Book review: 'My Times in Black and White,' by Gerald Boyd

Book Review by Kim McLarin

Book Title: MY TIMES IN BLACK AND WHITE -- Race and Power at the New York Times

By Gerald M. Boyd

Book Publisher: Lawrence Hill. 402 pp. $26.95

I knew Gerald Boyd, a little. He was assistant managing editor of the New York Times when I joined the paper's news staff in 1993. He helped recruit me, as he did many other reporters, including many African American ones; then he pretty much left me to sink or swim, which was also not unusual. During my years at the paper, we had only a handful of conversations, including the one when I decided to leave.

"You are making a big mistake," he told me somberly. He might even have said, "You are making the biggest mistake of your life." The exact wording escapes me; I dismissed it as a technique of Times management. But after reading his posthumous memoir, "My Times in Black and White," I realize that Boyd believed what he was saying. For him, the Times was "not just a newspaper, but a public trust," not just a job but an identity, and he could scarcely imagine a life apart from it. Which is why, when he was forced out in 2003 along with executive editor Howell Raines in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, the loss was so devastating.

"I was being cast out and pushed away from everything that defined me as a journalist and, in many ways, as a person," Boyd writes. He struggled through bouts of depression, and three years after his career ended at the Times, he was dead of lung cancer, leaving a wife and young child to mourn him. Reading this memoir, I was struck again, as I was when reading his Times obituary, by the tragic, Shakespearan nature of his tale.

Boyd grew up poor and struggling in St. Louis, raised by his grandmother after his mother died in childbirth and his father abandoned the family. By senior year of high school, he had found his calling: to become a journalist, with the dream of working for the New York Times. He outlines his radical student days at the University of Missouri, his start at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and his leap to the Times. Once he'd landed at the paper of his dreams, he rose steadily through the ranks to become, in 1993, the paper's first African American assistant managing editor.

As the first black person on the masthead, Boyd had an inside look at what was once and may still be (though in a greatly diminished field) the nation's most powerful newspaper. Anyone who perceives the Times as a gentlemanly meritocracy might not want to peek at the sausage-making on display here. Influence is amassed, careers advanced and decisions made, in ways that sometimes feel more High School Musical than Great Gray Lady. Even before the Blair mess, the Times newsroom comes across as riven by political maneuvering, grudge-nursing and territory-marking. The dominant stories are shaped as much by who bullies whom in the news meetings as by the news itself. Few people were happy, writes Boyd. Even the stars. "Instead they hung in a state of perpetual neurosis as they struggled to remain on top. In doing so they cultivated an environment of fear, distrust and agendas. The twin goals: protecting one's turf and watching one's back."

The book's emotional weight falls squarely on the 2003 scandal that brought down Boyd and Raines and left the Times scrambling to repair its credibility with readers and to staunch the wounds from an ugly newsroom revolt. Boyd's side of the story is that, although he made some mistakes regarding Blair, he did not shield the young reporter from scrutiny. The only thing they had in common, Boyd writes, was race -- and it was the reason for his downfall: "The erroneous, anonymous reports declaring me Jayson Blair's mentor would have never stuck had one of us been white."

If the fate of a tragic hero is often triggered by some defect in his character, what was Boyd's flaw? Ambition? Arrogance? Both are a near-requirement of a Times editor. His critics would say it was an overzealous devotion to diversity, to putting race before quality, as they argue he did during the Blair controversy. This Boyd passionately disputes.

Perhaps Boyd's real tragic flaw was being imperfect in a role that demanded perfection: first black fill-in-the-blank. Anyone who's ever done it knows how impossible the journey is: You are supposed to be commanding but not threatening, accomplished but humble, superhuman but not holier-than-thou. You're supposed to break barriers you pretend don't exist and be all things to all people, but not too much to any one group in particular. Meaning, of course, your own.

Boyd seems to have believed that, in addition to race, it was excessive love and loyalty that caused his fall -- loyalty to Raines, to the Times, to believing "perhaps naively, that part of the answer to racial misunderstandings was something as simple as honesty." Naive is a word Boyd uses often when discussing race at the Times. Earlier in his career he was shocked and hurt at the level of racial animosity in the newsroom, shocked to be named in a black editor's discrimination suit, shocked at how a white reporter saw him as, first and foremost, an intimidating and "intense-looking black man."

A skeptic -- or just a good reporter -- might find it hard to accept that a man who climbed as high at the politically driven Times could be as guileless as Boyd portrays himself. But this memoir is not meant as a deep character study. Had Boyd lived and gained more distance, he might have written a more self-probing book. This is a reclamation project, and as such it largely succeeds. Othello's real tragic flaw was not jealously but misplaced trust.

Kim McLarin is a novelist and writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston.