Behind the Times (50 page)

Specialization was the journalistic future, in any case. “It’s easier to bring writing style to a knowledgeable person than knowledge to a stylish writer,” Jack Rosenthal argued. “So we find a former assistant secretary of state like Les Gelb, and bring him in. Then we get great clashes of the experts at our board meetings. The knowledgeable economist and the lawyer come at each other across the table. We get to be like a family. We’re not afraid to appear stupid in our crosstalk. For example, someone can say, ‘I missed that story, tell me about it.…’ Or: ‘I don’t understand your use of that economics term, explain it.…’ Or: ‘Defend your position against the objection that …’ The
man who comments on the latest decision of the U.S. Supreme Court [John McKenzie, also trained in the law] has to take cognizance in his editorial of the points raised by the rest of the board in our discussions. The writer doesn’t have to agree with the points, but he has to deal with them in the editorial.”

The board tried to be part of the drive to be reader-friendly. Editorials were changing, just as news coverage was changing. To some extent, Rosenthal explained, “Editorials are the news of yesterday in review, with a point of view. But we don’t want just a sterile recitation of what happened. There are other ways to process information. We can have fun. We can be the first to say ‘Holy Cow!’ on a topic. I expect the board to re-report everything.” Quickly, he added: “Not that we don’t trust our newsroom staff, they’re the greatest in the world. But reporters are often on deadline, they are lied to, they are hurried. So our specialists have to do some work, too; we have to do our own reporting.”

In fact, the 1990s
Times
broadened the scope of commentary to include new approaches to the editorial form. Rosenthal offered six examples from the editorial pages in the late summer and early fall of 1991 to illustrate how the old categories had expanded. Two were examples of Traditional Commentary—first, the
Times
’ position on the big news of the day (“Anita Hill and the Senate’s Duty,” October 8, 1991, about Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court) and, second, the
Times
’ policy analyses of the major issues, or as Rosenthal explained it, “What should our intelligent readers think about family planning, D.C. statehood, the homeless, foreign affairs?” (“The President Is Right On Israel,” September 17, 1991). Rosenthal’s next three categories were less traditional. One, “Warren McCleskey Is Dead” (September 29, 1991) dealt with a convict who died in Georgia’s electric chair. Rosenthal called this the Pure Outrage editorial form: “It did not have a policy point. It asked if McCleskey deserved to die. We didn’t save his life but we did pound the table and rail at the Supreme Court.” Another nontraditional category he called Music—“short commentary on what people are feeling and thinking, on what’s in the air.” “Still Crazy” (August 17, 1991) was a reflection on a Paul Simon concert (“Thursday night in Central Park turned into a milestone of mellowness.…”). The fourth editorial form, Social Comment, turned on even slighter subjects. “Sick Jokes” (August 6, 1991) speculated on how ad hoc jokes about the Dahmer multiple-murder
case in Milwaukee and the Pee Wee Herman morals arrest in Sarasota moved by E-mail throughout the country. The casual assumption that readers of the editorial page were the kind of people who have desktop computers with modems and networking services—stock brokers, writers, high technologists—fitted neatly with the
Times
’ image of itself.

The Social Comment form appeared regularly. Many dealt with “up” subjects. “
The Busiest Day” recounted the demanding schedule of “one Manhattan socialite,” whose appointments calendar for that day, October 24, started at 9:00
A.M.
and listed five events (“She already has turned down two more”). Among the events, according to the
Times
: “the new Royalton Hotel for a
Vanity Fair
party, Mortimer’s to celebrate the launch of a new jewelry firm, the Plaza for the Casita Maria fiesta and the Rainbow Room for a Duke Ellington memorial fund-raiser.” Another woman was said to be so stressed by all the social demands that she was “looking forward to escape on a yacht in Antigua.” There was no sign that the
Times
was being sarcastic; my dear! these are our readers.

Historically, the most venerable commentary on newspaper editorial pages has dealt with government and the political parties, rather than
Vanity Fair
’s parties. Newspapers identified themselves as Federalist or Whig, later as Democratic or Republican. That changed, too, though the modern
Times
was hardly the only newspaper affected. The colonial press was partisan on the editorial pages and in the news columns. In the late nineteenth century, the doctrine of objectivity in the news began taking hold; general-interest dailies started restricting their political views more and more to the editorial pages, cleaning up their news acts in the interests of greater credibility and wider acceptance in the marketplace. By the midpoint of the twentieth century, the move toward “objectivity” had taken many newspapers’ editorial pages away from party identification entirely. Since 1932, when the trade magazine
Editor & Publisher
began its quadrennial survey of
editorial-page endorsements in U.S. dailies, the number of papers endorsing presidential candidates has steadily dropped. By 1988, and the George Bush-Michael Dukakis race, 436 daily newspapers, or 56.5 percent of the 772 responding to the
Editor
&
Publisher
mail and telephone survey, said they would not endorse either candidate—the largest number of abstentions recorded by the magazine over almost sixty years. Hundreds of big-city papers, including the
Washington Post
and the
Los Angeles Times
, declined to recommend either candidate to their readers in 1988. The reasons varied: The
Post
said it didn’t have confidence in Bush or Dukakis; the
Los Angeles Times
stopped making presidential endorsements in the early 1970s, as competing papers in the city disappeared and the
Times
“was no longer one voice among many.” Other newspapers declined to make endorsements because they didn’t think the paper’s views made much difference to the voters. In 1992 the endorsement record marginally changed; the
Washington Post
, for example, endorsed the Democrat, Bill Clinton, but few analysts doubted any lasting reversal of the downward trend.

While there were fewer abstentions in 1992, not many publishers would say publicly what many in their ranks believed: Readers were hard enough to come by, the less materials that turned them off, the better. The Sulzbergers had no use for such behavior, regarding it as a dereliction of journalistic duty. “If a publisher is going to allow his editorial page to comment on what goes on in the world when it comes to every other issue,” Punch Sulzberger declared, “he can’t pretend that he can’t make up his mind on who should run the country.”

If there were readers who didn’t care, the
Times
nevertheless shouldered its electoral responsibilities. Before making the paper’s endorsements for the New York City Council in 1991, board members interviewed all 105 candidates for the council’s fifty-one seats. “It was as if we were able to put a finger on the pulse of the city,” Jack Rosenthal remembered. “It gave us a feeling that we knew what we were talking about.” The candidates were happy to be interviewed. When the
Times
is on the line, almost everyone pays attention. “It’s the joy of working at the
Times
,” said Jack Rosenthal. “Leave a phone message that the
Times
has called, and they’ll call you back right away.”

Politicians and the Op-Ed brigade called on the
Times
, without waiting to be called. For decades, mayoral, congressional, and presidential candidates dutifully trooped to the tenth-floor conference room to meet with the board and the publisher, and make their cases for the
Times
’ endorsement. These election-year encounters were usually low-key affairs, conducted with a minimum of publicity. In recent years, however, when the
Times
was deciding its choices for president of the United States in 1988 and for New York City mayor in 1989, the process got out of hand. The two high-profile episodes helped shatter the Oz-like institutional aura the
Times
liked to project.

*        *        *

The
Times
’ editorial page has been the voice of the liberal establishment for half a century. As Karl E. Meyer explained, “liberal” traditionally meant “centrist” or “mainstream.” The word “establishment” has murkier roots. The writer Richard Rovere helped popularize the idea of an American Establishment in the early 1960s; Rovere didn’t actually believe that a single, unelected, unacknowledged elite “ran” America. He used the word “establishment” somewhat facetiously. By 1980, however, the economics writer (and
Times
Business Day columnist) Leonard Silk treated the American establishment as if it were a tangible entity. Silk, together with his son, Mark, at the time a Harvard teaching fellow, described the establishment as “a third force” that mediated between popular democracy and corporate capitalism. According to the Silks, the institutions that made the establishment the establishment were, in order: the establishment’s leading university, Harvard; its “premiere newspaper,” the
New York Times
—“disinterested, pure, apostle of moderation and business progress”; the Ford Foundation, the Brookings Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations; groups such as the Business Roundtable, the Eastern wing of the Republican Party, and the Trilateral Commission.

Today the Silks’ list has mainly antiquarian value. Americans encounter Eastern Moderate Republicans as infrequently as the spotted owl; not even conspiracy theorists bother to mention trilateralism anymore. The
Times
’ editorial page, however, perseveres. It still tries to act as honest broker on “the issues.” It addresses both major matters—for example, mediating between the White House and Israel—and the more minor concerns of the moment (a socialite’s “Busiest Day”). “What the
Times
said” on the editorial page became a shorthand for the midground consensus. It said what the thoughtful people thought. A few years back, Hedley Donovan, the former editor in chief of the Time Inc. magazines, despaired of the leadership qualities of Jason McManus, who became Time Inc. editor in chief in 1988. Donovan didn’t think McManus had the necessary imagination or the new ideas to keep the magazines fresh and vital. “Jason,” Donovan complained, looking for the right words to convey his disappointment,
“never expressed an opinion at our meetings that couldn’t be found on the editorial pages of
The New York Times.
”

Donovan was perhaps too harsh on the
Times
, and on McManus. The editorial page was not always predictable. The
Times
endorsed
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, and broke with him in 1940 when he ran for a third term, spurning presidential tradition (read: moderation). But then Roosevelt, the wartime president leading the allied coalition, won the
Times
’ endorsement for his
fourth
term in 1944. During the cold-war years, the
Times
’ editorial choices swung back to moderate Republicans—Thomas E. Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower, twice (the voters also liked Ike). By the 1960s, the country, and the
Times
along with it, was ready for change again. A new liberal voice, John Oakes’s, was heard on the editorial pages; the
Times
endorsed the cool centrist John Kennedy in 1960 against the hot Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson over New Right Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Hubert Humphrey instead of Nixon in 1968—Oakes was still unable to stomach Nixon, while the Sulzbergers thought he was an anti-Semite.

During the 1970s and ’80s, the editorial page’s enthusiasm for moderate Democrats Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale grew fainter and fainter. Then came the 1988 presidential elections. The Democrat Michael Dukakis was the board’s favorite by a clear majority. Soon after the candidate came to lunch with the publisher and selected editors and board members, however, the word spread in the newsroom that Punch Sulzberger had been underwhelmed by Dukakis. He came across as narrow, a technocrat, programmed, “as if he were running mechanically, like a candidate for sanitary district engineer.” There were reports that the
Times
would not endorse either man.

The Sunday before election day, October 30, 1988, Jack Rosenthal’s lead editorial appeared; “
Two Good Men,” the headline read. The editorial complained about the “sour, superficial, misleading campaign.” But then George Bush was described as informed and affable, and Michael Dukakis as disciplined and decent. Bush was serious. Dukakis was also serious. And so on, down the page. Readers couldn’t discern the
Times
’ choice for president that next Tuesday until the last paragraph. After 1,785 words of analysis, the
Times
’ verdict came in the final thirty-six words: “Here, then, is the final test. Getting America out of hock is, by far, the next president’s most urgent job. Who’s likely to do it better? The answer tips a closely balanced scale—to Michael Dukakis.”

Later, when Jack Rosenthal and Punch Sulzberger were asked, separately, about
the genesis of “Two Good Men,” they offered two different explanations. Rosenthal gave an intellectual’s policy-oriented
answer. “It turned on Bush’s cockamamie proposals to cut the capital gains tax.” Sulzberger gave a more personal account. “Did I find Dukakis ‘underwhelming’? That’s semi-true, like all such stories. I could very easily have gone for Bush until he nominated Dan Quayle. That just knocked me over, and I couldn’t do it. But we didn’t cop out as some as our friends in the industry did. We went to Dukakis.” Both men also offered a peek at the “collegial” process. “We have a contractual relationship with the reader,” Rosenthal said. “They look to us for informed commentary. We nominated ourselves to ruminate, to think. But then when the time came to draw the line, and add it all up, we couldn’t say at that point, ‘We’re going to pull away.’ That would have been patronizing. That would have been evading responsibility. It was a hard call. The
Washington Post
did not endorse that same week. We did, yes, sure, on the thinnest grounds. But we did it. We endorsed.” Punch Sulzberger was more direct: “When the discussion is about who we choose, the editorial page editor and I really don’t have any philosophic arguments. We don’t get into fights at the end of the day, about who goes for Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith. We work together and it comes quite naturally and quite easily.” Then he said something that sounded familiar: “I play a very active role in these things. They don’t go the other way if I don’t want them to.”