One Crucial Piece Missing from Howell Raines' Memoir

One Crucial Piece Missing from Howell Raines' Memoir
By Greg Mitchell
Editors and Publishers
May 14, 2006

Since Howell Raines' new book is titled "The One that Got Away,"and it picks up where his previous memoir left off in 1993, the "one" might well refer to former New York Times reporters Jayson Blair or Judith Miller, or perhaps the author's position as executive editor of that newspaper. Perhaps it does slyly suggest all of those things, but, like his previous memoir, it mainly covers reeling in fish, not front-page stories. Only two of its 44 chapters focus on the Blair Affair, which cost Raines his job in 2003. That's fine with me, but more troubling: There's not a single mention of Judith Miller or the Times' coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war, which cost the entire country incalculably.

Now, Raines has a right to write any kind of memoir he wants. I should talk; I wrote a book about managing my son in Little League. Still, if human tragedy had struck our ballfield, and I was accused of having something to do with it, I probably would have found a way to include it. Raines has a lot to say in the book about his newspaper's mission and the press in general, so ignoring Iraq suggests avoidance or denial.

Although most people may be confused about the timeline, it was Raines who managed (or mismanaged) the Times' prewar Iraq coverage. He did not exit the paper until May 2003, two months after the invasion, with his successor Bill Keller arriving in July. (It then took Keller nearly a year to produce a relatively brief and unapologetic editors' note on the WMD mess.) So a brief look back at Raines and Iraq is in order: Call it "The One That Got Away from 'The One That Got Away.'"

When the Iraq run-up began in earnest in mid-2002, Raines was riding high after the Times' much-honored coverage of 9/11. That focus earned the newspaper praise even from conservatives. In a Franklin Foer article for New York magazine in 2004, one former Times editor suggested that Raines, long suspected of ultra-liberalism, wanted to prove that he could be "fair-minded about the Bush administration" and so "bent over backwards to back them often" in the build-up to the war. Another former editor said that Raines often objected to stories that questioned the administration's claims on Iraq while "never" raising doubts about Miller's pieces.

According to Foer, investigations editor Doug Frantz and foreign editor Roger Cohen "went to managing editor Gerald Boyd on several occasions with concerns about Miller's over-reliance on Chalabi and his Pentagon champions. ... But Raines and Boyd continually reaffirmed management's faith in her by putting her stories on page 1."

Raines has defended himself most fully in a letter to Los Angeles Times media reporter Tim Rutten on May 26, 2004. Keller had just published his belated editor's note, which emphasized that all of the Times' deeply flawed WMD stories came during Raines' reign, lacked "rigorous" oversight, and may have been rushed into print.

In his response, Raines charged that Keller (once the paper's managing editor), Jill Abramson (then the Washington bureau chief) and others actually supervised Miller. He asserted that Abramson "told me that she had a good rapport with Ms. Miller." She "personally edited the resulting stories before they went into the paper. It seems to me unfair to single out Judy Miller, even in a blind reference, or to cite individual stories by other reporters without drawing aside the veil of anonymity around un-bylined editors who worked with them." Ouch.

Further, "The stories were published in a reasonable effort to share with our readers the best knowledge that we had at the time. We relied in that period on a group of national security and intelligence reporters who worked tirelessly to keep up with developments in the search for weapons of mass destruction. I believe then as I do now that this group of reporters acted in good faith to present the best version of the facts they could obtain at the time.

"Personally, I do not agree with the contention in the editors' note that problems in the WMD stories came about because some editors felt pressured to get scoops into the paper before the necessary checking had taken place. ... My feeling is that no editor did this kind of reckless rushing while I was executive editor. ... As for my part, I can tell you positively that in 25 years on the Times and in 21 months as executive editor, I never put anything into the paper before I thought it was ready." Then he recalled that Miller's previous work "was prescient, and much of her work on terrorism over the years has been highly regarded."

Unless he's changed his views since -- the new book is certainly no help -- Raines' recognition of his personal responsibility for the damaging and influential Times' WMD coverage that helped push America into a disastrous war seems very slim.

The former Times' ombudsman, Dan Okrent, is out with his own book this month, called "Public Editor #1." In it he reprints some of his columns, plus updated commentary.

One of his most high-profile columns appeared on May 30, 2004, after Keller's rather muted editors' note admitted at least some wrongdoing in the WMD coverage. Okrent noted Raines' defense, in the letter to Rutten, but revealed that talking to nearly two dozen current and former Times staffers had convinced him that under Raines command "a dysfunctional system enabled some reporters operating out of Washington and Baghdad to work outside the lines of customary bureau management.

"In some cases, reporters who raised substantive questions about certain stories were not heeded. Worse, some with substantial knowledge of the subject at hand seem not to have been given the chance to express reservations." This led to, among other things, "rather breathless stories built on unsubstantiated revelations" and "credulous" stories given "front-page display and heavy-breathing headlines."

Okrent observed that this occurred even though, as he put it, "War requires an extra standard of care, not a lesser one."