Book Review
My Times in Black and White, Gerald M. Boyd,
Lawrence Hill Books, February 2010

By Wayne Dawkins

Gerald Boyd was only 56 when he died in fall 2006 after a battle with lung cancer. He was a black pioneer – the first of his race to appear on the masthead of the New York Times – with a long, distinguished newspaper career.

Boyd’s two-decade ascension at the Times as Washington correspondent, metro editor and managing editor crashed after the spring 2003 Jayson Blair scandal.

In the tradition of former top New York Times editors, Boyd wrote a memoir about his life and work as a Timesman. His wife Robin D. Stone guided the manuscript to publication. “My Times in Black and White” is a welcome addition to biographical journalism. Boyd needed to speak his truth because too often others defined him narrowly.

Some of them had grumbled, anonymously, that Boyd was a weak, ineffective editor. That had to be laughable to informed colleagues – allies and adversaries – inside and outside the Times newsroom. In an 18,000-word New Yorker magazine piece about the newspaper, a respected media writer called Boyd an imposing yet invisible figure. In his account, Boyd mused that invisibility would be quite a feat.

When Executive Editor Max Frankel brought him north to Times Square after he’d covered presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush in Washington, Boyd – a St. Louis native who still rooted for the baseball Cardinals – pumped life into an underperforming Times metro section. He hired talented women and minority journalists and motivated the veteran staffers he inherited. When necessary, he isolated and minimized veterans who tried to coast and resisted performing to his high standards.

Indeed, Boyd was far from invisible. An indisputable fact is Boyd’s leadership is linked to 10 of the New York Times’ then 89 Pulitzer Prizes. His shining achievement was the “How Race is Lived in America” project of 2000. Other Pulitzers included the metro section’s coverage of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and a record seven Pulitzers after the 2001 Sept. 11 attacks on America. Boyd and Raines were only weeks into their top editing posts when that devastating story broke.
What makes Boyd’s memoir a page turner was his takes on complex relationships with Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld, his successor Howell Raines, Boyd’s boss and co-pilot, and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Boyd’s perspectives: He and Lelyveld maintained an uncomfortable relationship, but respected each other. Boyd praised his publisher and emphasized that Sulzberger was a sounder visionary and businessman than most media watchers acknowledged. The publisher fortunately moved the Times to digital publishing early, despite resistance from top managers, and Sulzberger’s commitment to racial and gender diversity was deep and unwavering, Boyd wrote.

Raines was Boyd’s friend from their Washington reporting days, and he became the acerbic editorial page editor in New York before he assumed the executive editor post. Boyd wrote that he often tried to save Raines from his excesses and impulsive behavior.

Frankly, Raines was inexperienced. Running the opinion section, which was autonomous from the newsroom, meant he was not as grounded as Boyd, who had a decade of experience managing the vast 1,100-member journalistic bureaucracy that is the Times.

The Jayson Blair fiasco that got Boyd and Raines sacked remains murky in this account.

Boyd speaks his truth: Blair was a master at gaming the Times’ vaunted system of checks and balances and that was how the young reporter committed colossal fraud and besmirched the newspaper Boyd loved so deeply. Boyd also insists that he did not have a mentor relationship with Blair as some Times watchers assumed because both men were black. Boyd said middle managers called attention to Blair’s sloppy work and during substantive chats with the young reporter he read him the riot act.

Blair cleaned up his act, then relapsed and committed egregious acts of plagiarism and deception that mortally wounded Boyd’s Times career.

Readers of “My Times in Black and White” will have to read between the lines and decide for themselves whether Boyd was s victim or was partially to blame for his fall from grace.