Hard News (20 page)

By this point, Bill Schmidt and employees from the paper’s news administration staff had worked through Blair’s expense reports and other records. “It was suggested to me that there was a suspicion that he might not have been [in Texas],” says Steinberg. But no one had actually reached Juanita Anguiano, the mother of the soldier Blair wrote about.

That afternoon, Steinberg tracked down Anguiano at her home in Los Fresnos, Texas—he was the first reporter to reach her since the story had broken earlier that week—and began to ask her about conversations she’d had with reporters, including one from
The New York Times.
As Steinberg continued his interview, some of the reporters seated at the desks surrounding his realized what was going on. They gathered around his cubicle. It was at that point that Anguiano said she had to get off the phone. She was, she said, on her way to her son’s funeral—in the five days since Blair’s story had run, Edward Anguiano’s remains had been identified.

“I very gently told her I just needed to confirm this one fact,” Steinberg says, “that Jayson had actually been there to see her.” Anguiano said he hadn’t. “I kept apologizing profusely,” Steinberg says. “But I asked her—several times, as I recall—if she was sure he hadn’t been there. Was there any chance she had forgotten? Remember, it was just a completely alien thought, at that point, to me or any other reporter, that Jayson would have datelined a story and not gone there. This was thought to be just a dustup over plagiarism.”

Steinberg hung up the phone, stunned. He assumed there had to be an explanation. Maybe Blair had been in Texas but reached the woman only by phone? Maybe Anguiano just completely forgot about Blair’s visit? After all, she had had a traumatic several weeks: Her son, first thought to be merely missing, was then presumed dead, and now she was off to bury him in a military funeral. Steinberg conferred with Manly and then punched in Jayson Blair’s cellphone number. His call was returned by Lena Williams, who was across the street at a hotel bar, trying to comfort Blair. Blair, Williams said, wouldn’t comment. Steinberg explained that Juanita Anguiano had just told him that Blair had never been to her house and that he needed to know if Blair had, in fact, even been in Texas.

“I said, ‘Lena, you know how this works. I need to show the reader that I’ve tried to convey this information to Jayson to get a comment. I spoke with the people in Texas, with Juanita Anguiano.’ Even at that point, as a colleague, I’m thinking there’s got to be some explanation for this,” Steinberg recalls. Williams put down the phone for a minute and then returned to the line. Blair, she said, was covering his ears. “And so I went back and said, ‘Lena, you have to tell him, it’s not just that I spoke with her, it’s that she says he wasn’t there. She says he was never in Los Fresnos.’ And she said she’d try, but then whenever she went to him he’d cover up his ears.”

“I couldn’t ask the question. He didn’t want to hear the question you had,” Williams said. Steinberg hung up the phone and turned to Manly. It now seemed entirely possible, they agreed, that Jayson Blair had never been in Texas.

“I keep trying to come up with a better word than ‘surreal,’ ” says Manly. “But that’s what it was. It was like
The Twilight Zone. . . .
I mean, people would kill to get these assignments, to get a chance to go and talk to and write about people around the country. And here was this guy that might not even have bothered to get on a plane? What for?”

Steinberg wrote up his story, a 644-word piece that ran on page A30 the following day, a Friday. Blair, Steinberg wrote, had resigned; he attributed that revelation not to any editor or spokesperson but to “The Times.” Steinberg quoted Juanita Anguiano saying, “No, no, no, he didn’t come.” He also reported that before his phone call, Juanita Anguiano was unaware of the
Times
’s article by Jayson Blair.

As the reporters and editors were finishing up for the day, Gerald Boyd wandered over to the media cluster, on the far west side of the newsroom. Steinberg had known Boyd for years, from back when Steinberg was a clerk in Washington and Boyd was covering the White House. Steinberg, like all reporters, wanted more space for a good story. He asked Boyd if he could give the Blair saga the “David Shaw treatment,” referring to the
Los Angeles Times
media reporter who wrote a thirty-one-thousand-word report on a scandal that erupted in 1999 after the publisher of the
Los Angeles Times
had arranged to produce a 168-page Sunday magazine supplement devoted to the Staples Center, a downtown arena, splitting the $2 million in advertising revenue with the center. “I was thinking about Reston and what he’d want me to do in a situation like this,” says Steinberg. “And he’d say to just report the hell out of it. And much of who I am as a reporter was taught to me by Gerald himself. I just wanted to use all the techniques the paper has invested in me to just turn loose on this.”

Without making any decisions, everyone went home for the night. “We both knew there was more to be done,” Manly says. “We were going to go back in the next morning and tell Gerald we should really go back at this.”

“Whatever happened, I knew when I went home that night that my life was going to be very different on Friday,” Steinberg says. That night, Steinberg—who has two children under five years old—told his wife, “You can expect not to see me for a while.” He was right.

A T
EAM
A
SSEMBLED

On the morning of Friday, May 2, 2003, Gerald Boyd’s secretary summoned Adam Liptak to the managing editor’s office. Liptak, the
Times
’s thin, balding legal correspondent, had traveled an atypical path to the
Times
’s newsroom. For years, he had served as one of the paper’s in-house lawyers, working closely with the editorial side of the paper on libel and First Amendment issues. He’d always maintained an interest in writing—he’d written a fair amount for the
Times
and had once written a “Talk of the Town” piece for
The New Yorker
—but was still surprised when, in 2002, Howell Raines asked him if he was interested in serving as the paper’s national legal correspondent. Liptak, whose five-year-old daughter, Katie, was in kindergarten at the Bank Street School on 112th Street, had a parent-teacher conference scheduled for lunchtime, and when he was summoned into Boyd’s office, he called his wife to tell her he might not be able to make it. “I had no idea what this was about,” Liptak says, “but whatever it was, I assumed it was some issue that had to do with me.” Liptak arrived first and sat alone, waiting.

Boyd’s secretary also called Jonathan Glater. Glater, an African American reporter with wavy hair and braces, is exceedingly polite. He was coming up on his three-year anniversary at the
Times;
he’d arrived during the paper’s (and the industry’s) last big round of hiring, back in the fall of 2000. Before that, Glater had been removed from the world of daily journalism for half a decade, since he left
The Washington Post
in the mid-1990s. After the
Post,
Glater went to Yale Law School and then spent two years working as a lawyer, first in private practice in Buenos Aires and then as a litigator in the New York office of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. The whole time he was practicing law, Glater says, he missed writing. In the summer of 2000, he decided to send out his clips. “The great thing about law is, sometimes you can make a difference—usually for one client at a time,” Glater says. “As a journalist, you can make a difference for a whole lot of people at once.” To his surprise, he was offered a job on the
Times
’s business staff covering law firms, accounting firms, and consulting firms. He knows his timing was fortuitous. “Six months later in 2001 [after the stock market bubble burst], no one was hiring at all, least of all one more wannabe law firm refugee with various journalism internships but no clips in years,” he says.

Glater thought he’d been summoned for a debriefing about his recent monthlong reporting stint in Los Angeles, where he had replaced Jacques Steinberg, who had also been there on a temporary posting. It was Glater’s first real assignment for the paper’s national staff, but he knew it might not be his last. Ever since September 11, the
Times
had been in triage mode, as many of the paper’s most enterprising reporters were recruited to cover the first terror strikes, then the war in Afghanistan, then the war in Iraq. Adding to the staffing problems was the fact that Howell Raines had forced out a handful of the paper’s national correspondents in 2002. Glater, whose wife works in a Manhattan law firm, didn’t have the flexibility to ask for a posting overseas, but earlier in the year he had gone to Boyd and said he would welcome the chance to spend a month or so filling in at one of the paper’s domestic bureaus.

When Glater saw Liptak in Boyd’s office, he concluded that Liptak had been tapped as the next person to fill in at the L.A. bureau. To pass the time until Boyd showed up, Glater spoke to Liptak, recounting details from one of his more amusing and memorable stories. “Adultery May Be a Sin, but It’s a Crime No More,” published on April 17, 2003, was a lighthearted piece about a gated community more than an hour’s drive from Los Angeles that had recently removed from its books a statute outlawing adultery. (The piece quoted a retired banker who dated another woman during his divorce: “Arguably that would’ve run afoul of this,” the banker said. “I try not to violate these provisions.”) Glater told Liptak about how he drove all the way out to the community, called Rolling Hills, only to be turned back at the gate. As he was finishing his story, Boyd walked into the room.

“Well, at least you went,” said Boyd. That was the first hint Glater got that the meeting wasn’t going to be about Los Angeles. Jacques Steinberg and Lorne Manly arrived soon after. (Earlier that morning, Manly had been told he’d have the “acting” removed from his title and would be made the paper’s permanent media editor.) Boyd told the three reporters and one editor that he wanted them to work on a team that would examine the career of Jayson Blair at
The New York Times.
“The notion that Jayson wasn’t in Los Fresnos changes things substantially,” Boyd said. “We need to go back and look at everything, starting with the work he did for the national desk.” The team, Boyd said, should get started immediately. “The initial marching orders were not incredibly precise,” says Glater. “Our sense was we’d need to come up with twenty-five hundred words by Monday or Tuesday.”

“Gerald started to lay out a working hypothesis of what he expected us to find out about Jayson,” Liptak says. “And that’s that Jayson had no credit, that he had reached his limit on the company credit card, and this was why he got boxed in to this position where he’d either need to turn down assignments or make stuff up.” The
Times,
like many media companies, requires its reporters to front their travel expenses and file receipts to be reimbursed. For a national reporter making last-minute reservations and flying around the country, this can result in outlays of thousands of dollars. Glater mentioned how he had been fronting significant sums of money while he was in Los Angeles.

Boyd also made it clear that the team would need to report on their superiors, including himself and Howell Raines. “He told us that he was going to be deciding what sort of cooperation to extend us,” Liptak says. “He was saying, ‘There are some things I might tell you, some things I might not. There are some records we might share, and some we might not.’ He was plainly setting up an independent unit in the paper to report on the paper.”

“We were going to report this as
Times
reporters,” Steinberg says. “It wasn’t even clear yet who was going to lead us, so we were told to just kind of sit tight, and they were in the process of getting in touch with people who might head up the team. But it was clear we were heading into uncharted territory.” Later, Steinberg called his wife and told her, “It’s happening exactly the way I’d thought it would happen.”

After Glater, Liptak, and Steinberg left Gerald Boyd’s office, Boyd spoke to Manly about how the project would evolve. “I wasn’t going to be the main editor,” Manly says. “But Gerald had no idea who would be. He talked vaguely about wanting someone who wasn’t involved in the newsroom but knew the culture. But at this point he was mainly just stressing that they wanted the record corrected.” Manly had been in charge of the paper’s media coverage for only two weeks, and he was still trying to feel his way around the
Times
’s power structure. “Gerald can talk in riddles sometimes,” Manly says. “So it was a little hard to tell exactly what was happening.”

Several hours later, in Portland, Oregon, David Barstow was returning to his hotel room. Barstow was a four-year veteran of the
Times.
After graduating from Northwestern, he spent three years as a reporter on the
Rochester Times-Union.
Then he moved to Florida to work on the
St. Petersburg Times,
one of the best regional papers in the country. It was in Florida that Barstow learned how to handle the pressure of producing the day’s big story. “When I got [to
The New York Times
] I got down on my knees and thanked God that I didn’t get hired here when I was in my twenties. I was not ready,” Barstow says. “Everyone has this experience at some point: It’s three o’clock and the spotlight swivels and you’re the man and you need to deliver by six. [At the
St. Petersburg Times
], I was the go-to guy on a lot of big stories in a lot of weird circumstances. I’m glad I learned how to do that there.” While in Florida, Barstow was a finalist for Pulitzer Prizes in three separate categories—breaking news, investigative reporting, and explanatory reporting. At the
Times,
Barstow worked in metro before becoming one of the linchpins of the paper’s investigative unit.