Hard News (11 page)

“I always told my staff that they saved my job. We did so well on that story, it became clear to Howell that we were quite good already and that we could be trusted.”

With the business and national staffs still trying to find their footing, Howell Raines set his sights on an even bigger project: reorganizing his old stomping grounds, the Washington bureau. It would become one of the most contentious managerial battles he would fight.

T
HE
W
ASHINGTON
B
UREAU

Jill Abramson was hired by the
Times
from
The Wall Street Journal
in 1997. Abramson is a short, droll woman who draws out her words as she speaks. She’s also a ferocious political reporter and was scooped up by the
Times
because she was regularly beating the paper on stories involving Clinton’s fund-raising scandals. After only three years there, she was named the
Times
’s Washington bureau chief: On Election Day 2000, Abramson was in New York helping to coordinate the
Times
’s coverage when Joe Lelyveld called her into his office. “We don’t know who’s going to be the next president,” Lelyveld said, “but we know who’ll be the next Washington bureau chief.” Abramson started her new post on January 1, 2001.

Only five months later, Raines was named as Lelyveld’s successor, and that summer Raines asked Abramson to dinner. The two had met before—Abramson’s best friend at the
Times
is Op-Ed page columnist Maureen Dowd, who was one of Raines’s stars when he led the Washington bureau. Now, the agenda was the future. “He clearly wanted me to take a different job in New York,” Abramson says. But Abramson had barely begun her new job, which was one she thought she “was born to do.” Besides, her son was just starting high school in Washington.

Over dinner, Raines asked Abramson if she thought Patrick Tyler, the paper’s London bureau chief and an old friend of Raines’s, would make a good Washington bureau chief. Abramson was taken aback. “That struck me as odd,” Abramson says. After all, Washington already had a bureau chief. But despite that awkwardness, Abramson liked Raines: “He had a really good sense of humor and a very sharp take on politics, which had always been my passion. I thought we would be kind of simpatico.”

After Raines took over, things went downhill fast. The Washington bureau, Raines felt, had underperformed in its September 11 coverage, and he grew even more autocratic than usual when it came to deciding what stories the bureau should be pursuing. By October, Raines was dictating stories for the bureau to write over the daily squawk box meetings. “
He
became the Washington bureau chief,” Abramson says. “
He
was deciding who he wanted to write most of the big stories. And
he
decided to have Pat Tyler come back from London. . . . I definitely had the feeling that he did not have the confidence in me and anyone else in the Washington bureau who hadn’t been part of his own Washington bureau A-team.”

Tyler’s appointment reinforced Raines’s reputation among the bureau’s staffers as someone who was insensitive and arrogant. As far back as Scotty Reston’s days in the 1940s and 1950s, the Washington bureau has resented what it sees as the meddling from New York; Raines himself had pushed back against the authority of the home office when he was bureau chief. In picking a fight with Abramson so early on, Raines virtually guaranteed that the bureau would unite against him. And in selecting Tyler as Abramson’s designated successor, Raines also inflamed speculation that he was willing to dole out key positions based upon friendship rather than reportorial chops. Tyler was a fine correspondent, but he had also famously been a fishing buddy of Raines’s for more than three decades. Before long, the fifty-person Washington bureau had begun referring to the paper’s masthead as the Taliban and Raines as Mullah Omar. (“Jill Abramson never expressed any frustration to me . . . about my assignment to the Washington bureau,” Tyler wrote to me in an e-mail. “On the contrary, she expressed gratitude to me that I would be bringing my extensive experience in international affairs . . . to the bureau management team.”)
^*26

In mid-October 2001, Gerald Boyd flew to Washington to meet with the staff there. He spoke about the importance of the Washington report but did so in a way that made the bureau feel inconsequential. “He kept saying, ‘At nine o’clock, we [the masthead] decide, then at ten o’clock we decide, and at noon we decide.’ That angered people,” Abramson says. Boyd also explained how when something “major” happened in Washington, “we want Johnny Apple writing the story.” R. W. “Johnny” Apple, who at one time had specialized in writing the
Times
’s trademark page-one comprehensive summaries of the issue of the day, hadn’t been a daily presence in the bureau for years; by 2001, his input was increasingly felt in the Dining In/Dining Out section, for which he contributed articles about his gastronomical adventures. The bureau was surprised by this announcement, especially because Boyd seemed to overlook Adam Clymer, the
Times
’s Washington correspondent, who was the paper’s presumptive go-to guy on major D.C. events. But as of late, he too had been forgotten—or neglected—in Raines’s frenzied reorganization.

“The thing about Howell and Gerald to a degree is they’d been out of the newsroom for a while,” Abramson says. “So they missed this whole generation of new reporters who’d broken incredible stories. It was like they didn’t exist.”

Boyd was shaken by the level of discontent he encountered in the D.C. bureau. “The issue of the heavy-handedness was a lot more personal than I certainly realized,” Boyd told Ken Auletta for
The New Yorker.
“I didn’t defuse it. I probably added to it, which wasn’t good.” After the bureau meeting, Abramson and Boyd sat outside on a bench facing the White House to talk one-on-one.

That meeting went much better than the one at the bureau. “What I appreciated about [Gerald] was that he was approachable,” Abramson says. The two spoke in depth, and Abramson told Boyd that she felt Raines and Boyd were “especially disrespectful to the women managers in the newsroom.” Abramson felt national editor Katy Roberts was being “run over” and Week in Review editor Susan Chira was “pretty desperate” because her weekly lineup was being dictated to her. Boyd told Abramson that things could get worse before they got better, but Abramson left the meeting feeling that she and Boyd had reached an understanding. “I felt like he was talking to me from the heart and honestly,” says Abramson. “And I felt that he went back and at least conveyed my message to Howell.”

But Raines and Abramson’s relationship would continue to deteriorate throughout the new year, even though Raines did make attempts to reach out to his Washington bureau chief. In late January 2002, Raines’s son’s funk band, Galactic, was playing at New York’s Irving Plaza, a standing-room-only concert hall just east of Union Square. Abramson’s son Will is an aspiring musician, and Raines invited Abramson and Will up to New York for the show. He cooked a lamb dinner and then got a backstage pass for Will. By that time, Raines and the D.C. bureau were almost at open war, but both Howell Raines and Jill Abramson managed to put aside their professional animosity for an evening. “It was so nice,” Abramson says wistfully, remembering that night more than two years later. “Actually lovely.”

A G
ROWING
M
ANDATE

The September 11 coverage put Howell Raines’s plans to overhaul the paper temporarily on hold. “This story was so consuming that there wasn’t a lot of time to think about organizational issues, staffing issues, and long-term strategy,” Raines said in August 2002. “This was a matter of total immersion.” By January 2002, he was ready to move again. One of his first decisions involved what to do about Kevin Sack, who had yet to hear a word from Raines since their contentious meeting in Atlanta the previous August. Raines dispatched Jill Abramson to Atlanta to meet with Sack and David Firestone, the paper’s Atlanta correspondent. Abramson told Sack that he could have a national beat based out of D.C. Firestone was being asked to move to Washington as well. “I felt in the case of Kevin, it was clear they didn’t really care whether he stayed or went,” Abramson says. “But I cared a lot.”

Sack asked Abramson if he’d be able to return to Atlanta on the weekends. Occasionally, she said. Abramson was sympathetic to Sack and told him she’d do her best to make sure he could return more often than not, at least every other weekend. Sack asked if any arrangement he made with Abramson would be binding to the next Washington bureau chief. Abramson said it wouldn’t be. The next Monday, Sack declined the offer. He e-mailed Raines and Boyd to ask what he should do next.

Boyd shot back a terse e-mail declaring that Sack’s next job for
The New York Times
would not be in Atlanta. Raines didn’t even bother replying. “I just thought that was awful,” says Mike Oreskes, who had worked extensively with Sack over the years. “I understand that Howell didn’t want people staying in places forever, but Kevin is a rare talent, and I thought we should do whatever we could to keep him. And besides that, the way Howell dealt with the whole thing was so bullheaded and wrong.”

Throughout the process, Raines never called Sack to discuss the situation. “He let Gerald carry all the water,” says Sack, “to the point where I was getting e-mails and calls because other people were so outraged. Finally, after this had started leaking out he called and [we] had a very perfunctory conversation.”

Sack began to look for another job. Meanwhile, word of the incident began to trickle through the
Times
’s newsroom. Raines’s few public declarations—that national correspondents should expect to travel more, that he was looking to respond more quickly to the news—only heightened tension. At one meeting in Washington, Raines told the staff that he hadn’t worked long and hard to get to his post just to sit back and passively watch the paper’s staff do whatever they wanted. San Francisco–based Evelyn Nieves, Los Angeles–based James Sterngold, Denver-based Michael Janofsky, and Seattle-based Sam Howe Verhovek—longtime bureau chiefs or correspondents all—were told they’d be relocated or moved back to New York.

Particularly galling to the correspondents was the fact that while Raines was unwilling to compromise with Sack, he bent over backward to accommodate his personal friend Rick Bragg, who seemed to be permanently parked in New Orleans, a city where the
Times
didn’t traditionally even have a bureau. Ever since Raines had been named executive editor, Bragg had frequently reminded other reporters how close he was to the paper’s new boss. Bragg also appeared to get better play than virtually any other reporter on staff. In Raines’s first six months on the job, ten out of Bragg’s twenty-one stories ran on page one. From the time he was hired by Joe Lelyveld, Bragg had always been a difficult writer to handle, but Raines’s coddling made things worse. Raines put out word to Bragg’s editors that his copy shouldn’t be edited unnecessarily; in fact, he said, he viewed
any
substantial editing of Bragg’s work as unnecessary. When, immediately after September 11, Raines had insisted Bragg be sent overseas to Pakistan, he did so over objections from acting foreign editor Roger Cohen and members of the masthead. Bragg had little foreign experience and was known for being intractable. This was too important a story to assign to someone like Bragg, they felt.
^*27

After joining the
Times
in 1994, Bragg, a native Alabamian, was quickly promoted to the paper’s national desk. (“It was my dream to do this someday, but some things even I was afraid to dream,” he wrote later.) He specialized in colorful stories about the American South, stories more lyrical and quirky than what the
Times
usually ran. He delighted in painting himself as the ultimate outsider: In an online autobiography, he described his appointment as one of Harvard’s Nieman fellows as being made so the university could “fill . . . their white trash quota.” From his early days at the paper, Bragg inspired wildly divergent opinions. Some readers—and some of the paper’s other writers—loved his writing and felt it brought a dose of much-needed humanity and liveliness to the paper’s pages. (The Pulitzer board agreed and in 1996 awarded Bragg the prize for feature writing.) Others decried what they saw as overwrought sentimentality. “I stopped reading him long ago,” blogger and journalist Ana Marie Cox wrote in 2003, “about the time I realized that any article carrying his byline would, more likely than not, be the Platonic ideal of
Times
ian condescension. More specifically, they would be about people who lived in trailer parks (or some such lower-class milieu) but had the kind of stubborn dignity—or precocious skill—the middle class folks find so quaint.”