Gray Lady Down. William McGowan
Table of Contents
one - Abe Rosenthal and the Golden Age
three - Bullets over Arthur Jr.
for Louise Salerno
Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated, the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served.
—“is it True What They Say About the New York Times?” National Review, 1972
if you think The Times plays it down the middle on [divisive social issues], you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.
—Daniel Okrent, Times Public Editor, “is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” 2004
Prologue
I am not one of those people “who love to hate the Times,” as the paper’s executive editor Bill Keller has phrased it. I’ve read the New York Times since I was a kid, and I am proud to have been published prominently in it very early in my career. (The first things I ever published appeared in the Times Magazine and on the op-ed page.) I still consider the Times an important national resource, albeit an endangered one, and I confess to being one of those New Yorkers who refer to it simply as “the paper.” Pre-Internet, I would find myself wandering to the corner newsstand late at night and waiting like a junkie for a fix in the form of the next day’s edition. If I was out of town and couldn’t find it, I would jones.
But sadly, those days, that young man and that New York Times are long gone.
My aim is not to embarrass the Times or to feed a case for “going Timesless,” as some subscription cancellers and former readers have called it. Some may think the Times to be irrelevant in this age of media hyperchoice. I think it’s actually more necessary than ever. But if “These Times Demand The Times,” as the paper’s advertising slogan goes, they also demand a better Times than the one we are getting, especially at this fraught point in our political, social and cultural history.
William McGowan The Writers Room New York City September 2010
one
Abe Rosenthal and the Golden Age
Back in the seventies, during an alarming downturn in stock price, advertising sales, revenue and circulation at the New York Times, the famed executive editor A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal confessed to having a recurrent nightmare: It was an ordinary Wednesday morning and “there was no New York Times.” Rosenthal outlived his nightmare. Along with the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and a group of skillful news executives, he put the paper back into the black. In the process, this team revolutionized the way the paper reported the news and set an example that transformed newspaper journalism in the rest of the country.
Rosenthal retired from the executive editor position in 1986 and then wrote a twice-weekly column on the op-ed page until 1999. Along with James Reston and a handful of others, he is identified with the New York Times’ golden age, a time when the paper spoke to—and for—the nation. In May 2006, Rosenthal died after a massive stroke at the age of eighty-four. He had worked fifty-three years for the Times, after coming aboard as a copyboy in 1946 in his early twenties.
Rosenthal’s death prompted a week’s worth of published tributes and flattering obituaries, describing how, as his Times obituary put it, “he climbed on rungs of talent, drive and ambition to the highest echelons of the Times and American journalism.” The salutes culminated in the passionate eulogies delivered at his funeral, held at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. An estimated eight hundred people attended the service, representing a Who’s Who of New York’s business, media, political and cultural elite, including figures as diverse as Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Beverly Sills, Charlie Rose, Midge Decter and Rudy Giuliani. The honorary pallbearers were led by the former mayor Ed Koch and William F. Buckley Jr. They were followed by a half-dozen men who had worked with Rosenthal at the Times, including his former boss, Arthur O. Sulzberger. That week, Buckley had hailed Rosenthal as the commanding figure in the evolution of serious daily journalism, which he had influenced as decisively, in Buckley’s opinion, as William Randolph Hearst had the tabloids, and Henry Luce the weekly newsmagazines. Sulzberger, by then the former publisher, had told the New York Sun that “It was the golden age of journalism when Abe was at the Times.”
Some of the tributes focused on Rosenthal’s impoverished and tragic background. He was the son of a Byelorussian immigrant who became a Canadian fur trapper before coming to America to work as a housepainter. Abe’s father died after falling off a ladder, four of his five sisters passed away before he was an adult, and Abe himself was afflicted with osteomyelitis, a rare bone disorder. The medical care he received was substandard. At one point an operation was performed on the wrong part of his leg, and as he was lying in a full body cast he was told that he would never walk again. It was only after being admitted to the Mayo Clinic as a charity case that he recovered, but he still experienced lifelong pain.
Other tributes focused on his remarkable career trajectory. Beginning as the Times stringer at New York’s City College, he was formally hired as a copyboy without even graduating. He was a reporter for nineteen years, covering the fledgling United Nations before becoming a foreign correspondent in 1955, assigned to cover India, Japan and Poland. He was expelled from Poland for reporting that was “too probing” for the Communist government there, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for international reporting. In 1963 he returned to New York to assume a