published on July 22, 2024 in Front Page News

Joseph Lelyveld, who led New York Times into digital age, dies at 86

Joseph Lelyveld, who rose from copy boy to top editor at the New York Times, where he distinguished himself as the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about apartheid South Africa and where he sought to carry the bedrock values of journalism into the digital age, died Jan. 5 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said Janny Scott, his companion and a former Times reporter.

Hired by the Times in 1962, the year he turned 25, Mr. Lelyveld helped shape four decades of the proverbial first draft of history as a reporter covering New York City, as a correspondent dispatched to Africa, Asia and Europe, and as an editor who ascended the masthead on the strength of his intellect and sense of mission.

He presided over the newsroom as executive editor from 1994 to 2001, a period that coincided with the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the chaotic presidential election night of 2000, when Mr. Lelyveld stopped the presses — twice — because the race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore was too close to call.

Mr. Lelyveld’s tenure also coincided with the advent of digital media, including the launch of the Times’s website in 1996. He navigated the quandaries that arose amid competition from online upstarts and became known within his newsroom and beyond as a champion of journalistic traditions. To critics, some of those traditions had grown hidebound and dull; to Mr. Lelyveld and his admirers, they were noble.

The Times won 12 Pulitzer Prizes under Mr. Lelyveld’s leadership. And he was credited with having built the newsroom talent that won a record seven Pulitzers for coverage of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, although Mr. Lelyveld, in what he described as a turn of “spectacular ill timing,” had retired six days before the attacks occurred.

He did not possess the outward dynamism of A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal of the Times or Benjamin C. Bradlee at The Washington Post, who led their respective newspapers through the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

Mr. Lelyveld “never did become a glad-hander,” author and journalist Stephen J. Dubner wrote a 2005 profile of Mr. Lelyveld published in New York magazine. “But within the awkwardness lay a strange tenderness — for the newspaper that he considered the greatest in the world, and for just about every person who helped make it.”

The high regard in which Mr. Lelyveld was held came on display not long after his retirement, when the Times faced perhaps the most acute crisis of its modern era: the revelation in 2003 of serial, flagrant fabrications and plagiarism by a 27-year-old reporter, Jayson Blair.

Howell Raines, who had succeeded Mr. Lelyveld as executive editor, and Gerald M. Boyd, who held the No. 2 post of managing editor, resigned in the wake of the scandal, which echoed the journalistic betrayal two decades earlier of Post reporter Janet Cooke.

For a steadying hand, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. turned to Mr. Lelyveld. On Sulzberger’s request, he stepped in to serve as interim executive editor until Bill Keller, a columnist and former foreign correspondent who had been Mr. Lelyveld’s managing editor, was named to the post several weeks later.

Returning to the Times newsroom, if only briefly, after a retirement that had lasted less than two years, Mr. Lelyveld immediately put the staff at ease with a wry remark: “So,” he said before the assembled staff, “as I was saying.”

“With those five words, Lelyveld erased twenty-one months of turmoil and anxiety,” Adam Nagourney, a Times reporter, wrote in his 2023 book about the newspaper, “The Times,” “or at least that was how it felt to the people gathered to hear him.”

Foreign posts and Pulitzer

Mr. Lelyveld was the son of a rabbi who was often traveling for his work and a mother who suffered from suicidal depression. In a memoir, “Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop” (2005), Mr. Lelyveld recounted that he was sent off to live with relatives or acquaintances in various places, including once to a Nebraska farm with a family of Seventh-day Adventists.

Reporter Melinda Henneberger, who reviewed the book for Washington Monthly, drew a line from the uncertainties of his early life to the search for verifiable truth that is central to journalism.

“As he tells it,” she wrote, “he never had any firm handle on his own situation as a boy; he did not always know where his family would end up next or whether they would be there together. What seemed true one day might not last the night.

“And like not a few others in the profession,” she continued, “he seems later to have been attracted to the business of recording reality as a result. As a reporter, it must have been easy for him to find the lie or face even the ugliest fact of life with not so much detachment as relief.”

Mr. Lelyveld was Harvard graduate studying at Columbia Journalism School when he landed his first gig as a Times copy boy. After graduation, during a Fulbright fellowship that took him to Southeast Asia, he filed stories for the foreign desk, an experience that lit his ambition to become a foreign correspondent.

He returned to the Times in 1962 and, after a stint as a reporter on the metro desk, embarked on foreign postings in the Congo, India, Hong Kong and London, where he was bureau chief. He was first dispatched to South Africa in 1965 but was expelled for reporting that was unflattering to the government.

In 1980, he persuaded the Times to send him back to South Africa, where he stayed three years chronicling the agonies of life under the apartheid regime. Mr. Lelyveld drew upon his reportage to write the book “Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White,” which received a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

“If there was one quality that characterized Lelyveld’s South African reporting, it was utter, down-the-middle, unemotional fairness, a major achievement given the wrenching nature of the assignment,” journalist Charles T. Powers wrote in a Los Angeles Times review of the book, describing Mr. Lelyveld’s newspaper reports.

But “after three years of going straight down the middle, of taking strict journalistic care to present government claims of reform alongside evidence to the contrary, the gloves have come off,” Powers continued.

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In one scene, a Black hotel waiter directs Mr. Lelyveld’s attention to a nearby rooftop, where he sees White South African police officers beating several Black men, seemingly for no reason. The victims make no protest because they know it would do no good.

Mr. Lelyveld described the episode as “a particular kind of sensation, a cheap thrill maybe, available to outsiders and voyeurs who can maintain access of a kind on all sides … as few South Africans can — experiencing the huge evasions of the whites and the helpless knowledge of the blacks, the willful denial of reality as well as its crushing weight.”

Ascending the ranks

Mr. Lelyveld’s rise through the editorial ranks at the Times began in earnest under Max Frankel, who succeeded Rosenthal as executive editor in 1986.

The year he received the Pulitzer, Mr. Lelyveld became foreign editor. He was promoted to deputy managing editor in 1989 and managing editor six months later. Frankel’s retirement in 1994 paved the way for Mr. Lelyveld to take over from him.

On his watch, the Times published color photos on its front page for the first time in the newspaper’s history. National distribution expanded to make the newspaper available in more than 200 cities. The internet allowed the dissemination of Times journalism far beyond even the largest print run, while throwing the newspaper and the media industry as a whole into existential upheaval.

As the Times was forced into competition with bloggers of and other fast-moving purveyors of what traditionalists regarded as rumor and tabloid fare, Mr. Lelyveld sided with the traditionalists.

When Princess Diana of Wales was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997, her death bumped another story from the front page of the Times and dominated the international media for days. But Mr. Lelyveld regarded the matter essentially as celebrity news.

He said he took “sneaking pleasure” in elevating dispatches from Bosnia and other stories that might not sell copies but demonstrated the newspaper’s “seriousness of purpose,” Nagourney wrote in his history of the Times.

Mr. Lelyveld insisted that the Times not buckle under pressure from the internet and hold true to the standards that had sustained its reputation for generations. Among those principles was the view that politicians were entitled to privacy in their personal lives, provided that their conduct did not affect the performance of their public duties.

That policy was sharply challenged in 1998 when the Drudge Report, then a relatively new website that often trafficked in gossip, published an article alleging that Clinton had had an affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The Times, hewing to its policy about politicians’ private lives, was slow to pick up on the story, which was soon verified by other news outlets.

“We were asleep, I have to admit it,” Mr. Lelyveld later said, according to Nagourney’s book.

As the scandal grew to encompass allegations that the president had lied to a grand jury about his conduct, and as those allegations led to Clinton’s impeachment by the House and eventual acquittal by the Senate, Mr. Lelyveld was obliged to oversee the publication of tawdry details about the president’s sexual encounters that would at one time have been considered unprintable in a family newspaper.

The question of how to address a key piece of evidence — the blue dress that Lewinsky said she had worn during a liaison with the president — was particularly vexing. Mr. Lelyveld said the matter, in its extreme unseemliness, troubled him more than an earlier decision made in collaboration with The Post for both newspapers to publish a manifesto by the anonymous assailant known as the Unabomber, later identified as Ted Kaczynski.

“Abe Rosenthal got to decide about the Pentagon papers,” Mr. Lelyveld said ruefully in a 2000 interview on the Charlie Rose talk show. “I got to decide about the semen-stained dress.”

“We did use it,” he added.

A ‘rabbi’s son’

Joseph Salem Lelyveld was born in Cincinnati on April 5, 1937. His father, Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld, was a leader in Reform Judaism and the Zionist movement, but Mr. Lelyveld objected to facile characterizations of himself as a “rabbi’s son” because his upbringing was so different from what the phrase might connote.

Mr. Lelyveld had what he described as a distant relationship with his father, but he seemed to take pride in his father’s courage as a civil rights organizer in the South. The elder man was once beaten with a tire iron for attempting to register Black voters in Mississippi.

Mr. Lelyveld mother, the former Toby Bookholtz, aspired to be a Shakespeare scholar and was by Mr. Lelyveld’s account deeply unfulfilled by the demands of motherhood. A tongue-in-cheek maxim instructs good journalists that “if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” Ever the reporter, Mr. Lelyveld checked it out. He determined, he wrote in his memoir, that she “had, in truth begun to find me unbearable the summer after I turned five.”

Mr. Lelyveld was in second grade when he moved to New York. He graduated in 1954 from the Bronx High School of Science, where he met his future wife, Carolyn Fox. He received a bachelor’s degree in history and literature in 1958 and a master’s degree in history in 1960, all from Harvard University. Also in 1960, he received a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School.

Mr. Lelyveld quickly worked his way into the newspaper’s reportorial ranks. For a story in 1964, following a tip from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, he located a former Nazi death camp guard at her home in Queens. Mr. Lelyveld began knocking on the home of every resident of the borough with the surname Ryan — the woman’s married name — until he came upon the former Hermine Braunsteiner.

“Oh my God, I knew this would happen,” she told him, weeping. “This is the end. This is the end of everything for me.”

Mr. Lelyveld’s story, about the guard and the horrors committed at Majdanek, the camp in occupied Poland where she had allegedly worked, was slated for publication on the front page. At the last moment, in an display of his journalistic caution recounted in Nagourney’s book, Mr. Lelyveld persuaded night editors to move the story to a less prominent spot inside the newspaper, until he could confirm that she was personally guilty of the most heinous crimes attributed to the Majdanek guards.

Years later, the woman became the first alleged Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States.

In addition to his assignments on the metro and foreign desks, Mr. Lelyveld worked in Washington and as a national correspondent for the Times magazine.

As executive editor, Mr. Lelyveld introduced new sections including Circuits, about emerging technologies, and embraced sweeping projects including “How Race Is Lived in America,” a multipart series that involved more than two dozen reporters and photographers and that received the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting.

After his second and final retirement from the Times in 2003, Mr. Lelyveld wrote several books. One volume, “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India” (2011), drew on his reportage years earlier from India. Another, “His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt” (2016), harked back to his university studies of history. He also contributed to publications including the New York Review of Books.

Mr. Lelyveld’s wife died in 2004 after 44 years of marriage. In addition to Scott, his companion of 19 years, survivors include two daughters from his marriage, Amy and Nita Lelyveld, and a granddaughter.

Toward the end of his tenure as executive editor, Mr. Lelyveld reflected on the worldview he had tried to safeguard at the Times.

“Newspapers don’t exist just to be a showcase for journalists,” he said on the Charlie Rose show. “They exist for readers. ... You don’t sell newspapers with stories about — you know, renewed tensions in Kosovo. And we don’t lead the paper with them because we think, boy, this is really going to fly off the stands.”

The final test of greatness, he concluded, is “the way we kind of are driven by what really matters and what’s really going on out there.”

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