The New York Times' Andrew Rosenthal on Iraq, Times Select, and his father's secret past

GENERATION GAP Andrew Rosenthal (left) and his father, Abe

Read Charles Kaiser's new media column, Full Court Press

Andy Rosenthal was named editor of the editorial page of the New York Times last January. He is the youngest of three boys. He was the only son whom his father, Abe Rosenthal, was determined to turn into a journalist, a process that began when they started going on reporting trips together when Andy was six. In 1964, he won the third-grade spelling bee at Public School 183 in Manhattan, on the word "necessary." He was the Moscow bureau chief for the Associated Press before joining the Times in 1987, immediately after his father retired as executive editor. I met him in his office in the Times's new Renzo Piano–designed headquarters on Eighth Avenue. His office is decorated with a series of striking color photos that Andy shot and printed himself. Then we decamped to the cafeteria to discuss Iraq, famous fathers, and the craziness that afflicts everyone who becomes executive editor—a job he insists (implausibly) that he does not aspire to.

ANDY ROSENTHAL: The Administration has managed to keep this war almost entirely invisible. I went to this thing last week, the International Women's Media Foundation, where they give the Courage in Journalism award. These are people who get up every day and risk their lives to do what we do here in the cafeteria, and in this case they gave it to six Iraqi women who were the backbone of the McClatchy bureau in Baghdad. You know, they couldn't be photographed in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom because their lives are at such risk, and this woman gave this wonderful speech and we ran it almost in full. The point there was, these people live with this war every single day of their lives and we don't live with it a single day of our lives.

CHARLES KAISER: Did you see [Col. Lawrence] Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, on the Daily Show? He said we'll have to go out in a year, because there won't be enough captains—it will be impossible to maintain this force.
They're offering $35,000 [to reenlist] if you're a major or something. And among the specialties they said they were short of is infantry. I'm sorry, I'm not a military man, but I think infantry is pretty basic to the army. You know what would be an interesting inquiry? Take the class of 2002 at West Point, which was the first class in generations that knew they were going to war. I went up there in November of 2001, after 9/11. I was shown around campus by the two top graduating cadets, a man and a woman, and they talked about that [knowing that they were going to war]. They said it really changed things for their graduating class. And then I ran into a guy who was a flak—this is about a year or so ago—a big shot in the military, like the head of a subdivision of the army. He was a colonel. And he said that particular class was washing out in droves. They got to the end of their mandated service and they were just leaving. It wasn't that they were afraid of dying—but that this war is insane; it's being run by people who have no idea what they're doing, at the expense of the soldiers. ... You never want to have troops in the field when the political mandate runs out in Washington. And that's exactly where they are. And it's the worst possible situation.
Being executive editor ruined him. It turned [my father] into a crazy person. They all—I don't know if they go in crazy, but they come out crazy. All of them
Let's talk a little bit about the Web, since the editorial page seems to be one of the most Web-hip spaces in the building. How many people do you have working exclusively on the Web besides Naka?
Three editors and a clerk. Plus, we have a whole list of people who only write for us online. We have lots. By January, when you come to our website, every day except Saturday you'll have something brand new and fresh for the Web. We have Stanley Fish, who is our curmudgeonly semiconservative guy. We have Tim Egan, who's a former New York Times correspondent who did a stint for us on the Op-Ed and will be a permanent online columnist for us starting in January. We will have Olivia Judson, who writes about science. We have Allison Arieff, who writes about design. We have Judith Warner, who writes about almost anything she wants to write about. And we have a little stable of visual artists, including Maira Kalman, Jeff Scher, and Rutu Modan.

Do you pay these people? Or do you use the Huffington Post model?
No, no, we pay them. Because we have this crazy view that people need to pay the rent. When I became executive editor ... not executive editor. Ahhh! [We both laugh.]

That's the Freudian slip we were waiting for!
A job I never want.

Oh, sure.
I don't. I have a family.

Yeah, yeah. You wouldn't be vice president, either. If it were offered.
Of the United States? Oh, hell yes. It's a four-year vacation with a guaranteed paycheck.

And a very good airplane.
An airplane and a nice house in Washington. I get to go to Bethesda for my medical treatment—I hear they do a great colonoscopy there.

Nobody's going to believe you don't want to be executive editor. Including me.
I don't want to talk about that. I watched that job kill my father. I'm not really interested in it.

It hardly killed him. He went on for quite a while afterward.
It ruined him. It turned him into a crazy person. They all—I don't know if they go in crazy, but they all come out crazy. All of them.

Did he seem crazier to you at the end than he was at the beginning?
Vastly.

CRAZY/DUTIFUL Bill Keller

Really?
Yes. They all were. Joe Lelyveld. Bill Keller.

What was your position on Times Select [which put Times columnists behind a wall that was only accessible to subscribers to the paper, or to those who paid for Times Select; the Times gave up on charging earlier this fall]?
I wasn't consulted. I wasn't part of the discussion. The discussion predated my becoming deputy editorial page editor. When they went behind the wall, I was deputy editor. My position at that point was, I think that the newspaper industry joined hands and took a collective leap off a cliff for no discernible reason—when we decided to announce to the world that what we do has no value at all. And we should have been charging for our websites from day one. Subscriptions have been part of this forever. You have to pay for paper. You have to pay for pixels. It costs money. And I think it was a huge mistake. I can't put that back in the tube now. But if you look at the Internet, the only thing that's free is what we do: information. Everything else costs money. Ring tones cost a dollar. You pay for your access to the Internet. You pay for your e-mail. Everybody says e-mail is free. It's not free. First of all, you're paying your ISP for it. And if you're using something like Google mail, you're turning yourself into an advertising conduit for a giant corporation. There's nothing free about the Internet. It's just baloney.

NATURAL SELECTION Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (Photo: Getty Images)

I've gotten to the point in the past few years, where every morning, when I unfold the newspaper, I feel like I'm having this wonderful experience that has a finite end date on it. Do you feel that way?
The paper-paper?

My father was a member of the Communist Youth Party, or whatever it was called at the timeYeah.
Yeah. I don't know when it is. I'm going to go out on a limb here. I don't think websites replace papers. I don't think they're the same thing at all. The website replaces the New York Times index effectively. The website is a fabulous place to go to ask for a piece of information—extract it and have it. You go to the New York Times website—I don't care how much time you spend there—you're only going to see about 20 percent of what we do on any given day. Because you get what you ask for, and that's it. The newspaper is a genius instrument. Paper is an amazing medium! We've become incredibly good at designing the paper to lead people through it. And present them with stories, and present them with the sidebars, and present them with the other information. And you don't have to leave the page—it's right there on the same page. That said, it's a medium shift. To a digital ink, or something like that.

Did you see Minority Report with Tom Cruise? There was a scene in the movie on a subway and everybody was sitting there reading a paper. And they were basically just plastic sheets of something. And it [the text] appears on there. Something like that, which costs a minimal amount to buy, has a battery that is easy to replace, or you just throw away and recycle. And you can receive your subscriptions on it. Whatever you want. Arranged however you want. That's passive and wireless, and therefore updatable. That starts to sound like a replacement for the newspaper.

How many editorials do you write each week?
Two. Maybe three.

Is [New York Times publisher] Arthur [Sulzberger] interested in everything?
Does he take a direct position on everything that goes into the paper? If it's 2 percent I'd be surprised. Arthur is really interested in Iraq. He's interested in anything to do with corporate governance, because it's what he does. He's a corporate governor. He gets our schedule, and he knows what we're doing every day. He can see the same directory I do. He might call and say, "What about this?" He makes suggestions: "I'd like this, I'd like that." I'm free to say I think that's a bad idea. But he is my boss so I have to defend it.

The first time Arthur said to me, "We should immediately withdraw from Iraq," was in April of 2004.
He was ahead of the page.

What was the buildup to that full-page editorial that you wrote last summer calling for immediate withdrawal?
A long time. We talked a lot about it. Gail [Collins, the previous editor of the page] and I felt very strongly that we had to get there through a process.

Did you know Arthur was ahead of the page?
Oh yeah, we talked about it. We owe our readers an explanation. We did a huge piece on why we were wrong on WMD's—it filled the entire page. We opposed the war. The editorial page opposed the war. We said George Bush should not invade Iraq without an international consensus.

Was the page in favor of the Senate resolution?
I wasn't there. I can't remember.

For a long time we took the position that having gone into Iraq, and having sacrificed all these lives, our first position was that we owed it to mankind, to the great karma of goodness, to do everything possible to make it work[The editorial page did not take a specific position on the war resolutions before the House and Senate. However, in a series of editorials immediately before and after they were passed in 2002, on October 3, October 8, and October 11, the paper emphasized "the need for the broadest possible international unity"; warned that "there could be urban clashes like those Americans experienced in Somalia, but on a vastly larger scale"; noted that "Iraq's mutually hostile Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish elements were hastily thrown together when Britain and its allies carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I," that "Modern Iraq has little experience as a free and stable nation," and that "reconstituting it as a democracy could take years and a substantial American commitment." It also quoted Bush as saying, "Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable." The Times added, "The country should hold him to that." Taken together, they were cautious, sensible, and extremely prescient.]

But the page did accept the theory of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And then we wrote a thing saying we shouldn't have. And explained why we did, and why we changed our mind. ... And then for a long time we took the position that having gone in there, and having sacrificed all these lives—and not just Americans lives, but hundreds of thousands, certainly Iraqi lives—our first position was that we owed it to mankind, to the great karma of goodness, to do everything possible to make it work. ... Then we found ourselves in a place where, as long as there's a remote possibility of salvaging something less than complete disaster out of this, we're willing to stay, but argue for what we think the policy should be. And then finally we said, "Basta!" And it was a very simple lead: "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit." And we acknowledged in that piece that it was going to be a mess. And what we have been trying to explain to people since then is that those are not the consequences of withdrawal: They're the consequences of invasion. And that's where the debate is right now. We were attacked—that we were in favor of genocide.

SORRY ABOUT THAT Gail Collins (Photo: Getty Images)

Yeah, but I don't think immediately.
I don't know, honestly. I don't know why Hillary can't say, "This is what I thought then, this is what I think now, and if I could go back and do it, I'd vote the other way."

We are 66 days, roughly, before the Iowa caucus. Is the New York Times likely to give voters guidance on who they should vote for?
Historically, we endorse before the New York primary.

Which is now moved up to ...
Which is now part of super-duper-zowie Tuesday. So, by any standard, we want to weigh in before that. We're not merely a New York newspaper anymore anyway. So we're talking about it. We've started our meetings. ... So far we've had Biden and Richardson. And we're working very hard on the Republicans. I know this is goofy, but we will pick a Republican candidate, too. We always do. My explanation to people is that we believe in democracy. That's pompous—it sounds awful. But it's true. ... If my system existed, there would be two levers next to each person's name, and you can only vote once—but you can vote no. And it counts as a minus. And if you end up with more minus votes than plus votes, then something bad has to happen to you, but I'm not sure what that is.

What did your father do to imbue you with the idea of becoming a reporter?
He started taking me on reporting trips when I was six. ... Then that whole reporting trip thing accelerated greatly from the time I was about 12. Every year we went away for a week or 10 days. My Dad would just take me out of school. The statement he made rather arrogantly was, "He'll learn a lot more from me then he's going to learn from you guys. It was with my dad and usually whoever was the national editor at the time. And they were amazingly tolerant of me—obviously, because they were sucking up to my father. But they were really nice. ... I went to a moon launch. [Times science editor] Hank Lieberman was sitting there doing the cigar-chomping thing. And I said to him, "How do computers work?" And he taught me about binary numbers, basically lights blinking on and off—and it was the beginning of my interest in computers. He made me understand that computers boil down to just one question: yes or no? Zero or one? Circuit open, circuit closed. ... And then watching the launch. It was very exciting, because they told me that the press trailers were in the "total destruct zone," so if the thing blew up, we'd all die. Which I thought was really cool.

Did your father try this with either of your older brothers?
No. In fact, when I wrote the eulogy for my father, I talked about this. And I discussed it with my brothers. And I realized now that maybe Dad was doing this deliberately. And they both just burst out in hysterical laughter. They said, "Everybody knew this but you—that you were the designated."

Was he like we knew him in the newsroom, or was he less volatile?
I think I said in the paper, as a father he was much like he was as a journalist.

The good parts?
And the bad parts. He was volatile and unreasonable and demanding and crazy. He used to quiz us on current events—for a quarter an answer.

Compared to almost all the other children of famous people I know—and your father wasn't the easiest of this bunch—you appear to have emerged more unscathed.
Is that right?

Yeah. For most of them, this was a terrible disability.
I guess I owe it to three people. My mother, who is an amazing woman, incredibly strong. My current wife. And this woman named Dr. Laurie Leitch, who was my therapist in Washington. Who I saw I think for seven years—including four and a half or five years of group therapy. And who really kicked my ass hard to get over being Abe's son and my first wife's husband.

Your current staff—all the ones I know—say you're a great boss.
Well, I try.

Is there a part of you that is frankly trying to be the "not Abe"?
Sure. Don't we try to be our not-parents in the way we do everything? I always say that parents have two beneficial functions: one, the example you want to follow, and the other, the example you don't want to follow—the parenting, and the counter-parenting.

Do you want to talk about your father's unlikely party affiliation?
His communism?

Yes.
That was quite a revelation. My father was a member of the Communist Youth Party, or whatever it was called at the time.

This was a letter that you found from your aunt?
It was a letter from my aunt Ruth, who I never met, to her husband, George Watt, who was fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the Abraham Lincoln brigade. And they corresponded. She wrote one day that she had gone down to youth headquarters. Because it was "Sonny's" first day as a party member.

And we're sure Sonny was Abe?
There is no other Sonny. That was him. [Andy asked his father about this several times before he died, but Abe always refused to discuss it.]

When did your father tell you that you were right about the war in Iraq?
My last conversation with him. My 50th birthday, at our house in the People's Republic of Montclair, NJ. The last liberal bastion. He had me pull up my chair to his and he leaned over and he said, "You know, you were right about Bush and this war, and I was wrong."

Read Charles Kaiser's new media column, Full Court Press