Hard News by Seth Mnookin Read Free Book Online

reporter in the D.C. bureau. Raines immediately struck up a friendship with Sulzberger—some on the paper viewed it more as a courtship, with Raines the suitor—that lasted for the next twenty years. “Howell was a mentor to Arthur when Arthur was a young correspondent in the Washington bureau,” says Jack Rosenthal, a former editorial-page and
Times Magazine
editor and currently the head of the Times Company’s charitable foundation. “It always seemed to me from then that [Arthur] ordained Howell to climb the ladder.” Both Raines and Sulzberger responded well to Bill Kovach, an editor who managed to be both respected and liked; Sulzberger, in particular, liked Kovach’s open-door policy, in which all of the bureau’s employees were encouraged to tell him if they had any concerns or problems.
    But in a cutthroat industry where reporters constantly vie for the next, bigger assignment, Raines was questioning his place in the world. In his 1993 memoir,
Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis,
Raines wrote of the frustration he experienced covering Reagan, a president he felt was “making life harder for citizens who were not born rich, white and healthy.” He wrote of this time, “And I, as a boy wonder writer who had set out to create novels about the great struggles of our time, was a middle-aged man in a gray suit who trudged to the White House press room to write stories that began, ‘President Reagan said today . . .’ They call it journalism, but some days it felt like stenography.”
    This feeling of malaise, of intense introspection, came to permeate Raines’s life for years. Anxious and depressed, he began browsing the self-help section of local bookstores. “Figure out what you really want to do and do it,” one book told him. “Easy for you to say,” Raines responded. There was, he would later say, a hole in his soul, an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness, a sense of time “being piddled away, by me, in the grind of daily newspapering.”
    Later in his fly-fishing memoir, Raines wrote, of himself and of humankind, “We are full of lust, and some of it has to get out.” Howell Raines had no outlet for his lust. His marriage was struggling. It appeared he would never be known as a great novelist. Increasingly, he even seemed unsure he’d ever be known as a truly great reporter—it was the 1980s, he was in his forties, and he hadn’t yet won a Pulitzer Prize. He’d had an impressive career, but neither his reportage nor his writing particularly stood out at the
Times,
a paper well staffed with talented wordsmiths and reporters. “So here is where I came out as I entered my fiftieth year,” he wrote. “We are not on this earth for long. Part of what the midlife crisis is about is figuring out what gives you pleasure and doing more of that in the time you have left without asking for permission or financial or emotional subsidy from anyone else.”
    So Raines set his sights on the
Times
itself. Thwarted in his other ambitions, he’d instead become a great editor, perhaps even the greatest editor in the history of the paper. It was a job that traditionally went to men in their mid- to late fifties. Raines still had plenty of time to prepare.
    In 1986, Max Frankel succeeded A. M. Rosenthal as executive editor of
The New York Times.
Bill Kovach, disappointed that he hadn’t gotten the paper’s top job, left to become editor of what had become
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Raines lobbied to be named Kovach’s successor as Washington bureau chief, but Frankel, according to “The Howell Doctrine,” Ken Auletta’s seventeen-thousand-word, June 10, 2002,
New Yorker
profile, didn’t think he was up for that job, which required leading a largely autonomous office. Instead, Frankel offered Raines his choice of three postings: national editor, where he’d work in New York under the supervision of the paper’s top editors, or London or Paris bureau chief, both positions that were really