Howard Kurst confirms the "Buzz" that Keller will take over the Times job. He does a rundown of Kellers thinking, taken from his recent Op-Ed pieces. It's a shame that the Times has got to the point of advocacy in the News sections that Keller's political positions are important.
>>>By picking Keller, Sulzberger would in effect be conceding that he erred by passing him over less than two years ago when he tapped editorial page editor Howell Raines to run the paper. But so what? It was always felt that the younger Keller might have a shot after Raines stepped down, although no one expected that to happen quite so quickly. Keller has a much lower-key style than the hard-charging Raines. Keller also has a champion in the man now running the Times on an interim basis, former executive editor Joe Lelyveld.
The new Vanity Fair , by the way, describing Keller as "a cool, cerebral type more in the Lelyveld mold," says if Keller had gotten the job last time he would have picked as managing editor Jonathan Landman, the metro editor who clashed with Raines and wrote the famous memo saying that Jayson Blair had to be stopped. The article portrays Landman and Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson, the subject of much speculation for the managing editor's post, as leaders of the anti-Raines insurrection.
With Keller the odds-on favorite, it's worth looking at what he believes. Which we're able to do because he's written some provocative op-ed columns and magazine pieces since stepping down from the editing ranks.
While the Times was often seen as opposing the war in Iraq, Keller backed it:
"The president will take us to war with support -- often, I admit, equivocal and patronizing in tone -- from quite a few members of the East Coast liberal media cabal. The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club includes op-ed regulars at this newspaper and The Washington Post, the editors of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Slate, columnists in Time and Newsweek . Many of these wary warmongers are baby-boom liberals whose aversion to the deployment of American power was formed by Vietnam but who had a kind of epiphany along the way -- for most of us, in the vicinity of Bosnia."
At one point, Keller crawled out on a limb and called for Colin Powell to resign:
"The most important reason the secretary of state should go is that the president has chosen a course that repudiates much of what Mr. Powell has stood for -- notably his deep suspicion of arrogant idealism."
After the successful march to Baghdad, though, some of Keller's doubts rose to the surface:
"I supported the war, with misgivings about the haste, the America-knows-best attitude and our ability to win the peace. The deciding factor for me was not the monstrosity of the regime (routing tyrants is a noble cause, but where do you stop?), nor the opportunity to detoxify the Middle East (another noble cause, but dubious justification for a war when hardly anyone else in the world supports you). No, I supported it mainly because of the convergence of a real threat and a real opportunity. . . .
"The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted. To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face. Even if you believe that this war is justified, the route to it has been an ugly display of American opportunism and bullying, dissembling and dissonance."
So even antiwar liberals should find something to like in this reluctant hawk.
Keller doesn't buy the criticism that George Bush is a religious zealot, even as he tries to explain it:
"I understand the critics' discomfort with Mr. Bush's public piety. It contributes to an image of crusading arrogance abroad, and to a fear of invasive moralism at home. . . . Perhaps the most important effect of Mr. Bush's religion is that, for better or for worse, it imparts a profound self-confidence once he has decided on a course of action."
As for affirmative action, Keller supports it, even while recognizing it is not a panacea:
"My own views on this subject are not entirely theoretical. I'm a trustee of a liberal arts college that tries to attract black and Latino scholars using a standard much like the one at the Michigan Law School. I also work for a newspaper that makes an effort to hire and promote talented minority journalists. The paper does this not for the sake of doing good (for that it has a charitable foundation) nor to defend a principle (for that it has an editorial page), but mainly because we can better comprehend a disparate world and explain it to a disparate audience if our reporting and editing staff does not consist entirely of Ivy League white guys."
In short, this is a man of many opinions, but hardly a polemicist or an ideologue. Those opinions will be getting plenty of attention if Bill Keller gets his promotion.
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