Free Hard News by Seth Mnookin

editors will start thinking you’re talking about them.”
    Raines, though, was in too much of a hurry for such niceties, and he began to lay out a vaguely defined vision: The paper would have a “higher competitive metabolism”; business would push harder on breaking stories; sports coverage would trend more national. Meanwhile, Joe Lelyveld was still running the newsroom. The tension between the two men grew. In August, when invitations were sent out for a gala fete celebrating Lelyveld’s career, the gatefold invite featured dozens of datelines that Lelyveld had filed from, including Kashmir, South Africa, London, Nairobi, Geneva, and Burma. Some thought the design was intended as a barb to Raines, who, with the possible exception of Scotty Reston, was the least-traveled executive editor in the history of
The New York Times.
     
    T HE D EPUTY
    On July 26, 2001, Raines made his first, and most significant, appointment, naming as his managing editor the fifty-one-year-old Gerald Boyd, the paper’s deputy managing editor for news. Boyd’s elevation to the newsroom’s second in command was not a surprise: Raines had made Boyd’s ascension, which would make him the highest-ranking African American in the history of the paper, part of his campaign to win the executive editorship. But it did little to soothe those looking for a counterbalance to Raines’s imperious ways. Boyd had a reputation for being cold and caustic—“No more Mr. Gruff,” he told the newsroom after his appointment was announced. Boyd had worked with Raines in Washington and had been at the
Times
since 1983, when he was hired from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
as a political reporter. After a period spent covering the White House, Boyd had been an editor in Washington and had served time on the national and metro desks as well. He also did a stint as metro editor in the early 1990s.
    Gerald Boyd grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. His early life was difficult. His mother died when he was five, and he was raised by his grandmother, whose only income was her pension. During high school, he worked full-time bagging groceries and won a University of Missouri scholarship sponsored by the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
At the university, he helped found and edit
Blackout,
a black student newspaper. He began reporting for the
Post-Dispatch
after graduating in 1973, working his way up from the city desk to land in Washington during Ronald Reagan’s first term as president. From 1983 until 1990, he covered the White House for the
Times,
where he soon earned a reputation for being contentious, even with his sources. “He was extremely aggressive in the way he handled politicians,” said Andrew Rosenthal, a
Times
reporter and editor who worked with Boyd in both Washington and New York. “He was famous for calling the White House and getting [former presidential spokesman] Marlin Fitzwater or whoever on the phone and starting out the conversation, ‘What in the hell is going on over there?’ He had this idea that aggressive behavior was useful in dealing with the White House.”
    “Gerald is not your biggest book-learned guy,” says Soma Golden Behr, who was one of Boyd’s closest friends on the paper. “He’s not like all the card-carrying Ivy League liberals that run around
The New York Times.
He’s had a different life, and he has a way of zigging and zagging. He’s not always going to tell you what he thinks. He might kid you. He might razz you.”
    Sometimes, Boyd seemed not to know exactly what it was he was looking for from his reporters, which made getting assignments from him a notoriously dicey process—he’d gather reporters around his desk, and they’d speak to fill in his awkward silences, trying to discern what it was he wanted. But although Gerald Boyd was never a widely beloved figure in the newsroom, there were those staffers in whom he inspired a fierce respect. He was loyal to his troops and had a deep love for the
Times.
“He was very