A lengthy New York Magazine profile of ex-New York Times managing editor Howell Raines is well worth reading. It's titled "Fishing With Howell," by Philip Weiss. Raines, who was forced to resign in disgrace after his diversity-mentee-gone-bad Jayson Blair was nailed for serial fabulism and plagiarism, is much more than a footnote to the scandal for which he is best known. The lively piece - based in part on interviews in Louisiana, where Raines' son, Galactic guitarist Jeff, lives - brings to life the father's Southern bona fides, his career path at The Times, and notes that Raines has written a number of well-received books, fiction and non-fiction.

Raines comes off as not quite the monotonal Republican-hostile ideologue you might expect of an ex-NYT writer, bureau chief and managing editor, even if his newspaper life did tragically incinerate in an egregiously misguided careerist quest to put newsroom diversity ahead of integrity.

The article helps someone who has only a passing familiarity with Raines understand that his diversity-hued downfall is not unrelated to his coming of age in The South as a feisty crusader for civil rights and against racism when it was real in the U.S., not largely imagined, as today.

Another thing that jumps out is that Raines gets the power of the personal, as evidenced by his takes on both Reagan, and Bush The Younger. Here's Raines:

"Ronald Reagan is the most mysterious politician in our experience. You know, Clark Clifford called him an amiable dunce. And Clark Clifford winds up being indicted for bank fraud, and Ronald Reagan ends the Cold War. But at the deepest level—family or political level—Reagan was unknowable. “I wonder, was Reagan’s decision to up the ante in the arms race intuitive or reasoned?"

"You know, one of Reagan’s secrets, the rubber-chicken dinners people go to because of civic obligation, and we [reporters] go to of necessity—well, Reagan loved them. He was having a great time. And I’m told he liked bawdy jokes. There was a press reception when he was running for president, in a social setting, and he was asked what his physical regime was, and he said, with a wink, ‘I do everything a younger man does.’ It was a guy joke, delivered very cleverly and disarmingly.

I'm not so sure Reagan was that mysterious. He had a pretty firm grip of good what good and evil meant, and who embodied which. Maybe such moral clarity is sadly baffling to Raines, but I at least give him some credit for being able to acknowledge the importance of Reagan's great and positive role in foreign policy. That's something on which a lot of lib lions still choke, unfortunately.

A few more interesting excerpts, one not so flattering.

Raines talks about the poor federal response to Hurricane Katrina, but when confronted with a real-life Katrina victim, at first seems impatient to get away.

Driving around the Lower Ninth Ward, viewing the devastation and the fact that only college kids in white hazmat suits were doing anything, Raines got worked up....You have to entertain the possibility that Bush can’t think his way through problems like this. Here’s a family that has had every benefit that American society can offer for four generations—wealth, education, social position—and they have no impulse toward repaying anything back to this society that has been so generous to them. Faulkner talks about the human heart in conflict. Well, I see no evidence of conflict in their hearts. Just meanness.”

At Jeff’s house, a little thing happened. A guy who had been displaced by the hurricane had moved in across the street, and he was outside, sorting through stuff in his pickup. He wanted to talk, tell us his sad story. I lingered in the street to talk to him for a minute, but Raines was impatient to get inside, and I felt rude either way. Here was a real-life victim, he didn’t care. Then Raines saw I was interested in the guy and he came back into the street. “Well, you know what they say. We say we want justice when all we really need is mercy,” he said. Then everyone smiled politely and we went inside.

Finally, a telling anecdote about W, from Raines.

During Bush’s campaign for his first term, I invited him to come meet with the editorial board and the senior news-department editors and the publisher in the Times boardroom. And we kept getting put off, kept getting put off. I have a friend named Stuart Stevens who was working in the Bush campaign, mid-high-level. I said, ‘Stuart, this needs to happen, not just because we want it to, but because it’s part of the festival of democracy, that the presidential candidate comes to the Times, and even though he is not supported by the paper editorially, he is treated with the respect that a nominee of the party is entitled to.’

“So Stuart—I don’t know what he did, but weeks go by, then the word comes down that Bush is coming, and he does, and he comes and he goes around the table, there are probably 25 people, and he says something personal to each person in the room. ‘Oh, you’re the one . . . ’ or ‘I’ve heard you have a daughter at University of Texas.’ Almost every person, there was something, or he had read something. He gets to me, and he shakes my hand, and he leans in confidentially, and he said, ‘Thank you for putting this meeting together.’ As if I had done him a great service, when in fact they had been resisting it with every means possible for months.

“What I subsequently found out is that despite this characterization of him as the laid-back guy who gives everybody nicknames, he had spent a long time on the telephone the previous night with his friend who runs Chelsea Piers [Roland Betts], who was with him at Yale and who was his most important backer in New York. They had asked us for a list of people who would be there. For security and other reasons, and he had gone over this list with this guy. That tells you several things. One, I was impressed by his memory. It told me that there was an element of calculation there that was completely different from the casual-Texan persona we were asked to believe in."

What'd ya expect? A guy doesn't actually get to the White House if he's merely not a dunce, despite what the, ah, MSM, like to think.

I can see you're working through a lot of issues, Howell. Best of luck. And do keep writing.

TECHNORATI TAGS: HOWELL RAINES, NEW YORK MAGAZINE, NEW YORK TIMES, REAGAN, BUSH, KATRINA, FISHING WITH HOWELL, JAYSON BLAIR, GALACTIC, JEFF RAINES

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at May 2, 2006 07:43 PM