Stories at odds in N.Y.

The New York Times has been through so many extraordinary events over the past few months that the circumstances surrounding Bill Keller’s appointment as the paper’s new executive editor probably rank as merely curious.

Yet curious they are -- for a couple of reasons.

At 54, Keller is a distinguished and formidable journalist with a classic New York Times news executive’s resume: stints as managing editor and foreign editor, preceded by successful tours as a correspondent in Moscow, Johannesburg and Washington. More recently, he has written columns and analytic features for the paper’s op-ed page and Sunday magazine. In 1989, his reportage from the Soviet Union won him a share of that year’s Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence.

But two years ago, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. conspicuously passed over Keller for the executive editor’s job, selecting instead Howell Raines, who along with his managing editor, Gerald Boyd, resigned in disgrace last month when their mishandling of the Jayson Blair scandal brought to light a raft of other problems. Since then, the paper has been run by Keller’s former boss and patron, Joe Lelyveld, who came out of retirement to steady the Times until a new executive editor could be named.

One of the curious aspects of Monday’s events was the brief and rather tepid memo Sulzberger issued to announce Keller’s appointment. At three paragraphs, it was precisely half the length of the note the publisher wrote June 5 to inform the staff of Raines’ and Boyd’s resignations.

The final paragraph of Monday’s note begins: “Bill was a close contender for this job last time around. He’s enjoyed his role over the last two years and has gained some valuable perspective during that time.” Thus do the so-often-unforgiving people who own the presses create rhetorical cover for their own mistakes, no matter how egregious.

Just how deep a mistake Raines’ appointment was became clear Friday night in an hourlong interview the former editor gave public television personality Charlie Rose, a longtime friend. Raines’ grandiosity and penchant for self-justifying delusion raises interesting questions about how he came to be appointed in the first place. By his account, he was undone by fifth columnists, a Taliban of Times traditionalists who resisted his attempts to improve the quality of the paper, infuse it with a sense of competitive urgency and give it broad national appeal rather than a New York focus. He defended personnel practices that have come to be called a “star system” -- but which from the outside looked a lot like cronyism -- by alleging that he was rewarding “performance” where previously a “buddy system” had prevailed.

Commentator Mickey Kaus got it right in his analysis for the online magazine Slate: “Guess all that contrition Raines displayed when he was campaigning to save his job was bogus.... He wouldn’t admit to a single mistake, except having excessively high standards and moving too fast. His argument is he was done in by Lelyveldian pygmies who were defending the status quo against his bold vision of change.”

Nor does it appear the timing of Raines’ apologia was coincidental. The timing of Keller’s appointment was well known around the Times’ 43rd Street headquarters. Raines was able to tell his story first, and the result was clear from what transpired Monday in the paper’s newsroom.

As Sulzberger and Keller made the announcement from the very spot where Raines had delivered his own farewell, the disgraced former editor was like an invisible presence between them. Both, in fact, felt compelled to respond to at least some of their former colleague’s criticisms.

On the Rose show, for example, Raines said he had been selected by Sulzberger because both felt the paper’s staff “had settled into a lethargic culture of complacency.” In his remarks Monday, according to news reports, the publisher responded: “There’s no complacency here. Never has been. Never will be.”

Although Keller said he had no desire to “play defense,” he pointedly delineated how his expectations of the staff differ from those of Raines, who triggered an unusual number of departures by demanding that reporters put their editors’ every demand above their personal lives. The new executive editor told his newsroom “a little more savoring of life” through time spent with families or looking at art would “enrich your work as much as a competitive pulse rate will.”

Sound and welcome sentiments from both men, but neither addressed what surely was the most troubling allegation the former executive editor made on the Rose show.

The fall of Raines and Boyd was triggered by a crisis of integrity in the Times’ reporting of the news. If Raines’ comments to Rose on Friday are to be believed, then the paper’s reports on his exit were inaccurate because he and Sulzberger willfully deceived their readers.

In his June 5 memo to the staff, Sulzberger wrote, “ ... this morning I accepted the resignations” of Raines and Boyd, who “concluded that it was best for the Times that they step down. With great sadness, I agreed with their decision.”

That’s the version the Times reported to its readers the following day.

Friday, however, Raines told Rose that Sulzberger forced him to resign. “After four weeks of working our way through these problems, Arthur asked me to step down.... Arthur said ... ‘I can’t calm this place down. I’d like -- I’m having to ask you to step aside. It’s a painful conversation; it’s breaking my heart.’ ”

So, either Howell Raines lied Friday or Arthur Sulzberger allowed his own reporter to mislead the Times’ readers June 6. And, if the latter, then does the new executive editor have an obligation to correct the record? Either way, the implications are particularly nasty.

Nor does the Raines problem seem likely to end there.

His performance Friday suggests that there’s a self-justifying and accusatory book in the offing.

The proposal’s working title might be: “How I Tried to Save the New York Times From Itself and Was Betrayed by Knaves, Fools and a Cowardly Publisher.”

Jayson Blair may be having trouble finding a publisher for his book, but Raines will need a shovel to handle the offers sure to be coming his way.