SEVEN STORIES PRESS, 271 PAGES, $16.95   IT'S BEEN A year of ...

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SEVEN STORIES PRESS, 271 PAGES, $16.95

IT'S BEEN A year of crow-on-the-cob for the New York Times. The pavement on 43rd St. still undulates from Jayson Blair's exit wake, the force of which resulted in a new masthead, a new byline policy and the hiring of public editor Dan Okrent. The rock covering the Times' role in echoing bogus Iraq intelligence is finally being lifted, even if the queen centipede now hissing at the sunlight, Judith Miller, has yet to be crushed. David Brooks, the paper's great conservative hope, falls limper with each column, his snide brand of pop sociology newly revealed as a worthy counterpart to Miller's Chalabi-stamped scoops.

Beneath the radar was the publication of My Times, John L. Hess' frank, juicy and devastating memoir of his 24 years at the paper. Between 1954 and 1978, Hess was a leading Timesman, working as editor, foreign correspondent, city reporter, food critic, rewrite man and obit writer. Alone among major Times alums, Hess was never interested in protecting the paper's reputation or propagating the Times myth. He is a defector. The result is an invaluable insider's look at how the paper functioned at the highest levels during the height of the Cold War. Hess describes a royally self-satisfied, openly corrupt newsroom culture where leading Times figures reveled in their roles as access sluts, where licking the palms of officialdom in exchange for crumbs was understood as "the transaction of commerce." Or, as Times foreign editor Emanuel Freedman told Hess when he requested a transfer from the editor's desk, "I don't know why everybody wants to be a reporter—always asking questions."

The Times' function as a loyal mouthpiece for the eastern establishment, Hess explains, grows out of the paper's very origins. The group of Wall St. financiers that helped a failed Tennessee businessman named Adolph Ochs keep the struggling daily afloat was making a strategic political investment. Led by J.P. Morgan, the backers wanted to keep the paper alive as a "responsible" Democratic Party bulwark against the populist challenge of William Jennings Bryan, who was then attacking Wall St. in front of receptive audiences across the country. The Times was to lead the counterattack.

Hess believes the investment has more than paid itself off. He details numerous instances during his career in which Times coverage took its marching orders directly from the CIA, the White House and powerful economic interests. This in itself isn't shocking—as Noam Chomsky and others have chronicled, it was fairly obvious at the time—but Hess provides insider's anecdotes that illuminate just how deep and pathetic was the Times' institutional venality. Abe Rosenthal, for example, changed the Times style book so that the "Mr." could be applied to Spiro Agnew after he pleaded no contest to criminal charges during Watergate. (Previously, convicts were denied the honorific.) As for the Watergate scandal itself, the Times blew the story because Washington bureau chief Max Frankel had been assured by his friend Henry Kissinger that the White House was not involved. And so on.

The paper did have its moments—"like raisins in oatmeal," according to Hess. Publishing the Pentagon Papers, for one, and Hess' own successful expose on New York nursing home racketeer Bernard Bergman for another. But these were exceptions that proved the rule. During his tenure, Hess writes, "muckraking…tended to make the Times brass nervous...Truly investigating, questioning, skeptical reporting was practically unTimesian." Foreign policy reporting reflected official prerogatives until such time as they became untenable, while local reporting reflected whatever coalition of interests had gathered behind the latest development project favored by Robert Moses—a Times untouchable for decades.

Hess is no hypocrite. He admits to harvesting the fruits of a Times calling card as greedily as anyone. But he was too close to the reality to buy into the myth of the paper as a beacon of excellence in journalism. The Times, writes Hess, was never "the greatest newspaper in the world," just "the most influential." As Judith Miller reminds us, there is still a difference.

ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK