Times Confronted By Ms. Rice In 2002 But Held Ground

By Gabriel Sherman
In late August of 2002, David Sanger, White House correspondent for The New York Times, found himself in the far west wing of the West Wing: at President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex.

There, in what must have been a fairly routine meeting with then–National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, he was told in no uncertain terms what the White House had thought of much of The Times’ reporting on the President’s Iraq policy that summer. They were not happy.

“I would not discuss any background conversations with any sources in the White House,” Mr. Sanger said, sounding quite a bit like a former co-worker of his. “I remember that several members of the administration were unhappy with our coverage [in the summer of 2002], but that’s not a rare event on many different subjects.”

But two sources—one who was at the Washington bureau and one high-ranking editor back at The Times’ West 43rd Street headquarters at the time of the meeting—remembered the criticism was worrying. Would the Washington bureau be frozen out of the big stories emanating from the White House?

It was the summer the President and his allies were laying the groundwork for military action in Iraq, and the premium on high-level sourcing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was perhaps at its apex. And for The Times’ Washington bureau, the pressure was on to deliver on the biggest story of this still-young administration.

But one senior Washington bureau staffer said that as the Bush administration edged closer to invasion, the editorial climate inside The Times shifted from questioning the rationale for military action to putting the paper on a proper war footing.

“Everyone could see the war coming. The Times wanted to be out front on the biggest story,” the staffer said. “It became the plan of attack.”

Pace Bob Woodward.

On Charlie Rose this month, Mr. Sulzberger pinpointed this as the period in which The Times’ seriously flawed reporting on weapons of mass destruction was produced. Describing the time as the “overheated period that followed 9/11,” he said, “I think it’s fair to say that those stories would not have run in The New York Times today.”

He also declined to blame recently departed reporter Judith Miller for The Times’ faulty reporting on Iraqi W.M.D., saying the problems were “institutional.”


And yet, inside The Times, nobody seems to agree on how that reporting actually made it to the page out of the Washington bureau. Nobody has the same picture of the institution that reported it—the Washington bureau under the leadership of Jill Abramson, now managing editor of the newspaper, and then–executive editor Howell Raines, who seems to be fishing a lot these days. And unlike the period after Jayson Blair’s deceptions, it does not appear to be a major agenda item for the newspaper to find out how it happened. (Ms. Abramson, contacted by The Observer, declined to comment for this story; Mr. Raines did not respond to requests for comment.)

Back to the beginning: What was Ms. Rice so mad about?

In mid-August of 2002, The Times came under fire for back-to-back front-page pieces calling out top Republicans who had broken ranks with the administration over support of an Iraq invasion.

The first piece, which ran on Aug. 16 and was co-written by Patrick Tyler and Todd Purdum, included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in an influential camp of dissenting Republicans—such as former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft—who were opposing Mr. Bush’s planned military operation in Iraq. The next day, Elisabeth Bumiller attributed anti-war views to Mr. Kissinger in a piece with a Crawford, Tex., dateline.

An item in the Aug. 26 issue of The Weekly Standard lashed into The Times for putting Mr. Kissinger in the category of people who didn’t support the war. The opening line: “There’s nothing subtle about the opposition of the New York Times to President Bush’s plan for military action to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq.”

The Times took a drubbing from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, columnist Charles Krauthammer and George Will speaking on ABC’s This Week.

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