Hard News (10 page)

In addition to instituting a top-down management style, Raines didn’t seem much concerned with familiarizing himself with the newsroom’s assorted factions. “I used to spend most of my day prowling the office,” says Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of
The Washington Post.
Bradlee is a legendary newsroom figure—the archetypal newsman, he led the
Post
in its Watergate coverage and is still stopped on the street by people who thank him for his contribution to the country. “I could stand two people talking in the newsroom, but suddenly if there were three people talking together, I want to know what the hell it’s about,” he continues. “And if it’s good, I want a piece of it. I had glass walls in my office so I could see what was going on, and if there was something I didn’t know about, it would drive me crazy.”

Raines, tucked away either in his office or in high-level meetings, seemed content not to know. Privately, he would later reveal, he thought the newsroom was filled with lazy, occasionally incompetent staffers. The paper’s “indifference to competition and its chronic slowness in anticipating the news” had dulled its journalistic wits and largely negated the advantage of the paper’s superior resources, according to Raines’s May 2004
Atlantic
essay. Instead of taking the pulse of the newsroom, he barked out orders. He instituted pieces he called “all-known thoughts,” weighty, multi-thousand-word exposés that ran on the front page of the Sunday paper. The stories were meant to distill authoritatively the hot news topic of the moment, but in practice the pieces often seemed larded with extraneous, recycled detail at the expense of actual news. He seemed to want buzzy, snappy pieces, regardless of whether any buzzy, snappy news was happening at any given time.

By Friday, September 7, just two days into Raines’s tenure, the newsroom already felt as if it were under the gun, and staffers speculated openly about whose necks were on the chopping block. Word was out that Raines thought business editor Glenn Kramon was underperforming. In fact, Howell was said to be putting all his top editors on notice that they had better shape up. He’d called Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson at her vacation home in Madison, Connecticut, and told her he wanted “something to pop” from her for Sunday’s edition. He’d moved Rosenthal off the foreign desk but hadn’t yet officially tapped a successor: Roger Cohen would need to do the job with the word “acting” preceding his “foreign editor” title. Boyd, though at least well-known in the newsroom, was no comfort, either; he’d already begun to emulate the arrogant swagger of his executive editor.

The first weekend after Raines took office was unseasonably warm in New York City. Central Park was filled with people in shorts and T-shirts. Up in the Bronx, the Yankees took three straight from their archrivals, the Boston Red Sox. On Monday, September 10, the city was drenched in a torrential late afternoon downpour. The rain tapered off overnight, and Tuesday, September 11, was an impossibly clear, cloudless fall day.

Howell Raines lives in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, about midway between the World Trade Center towers and the
Times
’s headquarters. His four-story townhouse sits across the street from St. Vincent’s Hospital. On the morning of September 11, he was sitting at his computer, not yet dressed, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. The impact was clearly audible in the Village; it sounded like a fireball exploding. Raines took a call from Arthur Sulzberger and rushed outside. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the south tower at 9:03 a.m. Raines arrived at the
Times
around ten o’clock, just as the south tower was collapsing. The Pentagon had also been hit. All local bridges and tunnels were shut down, as were all of the country’s flight operations.

By the time Raines and the paper’s top editors made their way to the paper, dozens of reporters had swarmed toward the World Trade Center. A handful of the paper’s metro staffers were already downtown—September 11 was the scheduled primary day for November’s mayoral election. Some of them would remain at ground zero for weeks.

That day, ultimately,
The New York Times
would dispatch three hundred reporters, thirty staff photographers, and twenty-four freelance photographers. Seventy-four staffers got bylines, and thirty-three pages of the next morning’s paper were devoted to the attacks. According to a 2002 article in
The New Yorker,
on September 12 the
Times
devoted 82,500 words to coverage of the attack, almost as many as the number that make up the text of this book.

The
Times
’s coverage of the attacks and their aftermath was remarkable. Raines, whose first wife had been a photographer, made extraordinary use of the paper’s photographers and produced a visually arresting paper that was more handsome and gripping than ever before. The paper’s coverage was comprehensive and humane; the “Portraits of Grief,” thumbnail-sketch biographies of the victims of the attacks, became one of the most profoundly moving components of the paper’s daily reports. Even the solutions that had been conceived to manage the volume of coverage were daring and unique: Because the paper wanted to dedicate a daily, stand-alone section to coverage of the attacks, the paper’s editors had to come up with a way to collapse two sections into one. Instead of beginning one halfway through another, they decided to run sports on the back of the daily metro section, flipped upside down, so readers could read each section with its own front page. In many ways, the
Times
’s robust coverage of September 11 played to Raines’s greatest strengths: his vigor, his editorial ingenuity, his love of all-consuming stories, and his keen aesthetic sense.

Immediately after September 11, the
Times,
like many New York–based newspapers, made counseling available for staffers who felt emotionally overwhelmed, but the vast majority of reporters and editors were too busy, or felt too proud, to avail themselves of help. Over the months, the demands on the newsroom and the stresses of working at a potential target for terrorist attacks only grew. The
Times
wrote about how Times Square—its home—was a largely unprotected magnet for suicide bombers. “There was the enormous stress of September 11 as a news story, and then there was also the enormous stress of September 11 as a horrifying tragedy in your hometown,” says assistant managing editor Mike Oreskes.

Oreskes himself says he didn’t fully realize the pressure the newsroom was under until it was brought home by his young son. A couple of weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, his son was speaking with a counselor in school, and he said that he had never before realized that his parents had jobs that required them to rush toward danger. (Oreskes’s wife is a New York–based columnist for the
Los Angeles Times.
) “[The events surrounding September 11] affected us individually as human beings in ways I don’t think we quite realized,” Oreskes says. “We had an anthrax scare in the newsroom. The enormous stress of the story was unlike anything our generation has ever dealt with.

“At some level, I think we accepted the idea that some of the problems we were wrestling with in the newsroom were about the multiple traumas of September 11,” he says. “I thought we would recover. Things would get better—we would act to
make
them better.”

As stressful as September 11 was to the staff, not all the tensions in the newsroom were attributable to the disaster. Editors and reporters alike became increasingly dismayed by what they felt was Raines’s self-centeredness. The week of the September 11 attacks, Raines met with investigative editor Stephen Engelberg and reporter Ethan Bronner in a conference room on the fourth floor to strategize about the best ways to pursue the unfolding story. Engelberg tried to talk to Raines about a three-part series he’d worked on with reporter Judith Miller, a specialist in bioterrorism and chemical weapons, about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda that ran in January 2001. “It became clear he hadn’t read it,” Engelberg says. Frustrated, he then proposed examining the Bush and Clinton administrations’ planning and response to warnings about attacks on American soil, but Raines dismissed the idea. (“Let’s just say we had heard of Richard Clarke,” Engelberg says dryly, referring to the Bush and Clinton antiterrorism adviser who, in the spring of 2004, ignited a firestorm when he criticized President Bush for dropping the ball on warnings about al-Qaeda. Clarke was quoted in Engelberg and Miller’s January 2001 series.) After a vague discussion in which Raines said he wanted to look forward, not back, he told Engelberg and Bronner, “I don’t want my obituary to read that I was the editor who blew the biggest investigative story of my generation.”

“I was just staggered,” says Engelberg. “The sheer ego of it. It wasn’t about doing great journalism. It wasn’t about the thousands dead at ground zero. It wasn’t about getting the story right. It was about his obituary.”

Still, the newsroom needed a leader, and it’s entirely possible that the
Times
’s staff might have embraced one in Raines if he’d been willing to show them he valued having them on his team. But Raines seemed uninterested in providing that sort of leadership. In his first month on the job, he had already begun to alienate a key constituency, a group of powerful newsroom brokers who could have helped interpret his vision: the desk editors. In taking authority and control away from the men and women who ran the paper’s myriad departments, Raines immediately disenfranchised the layer of management that had the most interaction with reporters. “When you empower the desk editors, you in effect empower the reporters,” says Gene Roberts, Joe Lelyveld’s first managing editor. “Ten o’clock is the busiest time of the day for the assignment desk. Reporters are coming in, they’re checking with sources, so between ten and eleven, reporters and editors are making deals about what their days are going to be like. And then meanwhile you have the AMEs [assistant managing editors] meeting with the executive editor and reflecting on yesterday’s newspaper. So they come out of that meeting and give marching orders to the desk editors, but they’ve already talked to their reporters.

“At this point either the assignment editor basically ignores the assistant MEs or they have to go back to the reporters and say, ‘Oops, I said you could do story X, but now you have to do story Y.’ So you have a kind of institutional disconnect that gets built right into the system, and no matter what your personality is, having that kind of day-in-day-out problem starts unsettling people on a massive scale.” By ignoring the desk editors, Howell Raines had all but forced them to make an unpleasant choice: either they could cheerily carry out Raines’s marching orders and risk the wrath of their reporters or they could align themselves with their staffs and join in the griping. Most of them sided with their reporters—and against Raines.

There were also more personal reasons that the paper’s midlevel editors felt frustrated. The
Times,
like any tribal institution, has its own set of social classes. One of the most important is made up of midlevel editors, the group of
Times
lifers between thirty and sixty years old who actually put out the paper on a day-to-day basis. They assign the stories, they edit the copy, they deal with complaints. They are, invariably, journalists who have made enormous sacrifices to work at the
Times.
“Where are these people going?” asks one
Times
editor. “They’re not going to
Esquire,
they’re not going to
Vanity Fair.
They carve out some small amount of space, they fight for some tiny bit of creativity, and they do it for the chance to be a part of something larger. Howell took that away.”

As the year stretched on, the
Times
settled into a routine in which reporters and editors were working seven-day weeks. In the midst of this chaos, Raines began a campaign to more purposefully remake specific sections of the paper.

He began by focusing on both the national and business desks. Raines, working through Gerald Boyd and Andrew Rosenthal, would send marching orders to national editor Katy Roberts, who sometimes ended up in tears because she had to go to a reporter to whom she had already given a story and take back the assignment.

Raines had more success with the business section. “Early on,” says Glenn Kramon, “there was this sense that Biz Day needed to be told what to do.” Kramon responded by exhorting his staff to prove to Raines that they were worthy of his respect and praise. “As it went on, it became much more of a collaboration.” In early 2002, no business story was more consuming than the collapse of Enron, and Raines’s intense desire to dominate breaking news coupled with the hard-nosed work of Kramon’s staff pushed the
Times
’s coverage of the story into the lead, ahead of
The Wall Street Journal,
which had dominated the story early on. On January 17, the
Times
’s David Cay Johnston broke a story on page one detailing how the company had avoided paying income taxes for four out of the previous five years. On January 25, Alex Berenson detailed how Enron had created illusory profits in a division run by Thomas White, who left Enron to become secretary of the army. And on February 10, Kurt Eichenwald authored a 6,460-word front-page story that to this day serves as an excellent primer on the downfall of a once mighty company.

“[Howell] recognized early on what a huge story Enron was,” says Kramon. “And he pushed us hard to dominate the story, to stay ahead of competitors like the
Journal.
On days we did, he was extremely complimentary and enthusiastic. He had great instincts for stories that would excite readers.”

Once Kramon showed he was able to lead his staff to dominate the coverage, Raines became less dictatorial as well. On days when Enron would be a major focus of the paper’s news report, Raines, Boyd, and Rosenthal would meet with Kramon and other reporters and editors involved in the story to map out coverage. “It wasn’t, ‘You should do this or you should do that,’ ” says Kramon. “Which was in contrast to what happened early on.