A Gray Lady in his sights
In an astonishing 21,000-word cover story in the forthcoming issue of the Atlantic magazine, Howell Raines, deposed as executive editor of the New York Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal last year, delivers a devastating appraisal of his former newspaper and its prospects.
Raines, who last June was forced to resign along with managing editor Gerald Boyd, writes that “nowadays I think of Jayson Blair as an accident that ended my newspaper career in the same unpredictable way that a heart attack or plane crash might have.” Though he takes “full responsibility” for the scandal, he fixes it in the context of an exhaustive and exhausting effort to reform the Times that he now argues has been all but aborted.
Raines writes that the paper he inherited when he succeeded Joseph Lelyveld as executive editor is mired in a kind of internal civil war between “a culture of achievement” and “a culture of complaint.” The New York Times, he writes, is dominated by “an internal personnel system I came to think of as management by mendacity. Great work gets the great praise it deserves, but routine work, too, is praised as excellent at the Times and sloppy work is accepted as adequate.”
According to Raines, he was appointed by Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to reform this culture and ensure the newspaper’s survival into the 21st century. “Today,” Raines writes, “the sad fact is that Arthur Sulzberger, who was my partner in the great enterprise of revitalizing the Times, and who remains my friend, may no longer be in a strong enough position internally to push all the reforms we felt were essential.”
The publisher is one of many former colleagues who comes in for hard handling from Raines. The former executive editor speculates that he might have survived the Blair affair if only he had “stiffened” Sulzberger’s spine. “Whatever his strengths and weaknesses, Arthur is his own man, a different man than his father,” former Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Sr., who “in his prime would never have thrown over one of his executive editors under the pressure of employees who didn’t like the editor personally or who disagreed with him.”
Among the latter opponents of his reforms, Raines identifies a cabal of newsroom “traditionalists” and a nest -- Times critics will love this one -- of “neo-conservatives” who Raines alleges resented him for “political correctness” and attempts to promote racial justice at the Times. In fact, he characterized the paper as one now riven by racial division in the aftermath of the Blair affair.
Along the way, Raines singles out for criticism Boyd, who failed to inform him of Blair’s problems, then-city editor Jon Landman for failing to copy the executive editor on the now infamous memo drawing attention to the young reporter’s problems, and one-time Raines mentor Arthur Gelb, who failed to support the former executive editor’s handling of the fallout from the scandal.
Nobody, however, comes in for rougher treatment than Raines’ predecessor, Lelyveld, who is accused of leaving the paper with “a calcified front page” and a cultural report in total disarray. Lelyveld, according to Raines, was criticized by some as a micromanager who functioned as “executive copy editor.” It is a portrait utterly at odds with that shared by nearly all of Lelyveld’s former associates, who regard him not only as a distinguished reporter and foreign correspondent but also as a highly effective editor of keen intelligence and untarnished integrity. (Both Raines and Lelyveld were unavailable to comment for this column.)
The story of how the Atlantic obtained Raines’ extraordinary essay is itself revelatory on a number of levels. Senior editor Robert Vare, who solicited and edited the piece, formerly worked on the New York Times’ Sunday magazine. Raines, then the paper’s Washington editor, was a frequent contributor and Vare was his editor. “Grady’s Gift,” one of the stories on which they collaborated, won Raines a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
“Two weeks after Howell’s dismissal,” Vare recalled this week in an interview. “I wrote him a letter and invited him to write a piece for us.” Raines declined, but suggested that he might want to write something about the coming presidential campaign. Last fall, Vare called with an idea for such a piece, but Raines said he “had an idea taking shape and really would like to discuss it over lunch.”
The pair met in early December and, according to Vare, the former Times editor “started laying out the story that was everything I had hoped for. He wanted to give an account of what had occurred to him, but also to take a long historical look at the Times.” A second lunch attended by Atlantic editor Cullen Murphy followed, and Raines agreed to begin writing immediately after the holidays. “He said he would deliver in a month,” Vare recalled, “because he said he needed to get it out.
“On Feb. 12, he delivered a first draft of 30,000 words. We worked without letup for the next month to produce the 21,000 words we published.” As an editor, Vare said, he was impressed with “the extreme candor with which he dealt with the subject.... The biggest surprises were his candor about his relationship with Arthur Sulzberger and the unglossed way he presents his own feelings. That sort of frankness is rare in a memoir.”
But perhaps the most interesting part of this back story involves Lelyveld, the obvious target of so much Rainesian disdain. “When Joe stepped down early as executive editor in 2001,” the Atlantic’s Vare said, “I suggested that we try and recruit him to write a piece. Joe said he was flattered by our interest, but that was the end of it. The obvious parallel is that when I got in touch with Howell, he responded with this piece.”
For all its inside analysis and historical scope, the genuine import of Raines’ essay is as a window on the role the human factor plays at every level of American journalism.
Lelyveld could not write the piece the Atlantic invited him to write because his sense of his own integrity involves discretion and an abiding loyalty to an institution he believes serves the public’s interest. Raines could not refuse the opportunity because his sense of integrity -- different but no less powerful -- involves an equally deep loyalty to his personal values and the necessity of their expression.
At the end of his piece, Raines writes that he and Sulzberger used to exchange historical quotations. The publisher leaned toward Churchill, Eisenhower and John Wayne. His editor preferred Bear Bryant and civil war generals, one of whom -- William Tecumseh Sherman -- once wrote that the place to lead was at the army’s head. “Arthur observed that the head of the army was also a good place to get shot,” Raines wrote.
