Gray Lady Down. William McGowan

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      The lacerating political and journalistic self-assessment that followed the Bay of Pigs debacle was the backdrop for the Times’ deliberations over whether to go into print with the infamous Pentagon Papers. “A tale of reckless military gambles and public deceptions” according to Max Frankel, executive editor from 1986 to 1994, the papers showed that “the government had hidden the true dimensions of its enterprise and its abundant doubts about the prospects for success” at every stage “along a twenty year arc.” Yet far from being the journalistic no-brainer it might be considered today, the Pentagon Papers case provoked considerable agony and debate at the Times. For Punch Sulzberger, the idea of publishing live military secrets was anathema, and as the internal debate flared, he invoked the national interest to delay publication. Rosenthal, the managing editor, agreed with Sulzberger’s qualms. According to Frankel, he asked “Were we on an ego trip?” before finally agreeing to publish the papers after it was found that no current military secrets would be disclosed.

      The New York Times took a similarly cautious approach to the subject of civil rights in the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, maintaining careful neutrality in explaining the historic shifts that were afoot, as well as the resistance these shifts were provoking. The paper was solidly behind most of the major civil rights developments—Brown v. Board of Education, the March on Selma, the protests in Birmingham. But it also gave positive coverage to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s now-famous 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, while some media identified with the left excoriated it. The Times affirmed Moynihan’s insight that, as with immigrants at the turn of the century, “Negro upliftment” would come through programs that asserted the primacy of the mainstream culture and promoted the values needed to enter it. Moynihan was not “blaming the victims,” the Times took pains to explain, but was blaming three hundred years of white racism that had victimized them.

      Another subject on which the Times showed far different leanings from today was cultural separatism, especially as associated with black militancy and the Black Power movement. An editorial in 1966 described Black Power as “racism in reverse” and said it “could only bring disaster to the cause of racial equality.” When Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, the editorial page called him “an extraordinary but twisted man, turning many gifts to evil purpose.” The editorial concluded: “The world he saw through those horn-rimmed glasses of his was distorted and dark. But he made it darker still through his exaltation of fanaticism. Yesterday someone came out of the darkness he spawned and killed him.”

      The Times was hardly quick to embrace the emerging counterculture either, or its radical critique of American consumerism, family structure and political authority. Rosenthal himself was appalled at some of the destructive excesses of the antiwar movement, particularly the 1968 takeover of Columbia University and the sacking of President Grayson Kirk’s office. He was dubious of the subjectivity and relativism inherent in the counterculture and its replacement of objectivity with political and cultural partisanship. “We live in a time of commitment and advocacy,” he wrote somewhat sardonically in one staff memo. “‘Tell it like it is’ really means, ‘tell it like I say it is, or tell it as I want it to be.’ For precisely that reason it is more important than ever that the Times keep objectivity in its news columns as its number one, bedrock principle.” A subsequent memo would tell the staff that the Times “shouldn’t stick fingers in people’s eyes just because we have the power to do so.”

      As Edwin Diamond notes, Rosenthal was especially on guard against the counterculture’s reflexive anti-Americanism. In early November 1969, he wrote a memo about the “awry picture of America” that, he maintained, the Times was perpetuating. Drawing his examples from the November 7 issue, he cited a story on page 7 about a GI trial in Fort Dix, a report on an MIT sit-in on page 8, an account of the moratorium on page 9, a story on the Army memo of that antiwar protest on page 13, and a report on page 22 about the ongoing Chicago trial, flanked by two different stories about poverty and housing demonstrations. He ended his list with a story on page 27 about job discrimination, before declaring that “there were others.” November 7 was not even a particularly outstanding day for that kind of thing, Rosenthal went on.

       But I get the impression, reading the Times, that the image we give of America is largely demonstrations, discrimination, anti-war movements, rallies, protests, etc.... Obviously all these things are an important part of the American scene. But I think that because of our own liberal interests and reporters’ inclinations we overdo this. I am not suggesting eliminating any of these stories. I am suggesting that reporters and editors look a bit more around them to see what is going on in other fields and try to make an effort to represent other shades of opinion than those held by the new left, the old left, the middle-aged left and anti-war people.

      Another time that Rosenthal’s nose for radical chic got out of joint was over a story by Robert Reinhold in 1979, marking the tenth anniversary of Woodstock. Reinhold had called Woodstock a symbol of national, cultural and political awakening, extolling it as the culmination of a decade-long youth crusade for a freer style of life, for peace and for tolerance. Rosenthal did not see the story until the Saturday evening before it ran in the Sunday edition. Livid, he ordered it out of all subsequent editions.

      A hallmark of Rosenthal’s commitment to keeping the Times “as close to the center as possible” was his wariness of allowing culture critics to thread their political opinions into reviews of plays, books, movies and television shows. Political opinions don’t belong in cultural reviews, Rosenthal believed. Otherwise the Times “would have ten extra commentators on the paper.” The news columns would not be made “into a political broadsheet, period,” he insisted; there would be no “editorial needles.”