Editor’s Legacy : Good Writing, Long Stories and Freedom

Noel Greenwood can still remember the hoots of derision and confusion he heard at The Times in 1967 when he was a new reporter here and the paper had just published a colleague’s lengthy, impressionistic account of hippie life in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco.

Reporter David Felton had spent six weeks on the story, and when Greenwood came to work the morning it was published, he found many of the paper’s veteran reporters muttering about the judgment--if not the sanity--of William F. Thomas, the metropolitan editor, who had assigned and approved the story.

Felton is a gifted and stylish writer, and on the Haight story Thomas had told him, “Don’t be afraid to try something different . . . take risks.” Sure enough, Felton had produced a 6,000-word blend of hippie dialogue in quasi-dramatic form, punctuated by his own observations, written almost as stage directions and presented in italics and parentheses.

‘Down the Toilet’

“The older reporters . . . thought that the newspaper had gone down the toilet,” said Greenwood, now a deputy managing editor at The Times. “They thought that Thomas had lost his mind. . . . What was this strange piece doing in the paper? And why in the world would you need (several) . . . weeks to do a story?”

But Greenwood admires both Thomas and Felton (who is now a movie and television writer), and he saw Felton’s story as a “shot fired across the bow” of traditional journalism.

Indeed it was.

Thomas officially retires today, five months shy of his 65th birthday, after 32 years with the Times Mirror Co., including six years as metropolitan editor and the last 17 years as editor of The Times; two decades after Felton’s story was written, it remains symbolic, in a way, of both Thomas’ tenure and his legacy.

600% Increase in Budget

In tributes to Thomas over the last few weeks, company executives have almost inevitably focused on the numbers that tell the tale of Thomas’ stewardship--nine Pulitzer Prizes; six new foreign bureaus and five new domestic bureaus; two new regional editions, in San Diego and the San Fernando Valley; three new separate sections, Book Review, Calendar and Business; a new Sunday magazine; a 100% increase in the paper’s news and editorial staff; a 600% increase in the paper’s annual news and editorial budget; all-time highs in daily circulation (1.1 million) and Sunday circulation (1.4 million).

But as impressive as those numbers are, stories like Felton’s “Haight-Ashbury Revisited: Some Observations in the Week After the Death of Chocolate George” may represent--to admirers and critics alike--a more relevant and more revealing insight into the Thomas years at The Times.

Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and others were experimenting with different approaches to conventional journalistic storytelling before Felton, Dave Smith, Charles T. Powers and other young journalists-cum-poets were hired by Thomas in the late 1960s. But most of this work showed up in magazines, not in the news columns of daily newspapers; with a few notable exceptions, most newspaper journalism in 1967 was straightforward, unadorned prose that told--as briefly as possible--the who, what, when, where and why of a city council meeting, a murder, a political speech or some other traditional news event.

Thomas felt that to fully engage contemporary readers, to compete with the then-new threat of television and to address the increasingly complex and diverse issues of the time, newspapers had to break with many of their rigid formulas of the past. He remained committed to fairness, accuracy and responsibility--fiercely so--but he wanted these essential journalistic precepts embodied in new forms, addressing new subjects.

Thomas was not the only newspaper editor to take on this challenge, of course, but he gave the new forms a freer rein, enabling his best writers to practice literature as daily journalism.

Not surprisingly, this freedom also contributed significantly to what critics came to see as the paper’s biggest flaws:

The Times is uneven. When talented, enterprising reporters take on interesting and/or important subjects, Times coverage is generally superb, as good as, or sometimes better than, that provided by any other newspaper in the country. But other Times coverage--individual stories, general subjects, whole sections of the paper--are, at times, embarrassingly weak. (“You wonder why a paper of this caliber has the shortcomings it does have,” said David Lamb, a Times reporter, and a Thomas admirer, since 1970.)

- The Times is a “velvet coffin,” with an overly comfortable atmosphere in which there appears to be little, if any, internal or external competitive pressures, despite the rival presence of several strong suburban newspapers. Thomas often said he edited more by “osmosis” than by fiat, and this made it possible for many of the best people at The Times to do their best work, unencumbered by the rigid dictates, the intense pressure and the fear of failure and humiliation that haunt reporters at some other major newspapers. But because other Times editors generally shared Thomas’ basic philosophy and style, if not invariably his creative vision, some people who needed more direction grew lazy and complacent.

- The Times publishes too many long stories, some of which have required so much time and space that other concerns have been neglected, and the paper itself has often had a “gray, somewhat dull” quality, in the words of Otis Chandler, former publisher of The Times and now chairman of the executive committee of its parent company, Times Mirror.

Ben Bagdikian, the author and press critic, once an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post and later dean of the graduate school of journalism at UC Berkeley, said The Times has “always had the reputation of being an unedited paper, in the sense that it looked as though individual reporters reserved space on a first-come, first-served basis and then filled up that space without anybody looking over the whole day’s output.”

Nevertheless, Bagdikian said, “My impression is . . . there is more coherence within The Times today . . . than there was prior to his (Thomas’) taking over. . . . It’s clear that the L.A. Times is one of the best papers in the country . . . I keep getting things in The Times that need to be done by major newspapers elsewhere that don’t get done. . . .

“I use The Times constantly as an example to counter the slick operators who are always in danger of corrupting the American newspaper business with cheap and easy approaches to selling papers. . . .”

Other newspaper editors also praise The Times under Thomas.

“He presided over it at a time when it became a great American newspaper,” said Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post.

“Bill may be the most underestimated editor in the United States,” said Frank McCulloch, managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner and, for three years in the early 1960s, day managing editor at The Times.

Both Bradlee and McCulloch have been critical of The Times on occasion, and even Thomas concedes that the paper can be uneven--and that he probably did not devote as much time and energy to some parts as he should have.

“You can look at this paper sometimes and think that there’s maybe three or four or five or six newspapers operating here,” deputy managing editor Greenwood said. “Bill sees that as, I think, somewhat to our advantage. . . . It avoids homogenization. I think maybe you can get a little closer to having uniformity and continuity. . . .”

But Thomas has always abhorred uniformity--his own seemingly conventional persona notwithstanding. Thomas’ father was a bank vice president in the small Michigan town of Bay City; Thomas is a World War II veteran; he’s been married for 40 years; he’s a creature of habit and routine who swims every morning, regardless of the weather, spends three weeks in Oceanside every August and plays golf every Saturday with his male friends and every Sunday with his wife. On the golf course, he’s a stickler for rules; in his car he refuses to dodge in and out of traffic or cut in front of other drivers--and he’s critical of those who do. A real straight arrow, in other words.

And yet, Thomas is a witty, sophisticated man who has always prized individuality, even eccentricity and quirkiness, in others--and his approach to journalism has been anything but straight arrow.

Thomas didn’t even start out wanting to be a journalist. At 14 he was a piano player, traveling around Michigan with his own band; as a high school and junior college student, he studied creative writing, and it was writing--not journalism--that first attracted him to newspaper work. He was largely indifferent to or critical of what he read in newspapers in those early years.

“I suppose I didn’t like them because . . . there was not a lot of what I would call . . . flexibility in writing style and scope,” he later said.

After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism at Northwestern University, Thomas began his journalistic career as a copy editor on the Buffalo Evening News. When a friend bought a weekly newspaper in Sierra Madre in 1955, Thomas joined him as editor and partner. A year later, Thomas went to work at the Los Angeles Mirror-News, a Times Mirror newspaper, where he ultimately became city editor.

The Mirror-News was a tabloid newspaper, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s that meant--as Thomas later said, not altogether in jest--”we had a lot of fun before the deadly scourge of responsibility hit journalism.”

When the Mirror-News went out of business in 1962, Thomas joined The Times. He became metropolitan editor three years later, burdened with a less-than-sparkling staff--”a roomful of people, of whom maybe half a dozen could write,” as he recently recalled.

Thomas said he “consciously set out to . . . hire people whose writing was first-rate,” and he gave them the freedom, the time and the space to experiment with style and subject.

Many veteran Times copy editors were both baffled and appalled by much of what Thomas’ new stable of poets began turning in. Copy editors are supposed to read and correct stories for accuracy, style, readability, grammar and syntax, but many of these stories defied traditional editing. When the copy editors tried to mold his best and most innovative stories into the more restricted forms of daily journalism, Thomas passed the word:

“After it leaves my desk, leave my writers’ copy alone.”

That directive gave a generation of reporters at The Times unprecedented freedom. But it also so intimidated many lower-echelon editors that they were reluctant to give reporters even the basic editing that all need. This led to increasingly longer and not always well-crafted stories, although as editor, Thomas later tried--with mixed results--to reverse this trend.

Under Thomas, The Times’ metropolitan staff won two Pulitzer Prizes--for coverage of the Watts riot and for exposing wrongdoing in city government commissions--and in 1971, Otis Chandler, then-publisher of The Times, promoted Thomas to editor, succeeding Nick B. Williams.

In tandem with Chandler, Williams had presided over the beginning of the transformation of The Times from one of the nation’s worst newspapers to one of its best; author David Halberstam later described Williams as “perhaps the ablest major American newspaper editor of his generation.”

As Williams approached retirement, Chandler brought Robert J. Donovan to Los Angeles from Washington to serve as executive editor and heir apparent. When Chandler decided that Donovan was not the right person to build on the foundation Williams had already started, he named Thomas editor instead, leapfrogging him over several senior editors.

It was “a risk . . . a longshot,” Chandler later said.

To the Eastern Establishment, the selection of Thomas, the metropolitan editor, over Donovan, the longtime Washington bureau chief and author, suggested that Chandler wanted a more parochial approach to the news, a renewed emphasis on local and regional coverage at the expense of national and international coverage.

The Times’ rapid buildup of its foreign and national staff from virtually ground zero when Williams took over had diminished local coverage and, under Thomas, The Times improved that coverage considerably. But the paper also continued to expand its foreign and domestic coverage, and to this day The Times, like most large, metropolitan dailies, is still criticized for its local coverage.

The Times also has been accused of not covering--or breaking--enough daily news stories because of its seeming preoccupation with longer feature stories (like this one).

The Times has had “a large, large supply of exclusives” over the years, in the words of A. M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of the New York Times--most recently in the Pentagon profiteering scandal and, before that, the Iran-Contra scandal. But Thomas, while determined to cover the important daily news, made it clear where his own greater interest lay.

His vision was that The Times not be a traditional newspaper but a regional, daily news magazine.

“If you want the skimming of the news, you can watch television,” he said, “so my theory is that in every area, we’ve got to be accurate and (as) complete as possible, never dreaming for a minute that all of our readers are interested in everything we are offering them, which was the old-style newspaper.

“If you’re interested in a science story, (if) you’re a doctor or engineer,” he explained, “you may not be interested in a third, at least, of what else is in the paper in depth. But the few stories in your area that you want to read, you want them to be accurate and complete, or what the hell good are we to you?”

Many readers and critics complained about the length of Times stories, as even The Times’ own research showed. But that same research also showed that most readers liked the paper’s “long, detailed feature articles.”

Thomas, who reads widely and is particularly fond of history, often assigned stories that tried to place such problems as pollution, violence and corruption in a historical perspective. He thought journalists and others tended to overreact to some contemporary events and issues, and he was curious about how these cyclical phenomena had been treated in earlier times. He wanted The Times to give readers context and perspective as well as facts.

Chandler and Thomas largely shared the same vision for The Times, and those who know Thomas best say his job as editor became less enjoyable as Times Mirror expanded its corporate interests and Chandler became less involved with the paper itself in the 1980s.

Not that Thomas and Chandler’s successor, Tom Johnson, didn’t like or respect each other; after some initial uneasiness, they did--a great deal. But The Times, like other large metropolitan newspapers, has changed from a family-run paper, on which the editor could go to the publisher for a quick answer, to a mammoth conglomerate in which questions and answers have to be filtered through several layers of bureaucracy. In such a working environment, an editor’s time is increasingly taken up with meetings and budget planning rather than editing--with business rather than journalism.

“Bill fought fiercely to protect his budget and his staff and his ratios--the amount of news columns (as opposed to advertising) we allocate each year,” Johnson said recently. “He almost always got his way because he almost always made his case, and made it well.”

Given the structure and priorities of Times Mirror, The Times has long been the cash cow for the corporation in a way that probably made Thomas’ job of wresting money from the parent company more difficult than that of his counterparts at the New York Times or Washington Post, the two newspapers to which The Times is most often compared.

Even Chandler and Johnson concede that this is increasingly true, despite the stated commitment to excellence that they and other Times Mirror executives have made and despite their own support of Thomas’ objectives for The Times. Indeed, Thomas’ long-term success in winning resources to finance the paper’s news and editorial operation may well be his enduring legacy.

Los Angeles Times executives have long wanted to challenge the New York Times for preeminence among American newspapers, and in 1987 a panel of experts polled by Adweek magazine rated the Los Angeles Times second only to the New York Times, ahead of the Washington Post. If the Los Angeles Times continued to improve, the panel said, “a duel for first place really might be in the offing.”

Money alone will not determine the winner of that duel, of course, but the Los Angeles Times will have trouble becoming No. 1 so long as it continues to lag well behind the New York Times in what it spends on its news and editorial product.

The Los Angeles Times has increased those expenditures enormously in recent years, but the New York Times still spends much more, even though until very recently, the Los Angeles Times was generally regarded by media stock analysts as the more profitable paper.

The New York Times’ news and editorial budget for 1988 was about $105 million; the Los Angeles Times’ was $86.5 million. The two papers have almost the same number of full-time news and editorial staffers, but the Los Angeles Times is engaged in a unique battle with strong suburban newspapers and in its suburban and regional expansion in recent years has allocated 34% of its professional staff to those sections and editions. The staff that covers the city, state, nation and world is considerably smaller than that of the New York Times: The New York Times has 53 people in its Washington bureau, for example; the Los Angeles Times has 41. The New York Times has 36 foreign correspondents; the Los Angeles Times has 26.

These gaps almost certainly would be even greater had Thomas not continually pushed Times Mirror to provide more resources for the paper--and that helps explain why Thomas, to the dismay of many at the paper, was not a very visible editor to most of the staff.

Thomas’ counterparts at the New York Times and the Washington Post have offices on the same floor as their newsrooms, in full view of the paper’s other editors and locally based reporting staffs. Thomas’ office was on the second floor--in the publisher’s suite, with the other top business executives--rather than in the third-floor newsroom.

“The second floor is where the real battles are fought,” he said. “If I’m not down here . . . getting in on those battles early, it doesn’t much matter what I or anyone else does up on the third floor. We won’t have the resources necessary to do our job.”

Moreover, Thomas had been a strong, dynamic metropolitan editor--working on the third floor, with his staff--and he felt that if he remained on the third floor as editor, his subordinates would always defer to him and would not develop their own authority. Just as he wanted his reporters to have freedom, so he wanted his editors to have autonomy--even if, ironically, this permitted one or two of his editors to run their departments much more harshly than he would have run them.

Thomas delegated authority at the office just as he delegates it at home, where his wife, Patricia, runs the household, pays the bills, deals with the tradesmen, even buys most of Thomas’ shirts and other clothing.

“I don’t need marching orders every day,” said Managing Editor George Cotliar. “I have a sense of what he would like to see the Los Angeles Times be. I share that view of the paper.”

Thus, unlike his counterparts at the New York Times, Washington Post and other large papers, Thomas did not attend the daily news conference at which the next day’s Page 1 was planned and laid out. Nor did he generally interview or meet new employees or stroll around the newsroom to chat with reporters and editors, all of which his counterparts at the New York Times and Washington Post do regularly.

But through meetings and conversations with his top editors, Thomas was much more involved in the daily operation than most reporters and lower-level editors realized. He quietly contributed many story ideas, made major personnel and policy decisions, created a special group of top reporters, based in Los Angeles, with license to travel around the country writing stories and, shortly before he retired, began to form a similar group of reporters to travel throughout the world.

Much earlier, in 1972, it was Thomas who personally gave the go-ahead to print an exclusive, first-person account of the Watergate break-in, despite the threat of a federal court contempt citation and a civil suit against The Times.

Some of Thomas’ first innovations met considerable resistance at the paper:

- In 1973, he started the senior writers program, a monthly meeting in which a rotating group of six top reporters and the paper’s four senior editors discuss anything the reporters want to talk about. It was Thomas’ attempt to involve reporters in policy-making, and even though two of the four senior editors often reacted defensively and angrily to the criticism the reporters made in these meetings, Thomas continued the program.

- In 1974, Thomas decided that the press should cover itself as critically and aggressively as it covered other major institutions. No other American newspaper has provided this kind of comprehensive self-examination, and again, many Times editors and reporters resented the coverage, especially when it exposed flaws in The Times’ own practices.

- In 1976, Thomas hired Robert Scheer, former editor of Ramparts magazine, to write special projects for the paper. Many worried that Scheer’s activist liberal views would taint The Times’ news columns, but Thomas was convinced that Scheer could add a valuable dimension to the paper without compromising it, and he saw such a broadening of the paper’s scope as part of his vision for a new kind of daily newspaper. As with the paper’s media coverage, he was willing to publish stories he did not necessarily agree with if he thought they were reasonable and of interest to the reader.

Most of Thomas’ other contributions and innovations as editor, initiated in private meetings or telephone conversations with other top editors, were less noticeable, which is why he was widely perceived by the staff as a remote figure, detached--”invisiBILL,” as several disgruntled newsroom wags dubbed him.

Thomas had been eminently visible and accessible as metropolitan editor, and veteran Times reporters and editors knew that he remained accessible as editor; anyone who wanted to talk to him could call him and drop by his office. But reporters and editors who had not known Thomas as metropolitan editor and who seldom saw him him as editor worried that their advances would be rebuffed--and that they might be resented by their immediate superiors.

Many staffers who have worked at The Times for five, six, seven years, or even longer, never had a conversation with Thomas and had no sense of what he wanted of them or of the paper--a situation that would be inconceivable at, say, the New York Times or Washington Post.

But Thomas is stylistically very different from the two men whose tenure roughly overlapped his at those two papers--Bradlee of the Post and Rosenthal of the New York Times--and the three papers reflect those personal differences.

Rosenthal was a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent and a brilliant editor whose creativity and leadership were critically important to pulling the New York Times back from the brink of insolvency in the 1970s. But many who worked for Rosenthal saw him as a capricious, imperious despot, and they tried feverishly to do their best at all times, if only to avoid his censure. Fear often seemed the prevailing mood at the New York Times under Rosenthal.

Bradlee is a charming swashbuckler, once described by the Wall Street Journal as “a gruff but witty and debonair man who looks rather like the Hollywood version of an international jewel thief.” Post reporters and editors compete for Bradlee’s favor in a manner that often results in “creative tension”--and in an exhilarating and, at times, unsettling oscillation between journalistic highs (Watergate) and journalistic lows (reporter Janet Cooke’s fictional story about an 8-year-old heroin addict).

Thomas was never persuaded that increasing his visibility, his direct, daily involvement in the paper and the tension level on the staff would make a better paper. Indeed, it would be unfair to suggest that the roles played by Rosenthal and Bradlee are the sole explanation for the excellence of the New York Times and Washington Post.

To begin with, the two papers have each other--and the rest of the intensely competitive New York-Washington media world--to spur them on every day. Moreover, the Los Angeles Times is a much larger, more complex operation than is the Post’s, much less susceptible to effective one-man rule, even had that been Thomas’ style. The Los Angeles Times’ full-time news and editorial staff of 1,064 (1,206 including part-timers and temporary employees) is 65% larger than the Post’s; The Times’ news budget is 45% larger than the Post’s. The Times is ringed by strong, healthy suburban newspapers, vigorously competing for its circulation and advertising base, unlike anything the Post faces.

The New York Times is also a large, diverse operation, of course, with its own unique complexities, but there is a tradition--and an incentive--of almost 100 years of excellence to live up to at the New York Times; at the Los Angeles Times, the commitment to excellence is barely 30 years old.

Many priorities that have long been taken for granted at the New York Times--a large allocation of news space, a national and international network of correspondents, a top-quality book review and Sunday magazine--had to be struggled for, and not always achieved, at the Los Angeles Times. One cannot overstate how much Thomas accomplished in a relatively short time, especially when that time coincided with a steady growth, almost everywhere, of pressures for improved, bottom-line profitability.

Nevertheless, it is fair to say that Thomas’ administration was more laissez-faire than those of Rosenthal and Bradlee; there is more room for individual freedom--and self-indulgence--at The Times because of that.

It can be argued that the very qualities that generally made working at The Times so pleasurable under Thomas also kept it from having that aggressive, demanding, hard edge that the Post and, in particular, the New York Times have.

“There’s a kind of passiveness . . . a kind of trust that everything’s going to work out all right, and I don’t think everything does work out all right,” said Linda Mathews, a Times editorial writer who also has been a local, national and foreign correspondent, editor of the op-ed page and an assistant national and foreign editor.

“Even when we’ve made big mistakes, Bill wasn’t on people’s backs . . . . That’s pleasant, but the paper’s never been quite as sharp as it should be because of it,” she said. “We kind of cruise along, doing what we do very well. . . kind of B+ students, chronic underachievers. . . . Bill has put together the talent that could produce a solid-A product every day, and I don’t think we do.”

Peter Boyer, who worked for both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, said, “If the L.A. Times . . . seemed to me to be sort of the Club Med of journalism . . . the New York Times was rather more a whitewater raft excursion down the Colorado River.”

Boyer said he enjoyed working at the Los Angeles Times, but “I really do think I did my best work at the New York Times. . . . The New York Times, in many ways, is much more invigorating and much more dangerous . . . more challenging, more disciplined.”

Knowing from regular, personal conversation that the top editor at the paper is interested in what you are doing makes a reporter work with “a more pronounced sense of focus and mission,” Boyer said.

On the other hand, he added, “The pronounced sense of security at the Los Angeles Times is far greater than at the New York Times. People at the New York Times seem to go through life with the assumption that something unpleasant is just around the corner.”

Richard Eder, who was a drama critic and foreign correspondent at the New York Times before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for the Los Angeles Times, makes a similar point in the course of saying how thoroughly he enjoyed working for a man of Thomas’ “intellect, decency and humanity.”

At the New York Times, he said, every time he went to see Rosenthal “there was always a sinking feeling in my stomach, and I sort of felt my bones afterward to see which ones might have been broken.”

Thomas is not the sort to throw his weight around, inside or outside the paper. He prizes civility at all times. Dr. Adrian Goodman, his family physician, said he often kept Thomas waiting half an hour or longer for his appointments, and Thomas--a determinedly punctual person, a busy and powerful executive--never complained.

“I have seldom met anyone who had as strong a personality and held views as strongly as he does who felt no impulse to impose them on other people,” said Tim Rutten, an assistant national editor of The Times.

Thomas did not even try to impose his preference for his own successor on those making that choice; indeed, he did his best to play no definitive role in that process. Moreover, unlike many editors, who make assignments and then insist that the story conform to their preconceptions, Thomas always seemed especially delighted when a reporter returned from his research with a story that surprised Thomas and disproved his own theories.

“I’m not interested in having my theories proved right; I’m interested in finding out what’s true,” he said.

Thomas always was willing to listen to dissenting opinions, and--more than most men in his position--he could be persuaded to change his mind. Although he was “absolutely, completely committed” to hiring and promoting women and minorities, deputy managing editor Greenwood said, he was initially skeptical of proposals for an in-house training and recruitment program for minorities.

But The Times now has that program--Metpro, a pioneer in the industry--and Thomas not only supported it enthusiastically but also went over budget and violated the paper’s hiring freeze several times to recruit and hire minority reporters.

The Times still trails many papers in this area, however. Minorities are 10.6% of its professional staff, for example, compared to 18% at the Washington Post; women are 25% of The Times’ professional staff, compared to 36% at the Post. The Times still has few women or minority editors, but progress is finally being made, and Thomas is not reluctant to admit that he was wrong about Metpro.

Moreover, while many editors bitterly resent criticism of their papers and seem to take any such criticism personally, as an attack on their professionalism, patriotism, fidelity and virility, Thomas has always seemed so serenely secure about himself that he could accept criticism of the paper with equanimity.

He once responded to a reader’s critical letter by writing back, “Sometimes we do dumb things. . . . Your criticism is right on every point.”

Perhaps Thomas was secure because, unlike many editors, his entire identity was not wrapped up in the paper. That also may help explain why he has gone so willingly into retirement--in contrast with Rosenthal, who resisted strongly, and Bradlee, who is 67 and shows no sign of wanting to retire. Thomas has had a long, happy home life and an active interest in golf, and he does most of his socializing with people outside The Times. Even when he is out to dinner with people from the paper, he doesn’t talk much about the paper.

“There’s nothing that will kill an evening quicker than getting into newspaper shop talk,” said David Lamb, one of the few Times reporters who occasionally sees Thomas socially.

But Thomas does care greatly about The Times, and friends say he vigorously defends it against unwarranted criticism.

When a reader challenged The Times’ integrity several years ago, he wrote back, “Your assertions, for the record, are insulting, baseless and founded upon totally inaccurate assumptions, and you personally, sir, must be a prime pain in the ass.”

For all his civility and tolerance for dissent, Thomas is strong and decisive, someone who tells people exactly what he thinks in a way that leaves no doubt where they stand with him--or, when necessary, what he wanted or didn’t want in his newspaper.

The Times publishes relatively few syndicated political columns because Thomas thinks most are too predictable. He also was opposed to permanent investigative teams, in part, he said, because investigative reporters tend to become “permanent cops . . . suspicious of everything.” (The Times did publish scores of investigative stories under Thomas, however, and won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting when he was metropolitan editor and another when he was editor.)

Thomas could also be quite acerbic with his staff when the occasion warranted it. Once, when a reporter sent him a teasing note about the “progress” the paper had made in agreeing to use the word “bullshit” in one of his stories five years after having refused to do so in another, Thomas sent back a message that said, “Contrary to what you seem to think, this is not the first time bullshit has appeared under your byline in The Times.”

More recently, Thomas told an editor that a story in that day’s paper had been “one of the silliest, most wise-ass failures . . . I’ve seen. . . .” When the editor relayed a subordinate’s defense, Thomas replied, “I find (that) . . . rationale even sillier than the column, although I would have thought that impossible.”

But Thomas generally believed that he should not have to second-guess his staff, should not have to inspire or terrify them. He said written memos were too impersonal and most policy statements too rigid.

“You always come a cropper with too many ‘Thou shalt nots,’ ” he said. “We hire adults. They know what we expect from them.”

But some people do not perform at their best without encouragement or praise or criticism, and publisher Johnson, for all his respect and affection for Thomas, referred obliquely to this problem in the course of his search for Thomas’ successor, when he spoke of wanting to find “a motivator” for the job.

Some Times editors and reporters, including several of Thomas’ most ardent supporters, periodically urged Thomas to take a firmer and more direct hand in the paper’s daily operations.

“He’s the best overall editor I know,” said Mark Murphy, former metropolitan editor of The Times and now an editor at the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. “But . . . he should have made more of an effort to impart what I saw as the magic about him to other people. . . . When you’re in a position like his, being a politician--and I mean that in a good sense--is extremely important. . . . I never felt that the editors working directly for him fully reflected his journalistic strength. I don’t think he was able to impart as much of his journalistic philosophy . . . as he should have.”

But politicking, in any sense, isn’t Thomas’ style.

In fact, Chandler also tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Thomas to become more of a politician, a public ambassador for the paper, to help raise the paper’s profile among the opinion-makers back East. Being in Los Angeles has kept Thomas and The Times from receiving the recognition both deserve, but Thomas, after a number of early speeches, decided that was not his style or the best use of his time, either.

An innately shy, private man, utterly without pretension, he almost invariably looks uncomfortable making a speech--and even more so making small talk at cocktail parties and other events at which editors, like executives in other businesses, often get to know and appreciate each other.

Besides, as Thomas often argued, “The best thing I can do to get more respect for The Times is to make it worthy of more respect--make it a better newspaper--and the best way for me to do that is to stay in Los Angeles and be the editor, not go to cocktail parties in Washington and New York.”

All Thomas ever really cared about, as editor of The Times, was putting out the best paper he could. He didn’t crave peer recognition, and in this celebrity-conscious town he actively avoided celebrityhood. He is self-confident but self-effacing.

Keith Love, a Times political writer, likens Thomas to William Shawn, the legendary New Yorker editor.

“You never see him, never hear him,” Love said. “He takes an unorthodox approach to a most orthodox profession. He comes up with a stable of good writers and gives them the freedom to write. They do long stories, often on unusual subjects, and that’s what distinguishes the L.A. Times, like the New Yorker.”