, she shot herself to death. Her body was discovered in her apartment when her super let in a prospective renter. Some of her friends complained about the
Times
’ treatment of Joyce, although they can point to nothing specific, other than the wording of the short obituary the paper ran. It described her as a “former” reporter of the
New York Times.
She had killed herself the day before she was scheduled to report to work at the
Atlanta Constitution.

To some
Times
people, the bureaucracy was the
Times
, and the
Times
was the bureaucracy. The editors’ authority has a physical locus—the news desk for the Washington bureau, the foreign desk for overseas correspondents and, above all, the “North Wall” where the senior editors sat, near the executive editor’s office suite at the north, or 44th Street, end of the block-long newsroom. When the whole place was repainted not long ago, some newsroom people began calling those editors “The Boys Along the Blue Wall.” In 1990 they became the boys and one woman, Carolyn Lee. Lee helped integrate the ranks of the senior editors when she was appointed an assistant managing editor. Today, the usage has been simplified, to The Wall.

New reporters learned to regard these ranks as a collective on matters of policy. Martin Levine, while an editor for the
Book Review
, received assurance of a desirable promotion from his section editor. A few weeks later, though, a Wall editor explained to Levine that the promise had no standing: “It was personal, because no one can speak for the
Times.
” The idea of the
Times
collective extended beyond internal administrative decisions. E. R. Shipp, a black woman reporter for the
Times
,
accepted an invitation from Fred Friendly of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism to appear on a television program about the Tawana Brawley case—and then abruptly canceled. Shipp had gone to Columbia and covered the Brawley case for the
Times
; Friendly thought she was an ideal choice and he spoke to her supervisor, metro editor John Darnton. “
The drift of Darnton’s conversation,” Friendly remembered, “was that ‘we can’t have a reporter speak for the
Times.
’ ” Friendly thought that Darnton was really saying, “a young black woman couldn’t speak for the
Times.
” But every good
Times
man is expected to reflect institutional opinion. Tokyo correspondent Steven Weisman, home on leave, happened to remark to a senior editor that the expanded national edition of the
Times
was “boring, a cut-and-paste job.” Not so, the editor replied, “the correct view now is that the national edition is a good product for the
Times
company.” The correspondent looked for a sign that the editor was being sarcastic about the
Times
’ ways: “But no, he said ‘the correct view’ with a straight face, without irony.”

The editors have the formal means to enforce their views of journalistic correctness. Most publicily, the boys along The Wall spoke through the “Editors’ Note” and “Corrections” boxes that regularly ran on page three of the
Times.
Until 1992 a two-page newsletter called
Winners & Sinners
was distributed to the staff twice a month.
Winners & Sinners
described itself “as a bulletin of second-guessing issued occasionally from the newsroom of
The New York Times
”; but the good
Times
man knew it was the voice of The Wall. The supervisor was the formidable assistant managing editor, Allan Siegal; for a donation of $25 to the
Times
’ Fresh Air Fund, non-
Times
people could subscribe. The newsletter consisted of a series of short, post-facto commentaries on news stories. Entries were instructive;
Winners
&
Sinners
bulletin no. 530, dated May 19, 1991, for example, informed readers that the
Times
style book requires “all right” to be two words, and not “alright,” as it was published in the newspaper of March 20. More substantively, no. 530 critiqued a feature story of April 19, which gave
Times
readers some suggestions on where to take visitors. One of the tips recommended fried chicken at Sylvia’s in Harlem, adding: “Ask the cab to wait.” The
W&S
comment: “Do all our readers have to take a cab to get to 126th Street and Lenox?” Further, “the snide aside” about asking the cab to wait sounded like, “Get out of there as fast as you can.” The W&S conclusion: “If we did want to offer the opinion that
the area is unsafe or unsavory, we should have said just that.” In 1992 Frankel drastically changed the format for
Winners
&
Sinners
, dropping the name and outside subscribers. Instead, The Wall began circulating a daily memo among the top editors, with strictly internal comments on the sinful and the winsome stories. Selected news stories from that morning’s edition, each with The Wall comments stapled to them, are pulled together into a small packet. Grammar, style, and questions of fact and interpretation are all covered. Reporters and midlevel editors usually saw these packets in a weekly collection called “the Greenies” (for the color of the paper). Some of the grunts in the newsroom decreed a different name: the “Daily Slam Sheet.”

Good
Times
men were never far from the reach of The Wall, no matter where they were stationed. Every foreign correspondent received a daily fronting cable, describing the page-one lineup of the current edition and telling where all foreign stories appeared in the paper. If the Nairobi correspondent was traveling to Dar Es Salaam, then the cable was sent to her hotel. In addition, every ten days or so, overseas correspondents got an air shipment of a week’s worth of the regular paper. As the sociologists would explain it, the correspondent read the status system of the
Times
, along with the air mail edition, and assimilated the ethos of the institution.

The growing bureaucracy of the Frankel years affected the good
Times
mans daily routines. The daily miracle of each edition, with its heft and sense of comprehensiveness, is more wondrous considering all the meetings the staff attends; the meetings give the workday the appearance of one extended story conference. “The challenge is
to survive the bureaucracy, not get frustrated, and find time to be productive,” Josh Mills explained to an interviewer. An editor on the
Times
’ business-news desk since 1986, Mills offered this outline of a typical day, from his own schedule in the spring of 1990, working for the Business Day section:

Within this formal framework are the multiple editing sessions among reporters, writers, and desk people. For example, an article about the press—an Alex Jones report in the summer of 1990 on, say, the decline of newspaper reading in America—was edited by the media-cluster editor, Martin Arnold, and/or his assistant, at the time, Judith Miller. Next the Business Day backfield looked at Jones’s copy for gaps, inconsistencies, and other matters of substance. Then the Business Day copy desk read over the story for proper grammar and style. In addition, the Business Day editor, or his deputy, might ask to see the edited version and request changes. This can cause a turf war. The Business Day editor can say, “It’s my department,” and the media-cluster editor can reply, “But it’s my page.” Higher editors then have to intervene. Finally, if the story contains any mention of the
New York Times
or the Times Company, no matter how peripherally, a copy must, without exception, be sent out to The Wall for an assistant managing editor to read and formally initial.

This, then, was the institutional
Times
that tried the souls of even the most ardent loyalists. People with no desire to be anything other than good
Times
men nevertheless suffered the pains of the
Times
’ tough love. “
Three things have dominated my life,” the columnist James Reston wrote in his memoirs, published in 1991. He listed them in order as the teachings of his parents, the love of his wife, and the “integrity of the
New York Times.
” But Reston diplomatically skipped over his unhappy tenure in New York, excising the memory of his months as executive editor with the brief comment that he didn’t
realize how much he would miss Washington when he accepted the editorship. Reston’s fellow columnist Russell Baker felt no need for such tact. Baker treated the
Times
with the same sardonic humor he used in his column. He mocked, gently to be sure, the bureaucratic habits of the
Times
’ newsroom and treated “the news game” itself as a shallow enterprise. Reston wrote a love letter to the
Times
and to the role of the press in the American democracy. Baker grew tired of being a
Times
man; on the White House beat, considered the plum assignment in the
Times
’ Washington bureau, Baker said the news was so tightly managed that a reporter’s only intelligent defense was boredom or cynicism. And so Baker accepted an offer from his old newspaper the
Baltimore Sun
, to write a column. When Baker informed his bureau chief, Reston, of the decision to resign and return to the
Sun
, Reston’s reaction was: “That’s
a kick in the balls to me.” Reston took Baker’s resignation personally, though Baker wasn’t sure whether Reston really wanted him to stay or was more upset at the notion that anyone would actually leave the
Times
for another newspaper, and a provincial one at that. At Reston’s instigation, the publisher immediately telephoned Baker to persuade him to remain. In quick succession Baker was asked if he wanted to be the chief of the
Times
bureau in Rome, in London, or in New Delhi. After the fourth offer, to have his own column in the
Times
, Baker withdrew his resignation. Even then, he maintained his distance from the bureaucracy, occasionally writing satirically about it in his columns. Eventually, he transferred himself out of the Washington bureau to work at home, and came into the office no more than once or twice a year.