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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A man who takes the subway wearing the white panama hat of a plantation owner is either blithely arrogant or irrepressibly self-confident, and in the nine months that Howell Raines has been the executive editor of the Times both qualities have been imputed to him. Raines is fifty-nine, and has worked for the Times for a quarter of a century; he has been praised and derided for the sometimes coruscating editorial page that he ran from January of 1993 until August, 2001. But until last year his acquaintance with the newsroom was only passing, and to most of his Times colleagues he was an alien--as the metropolitan editor, Jonathan Landman, characterized him, a "Martian."
Raines is built close to the ground (he is five feet eight), with short, stocky legs that churn rapidly--like those of "a Tasmanian devil," one female reporter says. He has a courtly manner and an engaging wit, and he is fond of quoting the former University of Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, or Yeats, or what he learned from his father, growing up in Birmingham, Alabama--sometimes all three, and sometimes trying the patience of his listeners.
Raines's eyes are nearly black; in photographs, even when he's half smiling, they convey an unsmiling intensity. That intensity has excited and occasionally alarmed the inhabitants of the world's most powerful newsroom, who often ask if this son of hill-country Alabamans is comfortable leading a newspaper staffed by Ivy Leaguers. They see that he enjoys power and is unafraid to use it, but wonder why he is often hostile to others who hold it. What is clear, a little more than a year since it was announced that he would succeed Joseph Lelyveld in the top job, is that Howell Raines is quickening the pulse of the Times.
Raines has been waiting for this chance for years. His friend R.W. (Johnny) Apple, Jr., the paper's political sage, recalled a trip they took to South Africa in 1995, when Raines talked about one day becoming executive editor. " 'I'm not at all sure I'll get it. But I'll be ready if I get it. I'm going to prepare myself,' " Apple remembers Raines saying. In early 2001, Lelyveld told Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the Times' chairman and publisher, that he planned to retire as executive editor; and when Sulzberger decided that his choice was between Raines and Bill Keller, the managing editor, Raines had indeed prepared. "I knew that I wanted to raise the competitive metabolism of the paper," Raines said to me during a series of interviews this winter and spring. When Sulzberger asked him what he might do as executive editor, he told the publisher that he "wanted to enliven the front page with more exclusive breaking news--original stories." He knew that, unlike almost every other newspaper in America, the Times' daily circulation was growing--by April of 2001 it had reached 1.15 million--but that this growth came from the national edition, introduced in 1980, which now accounted for nearly half of the paper's readers. To continue its expansion, Raines argued, the Times had to become "a must read" for new customers, and he described the paper in somewhat military terms: just as the "Powell doctrine," promulgated by General Colin Powell, declared that American troops should be sent into battle only if they had enough force to overpower the enemy, so Raines proposed covering big stories with the overwhelming force of the newspaper: some twelve hundred editorial employees, who work in newsrooms on the third and fourth floors of the Times Building, on West Forty-third Street, and in offices scattered throughout the building, as well as in twenty-eight foreign and ten domestic bureaus.
The newsroom was introduced to its editor-to-be on May 21, 2001. For Raines, the victory was total. He did not have to contend with his rival, Keller, because Keller was given a biweekly column, alternating Saturdays with Frank Rich, and became a senior writer for the Times Magazine. With Sulzberger's prior approval, Raines picked a somewhat reserved deputy managing editor, Gerald Boyd, to be his managing editor; they had worked together in the Washington bureau in the mid-eighties. A decade later, Boyd had been in the running for the managing editor's job, but was rejected by Lelyveld; Boyd, in turn, described Lelyveld and Keller as not "inclusive," a word with deep meaning for a fifty-one-year-old black man. Unlike Keller, Boyd was invited to join the regular Wednesday lunch that serves as the paper's steering committee, along with Sulzberger; Raines; Gail Collins, whom Raines had hired, and who succeeded him as the editorial-page editor; and the Times' president, Janet L. Robinson.
Raines spent the summer getting to know the newsroom. Earlier in his Times career, he had been based in Atlanta, Washington, and London; now he spent evenings visiting various desks, and took an assortment of editors to coffee, lunch, and dinner, all in preparation for taking over, after Labor Day. He met with the sports editor, Neil Amdur, and said that he wanted more college sports, particularly football and basketball. He met with Margaret O'Connor, the picture editor, and Mike Smith, her deputy, and heard that Times photographers felt like "second-class citizens" because they weren't sent out often enough on breaking stories; their best photographs were often unused. The photo department, Raines learned, had put these unused photographs up on a wall, under the words "The Ones That Got Away." Raines assured O'Connor and Smith that things would be different.
Raines said that he would manage the newsroom in the "collegial" way that he'd run the editorial board, which has fourteen members. But he can also be autocratic--some say bullying. In a sharp and, to those inside the paper, controversial departure from the Lelyveld era, Raines said that he wanted what is known as "the masthead" to be more engaged in shaping stories and coordinating news coverage. (The masthead consists of the managing editor, his deputy, and the seven assistant managing editors whose names appear under the executive editor's on the Times editorial page. The department editors, whose names do not appear, actually run the various sections of the paper.) "Howell has thought about this job a long time, and he loves it," John Huey, the editorial director of Time, Inc., who worked with Raines on the Atlanta Constitution in the early seventies, said. "Some people who held that job wore it like a hair shirt." (Huey mentioned Lelyveld and his predecessor, Max Frankel.) "Howell Raines expected to have fun." His energy was obvious, and the newsroom was probably more excited than anxious in the months before he took over. There was little indication of just how fast Raines intended to move.
A WEEK IN SEPTEMBER
The Raines era began on September 5, 2001. When Raines arrived at his office, in the northeast corner of the newsroom, his favorite image was already on the wall behind his desk. Taken by a Times photographer, George Tames, it is a sequence containing seven black-and-white photographs of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson cajoling Senator Theodore F. Green, of Rhode Island; in each succeeding frame, L.B.J. shrinks his colleague's space until Green is bent backward over his desk and L.B.J. is hovering just inches from his face. Implicitly, these photographs suggest how Raines intends to bend the Times to his will.
"I just like the tribal culture of a newsroom," Raines told me one day as we sat in a small room behind his office. "I'm--in some sense--home. The populist side of me is very much about my identification with the culture of a newsroom." He explained what he meant by citing Bear Bryant. "Coach Bryant had a lot of flaws--he was late to support integration," Raines said. "But he was a very influential figure for any student of leadership. . . . When Coach Bryant walked onto a football field, everybody in that stadium knew that football would be played here today."
September 5th, a Wednesday, was a relatively slow news day; the front page had stories about the New York mayoral primary, about Administration officials defending Bush's budget, about immigration policy. But the new editor's presence could be felt. The Washington bureau chief, Jill Abramson, remembers that Raines called her and said, "I want something with pop for the Sunday paper." To assure more "pop," he initiated, that first day, a 10:30 A.M. meeting of the masthead, to supplement a noon meeting, originated by Lelyveld, of the department and masthead editors and a 4:30 P.M. page-one meeting. The morning session, Raines said, was meant "as a teaching device for me" and as a way to "include the masthead" in shaping the paper.
On Monday, September 10th, Raines announced that Andrew Rosenthal, the foreign editor, was being promoted to assistant managing editor, and would serve as Gerald Boyd's principal news deputy, and that Roger Cohen, until recently the Berlin bureau chief, would become acting foreign editor. Raines also wanted the media reporter Alex Kuczynski to write the sort of pop-feature pieces that would appeal to the Times' national audience. "It was no accident that the first transfer I made when I got down here was to move Alex Kuczynski from media to style," Raines said. "I did that to set a standard."
On the morning of September 11th, Raines rose at around seven o'clock and prepared a pot of tea for Krystyna Stachowiak, thirty-eight, an attractive, self-possessed Polish-born public-relations executive who shares a Greenwich Village town house with him. Then he read the Times and sent e-mail. He wasn't yet dressed when he heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., called immediately. Minutes later, Raines was on Seventh Avenue, gaping at the smoldering north tower, to his left, and, to his right, at the staff of St. Vincent's hospital, in their green scrubs, mobilized for victims that never came. Uptown, Gerald Boyd was in a barber's chair at 104th Street and Amsterdam Avenue when a passerby poked his head in the door with the news. "I leaped out of the chair," Boyd recalls, and he hurried to the subway, which had already suspended service, before hailing a gypsy cab and getting to the office at 9:10 A.M., about forty minutes before Raines arrived.
Roger Cohen had just dropped off his son at school in Park Slope when he heard an explosion and looked up and saw orange flames billowing from the Trade Center and the sky raining paper. He raced to catch the No. 2 train, which ran under the World Trade Center site. "The subway must have been the last one to run," he said. Other members of the masthead never made it to the office that day. Andrew Rosenthal couldn't get across the Hudson from New Jersey; the ferry that Al Siegal, an assistant managing editor, was taking from Hoboken was turned back by the Coast Guard.
A few blocks from Boyd's barbershop, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, was at a gym on 106th Street, when he looked out the window and saw his wife running toward the building. She told him of the attacks. He hurried home and started calling some of his hundred-odd reporters, directing traffic to Ground Zero.
The police reporter Christopher John (C.J.) Chivers was already downtown. It was primary day in the city's mayoral election, and he had been assigned to the Board of Elections headquarters. He was wearing his best suit. When his beeper went off, he ran half a mile to Ground Zero, approaching Liberty Street just as the second plane hit the south tower. As desks and concrete and steel beams plunged to the street, he dived into the entrance of a liquor store near Trinity Church, and soon began interviewing people huddled nearby.
Chivers tried calling the metropolitan desk, but his cell phone didn't work. To escape falling debris, he moved under the Liberty Street Bridge to another building, stepping in dust "that was like fine powdered snow." He had reached a building that housed a day-care center, where children were fretting over the whereabouts of their parents, when he heard a "high-pitched, twisting, grinding, metallic screeching" that "sounded like an enormous train collision" and felt like an earthquake. The south tower had collapsed. He found a telephone and called Landman, who told him, "I don't really know what to tell you to do, but you have good judgment, so follow it." Chivers spent the next twenty-four hours at Ground Zero, feeding information to Times reporters in the newsroom.
Gerald Boyd was in the newsroom. "The dimensions kept growing," he recalled. "We heard Congress had closed and the airlines were shut down. We discussed what would happen if the New York Times were attacked. Could we put out a paper?" John Geddes, the deputy managing editor, who was at his desk when the first plane crashed into the Trade Center, said, "This was a story we had been training all our lives for."
Raines, who is unembarrassed by such comparisons, likened his role to that of Ulysses S. Grant: before attacking the biggest story of his career, he would concentrate his forces. All day, Raines and Boyd moved back and forth from their neighboring offices, sometimes ministering to distraught staff members. Sometimes they comforted themselves. They were not, of course, mere witnesses. Their families, their friends, their city were jeopardized. "The toughest thing for me was in a personal sense," Boyd said. "I had dropped my son at school and couldn't reach my wife and son until 5 P.M." Late in the afternoon, Krystyna Stachowiak left her midtown office, and made her way to the Times, where she greeted Raines with a hug.
For its September 12th edition, the Times deployed some three hundred reporters, thirty staff photographers, and two dozen freelance photographers. Eighty-two thousand five hundred words were devoted to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; there were seventy-four bylines accompanying sixty-seven stories, filling thirty-three pages of a ninety-six-page paper. Nearly 1.7 million copies were printed, almost half a million more than normal. At the top of the front page, which is now framed on Raines's wall, was a headline--"U.S. ATTACKED"--set in ninety-six-point type, a size used only twice before: to announce Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon, in 1969, and the resignation of President Nixon, in 1974. In the center of the page were four color photographs, showing the Twin Towers ablaze and the destruction at Ground Zero. Running down either side of page 1 were four stories, not the usual seven. In a September 12th e-mail to the newsroom, Raines wrote, "Thank you one and all for a magnificent effort in putting out, in the midst of a heartbreaking day, a paper of which we can be proud for years to come. . . . In a different context of violence, Yeats wrote that 'a terrible beauty is born.' "
Long before September 11th, Raines had given much thought to ways of conveying a sense of command. He says that he learned the importance of this from his father, who never finished high school but built a store-fixture business in Birmingham which eventually made him a millionaire. He often told colleagues the story of one summer after he graduated from Birmingham-Southern College and had gone to work for his father, who warned him that sooner or later an employee would challenge him, and told him that, when he did, "you've got to win that fight." Now, in September of 2001, Raines wanted to challenge his editors, to get into the fray before assignments were made.
Raines became what the assistant managing editor Michael Oreskes referred to as "the reader-in-chief," meeting constantly with the assistant managing editors. To better penetrate the Pentagon and the national-security agencies, he brought the defense-and-intelligence expert Michael Gordon back from London. He asked Patrick Tyler, a trusted friend, to return from Moscow, where he was bureau chief, to write "lead-alls"--stories meant to bring together the different...
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