New York Times’ Lelyveld to Retire

Joseph Lelyveld, widely credited with guiding the New York Times to the peak of its long-term journalistic excellence, will retire as executive editor in September and will be succeeded by Howell Raines, the editor of the paper’s editorial pages.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the Times, made the announcement of the changes late Monday afternoon in the paper’s third-floor newsroom.

Lelyveld, who turned 64 last month, could have remained as executive editor until his 65th birthday. But he has long said he would leave before then to avoid the kind of divisive jockeying and speculation that the paper endured in the mid-1980s, during the final years of A.M. Rosenthal’s tenure as executive editor.

“If we didn’t have mandatory retirement here, I would probably have wanted to stay another couple of years,” Lelyveld said in an interview Monday. “But the approaching deadline gets into everybody’s thinking, and people start becoming very worried about themselves and their own careers, and it takes the paper’s focus off the news.”

Managing Editor Will Stay at the Paper

Lelyveld, executive editor since mid-1994 and a distinguished foreign correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author before that, said he told Sulzberger over dinner in January that it was time for him to step down.

Sulzberger said he felt privileged to have two strong candidates to succeed Lelyveld--Raines and Bill Keller, the paper’s managing editor. Sulzberger said Keller had agreed to stay at the Times but mentioned no specific role for him. Raines, 58, will select his own managing editor.

Sulzberger praised Lelyveld for having added color and new and expanded sections to the paper and for having diversified its staff and shepherded its transformation into a national newspaper, now available in more than 200 cities.

“His contributions to the quality of our news report have been stunning,” Sulzberger said.

In recent interviews, others have been even more laudatory.

“The entire paper has improved in every way under Joe Lelyveld, and it’s at the apex of its history,” said Gene Roberts, a former Times reporter and editor who also edited the Philadelphia Inquirer for 18 years.

Tom Goldstein, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, said Lelyveld’s legacy would include “greatly enlivening the prose and the pages of the paper . . . and turning away from the Times’ historic misgivings about investigative reporting.”

Goldstein said Lelyveld deserves much of the credit for “How Race Is Lived in America,” a 13-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning series the Times ran last year based on the work of 29 reporters and photographers.

But Lelyveld’s years as executive editor were not without controversy. The Times was widely criticized for its coverage of Wen Ho Lee, the nuclear scientist who was released from prison in September after the federal government dropped 58 of 59 felony counts against him. The Times subsequently published a 1,600-word “public accounting” of its coverage and the criticism it engendered, as well as a two-part reexamination of the entire case.

The Times won 12 Pulitzer Prizes under Lelyveld. His own Pulitzer came in 1986, for “Move Your Shadow,” his book about apartheid in South Africa. Lelyveld, who started at the Times in 1962, reported for the paper from South Africa, London, New Delhi and Hong Kong before becoming foreign editor in 1987 and managing editor in 1990.

When he leaves, he said Monday, he will start writing again--books most likely.

Born in Alabama, Raines came to the paper in 1978 as its Atlanta correspondent and spent much of his Times career in Washington, where he was bureau chief from 1988 to 1992. He was also, briefly, London bureau chief and, like Lelyveld, has a Pulitzer Prize. He won in 1992 for “Grady’s Gift,” a New York Times Magazine story about his childhood friendship with his family’s housekeeper and the lessons born of that interracial relationship.

Raines is widely regarded as a fine prose stylist, and for many years, the test given to prospective Times copy editors included a passage written by Raines. Unlike other passages in the test, which deliberately were flawed and were supposed to be corrected and improved, the Raines passage was flawless--included to help determine whether job candidates could recognize and leave untouched a piece of good writing.

Raines is the author of “Fly Fishing Though the Midlife Crisis,” the novel “Whiskey Man” and “My Soul Is Rested,” an oral history of the civil rights movement.

“To understand Howell, you have to understand the South and the world he grew up in,” said Philip Taubman, who was assistant editorial pages editor under Raines and, before that, served as Raines’ deputy in Washington. “He’s steeped in the history of the South . . . and he has a Southern charm and congeniality that wins over a lot of people.”

As editorial pages editor, Raines had reported directly to Sulzberger, not to Lelyveld, a relationship that is widely thought to have helped him in the competition with Keller.

Raines ‘a Very Aggressive Journalist’

Editorials under Raines were often much sharper in tone than in previous years--so much so that, early on, they often jarred readers and newsmakers long accustomed to a gentler approach.

Colleagues say they expect that sharpness to carry over to his new duties.

“He’s a very aggressive journalist,” Taubman said. “He’s always been interested in investigative reporting.”

Raines was reluctant Monday to say anything specific about his plans for the paper.

“Our publisher has entrusted me with a great responsibility,” he said. “The first and foremost part of that responsibility . . . will be to preserve and expand the Times’ tradition of quality journalism.”