'NYT' Reviews Raines' Memoir, Finds It Lacking

By: E&P Staff The New York Times Book Review this Sunday takes on the difficult task of considering the new memoir by its former editor, Howell Raines. Given the assignment, Hal Espen, a former senior editor at The New Yorker and the editor of Outside magazine from 1999 to 2006, finds it wanting, at least in its sections on Raines' tenure at the newspaper -- which came to an abrupt halt following the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003.

"The One That Got Away," as others have noted, deals largely with Raines' fishing and other non-journalistic adventures. Espen calls his previous memoir, also largely about fishing, "funny, sweet, rueful and charming." But the new book? "The disarming, laid-back raconteur who served his material so well in the earlier book is only fitfully present this second time around," Espen decides.

"Instead, in between and in the midst of further fishing yarns, we encounter the problematic and highly debatable self-justifications and subjective stratagems of the hard-charging man who became the executive editor of The Times on Sept. 5, 2001, served 21 tempestuous months at the top of the newspaper's masthead and was fired in June 2003...."

As for Raines recounting of his downfall at the Times, Espen finds it
"unsatisfactory in almost every other way. Both in his Atlantic Monthly after-action report and here, Raines has remained doggedly inadequate to the task of shedding real light on how a man with one of the most supple and knowing minds in American journalism ended up with doesn't get it stamped on his forehead....There's the unfair but uncanny intuition that Blair's sins looked less like manifestations of the balky, cautious Times that Raines was always complaining about and more like grotesque caricatures of Raines's revolutionary goals: speed, scoops, aggression, competitive fearlessness."

But what Espen calls "the most frustrating omission in Raines's apologia is the lack of anything specific and useful about how the craft of journalism and editorial management can be practiced in a manner that intercepts and corrects or eliminates the feckless errors and fabulist concoctions of bad reporters.

"Raines paid dearly for a failure of technique, but he ducks responsibility for what was his obligation to establish an editorial culture in which a problem like Blair becomes the most important thing to confront, at the top of the masthead, the moment the problem comes to light."