The Unchanging of the Guard

Edwin Diamond's new book on The New York Times takes up where Gay Talese's The Kingdom and the Power left off. When Talese concluded his chronicle in February 1969, the old publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, had just died. The new publisher, his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was just emerging from apprenticeship. Downstairs, A.M. Rosenthal, as managing editor in all but title, had entered the staging area for assuming full control of all news and editorial operations. The gentlemanly old generation -- Clifton Daniel, Turner Catledge, James Reston -- had begun to release the reins.

Diamond, media columnist for New York magazine, now carries the story to the summer of 1993, through another dynasty -- the era of Punch Sulzberger and Rosenthal -- and into the time of their successors. (One notes that while Max Frankel, the current executive editor, is a prominent player in Talese, the current publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., is mentioned only as having been born, and the current managing editor, Joseph Lelyveld, does not appear at all.) Diamond's approach does not differ a great deal from that of Talese; the method is detail upon detail, anecdote upon anecdote, individual destinies and incremental policies, saturation rather than structure. The view is, hermetically, from the inside of 229 West Forty-third Street. For the most part, the heroes are the victors in bureaucratic struggles, the adepts in using the bureaucrat's deadliest weapon, the memorandum.

If one theme is clear, it is that the dominance forecast for Rosenthal in 1969 is shown by Diamond to have been attained in full. It is hard to think, historically speaking, of another editor in this century who so placed his stamp, his identity, on a major American newspaper, not even his constant rival, Benjamin C. Bradlee of The Washington Post. Diamond shows that Rosenthal's not inconsiderable strengths as a journalist -- particularly his tenacity and devotion to his conception of objectivity -- became strengths of the Times; that his vision of a controlled evolution from a newspaper into a multi-segmented publication of news, opinion, features, and consumerism was the one that won out; that his conservatism tinged what appeared in the paper; and that his temperament blunted all challenges to his authority. Not least important to this history, Rosenthal's working papers were available to Diamond in the Times archives, and his perspectives dominate this account.

At the same time, Diamond paints a more sophisticated picture of the owner's role than is usually found in journalist-oriented histories. He makes clear that a president and/or publisher of the caliber of Sulzberger did a great deal more than keep an eye on the accounts. Here Punch Sulzberger is shown to be an activist, mediating between the news and business sides, making known his opinions on what is appearing in the paper, and from time to time making his power felt directly.

Sulzberger's most memorable intervention occurred in his confrontation with John B. Oakes, editorial-page editor and a cousin from the branch of the family that Americanized its name during World War I. In the Democratic senatorial primary in 1976, Oakes preferred Bella Abzug; Sulzberger liked Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Oakes left for vacation believing that he had negotiated a standoff- no endorsement. But while he was gone an endorsement of Moynihan appeared and Oakes's rebuttal was squeezed from 450 to 40 words. (Moynihan won.) Oakes was given the message that his was no longer the hand on the wheel of the editorial page. Diamond's account makes clear that the issue was less Moynihan than Sulzberger's desire to regain control of an editorial page that had made him uncomfortable. He soon forced Oakes's retirement before his sixty-fifth birthday and cleaned out Oakes's stable of editorial writers. The implication is obvious: even when as potent an editor as Rosenthal or Oakes may seem to be in charge, is in the long run acting only by sufferance.

I have been speaking familiarly of these figures, as if they were as well known across the nation as the characters in L.A. Law. But this somber account will never make a television series. Some readers may well weary of what passes for apocalyptic struggle here -- the gestation of the Home section or the anointing of a new editor of the department of this or that. But even for those who may find the story less than enchanting, the book is worth study for the absolute clarity with which it demonstrates that Big Journalism in America is primarily bureaucratic in character. Diamond remarks aptly: "Many, many people oversee the output of many, many other people." So slight is the emphasis on the public, political, cultural, or social roles the Times might play in the greater world that one is left wondering whether the bureaucratic war games have any larger object than individual success and institutional survival. Perhaps not.

As in other bureaucracies, a few rules may be written down, but the rest need not be; that's why it works. The crises that Diamond chronicles do not involve conflict with forces outside the institution, but violations of the unwritten rules. The turmoil over the Times's identification of the accuser in William Kennedy Smith's rape trial, with which Diamond opens the book, was primarily a failure of functionaries to live up to a widely held professional understanding hence, a staff rebellion. Similarly, the long story defending Jerzy Kosinski, a Polish exile writer and friend of Times executives, from leftist criticism was seen as a violation by Rosenthal of the bureaucracy's rule against overt favoritism and politicization.

Diamond retells the stories of individual rebels against the Times system. There was Sydney Schanberg, pushed out for lese majesty, criticizing high-level policies of the Times on its own op-ed page. (Anna Quindlen committed almost the same crime during the William Kennedy Smith flap, but she criticized only middle-level bureaucrats.) There was Raymond Bonnet, recalled in disgrace from El Salvador when the Reagan administration sought to discredit his unwelcome reporting of the Mozote massacre. And Richard Severo, who challenged the Times's assumptions that it owned whatever was in its employees' minds. There are others less well known, including several African-Americans, who somehow have never fitted in on Forty-third Street. From this roster, Diamond does not draw any firm conclusions, but the implication is that the bureaucracy has an uncanny nose for smelling out those it distrusts, and vice versa.

He has almost nothing to say about organized dissidence at the Times, such as the separate lawsuits filed by women (in which my spouse, Betsy Wade, was a named plaintiff) and minorities in the 1970s seeking expanded promotion opportunities. Nor are the activities of the newspaper's unions, notably The Newspaper Guild, noted in any detail, although this was the period when the Times drained the blood from its unions via long-term contracts and attrition and entered a strike-free period that has now extended for fifteen years. In the perspective of this account, such matters are no more than gnats on the hide of the elephant.

There is a defensible rationale for this emphasis, or lack of emphasis. Diamond shows that the Times has not clasped diversity of opinion, much less dissent, to its breast. He observes: "The good Timesman, then and now, got along by going along." Gentlemen succeeded under Carledge, hustlers under Rosenthal, stylists under Frankel: "Through all the changes, the values of the top editor determined the ascendancy of one faction or another, as well as the tilt of the news."

Although the masthead and the byline array of the Times are now dressed up with a fetching selection of women and minorities, Diamond's account makes clear that the newspaper's continuity -- its institutionality, to coin a term -- still rests on those he calls Timesmen, people who can be trusted, the pool of bureaucratic warriors. It's a shame that the Times cannot be shown to differ in its essential character from the myriad other bureaucracies that run our society, that it might be more inspiring, more ethical, more enterprising. It's not. It's merely successful.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe