The Room Was Cleaned

What I learned about people after being thrown out of 229 West 43rd Street

I have gone back. Not inside — I have never gone inside — but to the sidewalk on Forty-Third Street, under the globes that still hang there as though the building were still what it says it is, and around the corner to the back doors on Forty-Fourth, where we used to duck out. I have done this more times than a well man would.

The Times left in 2007, four years after I did and under considerably better circumstances. The building was sold and gutted and refitted, and there is a bowling alley in it now. Lucky Strike. Ninety thousand square feet, the third floor and the fourth — which is to say all of it. The whole third-floor room, where Metro and National and Foreign and Business sat, and the mailroom, and the executive editor out in the open where anyone could see him. And the staircase up to photo and graphics and culture. The entire volume of air in which that newspaper was made is now a place where people bowl.

I don’t offer that as irony. I offer it as measurement. Whatever happened in that room in 2003, it was not a rite — you do not install lanes in a sanctuary. It was housekeeping. And when the housekeeping was finished, the institution moved out, sold the building, and let somebody put in a bar.

The front of The New York Times Building at 229 West 43d Street in 2005, two yearsa after I departed. Photo: Chad Davis via Wikimedia Commons

In 2003 I lied in print. Repeatedly, over a long stretch, in a great many stories, at the best newspaper in the country. Reporting I did not do. Places I had not been. Words in the mouths of people I never spoke to, some of them grieving, all of them real.

The Times investigated me and it was right to. I resigned before they could fire me, and they would have been right to do that too.

Those sentences stand by themselves. Everything after it will be read against it, and should be. I am not owed a rehearing. There is no but fastened to that paragraph, and if you are reading ahead looking for one, you are going to be disappointed, and I would rather disappoint you now than at the end.

The question I want to ask is not about me. It is about what the removal changed.

II. THE FLOOR PLAN WAS AN ARGUMENT

That third floor was not a warren of offices. It was one enormous open room, and the masthead sat in it — Joe Lelyveld, and then Howell Raines, out on the floor with the reporters. No glass. No doors. Sightlines.

And when it was over, they brought Lelyveld back. On an interim basis, to hold the room until Bill Keller could be walked down to it. Not a new theory of the newsroom. The old one, reinstalled.

The architecture made a claim. The claim was that we see each other, and that being seen is how the truth gets kept.

For the better part of a year, in a room built so that no one could hide, a man sitting a short walk from the executive editor filed datelines from cities he had never been to.

Nobody saw.

That is not an accusation. It is a fact about a floor plan, and it is worse than an accusation, because it forecloses the excuse the institution actually reached for. The story told afterward was that a man had concealed himself. He had not.

I remember coming down the fourth-floor staircase as one of my editors was coming up, and the look that crossed his face for a second — how are you here? I smiled. I waved. I kept walking.

There was nowhere to conceal myself. The theory of oversight was proximity, and proximity failed absolutely, and in twenty-three years no one has gone back to ask what should have replaced it.

They found a man instead. It was cheaper.

And what the desks knew, they could not escalate. A man was coming apart in an open room, and there was no mechanism anywhere in the culture for saying so out loud. At best you would be a Cassandra. At worst — in an industry where you are only as good as your last story — you would be jealous. That is not an audit that failed. That is a newsroom where seeing something and saying it were two different things, and only one of them was safe.

III. NOBODY WENT LOOKING

Eighteen years later, a man named Bill Adair went looking for us.

Adair founded PolitiFact and teaches journalism ethics at Duke’s public policy school, and when he was assigned to build a unit on fabricators, he found something he hadn’t expected: there was almost nothing to teach from. No real academic literature. Almost no follow-up reporting. Journalism’s most notorious sinners — he lists Janet Cooke, he lists Jack Kelley, he lists me — and virtually no curiosity anywhere in the profession about what became of any of us, or why, or whether the conditions that produced us had ever been touched.

Fired, and never heard from again. That was the whole body of knowledge.

Sit with it, because it is not a small thing. A profession whose entire function is finding out what happened had, in the case of its own worst failures, declined to find out what happened. Not because the material was unavailable. Because nobody went and got it.

The removal was the finding. There has never been another finding.

I am not the man who gets to say that. Adair is, and he did, in a paragraph with my name in it.

Adair’s friendship with a Times reporter named John Schwartz — a friend of mine, and a friend of David Carr’s — is how I knew Adair was doing good work. John had stayed. He had never treated me as unpersonable. I don’t know what part, if any, I played in what Adair went on to report, and I’d be careful about claiming one. What I know is that the door was opened by a person and not by an institution, and that this is the only way any of these doors ever open.

IV. THE RULE, AND WHAT BROKE IT

Which is how I came to know about Stephen Glass.

You know the outline. Forty-odd fabricated pieces at The New Republic, fake notes, a fake Web site, his brother impersonating a CEO. Fired in 1998. A movie about it. What you likely don’t know is what happened next, because for twenty years nobody in journalism went and asked.

Three people gave him a second chance. A constitutional law professor at Georgetown, who asked whether he could do research without making it up. A D.C. Superior Court judge, who hired him as a clerk. And a personal-injury lawyer in West Hollywood who read the résumé, deleted it, sat there a minute, and undeleted it — a man four years sober himself, who told Glass that being exposed might turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him.

A professor. A judge. A lawyer in recovery. Not one journalist. Not one editor. Not one institution of the profession he had actually injured. The work of his rehabilitation was outsourced entirely to people who owed him nothing and were implicated in nothing.

And having been handed the rule, he kept it. That was the architecture of his second life: never lie again. Absolute, auditable, binary. He confessed to strangers at wedding receptions. He repaid two hundred thousand dollars nobody had compelled him to repay. He recited his own disgrace to prospective clients until the people around him were sick of hearing it — something my own colleagues and friends would probably find relatable.

In 2014 the California Supreme Court looked at fifteen years of that and said no.

Read the opinion sometime. It is less a legal document than an expulsion performed in the register of law — belittling him as an evening law student, disputing his article counts, aggrieved about the timing of his repayments. The bar wanted documentary compliance and found the paperwork wanting. In the court’s view, the liar was still lying. It is hard to believe they did not start with their desired outcome and work their way backward.

Here is what the court could not see, because it was not in a format the court accepts.

That same year, Julie Hilden — his partner of fourteen years, a lawyer, whose own mother had died of early-onset Alzheimer’s, and who had written a book about abandoning her — was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She was forty-six. And she told him she did not want to know, did not want to discuss it, did not want anyone told. She wanted to be happy in the life she had.

It was, as Adair puts it in an AirMail article about Glass, “a command to lie.”

So he lied. Every day, for four years, to the person he loved most, having built a decade and a half of identity on the promise that he never would. He told her he would look into adopting a child. He read her a bar-exam prep book aloud and let her believe she would sit for it. He told their friends her strangeness was a foot injury. He kept her home in Venice, in the garden, and he stayed until she died in their bedroom in March of 2018.

He told Adair’s students, afterward, that the compassionate thing was not to tell the truth.

He broke the rule to become the man the rule was supposed to make him.

And there is no bar, no board, no ethics committee, no newsroom on this earth with a form for that.

An institution can only recognize the form of redemption it issues licenses for. And the realest thing a person ever does will never be in that format.

A picture I took on the Duke campus on April 9, 2018, during one of several visits to Bill Adair’s class.

V. TWO WAYS TO LAY IT DOWN

Glass and I both ended up talking to Bill’s classes.

I will talk to any journalism class that asks, and I have never once said no. Glass doesn’t often. Same fall, same distance from it, opposite settlements — and I have come to think neither of us is doing it wrong.

He laid the burden down by refusing to keep performing it. He had been confessing to strangers at weddings, reciting the whole thing to clients until the people around him were exhausted by it, and at some point he understood that the recitation had become its own kind of hiding. Somebody told him he had been apologizing for breathing. For him, silence was the harder and more honest thing.

I lay it down by walking into rooms full of twenty-two-year-olds and telling them the thing nobody else will tell them.

And I do not know which of us is right. I am certain that mine is the one that works — on me. I have no idea whether that certainty is worth anything, because a man is not a reliable witness to his own motives.

What I do know is what Adair writes — that when Glass came back four years later and told them about Julie, the room broke. Some of the students cried. He had seemed unsure of himself the first time. He was not unsure about her.

The institution did not and could not give either of us a way to put it down. No process. No rite. No end. There is no exit from an expulsion, because the expulsion was never designed to conclude — it was designed to relieve the group. So each of us had to invent a private ritual out of nothing, and we invented opposite ones, and the profession contributed not one thing to either.

The closest thing to a mechanism that exists is a classroom at Duke. And it exists because one professor went looking for a literature, found there wasn’t one, and built something himself.

VI. THE STARBUCKS ON EIGHTH AVENUE

Daryl Khan and I became friends because I would not hire him. He was a scrappy reporter at the University of Maryland’s student paper who ran circles around the competition, and he outlasted me at The Times. So when he asked me to talk to his students at the City University of New York, it was an easy call. Casual, quiet, no ceremony, no terms.

Carr was flying in from South by Southwest, so we arranged to meet afterward at a Starbucks on Eighth Avenue, on the route between the new Times and the old — a cinematic setup no reporter could avoid noticing, even when we aren’t writing. I cannot quote him and will not pretend to remember the exact words. We sat on the second floor with our coffees, and he asked whether I wanted to go up to the new newsroom.

I declined, for reasons harder to write off than embarrassment or the fear of provoking my former colleagues. It was easier on the sidewalk than it would have been in the room. On the sidewalk, the story was ended. In the room, it might have needed to be revised.

It was no surprise that Carr would offer. He had been in a ditch himself, and had climbed out of it in public, and then gone back to the newsroom where his addiction had caused so much chaos. In The Night of the Gun he reported out his own addiction as though it were a story — interviewing the people he had harmed, treating his own memory as an unreliable source, and saying so on the page. I appear near the end of the book, in an arc that left him on the other side of someone else’s colossal mess: the kind that does not only strike its maker but everyone nearby, and in my case seemed to reach every house within a country mile.

What I found remarkable about the book is that a working journalist performed an audit on his own life of exactly the kind the industry should have performed on itself after my case.

There is something to be said for sobriety. It teaches you to stop looking outside yourself for the answers to your problems, and how to take a fearless inventory that actually heals. The industry admired the book and adopted none of the method.

David is gone. The model he offered stands open to any person, or any institution, that might require it.

VII. THE ACCIDENT

I never sought readmission to journalism. I found my path doing what David’s book did for others — using the report-out of the audit of my own life to help someone else. It started in classrooms, then in mental health support systems, at non-profits and then in clinics. The work widened over the years, but one thing stayed constant: my life filled up with interesting conversations with interesting people, and I could learn something from every one of them and hand it to the next person who came around.

Rosemary Armao was on the other side of the microphone, interviewing me for Armao On The Brink, her podcast. We had met fourteen years earlier, when she invited me to talk to her journalism class at the University at Albany. In a closing question, she asked why I had returned to journalism.

I pushed back. I said I had not.

And then it dawned on me that she was right. Anyone, as she pointed out, who gathers news and related information and publishes it to the public is a journalist. It was an accident. Three accidents, really. In an effort to bring those conversations to other people, I had started a podcast designed to do at scale what I did one-on-one during the day — mental health work on a microphone. Then a true crime publication on Substack, which exists because my publishing partners and I had an editorial nobody would run, and I still cannot know whether it was the topic or one of the bylines. Then The Center Holds, which was a reaction to what was happening in Minnesota earlier this year. Therapy, more or less. Which is the oldest reason anyone has ever written anything.

It was the obvious thing, and I needed an outsider to tell me.

One of my partners at The True Crime Times came to true crime by accident too, after his own profession closed a door on him — a judicial nomination that fell apart, which is his to tell. And it was true crime that took him in — an audience that did not think itself rarefied enough to need a bar association's permission. So when I had my partners on my podcast and they had me on theirs, the set of hands that reached across the boundary belonged, again, to someone who had been on the far side of one.

It is easy to look at us as rare. It is amazing how many friends I have picked up who have been on the front page of The New York Times — not in the way you would want to be. But if you live long enough, you get back to that moment in the schoolyard when the teams were picked and you were not. Everyone has been cast out of something.

I am grateful for Carr, out of the ditch himself. For Schwartz, who simply refused the reflex. For the lawyer in West Hollywood, four years sober, who un-deleted an email, and the judge who gave Glass a chance, and the professor who came looking for both of us. For my partners. Every one of them acted against the reflex — which makes me wonder whether the Samaritan has always been someone who was once in the ditch.

VIII. THE LEDGER

I am better for my crucible. So, in their different ways, are Glass and Carr.

That is not a defense of crucibles. People grow after catastrophes — this is well documented, and it is not an argument for catastrophes. That I am a better man is evidence about human resilience, which is a fact about us. It is no evidence at all about the system that made the fall, or the one that answered it.

I asked, at the start, what the removal changed.

Everything, in us. Nothing, in them.

That is the whole ledger, and I want to be careful about where the coldness in it belongs. Not on the people. The people were extraordinary. A judge. A professor. A lawyer four years sober who un-deleted an email. A reporter who never stopped picking up the phone. A friend, out of his own ditch, who asked if I wanted to come up. Every one of them crossed a line they were under no obligation to cross, and every one did it as a person and not as an institution — because institutions do not cross lines. That is what they are for. That is the point of them. And it is why the thing that saves you is never going to arrive with a letterhead on it.

Unsparing about the buildings. Generous about everyone who ever walked out of one to go and find someone.

Some Saturday I am going to buy a ticket.

I will go up to the third floor of 229 West Forty-Third Street, and I will rent the shoes, and I will try to stand roughly where my desk was, in the middle of the room where the best newspaper in the world used to be made, and where I did one of the worst things I have ever done, and I will pick up something heavy and roll it down a lane.

The pins will fall. A machine will come down and set them up again.

I don’t know what I will feel. Something like nostalgia, I expect — for the mailroom, for the sightlines, for Joe out on the floor with the rest of us, for the whole beautiful, blind, unrepeatable room. And I think I will be smiling, and I think the smile will be uncomplicated, which is not a thing I could have written twenty years ago.

The room was cleaned. Then it was sold. Then it was filled with people having an ordinary good time, and not one of them knows or cares what happened there, and they are right not to.