Free Hard News by Seth Mnookin Page A

proud to be a part of
The New York Times,
” says Deborah Sontag, a
Times Magazine
writer who worked for Boyd as a reporter on the metro desk. “He had a huge belief in its power, its importance. In those days, he was charming and very avuncular.” Early in her career, Sontag was mugged coming out of a subway station in Brooklyn. She was knocked down and bloodied in the process, and Boyd came to the hospital to see her that same night. “He treated it like it was a moral thing to do: ‘These are my people, I’m responsible for them.’ And he wanted to make sure the authorities knew how important this was, that the metro editor of the
Times
was coming out.” At one point, as Sontag was in her hospital bed, she heard two cops talking. “Who’s the black guy in the suit?” one asked. When told it was the metro editor of the
Times,
the response was, “No shit.”
    “I realized that must be what he hears and feels all the time,” Sontag says.
    Boyd’s best work was on large projects that needed extensive coordination. He guided the
Times
staff on its coverage of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and in 2000 worked with Behr to lead a team of reporters on a fifteen-part, Pulitzer Prize–winning project on race relations in America. “He’s got incredible journalistic sensibilities,” says Behr. “These projects would not have been half of what they were without him.” *19
    “Gerald really showed me a lot during the race project,” says former
Times
reporter Kevin Sack, whose story about an integrated Pentecostal church in Decatur, Georgia, led off the series. “That was a massive undertaking, and he made very good decisions.”
    As he rose up the paper’s masthead, Boyd seemed to pride himself on adopting the
Times
’s hard-nosed swagger. When prospective reporters came in to meet with Boyd during their extensive job interviews (all candidates for positions at the
Times
go through a battery of one-on-one interviews), Boyd was famous for staring down the new recruit from across his desk and booming out, “So what makes you think you deserve to work at
The New York Times
?” According to people who worked for and with him, Boyd became increasingly thin-skinned the higher up the ladder he climbed.
    In 1993, Gerald Boyd was promoted to assistant managing editor. His time as assistant, and then deputy, managing editor was frustrating. In 1997, when Gene Roberts retired from the managing editor post, Joe Lelyveld spent a series of dinners and weekends with Boyd as he tried to decide whom he should appoint as Roberts’s replacement. When, over dinner one night, Lelyveld told Boyd he had decided on Bill Keller, Boyd was so angry that he almost left the restaurant.
    If on paper Gerald Boyd seemed a questionable fit for the second most powerful and important editorial position at the paper, he was also in some ways a smart choice, and Raines knew it. Boyd may have had a mixed record as a manager, but Raines knew full well of Sulzberger’s deep commitment to diversity, of how much he wanted to be known as a publisher who aggressively diversified the
Times.
Raines quite explicitly made Boyd part of his pitch for the job during the interviewing process. “I wanted to see, as Arthur himself needed to, what Gerald Boyd could do in a high-demand situation,” Raines would later write. It was a condescending slap. Boyd, Raines implied, hadn’t been chosen as his deputy on the merits; instead, the managing editor’s job would serve as a sort of audition, one that would determine for Sulzberger whether one day Boyd might be able to become
The New York Times
’s first nonwhite executive editor.
    Over the years, Boyd came to keep his opinions on race in the newsroom more to himself; a lot of time had passed since the days in Missouri when he sported an Afro and an array of dashikis and sometimes affected the pseudonym Uganda X. What’s more, Boyd had, as a friend noted when he was named