The Life and Times of Joseph Lelyveld

Joe Lelyveld, who died earlier this month at the age of 86, was the last great print editor of The New York Times, a steward and symbol of a passing era. He presided over the newsroom during a period when the Times, like almost all newspapers, defined its journalism by what rolled off the presses every night. And he was there for the beginning of momentous upheaval for the Times and for American journalism, with the rise of the internet.

Lelyveld bowed, albeit with more than a little skepticism and reluctance, to the first stirrings of the digital revolution that was championed by a young and forward-looking publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. And he navigated, with discomfort, the way this untethered era forced a reconsideration of journalistic standards, evident in the rise of the Drudge Report and the often unrestrained coverage of the exploits of figures such as Michael Jackson and the Kardashians. Lelyveld understood intuitively that these two forces shaping American newspapers were related: that digital was more than a means of delivery, that the immediacy of the format—the speed with which news would now have to be gathered, written, edited, and published—would change the substance and, potentially, the accuracy of reporting. He had learned about the potential and risks of asking reporters to cover news with little oversight in his years as a foreign correspondent, before the era of cellphones, when he might go days without being able to talk through a story he was working on with an editor back in New York. (He would not have been surprised, I think, at the editors’ note the Times was forced to run after an uproar about a digital headline, posted in the early hours of a fast-moving story, that blamed Israel for bombing a Gaza City hospital.)

Lelyveld walked out of the New York Times newsroom for the last time as executive editor in July 2003. He was 66 years old, and he had worked at the Times since 1962, when he started as a copyboy. He had, over those 41 years, been a reporter on the Metropolitan desk; a foreign correspondent in Congo, Hong Kong, India, and South Africa; the foreign editor; the deputy managing editor; the managing editor; and, on two different occasions, the executive editor. By the time of his death, though, Lelyveld had become a fading memory in the churn of a younger newsroom. Lelyveld found that deflating, but hardly surprising. When we spoke—over the course of a series of interviews as I researched The Times, my book on the history of the paper, from which this essay is drawn—Lelyveld would talk about how the mark of an executive editor was fleeting, unlike the mark of a reporter, who had a preserved record of accomplishment, whether crumpled newspaper clips or a Pulitzer Prize. (He had both.)

Lelyveld was a traditionalist. His unquestioned stature and credentials made him appealing to Sulzberger, who appointed him executive editor in 1994. The Times under Lelyveld’s eight-year watch was marked by distinguished, often superlative coverage; it was a prosperous and growing newspaper. (There was one blemish of note on his tenure, though a mostly forgotten one at that: the coverage of espionage charges against Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese American nuclear scientist, which were later dropped, stories that an editors’ note said “fell short of our standards.”)

The Times was a newspaper that, ever since it was bought by Adolph Ochs in 1896, had believed in restraint and discretion, even if that meant ignoring what other newspapers were covering or being a day late on a story of questionable worth, and Lelyveld embraced and celebrated those values. The Times would not write gratuitously about the sex lives of politicians, or chase the tabloid stories about Lorena Bobbitt or Tonya Harding or anything that smacked of popular culture’s excesses. “That is not why most of us got into this business; that is not where we want to take it,” Lelyveld told the Sulzberger family at a private retreat in 1999. “If others were doing it, let them do it. We will deal with the consequences. We can lead on other stories.” When Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, a few hours before the deadline in New York, the Times remade the front page to announce her death with a single-line headline across three columns. As the outpouring of grief over her death consumed newspapers around the world, a reporter from Time magazine asked Lelyveld whether the paper might have given her death more play if there had been more time to consider the importance of her death. “Actually,” Lelyveld responded, “I might have given it less.”

He struggled with how the Times should cover the story of a former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and her sexual encounters with President Bill Clinton. As the salacious details of their relationship trickled out, Lelyveld was the guard at the gates. “I would leave the cigar out as long as we possibly can,” he instructed his editors, after the paper learned of testimony that the former president had used a cigar for sex play with Lewinsky. His resistance would ultimately prove futile. He described his decision to report the account of Lewinsky’s blue dress, saved after an encounter with Clinton, perhaps the toughest call he ever made. “Abe Rosenthal had the Pentagon Papers,” he told me with mordant humor. “I had the semen-stained dress.”

But it was the digital revolution that most vexed him, that tested his instincts and resolve, that placed him at the hinge of change. Lelyveld went along with the early, often unsteady ventures by the Times into the online world of the 1990s: its first website; the posting of stories during the day, rather than waiting for the morning print newspaper; and, most significant, the hiring of Martin Nisenholtz, the founder and president of the Interactive Marketing Group at Ogilvy & Mather, to run the paper’s digital operation. He understood the publisher’s interest in moving the Times into this new world—Sulzberger’s instinct would prove correct; the thriving Times of today is his legacy—and Lelyveld was not about to turn his back on the future.

But Lelyveld would go only so far in accepting change. He read the online version of the newspaper, but defensively, to make sure it did not stray from the Times’ standards. He never enjoyed it, never believed that it could honor the quality that imbued the Times, never thought that it would (or should) replace the Times he had grown up with. In the early years of his career, Lelyveld worked beside Robert D. McFadden, who would go on to write his obituary for the Times, on the broadcast desk, scouring wire reports and banging out quick summaries of the news to send up to WQXR, the Times radio station. It was necessary work—he would recall 50 years later their crisp bulletins heralding the end of the 13-day Cuban missile crisis—but he found the product neither satisfying nor enduring. And that is what came to mind as he read his newspaper on a computer screen. “I never really believed that the digital New York Times could have the same authority and sway that the paper New York Times had,” he said.

His reservations only grew as the digital operation gained stature and prominence. Lelyveld worried about the threat to the newsroom posed by its ambitions—to its staff, its budget, and most of all, its reputation. He worried that the power of determining the journalistic identity of the Times would move from his newsroom to the digital empire that Nisenholtz was building. As the Times contemplated an IPO to fund its digital expansion, he was distressed to learn that Nisenholtz might receive options worth as much as the combined earnings of dozens of the paper’s most senior writers. “Nobody asked me, but I think that this is grotesque if not obscene and that some day, maybe some day very soon, we will look back on these decisions with a mixture of amazement and embarrassment,” he wrote a Times executive. Most of all, he objected to the idea that the paper’s traditions were a burden rather than an asset. “Martin wants what he deems to be the dead hand of the newsroom off his organization,” Lelyveld wrote Sulzberger. “He’ll take our continuous news, be courteous and collegial in personal encounters but grant us as little stake in what is done with Times news on the Web as he possibly can.” Lelyveld, as he did often over the years, schooled the younger man who was his publisher: “Part of your job is to celebrate and indeed seize the future. Another part is to avoid leaving the impression that there’s a revolutionary vanguard that excludes most of us.”

Sulzberger tried to reassure him. “The Internet is a sexy topic right now,” the publisher wrote in Lelyveld’s employment review in 1999. “One result is that Martin and his operation is getting a great deal of press and overall attention. This is a moment in time, and it will pass. The driver of our Company today and in the years ahead is and will remain the New York Times newspaper.” But Sulzberger later told me that hiring Nisenholtz was “one of the smartest things I ever did,” a window into the publisher’s priorities and ambitions for his newspaper.

Lelyveld was a serious journalist running a serious newspaper. He took a “sneaking pleasure” in putting stories about the Bosnian War on the front page—knowing full well that most readers would never read them—because it showed the mission of the Times. That was a luxury of an era when the Times’ front page set the agenda for the rest of the media, and when executive editors did not really have to think about circulation or advertising sales. His mindset said much about how the Times viewed itself. Lelyveld could not know that these were the final years when the newspaper could just assume profitability and dominance, when it thought it knew better than its readers what they should be reading, when the newsroom could be dismissive of the notion that it had a responsibility to help attract new readers in order to assure the newspaper’s financial success.

Lelyveld would no doubt struggle in today’s Times newsroom, where the print newspaper has been pushed to the side of the stage; where the news report is presented on so many different platforms, many of them short-form summaries; and where there is a focus on drawing the paying subscribers who are now the paper’s economic lifeblood. Lelyveld told me that in his final years running the newsroom, he would attend meetings where digital editors would throw around ideas about what the Times could do with its website, notions such as reader chats with reporters about restaurants and wine and politics. He would object—this is not why readers came to the Times, he would say—but before long Lelyveld began to feel, as he put it, like the old man in the room whom people were treating with polite tolerance. “I didn’t really understand what he was talking about,” he said, referring to Nisenholtz. “And I didn’t really care about what he was talking about.”

For Sulzberger, the story of these past 30 years has been the survival and the reinvention of his family’s newspaper while trying to stay true to its history and its  mission. He was a former wire-service reporter who described himself as “platform-agnostic.” Lelyveld, the defender of the Times, or of his vision of the Times, did not want readers to think of the website when they thought of the Times. But of course that is precisely what has happened.

The enduring quality of the Times’ journalism today—whatever platform it appears on—is testimony to the seriousness of purpose that is ingrained in the newsroom and that Lelyveld championed during his 41 years there. The New York Times is still very much itself, whatever the format. Still, the speed and exigencies of digital reporting—the need to attract new paying readers, be it with edgy coverage of politics or with diversions such as Wordle and the Cooking app—mean that this is an unfinished debate. The end of the story in which Lelyveld played so large a role is not yet known.