Hard News by Seth Mnookin Read Free Book Online Page B

the gift of a free and unhateful heart.” Some black staffers found Raines’s magazine piece condescending—and some referred to the article as “Driving Mr. Raines”—but the overall reaction was positive and further proof of Raines’s fluid prose and literary flair. Still, reporters in the newsroom noted that Raines was forced to rely on a personal remembrance rather than gumshoe reporting or foreign correspondence to win his Pulitzer.
    By the early 1990s, Raines was ready to move on to a new challenge. He knew he was a long shot to replace Frankel, who was to retire as executive editor in 1994, so he spoke with Sulzberger about an appointment as a politically liberal Op-Ed page columnist. Sulzberger, however, had a different idea. He wanted Raines to become the paper’s editorial-page editor. It was a post, Sulzberger promised, where Raines would be considered part of the steering committee that debated issues concerning the future of the
Times.
Raines, along with the next executive editor and the newspaper’s president, would meet once a week for lunch to discuss the paper’s, and the company’s, future. For Raines, it was, of course, a chance to further build his relationship with Sulzberger.
    Howell Raines took over as the editorial-page editor of
The New York Times
on January 1, 1993, one month before his fiftieth birthday. *17 The
Times,
like most daily American newspapers, maintains a Chinese wall between the paper’s news-gathering organization and its editorial page, with the publisher of the paper serving as the only bridge between the two operations. During the eight years that Raines ran the paper’s editorial page, Sulzberger and Raines grew extremely close.
    In replacing Jack Rosenthal, a more traditional-minded journalist, Raines inherited an editorial page that had long defined itself as sober and judicious. He made it clear from the start that he wasn’t much interested in learning from those who came before him. “While we were still in transition, he declined my advice,” Rosenthal says. “He was perfectly polite about it, but I would have thought that, whether or not he wanted advice from me in journalistic terms, he would at least want to know what I thought of individuals and how to handle people.”
    Raines wasted no time transforming the tone and spirit of the page. One of his earliest editorials referred to Bill Clinton—who was inaugurated as president on January 20, three weeks after Raines took over the page—as Slick Willie, a startling break from the page’s historically high-minded tone:
    On the job training is a messy process, and when you’re President everyone gets to watch. Bill Clinton’s early moves on the budget have been a three-ring circus of novice mistakes. Before long—and sooner wouldn’t hurt—he needs to show that he, not Slick Willie, is the ringmaster.
    Raines’s editorial page was an instant sensation. He quickly established himself as a maverick, someone who took obvious delight in throwing metaphoric grenades into crowds just to see what people’s reactions would be. Raines gleefully called Republicans “Dobermans” and wrote that the party’s “intellectual cupboard” was “barer than at any time since the Goldwater implosion.” He accused Clinton of being disingenuous: “Does he really care about the environment,” one editorial asked, “or was that just something he told the voters?” Another piece accused the president of confusing “mere assertion with real accomplishment.” Before spring was out, Raines had made the editorial page a must-read for Washington power brokers and the New York media elite alike. The page was feisty, provocative, fearless, and suddenly, startlingly relevant. Bob Dole, then the minority leader, denounced Raines from the floor of the Senate, complaining that the
Times
’s editorial page had abandoned the “traditional high road for the gutter.” (Raines shot right back, “It’s an unusual feeling to