The New York Times last week announced that a new executive editor had been chosen. Jill Abramson, the paper's managing editor since 2003, will take over for Bill Keller in September.
Abramson has a connection to Missouri politics. In 1994, while covering Washington for The Wall Street Journal, she co-wrote the definitive account of the political battle over Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court. The book, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, was critical of U.S. Sen. John Danforth, depicting him as a brain-dead partisan during the process.
A moderate with a patrician bent, Danforth had recruited Thomas out of Yale Law School when he was Missouri's Republican attorney general. Thomas also served as a legislative assistant to Danforth when he was in the Senate.
Strange Justice suggests that Danforth became so enamored of his patronage of Thomas that he failed to fairly consider Anita Hill's allegation that Thomas had sexually harassed her. Thomas told Danforth the charge was baseless, and that was good enough for the senator.
It was perhaps understandable that Danforth would take Thomas' word on faith. But Danforth was so certain of his own rectitude and so sure of his judgment of his protégé -- who was, after all, a reflection to some extent on himself -- that he never stopped to wonder whether there might be some truth to Hill's story.Danforth seemed to lose his mind during the confirmation battle. At one point, he wanted to peddle a theory that Hill suffered from a condition known as erotomania, which enabled her to sound so convincing when describing Thomas' sexual interest in her. (In his own book about the events of 1991, Danforth admits that he "fought dirty" but defends his actions by describing the terrible injustice done to Thomas.)
Abramson wrote the book with Jane Mayer, who has led an equally accomplished journalism career. Her 2008 book, The Dark Side, which chronicled the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Last year, she wrote an attention-getting piece for The New Yorker about the political activities of Charles and David Koch, whom she described as "longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry -- especially environmental regulation."
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