Times Editor's Tough Style Left Him Few Staff Allies
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 6, 2003; Page A12
Howie had the best info. He deserves the finishing story here.
In the end, Howell Raines sowed the seeds of his self-destruction with a bruising management style that left him with few allies in his hour of crisis.
His relentless drive and determination, great strengths in an editor, also alienated wide swaths of the New York Times newsroom, as people felt excluded and in many cases shoved aside by his autocratic rule.
"If people had voted in April, long before Jayson Blair, he would have lost that vote," a Times reporter said yesterday after Raines's resignation. "I just don't think he built much support for his regime. He never built a cabinet. He concentrated power in so few people that he didn't have a team."
Interviews with a broad range of Times staffers, most of whom declined to be named because of the unsettled situation, make clear that the departure of Raines and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd, was not entirely voluntary. Raines, in fact, was setting up appointments with staffers for next week. But Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., after a meeting with the Washington bureau Tuesday, must have "concluded there was no resurrection possible," a staffer said. "People thought it was the right move because of the amount of resentment and rage Howell had engendered with his imperious style of management, completely top-down."
What was particularly striking, the staffer said, was that no one at the Washington meeting spoke up in Raines's favor. As for Boyd, the staffer said, his departure if Raines was forced out "was seen as inevitable because they were a tandem."
Raines's zeal, and his "flood the zone" approach of inundating big stories with waves of reporters, helped the paper win six Pulitzers for its coverage of the 9/11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan. In the process, though, he hired people without the approval of department heads, made senior editors feel insignificant, created what one female staffer called a "boys' club" and sparked a wave of departures by talented editors and correspondents. He also became a lightning rod for conservative critics who accused him of pushing the news coverage to the left.
For Sulzberger, the company's hip and approachable chief executive who succeeded his more remote father, Raines proved to be a gamble that did not pay off.
Sulzberger appeared agonized by what he called the black eye of the Blair scandal, telling a tense staff meeting last month that the situation "sucks," but forcefully proclaiming faith in his handpicked editor and insisting he would not accept Raines's resignation. His decision to abandon that pledge is a tacit admission of error -- and perhaps of a larger error in picking Raines for the top job over the younger and more popular former managing editor Bill Keller. After all, if Raines made a hash of things, what does that say about the man who appointed him?
A staff member sympathetic to Raines said that even his supporters "felt he had brought this upon himself in many ways" and that Raines's "autocratic streak was seconded and thirded" by his tiny circle of top lieutenants. "No one extended a compassionate face to the newsroom, and that in many ways was the undoing of Howell and Gerald," the staffer said. Still, one faction of the newsroom is concerned "that this was somehow precipitated by outside pressure and that the Times caved in to the clamor for resignations from outside."
For all the antipathy toward Raines, there was some crying in the newsroom as he announced his departure. "After weeks of rancor and anger, the tears and sustained applause for Howell were striking," said Philip Taubman, the paper's deputy editorial page editor. "I found myself wondering whether it was just the cathartic moment and the poignancy of his departure or whether there was a good deal more respect and admiration for Howell than seemed apparent in recent weeks."
One reporter, Dinitia Smith, offered words of praise for Raines and added that she felt "especially sorry about Gerald, because in the end I feel he had little to do with the promotion of Jayson Blair and he has been unfairly tarred by the rest of the media." Raines has always displayed a hard-charging style, from his days as Washington bureau chief in the early 1990s, where he was accused of fostering an unforgiving star system, to his tenure as editorial page editor, where he hammered President Bill Clinton in harshly personal terms while championing liberal causes. When he took over as executive editor, a week before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he vowed in an interview to soften his style and emphasize his more "collegial, collaborative, cooperative side." But this journalistic leopard proved unable to change his spots.
The sense of relief that many staffers expressed at the reappointment of Joseph Lelyveld, a respected if lower-key journalist who presided over a much happier newsroom as executive editor, is on one level a fundamental rejection of Raines. Staffers expressed amazement at the drama of Lelyveld reclaiming the job he had yielded -- he and Raines made no secret of their mutual dislike -- as he approached the paper's mandatory retirement age of 65. The newsroom consensus is that Lelyveld is the one man who could take over immediately without missing a beat, though he is expected to serve no more than a couple of months while Sulzberger finds a successor.
"It's the right and perfect move for the moment because he was executive editor before the Times took this tumble," a veteran said. A newsroom of gossipy journalists was also stunned by the turn of events.
"Nobody saw it coming," a longtime staffer said.
In the early betting, insiders say Keller, now a Times columnist, is seen as a strong candidate, along with Marty Baron, editor of the Boston Globe, a Times Co. property, and Dean Baquet, a former Times national editor who is now managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins is viewed as a long shot.
Raines was not without his defenders yesterday. Peter Kilborn, a national reporter based in Washington, said, "Howell is a brilliant editor and a sweet writer." He added, "I think he thought he was taking over an institution he felt was stodgy and needed shaking up. And maybe it wasn't all that stodgy and maybe he shook too hard."
What may have sealed Raines's fate was a widespread sense that he failed to defend the paper during the fallout from Blair's serial fabrications and Rick Bragg's extensive use of interns and stringers, especially after Bragg contended in a Washington Post interview that this was business as usual. Raines and Boyd essentially stopped giving interviews as media criticism reached a crescendo, angering many Times reporters who felt that no one was defending their cause.
"He really, really mishandled Bragg, with the lack of a response to Rick's public comments," said the staffer who contends that Raines failed to build support for his regime.
Raines, in effect, remained in the bunker he had built, issuing reassuring memos to the staff. Even in announcing his resignation yesterday, sources said, Raines, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a memoir on growing up in Alabama, did not address the public relations mess but simply said he wanted to go on to a writing life. Boyd said he would now feel free to defend himself and the paper from the allegations that have swirled around the Times.
Boyd received a mixed verdict in the newsroom, with some staffers saying he had never won their confidence and others describing a reservoir of goodwill toward him from the days before he became Raines's deputy and the highest-ranking black editor in Times history.
An early harbinger of Raines's go-it-alone style came in December, when he initially ignored staff advice after killing two sports columns on the controversy over women being excluded from Augusta National Golf Club -- a controversy that the Southerner highlighted with so many news stories that critics saw an excessive flooding of the zone. Only after the flap turned into a public relations debacle did Raines allow the columns, which deviated from the Times's editorial policy, to be published.
Even Raines's detractors -- and there are many -- concede a certain poignancy in his fall from the job he had openly sought for years. He had, after all, been deceived by Blair like everyone else, though he admitted that deep down he was probably too tolerant of Blair's erratic work record and constant mistakes because the reporter was a promising African American.
Raines often marveled at the fact that an Alabaman "son of the hillbilly tribes," who was swept up by the civil rights movement, went to Birmingham-Southern University and started on the copy desk of the Birmingham Post-Herald, could rise through the ranks and take the helm of one of the world's great newspapers. But after serving the Times in Atlanta, Washington and London, in some ways he remained the outsider.
What the Blair fiasco did was to strip away the "climate of fear" that Raines acknowledged he had inadvertently created, making clear how deeply resented he was in the newsroom he ran for 19 tumultuous months. If Raines saw himself as a journalistic version of his hero, Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, he never won the loyalty of most of his players.
In his closing remarks, Raines seemed to echo the old coach in exhorting the staff that the next time a big story breaks out, to "go like hell."
The sense of shock in the West 43rd Street newsroom and in bureaus around the world is fueled by the fact that such coups almost never happen at a tradition-encrusted newspaper where power changes hands with the solemnity of a papal succession.
"The distraction and introspection of the last month created an environment at the Times unfamiliar to a lot of us in which newspapering almost seemed to take second place," Taubman said. "Now we can make a fresh start and everyone wants to get back to putting out the best newspaper possible."
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