Critics say the only thing that happened is that Sulzberger let Raines be Raines.

After early journalism apprenticeships in his home state of Alabama at the Tuscaloosa News and Birmingham News, Raines joined the Times in 1978 as a national reporter and worked his way to the top.

Over the years Raines earned a reputation for his regal, autocratic and driving management style. Detailing his tenure as the Washington bureau chief, Tifft and coauthor Alex Jones wrote in "The Trust" that Raines "demanded that reporters stack books on their desks vertically instead of horizontally, and once ordered a news clerk to bring his office ficus tree out into the rain so it could be watered naturally. Privately, detractors turned his name into a verb: 'to Raines' meant to have slaves and not admit it."

Following Raines' stint in D.C., Sulzberger tapped him to become the Times' editorial page editor and invited him to be part of the paper's permanent brain trust, a new kind of triumvirate made up of the Times' publisher, executive editor and editorial page editor. During the '90s, as the Times' editorial page attacked the Clinton White House mercilessly over trumped-up scandals such as Whitewater and the Wen Ho Lee spy case, Raines grew closer to Sulzberger and became the obvious choice for executive editor when the job opened in 2001.

Before offering him the job, though, Sulzberger, well aware of newsroom complaints about Raines' penchant for showering attention on a small cadre of favored writers while ignoring others for months on end, insisted Raines not run New York as he had D.C. In effect, Raines was ordered to play well with others.

According the New Yorker profile, "Sulzberger told those he confided in, that he would have blocked Raines' promotion [to executive editor] if Sulzberger was not convinced that he had changed." The irony of Sulzberger telling Raines to abandon his star system, notes Overholser, is that "Howell Raines is the ultimate expression of Arthur's having his own star system."

The other glaring contradiction was that Sulzberger had dedicated himself to modernizing the Times, remaking the newspaper and particularly its culture. Yet Raines was clearly a throwback to an era of harsh, headstrong, I-know-what's-right Times editors such as Rosenthal and Turner Catledge (in the '60s and '70), who ran the newsroom however they damn well pleased.

Not surprisingly, Raines did not change his management style. Critics complained that it became ever more overbearing -- "the republic of Fear," some dubbed it -- as he and his loyalists on the masthead began to dictate the content of the newspaper, and especially Page 1; and that, instead of letting reporters and lower-level editors ferret out the news and important analysis stories, assignments were coming from the top down.

That tension was only exacerbated following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, when the top editors on the masthead took control over stories coming out of the D.C. bureau, essentially assigning that day's political stories from New York. It was an unprecedented level of micromanagement, and it infuriated editors and reporters, many of whom began to flee the newspaper.

Last year, well before Jayson Blair, that approach created an uproar inside the Times. The Times wrote extensively about a campaign to open the prestigious Augusta National Golf Course to women; the newspaper clearly seemed to believe the course should be opened. When two sports columns dared to question that policy, they were spiked, a move that provoked an intense national debate among journalists and others. Raines eventually backed down and published the columns, which only highlighted how timid the essays were to begin with. But the episode damaged Raines badly inside the newsroom, where nobody could recall columns ever getting killed in such a manner in the past.

Adding to the unease was Raines' philosophy that even though the newspaper was published just once a day, the staff ought to compete with cable news and Internet outlets by relentlessly breaking news. The approach often left the newsroom drained, as did Raines' demand that national reporters spend more time on the road chasing stories. As one staffer complained to the New York Observer last year, under Raines' rules, "basically, if you have a family, you're f---ed."

Again, the approach was in direct contradiction to Sulzberger's often public proclamations about making the Times a family-friendly work environment. Staffers made sure the publisher, who put in several years as a reporter himself at the Times, understood the gap between his words and Raines' deeds. But Sulzberger opted to let Raines manage the paper as he saw fit.

Now the publisher has to decide whether that was the biggest mistake of his career.

"I've called Howell Raines a high-risk editor," says Overholser, who served as editor of the Des Moines Register for seven years. "And we've seen both the risks and the rewards. The extraordinary success covering 9/11, that was Howell Raines. But exhausting the newsroom and creating a star system was also very much Howell Raines. He's an exceedingly talented man, very passionate and hard-working. But the newsroom has found out he's not terribly open to criticism."

Some inside the newsroom, like Dwyer, are hopeful Raines can recover. "Howell has to assert himself as a wise presence and a trustworthy one. I certainly think he can do that."

Others are less sure. "I'm flabbergasted by it all," says a senior Timesman. "It's heartbreaking. But have we hit bottom yet? The top keeps spinning."

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