The Story Page 7

  Why had I graduated from Barnard in absentia? he asked, approaching dangerous turf. I had studied economics overseas at an institute at the University of Brussels during my last year at Barnard, I explained, and had also worked for a firm whose only client was the European Economic Community (EEC), as the European Community was first known. My research, I babbled on, had focused on the American Selling Price system, a nasty American tariff that had raised the price of European goods made of benzenoid chemicals by as much as 172 percent in the American market.

  Abe’s eyes glazed over. He was clearly not riveted by details of trade negotiations in Geneva and, I suspected, financial news in general. This was fortunate, since he quickly switched topics and did not ask me why I had spent my senior year overseas rather than at Barnard. Had he asked, I would have been forced to violate a John Finney dictum and disclose that I had fled America because I was more or less on the lam.

  My arrest at Fayerweather Hall in the spring of 1968 had not been my only encounter that year with law enforcement. I had been arrested twice before in antiwar protests led by Resist, whose nonviolence I preferred to the more aggressive tactics and goals of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Resist did not want to “off the pigs” of capitalist America but to disrupt the Vietnam War by peacefully encouraging draft-age men to destroy their draft cards and go to jail or flee the country. I had been given a warning after my first arrest for a sit-in at selective service headquarters in downtown New York. After the second, at the New York offices of Dow Chemical, the producers of napalm, I had been charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest for refusing to move. I had been released “on my recognizance,” which meant that I could stay out of jail while the matter was being adjudicated if I did not violate the law again.

  After my third arrest at Columbia, I spent my first hours in jail. The Manhattan House of Detention—better known as the Tombs, in downtown Manhattan—was filled that spring with Columbia and Barnard students arrested in antiwar protests. After my release, Resist’s lawyers advised me to find someplace to study overseas until my legal situation was resolved.

  Had Abe asked me, I would have told him that I never regretted my opposition to the Vietnam War, my civil disobedience, or my participating in the student strike at Columbia. Years later, when we again discussed those topics, we had become close enough that we could agree to disagree.

  — CHAPTER 4 —

  THE WASHINGTON BUREAU

  When I arrived at the Washington bureau, I discovered that I was not the only woman to have been hired in the paper’s scramble for gender correctness. By June 1977 three far more experienced female reporters had also joined the bureau.

  By that time, however, the Women’s Caucus in New York had gained access through its suit to private memos in the paper’s personnel files. It was not pretty: bigotry and sexism were blatant.1 Less than a year later, the suit was settled quietly. Because both sides agreed to an out-of-court settlement, the papers and affidavits associated with the case were sealed, and remain so. While refusing to acknowledge “past or present” discrimination, the Times pledged to implement an affirmative action plan that would place women at the paper in key jobs and give the Women’s Caucus annual status reports. The paper agreed to pay $350,000 to Times women, mostly for back pay—as Nan Robertson complained, a “puny amount” compared with the $1.375 million settlement that the Reader’s Digest’s women got in their lawsuit.

  Most of the caucus leaders wound up paying a high price for the suit. None ever became a manager. Before she sued, Betsy Wade, the lead plaintiff, was described in house publications as “one of the best damned editors who ever held down a place on a Times copydesk” and “one of the glories of the newsroom.”2 Part of the team that had worked on the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning story about the Pentagon Papers in 1971, she ended her career writing a weekly column in the Sunday Travel section called Practical Traveler. More than thirty years later, Betsy still believes that suing the paper was the most important thing she had done professionally. “We knew at the time that we would not be the ones to benefit. The beneficiaries would be those who came after us.”

  Progress was painfully slow.3 The men’s resentment of women, the double standards to which we were held, remained. Not until 2003 was a woman appointed to one of the top two editorial posts at the paper. That woman, Jill Abramson, was a high school classmate of Betsy’s younger son. “That’s how long it took to get a woman to the position that I thought I should have,” Betsy said.

  * * *

  The quiet resentment toward us new recruits to the Washington bureau was tolerable because the paper was in the midst of another wrenching transition. I was a novice, but an intensely competitive reporter at a time when the paper craved them. I lived for scoops, a goal often undervalued in the stately Washington bureau.

  Although Rick Smith still tried to run a traditional, hierarchical shop, Watergate had shattered the bureau’s independence from New York—a practice that began in the 1930s when Arthur Krock demanded autonomy as the price of moving to Washington to run the bureau. Since then, the bureau had been a “veritable duchy in the kingdom,” as one Times observer called it. Watergate changed all that.

  The bureau had gone from journalistic exaltation over its publication of the Pentagon Papers to despair from having been trounced by the Washington Post on the Watergate scandal, which began to unfold a year later. Under Max Frankel, the bureau had ceded the story of the century to the Washington Post, its main rival. Backed by executive editor Ben Bradlee, two metro reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, had run rings around the Times. Their triumph had dramatized investigative journalism, which had often been undervalued at the Times.

  The Times had begun in 1851 as a city broadsheet whose reporting—as implied by Adolph Ochs’s description of his paper as the impartial “newspaper of record”—had relied heavily on official pronouncements. Despite some excellent reporting, the Washington bureau had traditionally seen itself as part of the establishment.

  Frankel would later acknowledge that he had blown the story, remaining sluggish even after the White House itself was implicated.4 He had believed his sources, among them White House press secretary Ron Ziegler, his occasional tennis partner, as well as National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, and other White House officials who had dismissed the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters as a “third-rate burglary”—an assessment that many of Frankel’s reporters shared initially. Later, as Richard Nixon’s involvement in Watergate was revealed day after day in the pages of the Washington Post, the bureau began scrambling, but too late. “I was so envious of the Post’s lead that I allowed myself to be skeptical of some of its revelations,” Max confessed in his memoir decades later.

  This failure did not prevent him from becoming the paper’s Sunday editor and, despite another disappointing performance, succeeding Abe Rosenthal as executive editor in 1986. Among the fraternal order of Timesmen, life was full of second and third chances. Not so for women.

  After Watergate, Abe Rosenthal vowed not to be beaten again on a major story. In his book decades later, Arthur Gelb, Abe’s indispensable number two, said that Rosenthal considered his decision not to remove Frankel from the Washington bureau sooner “the greatest mistake of his career.”5

  By the time I was hired, a younger, more aggressive management—though tall, preppy Rick Smith was hardly Columbo—had taken command of the bureau. Smith, and Bill Kovach, who succeeded him, began hiring or promoting some of its investigative stars: David Burnham, whose police corruption series had resulted in major law enforcement reform; Nick Horrock, a dogged corruption reporter (an editor once joked that Horrock “kept his cards so close to his chest that not even he could see them”); and the relentless Ed Pound, who spent so much time reporting on FBI and drug enforcement officials that he came to resemble them. The short leash that Abe had kept on Seymour Hersh, who in 1968 had broken the My Lai massacre story in
Vietnam for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was finally loosened so that he could cajole and browbeat recalcitrant sources. Long before I joined the Times, I had urged Sy to team up with a long-standing friend of mine from the antiwar movement, Jeff Gerth, a gifted financial reporter. Their partnership produced an impressive series on the financial shenanigans of Sidney Korshak, a notorious fixer for the Mob. Jeff, who was also hired full-time by the Times in 1977, eventually won his own Pulitzer Prize.6

  * * *

  My first beat produced at least a couple of hard news stories a week. After reading the latest corporate filings at the SEC headquarters and speaking to the government attorneys who were overseeing a particular company of interest, I would race back to the bureau to file my story. Deadline had its own frenetic rhythm: we would type our stories, double-spaced, on thick copybooks of typing paper separated by sheets of carbon paper. After a page was finished, we would yell “Copy!” A copyboy, invariably a tweedy young man, usually a graduate of an elite college who yearned to work at the Times, would rush to our desks, pick up the finished page from our “out” baskets, and deliver it to an editor at the center of the office. As we struggled to complete another page, the copyboy would bring the edited pages back to us, the editor’s questions scribbled in the margins. If the questions were serious—such as, “Where is the lead of your story hiding?”—the news editor responsible for your section of the paper might call you on the phone. If there were even more serious issues, he would come to your desk. The financial desk editor, and even John Finney himself, spent a lot of time at my desk, teaching me what the Times expected in a news story and “news analysis” pieces, which, unlike today, were then clearly distinguishable from one another.

  The bureau had never been regarded as a particularly welcoming place, and some veteran reporters made little secret of their disapproval of the relatively large group of young, ambitious female reporters.

  But I soon discovered some supportive editors. I had a rocky start with one of them, David Binder, a former Bonn correspondent and Washington editor for foreign news who spoke several European languages and had written a brilliant biography of German chancellor Willy Brandt.

  Soon after I arrived, I filed a story on a Saturday about how an insurgency in some remote corner of the globe was being financed. Binder came by and threw the story on my desk in evident disgust.

  “The problem with you,” he said, “is that you have no respect for the craft.”

  I was crushed. “What did you mean?” I asked meekly.

  “Look at this copy,” he said, ignoring me. “Look at this sentence.”

  The page I had submitted lacked margins and the proper Times formatting. More seriously, it also referred to the rebel gang in the South American country I was writing about as a “gorilla” movement.

  “Is this group part of the Cro-Magnon family?” he mocked.

  It was just a spelling error, I said, trying to portray my mistake as haste rather than sloppiness. “The copy editor would have caught it,” I lamely added, falling back on the layers of Times editors who check and recheck facts, spelling, and even sentence structure.

  “You make a mistake a day like this,” Binder countered. “It’s unprofessional, and unacceptable,” he said, walking away from my desk. I raced out of the building to smoke a cigarette and calm down.

  Several cigarettes later, I returned to Binder’s desk. He was right, I told him. I neither knew nor cared much about the paper’s arcane rules and traditions. I thought I had been hired to break news, but observing the Times’s rituals of form and content were important. Would he help me figure them out?

  Binder seemed to soften. He agreed. I learned an enormous amount from him, though I doubt he ever knew of my intense admiration for him.

  It was on a weekend working overtime that I met my first real friend at the paper, and, eventually, an anchor of my personal and professional lives and that of our close-knit circle of friends. One Saturday, when the bureau was mostly empty, a boyish-looking blond in tennis clothes tossed his squash racket onto the desk of the chief economics reporter, whom I still had not met. “You can’t sit there,” I mumbled, assuming he was a new copyboy. “That’s Steve Rattner’s desk,” I told him.

  “He won’t mind,” the smiling young jock replied. “I am Steve Rattner.”

  I had heard that Rattner, who went on to make a fortune in investment banking, was a wunderkind who had been a news clerk to James “Scotty” Reston, a former Washington bureau chief and executive editor and distinguished political columnist. But I was stunned at how young he looked. In fact, Steve was just a few years younger than I. He laughed and suggested a drink.7

  Steve and I, among a handful of reporters under the age of thirty-five, quickly became a circle. Philip Taubman, who covered intelligence, and his wife, Felicity Barringer, who then worked for the Washington Post and would later join the Times, became part of the group. So did Steve Weisman, who had won a bureau slot after his superb coverage of New York City’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s.

  When the bureau moved to Connecticut Avenue and K Street, closer to the White House, a new desk appeared just opposite the economics cluster. Its occupant was a general assignment reporter who immediately stood out: he was young like us, but formally dressed, given the bureau’s rather informal dress code. The cuffs of his custom-made shirts bore gold links. He wore suspenders and a bow tie. But he was friendly and very funny, and was immediately accepted by us.8 His name was Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

  — CHAPTER 5 —

  BECOMING A “TIMESMAN”

  I was still covering the Securities and Exchange Commission when stories about my sharp elbows and romantic escapades began circulating. I paid little attention at first. I was determined to make news even on a beat that had little priority in Washington or New York. When I wasn’t working hard, I was socializing with equal fervor. Let them gossip, I thought. What did it matter?

  A child of the 1960s, I had what was then regarded as a traditionally “male” attitude toward sex: I enjoyed fairly casual encounters that neither my partners nor I assumed would lead to a long-term commitment. With rare exceptions, I remained on good terms with the men I dated.

  We female boomers were blessed to have come of age when, for the first time in history, women could control reproduction with ease and certainty. I was convinced that the birth control pill belonged on anyone’s list of history’s great inventions—ranking alongside the discovery of fire, the wheel, the printing press, cars, penicillin, and, as someone who spent so much time in the Middle East, air-conditioning.

  I was nevertheless intensely private. Long before joining the Times, I was determined to keep my personal life to myself. Part of that was my reluctance to share unpleasant if clichéd memories of modern American life: my parents’ ugly divorce, my mother’s lonely alcoholic binges, my brother’s self-destructive heroin addiction. Part of it was also pragmatic: dating influential men like Les Aspin, who, for all his high public profile was shy and also deeply private, made discretion essential.

  While the Times was in the disclosure business, it was institutionally averse back then to invading the private space of even the very public people it covered. The paper tended to be even more discreet about its own sexual and ethical lapses. The Times, of course, had conflict-of-interest and nepotism rules, often haphazardly enforced, almost invariably at the expense of women. Editors and other supervisors, for instance, were not supposed to fraternize with reporters or those they supervised. But a succession of senior editors often disregarded this rule: editors’ dalliances with secretaries, reporters, and other subordinates were well known among the staff.

  Rick Smith’s decision to assign me to the SEC, I learned, was based not only on a fortuitous opening in the department but also on a need to ensure that I would not be covering national security, politics, or other areas of potential conflict-of-interest with Les Aspin. Although I had been writing about these topics long before I was romanticall
y involved with him, I agreed reluctantly not to write about them for the Times as long as Les and I were living together.

  The Times was no monastery. But male journalists were rarely, if ever, scrutinized as closely as women were. While my male colleagues would often boast about having cultivated or slept with the secretaries and assistants of powerful men they covered, women reporters who were suspected of sleeping with their sources, or who openly socialized with them, were the objects of vicious gossip. Spy magazine, a forerunner of irresponsible internet bloggers, profited from the fascination with the Times and those who worked for it. The fact that I was living with a congressman was of interest, not to mention resentment in some quarters of the paper. Being linked with other powerful men whose friendship I enjoyed magnified that interest. But prior to my romance with Les and even after it, contrary to the many stories in Spy and other gossips, most of the men with whom I was romantically involved were fellow journalists, none of whom I worked for.

  To ward off gossip, I tried to avoid discussing Les at the office. But gossip about us continued. What most of my colleagues did not know was that after only a year at the paper, my relationship with him was quietly unraveling.

  * * *

  Long before I began dating Les, I had admired him. A Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University who had been one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s “whiz kids” in the 1960s, he had a small but close-knit group of national security–obsessed friends—among them, Les Gelb, who soon became my colleague and the chief national security analyst for the Times; Frank Wisner, a gifted foreign service officer who served as ambassador in both Cairo and New Delhi, India; Mort Halperin, a brilliant defense and policy analyst; and Richard Holbrooke, then an assistant secretary of state for Asia. Most of them had risked their careers by opposing the escalation of the war in Vietnam, which they had initially supported.