Times national political writer Adam Nagourney is the latest to write a book on that history, recounting the paper’s struggles from 1976 to 2016. The subtitle—“How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism”—presents this as the story of an important institution’s endurance in harrowing times. It is a valuable record of how one news organization stumbled through the difficult transition from print to internet, and a well-written history of the seven executive editors and the publishers who served during this period.
Its strength is in Nagourney’s brilliant portraits of the potentates who battled each other for power—probing, fair-minded, and extremely well-documented. It’s an engaging read in the tradition of Gay Talese’s 1969 history of the Times, The Kingdom and the Power. But the critique Nat Hentoff used in his 1969 Columbia Journalism Review piece on Talese’s book applies here: “The book is a spiral of fascinating tales…. But this spiral, alas, is also a weakness for those who might want to know more about the Times as a power in the country.”
The book is strongest when it shows how the personalities and power struggles of the masthead names impacted news coverage. Nagourney suggests, for example, that executive editor Abe Rosenthal’s “unease with homosexuality” explains why the Times was slow to cover the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. “Rosenthal’s antagonism for homosexuals was deeply rooted,” Nagourney writes, noting that he worried in his journal about a “homosexual clique” in the newsroom and once told a high-ranking editor “about his suspicion that there were clusters of homosexual editors” on two of the paper’s major desks.
Rosenthal, managing editor starting in 1969 and then executive editor from 1977 to 1986, is portrayed as a tyrant who pushed the paper in a more conservative direction. The more liberal Max Frankel, executive editor from 1986 to 1994, was his constant rival. After Rosenthal beat out Frankel for the executive editor job, Frankel got the considerable consolation prize of serving as editorial-page editor. Rosenthal then proceeded to undermine Frankel by badmouthing his editorials to the publisher (crossing a line that ought to exist between opinion pages and the news side). Their differences were also personal: Frankel was miffed that Rosenthal wouldn’t hire his wife at the time, Tobia Brown Frankel. “He didn’t like my politics,” Frankel would later say. “He didn’t like the tone of the editorial page. He just didn’t like me.”