Howell Raines was 58 years old—“the cusp of 60,” as he put it—when he walked into his new office in the northeast corner of the newsroom. It was September 5, 2001, his first day as executive editor. Raines was impatient, and he was driven—determined to shake up the Times, just as he had told the publisher, A. O. Sulzberger Jr., he would.
He knew he did not have that much time. His three immediate predecessors, A. M. Rosenthal, Max Frankel, and Joseph Lelyveld, had stepped down before they turned 65, and Raines had learned from covering politics that at any institution, a new executive had only so long before hitting the barrier of institutional resistance. He gave himself five years.
