Hard News (9 page)

“Ken couldn’t hack it,” says a reporter who was in the Los Angeles bureau at the time. “There was a bizarreness to his behavior. Sometimes he’d show up, and sometimes he wouldn’t. And this went on and on and on. Eventually I wondered why the
Times
was keeping him there. It was such a high-profile job, and it wasn’t just O.J.—there was all this other stuff going on.” Reporters from the dozens of news organizations covering the Simpson saga became close as the trial stretched on, and Noble’s behavior—and his absences and overreliance on stringers to do his reporting—was spoken of openly. Soon after Noble arrived in Los Angeles, the
Times
brought in David Margolick, whom Boyd had rejected for the Los Angeles bureau chief job and instead installed in San Francisco, to cover the trial. He remained in Los Angeles for the duration of the Simpson case. “What struck me was the notion that Gerald saw [promoting black reporters] as his mission,” says Mathews. “He was determined. I can’t argue with that as an objective, but I think Ken was really just the wrong person.”

By the end of 1996, Noble had been recalled from Los Angeles after an investigation into the bureau revealed rampant mismanagement. The next year, he left the paper for good.
^*24

Noble’s experience was obviously unique, and there were numerous African American reporters and editors who excelled at the
Times.
But the paper’s very public efforts at diversification, coupled with clumsy promotion of reporters like Noble, meant that those within the newsroom who were inclined to see the
Times
’s efforts at affirmative action as producing nothing but negative results had examples to which they could point. In the years to come, they’d have even more ammunition.

T
HE
A
GENDA

It didn’t take long for Raines and Boyd to start planning how they would remake the
Times
’s staff. In August 2001, a month before they were to take over the paper, the two editors, joined by national editor Katy Roberts, flew down to Atlanta in the Times Company’s corporate jet to meet with about half a dozen of the paper’s national correspondents. Kevin Sack, the paper’s Atlanta bureau chief, was the host of the event.

Sack had been hired by
The New York Times
in 1989, and during his twelve years at the paper, he’d had some experience working with both Raines and Boyd. After a brief stint in New York on the paper’s metro staff when Boyd was editor there, he was moved up to Albany. By 1992, Sack had been covering the state capital—and New York governor Mario Cuomo—for more than two years. The previous December, Cuomo had finally decided against joining the presidential race, and he was slated to deliver the keynote address at that summer’s Democratic convention. In his waning days as the paper’s Washington bureau chief, Raines had asked Sack to help cover the rest of that year’s presidential campaign. Looking for a story Sack could use to establish himself on the campaign, Raines assigned the reporter to write about how Cuomo’s speech had developed.

At the same time, Raines’s staff was preparing a profile of Bill Clinton. The day before it was set to run, Raines decided he didn’t like the story’s lead, and he pulled a bunch of reporters off their assignments to dig for better anecdotes. Sack was one of those reporters, and he grumbled to colleagues about how he thought it would be a better use of his time to finish his story about Cuomo’s speech.

One of the Washington bureau’s senior reporters told Raines about Sack’s complaint. Raines never said anything to Sack, but before the end of the convention, Gerald Boyd—with whom Sack was on good terms—pulled the reporter aside. “You need to be careful about this,” Boyd said. “Howell heard you were complaining about him.” Sack was soon pulled off of covering Bill Clinton.
^*25
Little did Sack know that his offhand complaint during the 1992 convention would follow him for years.

In 1995, after five years in New York’s capital, Sack’s wife said she wanted to return to her hometown of Atlanta. Atlanta appealed to Sack as well. “Her family is there, she wanted our newborn to be around her family, and she had spent some cold winters in Albany,” says Sack. “Furthermore . . . as something of a student of the region, covering the South for the
Times
had always been a dream.” Sack, knowing that the paper had hoped to use him as a political writer based out of Washington, asked Joe Lelyveld if he could cover the South for the paper instead, and Lelyveld agreed. That year, he moved to Georgia.

The
Times
has a long tradition of rotating national correspondents out of their domestic bureaus every four to five years. There are exceptions—Fox Butterfield has a seemingly permanent posting in Boston, and Rick Bragg was allowed to open his own one-person bureau in New Orleans—but the paper has a philosophical belief that it can get the best out of its bureaus by having fresh eyes on the scene. Besides, the national posts are plum positions, something for reporters to strive toward. Sack, of course, was well aware of this. But in 2000, when Sack should have been preparing to transfer to another bureau, he found himself unable to contemplate leaving Atlanta. His marriage was disintegrating, and his wife was determined to stay in Atlanta with the couple’s young daughter. Sack wanted to remain an active part of his only child’s life, which meant he was determined to stay as well. Over the five years he had been in Atlanta, Sack was an integral part of the 2000 series on race in America that Boyd and Soma Golden Behr had coordinated, and he spent much of the rest of that year on the road covering Al Gore’s presidential campaign. In May 2001, when Sack was in New York for that year’s Pulitzer luncheon, he spoke to Raines about his predicament.

“I explained the situation, and I said, ‘I know this puts you in a tough position,’ ” Sack says. “And he told me not to worry about it, that there was no need to discuss it yet.”

Raines’s tone had changed dramatically by the time he arrived in Atlanta for the August correspondents’ dinner. Upon arriving, he and Sack had a one-on-one meeting. It was then that he told Sack that he thought Lelyveld had mismanaged the paper by allowing people to stay in domestic bureaus for too long.

“I had made a decision that I had to stay in Atlanta,” says Sack. “I offered to cover any number of beats—race, immigration, religion, investigations. I tried to think of ways I could stay there without remaining on as bureau chief. He basically shot them all down at once. He just dismissed all of them. And I said, ‘What do you think about a contract, where I’d leave the staff but write a certain number of stories a year?’ He shot that down, too.” Sack was confused—and upset—by Raines’s stubbornness.

That night, the assembled correspondents and editors gathered in a room at 103 West, a rococo private restaurant in Atlanta’s fashionable Buckhead neighborhood. At the dinner, Raines laid out his vision for the national staff. He said he wanted three or four bylines a week from each correspondent, all from different places around the country. He wanted more breaking news and fewer analytical “thumb suckers” and trend pieces. National reporters, he said, shouldn’t expect to see much of their families.

The reporters were stunned. Not only was the leadership of Joe Lelyveld—who was still officially the executive editor of the paper—being dismissed, but the reporters’ work was being disparaged as well. “We thought our metabolism was pretty fucking high,” says one reporter who was at the meeting. “This asshole comes in after spending a decade sitting in his wood-paneled office on the editorial board and tells us we’re not moving fast enough?” Sack, who had essentially been on the road for the last half of 2000—first on the campaign, then on the Florida recount story—remembers feeling as if he’d entered a parallel universe. Two years later, Katy Roberts still finds the memories of the meeting too painful to discuss. “Please don’t make me relive those horrible two days,” she wrote in an e-mail to me when asked about the Atlanta meeting.

Worse was still to come. Kevin Sack was one of the most respected reporters at the
Times.
He was always willing to push harder for a story, always willing to travel for a good scene. He was the type of reporter Raines should have coveted. But the incoming executive editor was treating Sack as if he were deadweight, destined to be pushed overboard. Raines seemed to have made his mind up about Sack, perhaps on the basis of one long-ago incident that was reported to him secondhand—at least, that was the only explanation anyone could think of. Howell Raines’s era at
The New York Times
hadn’t yet begun, but already, fears about the way he would run the newsroom were being stoked.

A N
EW
E
RA

On September 5, 2001—the day Howell Raines officially began his tenure as executive editor of
The New York Times
—the
Times
was in the middle of a slow news period. The Florida election fiasco was well in the past, the business scandals that would grip the country had yet to be uncovered, and the biggest local story concerned the upcoming New York City mayoral primary, in which none of the candidates inspired even a fraction of the excitement that the outgoing mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had prompted in his allies and enemies alike. The flagging economy was the story of the day: The
Times
’s front page on September 5 featured one story on an agreement between President Bush and Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle not to use Social Security funds to pay government bills and another on New York’s jobless centers.

Howell Raines moved into the executive editor’s corner office that morning, the first time in his twenty-three-year career at the
Times
that he had worked in the paper’s third-floor newsroom. In one of his first official acts, he spoke to the staff in the newsroom and sent out a welcome letter and in the process took some not-so-subtle swipes at Joe Lelyveld. Raines promised the
Times
would no longer be outhustled by its competition and told the staff to stay hungry. He also said there wouldn’t be any “imminent” changes in the newsroom, before pausing for a beat and continuing: “This week.” Raines was followed by Boyd, who—alluding to the complaint that Lelyveld and Keller had often been hard to read—promised staffers they wouldn’t have to “wonder what Howell and Gerald” wanted.

Soon, Raines lined the walls of his office with a series of photographs of Lyndon Johnson in his years as Senate majority leader. In the pictures, Johnson towers over Senator Theodore Green of Rhode Island; in each successive picture, Johnson moves in closer and closer, until Green seems to be almost doubled over. For Raines, a man who disdained Johnson’s leadership during the Vietnam War and couldn’t stand dishonesty in politicians, the selection of photographs of Johnson bullying a colleague was an interesting choice, one that many visitors to his office felt sent a pointed message.

Other changes came quickly. Raines tapped foreign editor Andrew Rosenthal, the son of former
Times
executive editor A. M. Rosenthal, to be an assistant managing editor; Rosenthal, along with Gerald Boyd, would be in charge of assembling the daily news report. Raines also instituted a 10:30 a.m. meeting of the paper’s masthead in which the top newsroom executives would map out the major stories of the day. That was followed by the preexisting noon meeting, where the masthead and the department heads met to discuss that day’s coverage. Then at 4:30 p.m. was the page-one meeting. In the first week of his tenure, Raines had established a pattern in which he’d spend half of his day in meetings with a select group of top editors. Most of his remaining time was spent back in his office in the northeast corner of the newsroom, where it was almost impossible, by virtue of geography, for him to see his reporters or have his reporters see him. The days of Raines’s gregarious office meet-and-greets were over.

The 10:30 a.m. meeting was a sharp and purposeful departure from how Joe Lelyveld had run the newsroom. For decades, the editorial management of the
Times
has swung back and forth as if on a pendulum, as authority and power were either taken away from or bestowed upon the masthead and decisions either centralized or decentralized. Lelyveld, who empowered his desk editors, considered the
Times
’s reporters its most essential assets and wanted to create a system in which ideas trickled up. Raines disdained Lelyveld’s approach, which he thought resulted in a group of highly paid editors at the top ranks of the paper who did little but burn in frustration. He wanted ideas to flow downward, from the executive editor to the masthead to the desk editors to the reporters.