Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media

Great halls and monumental public rooms.

A complete Toys

Us inventory.

Marble.

Columns.

Statuary.

A bathroom as big as a whole normal apartment!

The most delicious cookies ever served anywhere.

Izzy’s father had gone to work at the New York Times just around the time when I did (for me it was the Watergate—Yom Kippur War—overthrow-of-Salvador Allende fall of 1973).

Manual typewriters—rows and rows of them on the third floor. Dirty linoleum floors. Rotary dial phones.

It was a preyuppie age. A prebusiness age. Another world, really.

I wonder if everyone in their careers finds themselves at some point thinking they are fundamentally from another era—and that they will be found out one embarrassing day.

Actually, I most wonder if there are people who have never experienced such a temporal break. Are there people whose lives and careers have a logical continuity?

There are, after all, still people—as though in some parallel world—in the New York Times newsroom. And while the floors are cleaner, and the office equipment up-to-date, they are still doing the same job that we used to do. I know many of these people, but I do not know if they know that, in a manner of speaking, the industrial revolution began and they stayed on the farm.

But perhaps they do know this, because among the two most irritating words to a generation of Times men are “Steve Rattner”—that is, Izzy’s father.

During the seven or eight years he was at the Times, Rattner did better than almost anybody else. He was really golden. New York, London, Washington: These were assignments that already put him in a sphere to make him one of the most powerful journalists in the world. His career path was the path of a Reston or Rosenthal or Frankel.

Now, no one, in that age, even far-lesser achievers, gave up the Times. It was like giving up the Church. You couldn’t replicate the career, you couldn’t improve upon it, you couldn’t substitute for it. Achievement at the Times, just being at the Times, was sui generis achievement.

Merely reaching the Times, like the priesthood or Harvard, was an accomplishment, and then, as a separate or additional process, you moved up inside the institution.

The exceptions were people who fell out because of weakness or eccentricity. Or you could in some risky, prodigal endeavor leave the Times to write. This was in some sense like leaving the priesthood for a contemplative order. Or like leaving the priesthood, in South America, to pursue revolutionary activities. But you didn’t and wouldn’t just leave the Times for some canny career reason.

Just as, one day, Steve Rattner did, upping and going into investment banking.

Everything argued against this. There was a line in the sand, deep and meaningful, between the business side and our side.

If you were one kind of person you couldn’t be the other kind of person.

These were inimical interests.

Male. Female.

And to discuss people who did business was hardly even to discuss people who did investment banking.

When Izzy’s father decided to leave the Times and become an investment banker, it was hardly clear—certainly hardly clear to virtually all the reporters at the New York Times—what investment banking even was. Or, at least, if it was anything grander than being a stockbroker.

In 1982, investment banking was still a dumb-dumb business. In the long shadow of the sixties, and the darkness of the no-growth seventies, Wall Street was a redoubt of C-students, and sons of former Wall Streeters (who were C-students).

So when Izzy’s father made this leap, crossed this chasm, he was seeing something that few other people saw—not just a series of opportunities, but, I think, a new identity.

There is a way that Rattner is described during his early years at the Times which is telling. First, he is always described. He is singled out. He is perceived as being different. Now this could mean that among highly ambitious people, which lots of people at the Times are (lots too, interestingly, are not ambitious at all—they are, in all aspects, lifers), he is just more ambitious. Or it could mean that his ambition is of a different order. Timesian ambition is very much of a corporate kind. It is Organization Man stuff. It is to rise up within the Times but always with the implicit understanding that without the Times you would be nothing. It’s a very precise individual-to-institution calculation. You are its product—almost never the other way around.

But there was something different when people talked about Steve Rattner. A further wariness. An additional respect. An uptick of interest. And often, an undercurrent of envy and dislike.

For his part, Rattner, a short, slight, fair young man, seemed cooler, more remote, more aware than others.

He began his Times career as James Reston’s assistant—which is something like beginning a legal career as a Supreme Court clerk. Chosen. This was, then, the most honored job for a young man in journalism.

From Reston’s office he went to the Metro desk and then, in the OPEC-obsessed seventies, to writing about energy and shuttling back and forth to the Middle East, and then, at 24, to the Washington Bureau.

As it happened, his Washington rotation intersected with that of the publisher’s son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

This circumstance of having the heir working in Washington, as a journalist among other journalists, is played, of course, as a normal one. But everyone knows it’s weird and loaded.

Now, nobody is at the New York Times by happenstance (whereas most people find themselves working in professions and at companies they couldn’t ever have anticipated—it’s pure randomness). Everybody who is at the Times has aimed for it, considered it for years, fetishized it in greater and lesser ways.

The Sulzberger family is a complicated part of this fetish. It is one of America’s longest-lasting, and last remaining, instances of primogeniture.

In any conventional career strategy at the Times, there really isn’t much advantage in having a relationship with the family. It presents more complications than benefits. The line of demarcation is too clear. It’s not just a hierarchical distinction, but a class line. And the family occupies a class of one—you can’t get into it. It would be like someone trying to rise up in Labor Party politics by befriending the Prince of Wales.

But Steve Rattner does befriend young Arthur (always called young Arthur). Indeed, young Arthur is befriended by an assortment of people in the Washington Bureau in the early eighties. That is young Arthur’s job at this point in time: to experience the Times as its reporters experience it—and to experience Times reporters.

But it’s situational. While he befriends these people now, he will unbefriend them as the situation changes. He will say later, in his surprising blunt-speak way, that he can’t be friends with Times reporters. That it doesn’t work. That it complicates things.

But the person he will stay friends with, best friends (they will later live in the same building in New York and, every morning, go to the gym together) is Izzy’s father—no longer at the Times, but now an investment banker, a media money guy, whose clients include the Sulzbergers.

I remember when I heard this: Steve Rattner had left the Times to go to Wall Street.

It was unclear what this meant, and yet it was clear to me that it was large—disturbing. If no one had ever done this, but someone, someone like Steve Rattner, was doing it now, what did it mean?

But I wasn’t that far from understanding.

When I had arrived at the Times, I’d known, within something like minutes, that it was all wrong.

It was Gothic. Dickensian. It did not look like the modern world. It lacked any feeling of affluence. It was dirty and gray and unfriendly. The men had tics and limps and hairpieces.

You could romanticize this—this was a newsroom, after all. And that’s what lots of affluent, suburban college boys must have done.

But I couldn’t shake the sense that this was a time warp, which, if you didn’t run fast, would catch you.

I sensed the grip of the place. The plantation quality. Still, I did not think that the career itself, the economic proposition, was flawed: to be a journalist. A writer in the culturally important person sense. A writer in the pre-rock-star sense. A writer in the sense of there being a recognized profession.

I left the Times, as Steve Rattner was moving up in the ranks, to enter what might fairly be called the late renaissance of the magazine business. These were terrible economic years, but in fact, there were plenty of alternatives to the Times in New York. It was (it borders on the bizarre to remember) a time of thriving, independent, Zeitgeisty magazines.