Hard News by Seth Mnookin Read Free Book Online Page A

super-reporter jobs rather than supervisory editing ones. Mindful of the fact that the Sulzberger family often vacationed in London, Raines decided to move to England. Journalistically, his two-year stint there was unimpressive, devoid of any major scoops or memorable reporting. But Raines did deepen his already strong bond with Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
    While Raines was in London, Craig Whitney, Kovach’s replacement in Washington, was floundering. Whitney came to Washington without ever having worked in the capital, and he had tried to force out about half a dozen of the bureau’s correspondents soon after his arrival. It soon became clear he had difficulty understanding the nuances of the culture. The D.C. bureau of the
Times
has a long tradition of struggling against the authority and control of New York, and Whitney wasn’t attuned to that struggle. Within two years, he was forced out, the victim of a staff mutiny, and Raines was headed back from London—to take the job he had wanted in the first place.
    —————
    R AINES DROVE his staff hard. In the 1980s, only a decade after Watergate, the
Times
’s D.C. bureau was still very much in the shadow of
The Washington Post,
and Raines worked furiously to make his troops more competitive. He told associates at the paper that the bureau was used to coming in on Monday, getting back in the swing of things for a day or so, and kicking into gear on Tuesday afternoon. Under his tutelage, it was clear working in Washington was a full-time job. “He was a damn good Washington bureau chief,” says Soma Golden Behr, the paper’s national editor in the late 1980s. “When he came on board my life got a lot easier, just because the stuff coming out of Washington was so much better.”
    But Raines wasn’t making many friends in the process. While in Washington, he gained a reputation for being imperious—even cruel. His underlings coined a new verb—“to Raines,” translated both as “to pretend not to own slaves” and “to have slaves and not admirers.” Raines could be autocratic to the point of ridiculousness—he declared the bureau’s reporters had to stack the books on their desks horizontally instead of vertically and once famously instructed a clerk to take his ficus plant out to a balcony so it could receive its nourishment from natural rainwater. He also was known for dividing the staff into a castelike system whereby his favorites (and fishing buddies) would get the plum assignments and the rest would get the leftovers: At one point, he even told the staff he had mentally divided them into an A team and a B team.
    “He could be very combative and arrogant,” Behr says. “If one of my editors was involved in fixing something on a Washington story, he would get his back up.” Raines, she felt, could be disrespectful: “There was an arrogance and this macho swagger, and I hated that.” Behr would push back against Raines, and eventually he came to respect her judgment and that of her editors. “Over time we got rid of [his arrogance], to the point where we collaborated on stories and had a really good time.”
    It was during this time that Raines wrote the story that won him a Pulitzer Prize, practically a prerequisite for editors who hoped to run the
Times
’s newsroom. Raines’s winning article, “Grady’s Gift,” which appeared in the December 1, 1991,
New York Times Magazine,
was a loving portrait of the African American housekeeper who had helped raise him. “She had been ‘our maid,’ but she taught me the most valuable lesson a writer can learn, which is to try to see—honestly and down to its very center—the world in which we live,” Raines had written. *16 Later in the piece, Raines stressed that he didn’t want to make Grady sound like “some 50’s version of Whoopi Goldberg.” “Grady had given me the most precious gift that could be received by a pampered white boy growing up in that time and place,” he wrote. “It was