The man behind the book

Klein was born in 1936 in Yonkers, N.Y., and at the age of 21 secured a job as copy boy at the New York Daily News. "I fell in love with journalism," he said, "practically the moment I set foot in the city room." With a degree from Columbia's School for General Studies and a fellowship from its journalism graduate school, Klein spent three years in Japan, reporting for United Press International and other papers. He also developed an early devotion to the work of A.M. Rosenthal, then a New York Times foreign correspondent, who later helped him get his first big break as a foreign affairs writer at Newsweek, where he eventually became foreign editor.

Ed Kosner, former editor of Newsweek and the New York Daily News, arrived at Newsweek as a national affairs writer at about the time Klein started there. The two climbed the masthead together, and when reached by phone, Kosner said that Klein and Newsweek were a good match. "Ed was a very enterprising and very talented newsmagazine writer and editor," said Kosner. He recalled Klein as "a work chum" who has always been "a very serious man; he's hardworking and he's very focused." Kosner didn't remember Klein showing any signs of political partisanship back at Newsweek. "I don't think Ed is an extremely political guy," said Kosner.

In 1977, Klein got a call from his mentor Rosenthal, then managing editor of the New York Times, asking him to take over the paper's weekly magazine. Klein recommended a complete overhaul, and set about making the magazine more fun. He published shorter articles, hired fashion writer Carrie Donovan, amped up the magazine's home design section, and made photography a priority. Proud of his "nose for news," Klein also bragged about the articles he assigned on subjects like the revolution in in vitro fertilization. "I have often been criticized for not assigning serious articles," Klein said, "but the magazine in some ways became more serious."

Not everyone was thrilled.

Klein admitted that he came to the job with some "very, very severe weaknesses." The first, he said, was that he was used to exercising magazine-style editorial control over copy, which didn't go over well at the Times. The second, he said, was that he "had an overbearing personality [that] did not really fit well there." Third, Klein said, was the prevalence of Times lifers who couldn't care less who the new guy was. "These were people who were virtually impossible to fire unless they stole money or plagiarized," said Klein. "And the attitude was, 'Look buddy, I've been through three editors and I'll go through three more after you're gone,' which didn't please me very much. So I had this recalcitrant staff used to doing things the way they'd been done since Lester Markel founded the place.

"I'm not trying to compare myself to Tina Brown," said Klein, "but just the way she found the New Yorker a hard nut to crack after it had been run virtually the same way for decades, I found the Times Magazine staff and its methods a tough nut to crack. And nuts I cracked. So I admit it made me not the most popular guy in the world."

"He was a snapper, an angry guy," said one of his former colleagues who asked not to be named. Longtime Times correspondent Steven Weisman remembered, "When he first came aboard I shared some of the skepticism felt by my colleagues." Weisman, then a White House correspondent, recalled, "The first time I met with Ed he lectured me -- and I remember this quite well -- he implied that a lot of what I wrote about was boring. He might have even said that outright." Weisman continued, "But he ended up getting good work out of me." In fact, Weisman said that he feels that he did the best work of his career for Klein. "It was his sense of narrative," said Weisman. "He wanted good stories." About Klein's work now, Weisman said, "I am amused and delighted that he's found these outlets for his creativity."

Some perceived Klein's popularity problem as extending outside the workplace, and told tales of his tone-deaf attempts to mimic the social cues of Manhattan's movers. "He had this need to be accepted that never happened, either at the Times or in any real publishing circles," said one person who knew Klein then. "There was this desire to be let in in a way that never happened, and that led him to be obsessed with powerful people and want to strike at them." Klein dismissed this characterization: "Anyone who is editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine is automatically invited to everything. In no sense was I shut out of New York City or its social circles. I was a first-nighter on Broadway. I was at parties with Frank Sinatra. I had to turn down more things than I went to."

But as far as the Times went, Klein agreed with his detractors. "Obviously I was an outsider," he said. "I think I was insensitive and I wish I hadn't been." But, he said, his unpopularity didn't faze him. "It didn't bother me because during the entire period I was there I was under Abe's protection," said Klein. "You needed a rabbi at the Times and you could not get a stronger rabbi than Abe Rosenthal."

It didn't hurt that the magazine was improving. There was the magazine's first Pulitzer Prize, in 1983, won by Nan Robertson for her story on toxic shock syndrome, which Klein described as "great, a vindication that we were doing the right thing." He also noted that when he started, the magazine had been losing money. "When I left in the end of '87 it was grossing almost $130 million a year and adding $20 million of that after expenses to the bottom line of the New York Times," Klein said.

There was a dark spot, though, a journalism hoax that embarrassed Klein in 1982, when reporter Christopher Jones did a piece for the magazine on the Khmer Rouge in which he claimed to have seen Pol Pot through binoculars on a distant hillside, his eyes "dead and stony." Alexander Cockburn, then at the Village Voice, smelled something fishy. Noting that Jones "clearly has an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time," Cockburn wrote a column remarking on the similarities between Jones' piece and a passage from Andre Malraux's accounts of his travels in Cambodia. The Washington Post picked up on Cockburn's column and ran a story questioning the piece. After a confrontation with Klein and two other Times correspondents, Jones confessed to having invented the story.

Next Page: "You cannot report on the Clintons unless you're willing to let them speak anonymously"

• View blog reactions