Hard News (6 page)

Raines wasted no time transforming the tone and spirit of the page. One of his earliest editorials referred to Bill Clinton—who was inaugurated as president on January 20, three weeks after Raines took over the page—as Slick Willie, a startling break from the page’s historically high-minded tone:

On the job training is a messy process, and when you’re President everyone gets to watch. Bill Clinton’s early moves on the budget have been a three-ring circus of novice mistakes. Before long—and sooner wouldn’t hurt—he needs to show that he, not Slick Willie, is the ringmaster.

Raines’s editorial page was an instant sensation. He quickly established himself as a maverick, someone who took obvious delight in throwing metaphoric grenades into crowds just to see what people’s reactions would be. Raines gleefully called Republicans “Dobermans” and wrote that the party’s “intellectual cupboard” was “barer than at any time since the Goldwater implosion.” He accused Clinton of being disingenuous: “Does he really care about the environment,” one editorial asked, “or was that just something he told the voters?” Another piece accused the president of confusing “mere assertion with real accomplishment.” Before spring was out, Raines had made the editorial page a must-read for Washington power brokers and the New York media elite alike. The page was feisty, provocative, fearless, and suddenly, startlingly relevant. Bob Dole, then the minority leader, denounced Raines from the floor of the Senate, complaining that the
Times
’s editorial page had abandoned the “traditional high road for the gutter.” (Raines shot right back, “It’s an unusual feeling to be called too tough by Bob Dole.”)

Before the spring was out,
The Washington Post
had run a feature on Raines, which described how the
Times
’s “new chief pontificator is wielding a stiletto-sharp quill.” Raines explained his seemingly strident editorials by quoting the aphorism about Harry Truman’s search for a one-armed economist so he would no longer be presented with opinions that began, “On the one hand . . .” Raines also broke from
Times
tradition in another way: By the mid-1990s, he had become a visible figure in New York’s social scene and gossip columns. He was dubbed “Howell on the Prowl” thanks to his penchant for squiring attractive women to parties (he and his wife, Susan, had divorced while Raines was still in Washington), and unlike the stereotypical
Times
editor, who shuttled from home to work outfitted in rumpled shirts and sagging trousers, Raines delighted in wearing bespoke shirts and elegant silk ties.

It wasn’t long before some of the paper’s veteran editorialists began (anonymously) denouncing their boss in the press. “When you spend a lot of paragraphs bashing people, you don’t spend a lot of paragraphs making sound arguments,” one said to
The Washington Post.
“You sort of dumb down the page.” Another griped to the
National Journal,
“We sound like the
New York Post,
an editorial page of shrill braying as opposed to sound argumentation.” Even his predecessors on the page, Jack Rosenthal and Max Frankel, criticized Raines. In his memoir, Frankel wrote how Raines “did rattle the china for a while, but if he read more of yesteryear’s papers, he’d have recognized that mere invective is no substitute for vigor and verve.” And Rosenthal told
George
magazine, “I didn’t want us to undermine our reporting staff in the way
The Wall Street Journal
editorial staff undermines its reporters.”

Although the complaints ostensibly concerned Raines’s philosophical approach to the editorial page, underlying them was a criticism of his managerial style. “He tended to lecture the board,” says one longtime editorialist. “He saw us as a group of very intelligent people who didn’t quite understand the importance of journalism or the positions of the paper as well as he did.” The grumblings echoed what had been said in Washington: Raines was autocratic; he didn’t have patience for anyone but his stars; he was unwilling to treat the board’s twelve members as partners. Before long, editorialists started leaving.

In their place, Raines was able to install like-minded writers, and within a couple of years had assembled a close-knit group whose talents and careers he nurtured. “He made that editorial page so exciting,” says Gail Collins, whom Raines recruited from
Newsday
in 1995, where she had been a political columnist. “I imagined it as everybody sitting around a table having very boring discussions. He was hugely into doing things on deadline, being up on the news, traveling on assignment.

“Howell had a vision of what the editorial page should be like,” Collins continues. “It should create talk, encourage this national conversation about the issues of the day.” The offices of the editorial page, located on the tenth floor of the
Times,
are some of the nicest in the building. There’s an extensive library with wood paneling. The tops of the doors are framed with small stained-glass windows, and the walls are trimmed with gothic moldings. It’s here that the fifty people involved in producing the two daily pages under the editorial-page editor’s control spend their days. Working with a relatively small group of people enabled Raines to develop a personal relationship with every member of his staff. Despite his truculence, he had always been a hugely charismatic figure, and he used that charisma to mold the editorial page to his vision. “There was a desire to get Howell’s attention, to convince him, to make him interested in your things,” Collins says. “It’s a very useful charisma. It drove things because you wanted him to dwell on you.”

The press certainly dwelled on Raines, but their attention was often critical. In Slate, Timothy Noah wrote that Raines’s editorials “routinely attempt to hide simpleminded logic behind lapidary prose and promiscuous contempt. Such elegant smugness! Such magnificent indifference to nuance!” And Michael Tomasky wrote in
The Nation,
“Raines would do well, once this is over, to give thought to the legacy he’s left—extinguishing many of the
Times
’ nobler traditions while using the country’s most important newspaper as his personal soapbox.” Some writers within the paper thought Raines’s approach had more to do with marketing than conviction. “To me, it seemed like a business approach,” says one editorial writer. “Like, ‘Let’s put the
Times
in a place where we’ll be talked about.’ It seemed like part of the business model Arthur [Sulzberger] and Howell understood.”

Other people thought Raines’s vitriolic tone—especially with respect to Bill Clinton—was fueled by nothing so much as personal rage. “That was a stormy time for the editorial page,” says one writer whom Raines hired. “The relentlessness, the savagery of those editorials [about Clinton]. There was no other subject on which we were more passionate, and it would have been good to at least have been that passionate about genocide.” Privately, Raines himself joked about the root of his animus for Clinton, riffing in conversation about a “certain type of person who reminds us of who we hated when we were kids.” For Raines, he said, it was “the fat kid in the band.”

There were times, everyone agreed, that Raines used the editorial page to great effect. In Raines’s last eight months as editorial-page editor, the page ran thirty-six editorials on campaign finance reform, of which he was a fierce advocate. “[Campaign finance] is the most boring issue in the entire world,” says Gail Collins. “It was just hell on wheels to try to make it interesting. I swear . . . if God had meant for campaign finance to be reformed, he wouldn’t have made it so boring.”

But Raines found a way to make it more exciting: by naming the senators and congressmen who were impeding passage. “He’d torture them,” Collins says admiringly. “And to not be afraid to run that many [pieces] when you’re the person who has this ‘exciting’ editorial page was sort of a great standard-bearing thing in itself.”

In one two-week period between March and early April 2001, Raines ran nine campaign finance editorials, including two on the same day. That whole year, the headlines were similar to the point of redundancy: “The Battle to Save Shays-Meehan”; “The Battle for Shays-Meehan”; “New Peril for Campaign Reform”; “Perils for Campaign Reform”; “The Senate’s Next Test”; “Next Test for Finance Reform”; and “An Impending Test for Reform.” “He would not stop,” Collins says. “He was totally and utterly committed.” And Raines never worried about going overboard. “It wasn’t the sort of thing Howell thought about,” she says.

Raines’s most famous editorial was written on the occasion of Robert McNamara’s 1995 memoir,
In Retrospect.
McNamara, who had served as secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was one of the main architects of the Vietnam War. Twenty years after its conclusion, he finally admitted it was a mistake. On April 12, 1995, Raines unleashed his fury in a 742-word piece titled “Mr. McNamara’s War.”

Comes now Robert McNamara with the announcement that he has in the fullness of time grasped realities that seemed readily apparent to millions of Americans throughout the Vietnam War. At the time, he appeared to be helping an obsessed President prosecute a war of no real consequence to the security of the United States. Millions of loyal citizens concluded that the war was a militarily unnecessary and politically futile effort to prop up a corrupt Government that could neither reform nor defend itself.

Through all the bloody years, those were the facts as they appeared on the surface. Therefore, only one argument could be advanced to clear President Johnson and Mr. McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, of the charge of wasting lives atrociously. That was the theory that they possessed superior knowledge, not available to the public, that the collapse of South Vietnam would lead to regional and perhaps world domination by the Communists; and moreover, that their superior knowledge was so compelling it rendered unreliable and untrue the apparent facts available to even the most expert opponents of the war.

With a few throwaway lines in his new book, “In Retrospect,” Mr. McNamara admits that such knowledge never existed.

Raines went on:

It is important to remember how fate dispensed rewards and punishment for Mr. McNamara’s thousands of days of error. Three million Vietnamese died. Fifty-eight thousand Americans got to come home in body bags. Mr. McNamara, while tormented by his role in the war, got a sinecure at the World Bank and summers at the Vineyard.

In both the newsroom and the editorial board, the reaction to Raines’s piece was mixed. Many felt it was just the kind of tough piece that the
Times
should be printing, that it behooved the most powerful paper in the country to take an impassioned stand. Others felt it unseemly. Editorial writer Leon Sigal, who at the time was writing on foreign policy for the page, thought the personal nature of the attack was beneath the
Times.
“It was simply beating up a guy,” he said. Arthur Sulzberger, however, wasn’t ambivalent about the piece: He nominated it for a Pulitzer and wrote a personal letter to the Pulitzer board. (Bob Semple, another
Times
editorial writer, ended up winning the award for editorial writing that year.)

Sulzberger’s gesture on Howell Raines’s behalf—and the intensely close relationship between the two men—did not go unnoticed by the staff. Indeed, some of the paper’s top editors felt their relationship bordered on the sycophantic. In a rare joint appearance with Raines on C-SPAN in 1997, Sulzberger was asked how editorial policy at the paper was set. “Howell and I talk all too frequently,” Sulzberger began.

“Not too frequently for me,” Raines cut in, flashing a sly grin.

At times, Sulzberger seemed dependent on Raines to let him know what was going on. At one of the annual State of the
Times
talks Sulzberger holds for employees, Sulzberger was asked if the paper had been “objective and unbiased” in its coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “Howell and his editorial colleagues, and me as well, felt that nothing we already knew warranted impeachment,” Sulzberger answered, before explaining that the
Times
had been an early advocate of . . . what? “I forgot the word,” Sulzberger said, looking out into the audience to find Raines.

“Censure,” Raines called back to him.

Raines, it became clear, was more than just a confidant of Sulzberger’s. And soon he’d be more than just
The New York Times
’s editorial-page editor.

T
HE
C
OMPETITION

In early 2001, shortly after Joe Lelyveld announced his pending retirement, Arthur Sulzberger approached Raines and managing editor Bill Keller and told the two men he wanted to speak with them, separately and over a series of dinners, about becoming the next leader of the
Times.
For Sulzberger, it would be a defining choice. When Max Frankel had retired, Sulzberger was relatively new on the job, and there was no obvious candidate except for Lelyveld. What’s more, he remembered how A. M. Rosenthal had stymied his father’s efforts to groom a successor. This time, Sulzberger made sure there were two viable candidates. The two men presented a stark contrast. Keller, a onetime foreign correspondent, is rangy and has a slightly patrician air. He had had a privileged childhood—his father was a former chairman of Chevron—and attended Pomona College in California. He has small, deep-set eyes and a reserved manner. Raines, in contrast, is short and expansive. His dark, fierce eyes intimidated subordinates even when he wasn’t speaking, and his family and colleagues said he sometimes looked like an angry hawk.