(continued)

So you thought Times Select was not a bad idea?
Well, I thought we had to try something. And it was obviously the wrong model.

I've gotten to the point in the past few years, where every morning, when I unfold the newspaper, I feel like I'm having this wonderful experience that has a finite end date on it. Do you feel that way?
The paper-paper?

My father was a member of the Communist Youth Party, or whatever it was called at the timeYeah.
Yeah. I don't know when it is. I'm going to go out on a limb here. I don't think websites replace papers. I don't think they're the same thing at all. The website replaces the New York Times index effectively. The website is a fabulous place to go to ask for a piece of information—extract it and have it. You go to the New York Times website—I don't care how much time you spend there—you're only going to see about 20 percent of what we do on any given day. Because you get what you ask for, and that's it. The newspaper is a genius instrument. Paper is an amazing medium! We've become incredibly good at designing the paper to lead people through it. And present them with stories, and present them with the sidebars, and present them with the other information. And you don't have to leave the page—it's right there on the same page. That said, it's a medium shift. To a digital ink, or something like that.

Did you see Minority Report with Tom Cruise? There was a scene in the movie on a subway and everybody was sitting there reading a paper. And they were basically just plastic sheets of something. And it [the text] appears on there. Something like that, which costs a minimal amount to buy, has a battery that is easy to replace, or you just throw away and recycle. And you can receive your subscriptions on it. Whatever you want. Arranged however you want. That's passive and wireless, and therefore updatable. That starts to sound like a replacement for the newspaper.

How many editorials do you write each week?
Two. Maybe three.

Is [New York Times publisher] Arthur [Sulzberger] interested in everything?
Does he take a direct position on everything that goes into the paper? If it's 2 percent I'd be surprised. Arthur is really interested in Iraq. He's interested in anything to do with corporate governance, because it's what he does. He's a corporate governor. He gets our schedule, and he knows what we're doing every day. He can see the same directory I do. He might call and say, "What about this?" He makes suggestions: "I'd like this, I'd like that." I'm free to say I think that's a bad idea. But he is my boss so I have to defend it.

The first time Arthur said to me, "We should immediately withdraw from Iraq," was in April of 2004.
He was ahead of the page.

What was the buildup to that full-page editorial that you wrote last summer calling for immediate withdrawal?
A long time. We talked a lot about it. Gail [Collins, the previous editor of the page] and I felt very strongly that we had to get there through a process.

Did you know Arthur was ahead of the page?
Oh yeah, we talked about it. We owe our readers an explanation. We did a huge piece on why we were wrong on WMD's—it filled the entire page. We opposed the war. The editorial page opposed the war. We said George Bush should not invade Iraq without an international consensus.

Was the page in favor of the Senate resolution?
I wasn't there. I can't remember.

For a long time we took the position that having gone into Iraq, and having sacrificed all these lives, our first position was that we owed it to mankind, to the great karma of goodness, to do everything possible to make it work[The editorial page did not take a specific position on the war resolutions before the House and Senate. However, in a series of editorials immediately before and after they were passed in 2002, on October 3, October 8, and October 11, the paper emphasized "the need for the broadest possible international unity"; warned that "there could be urban clashes like those Americans experienced in Somalia, but on a vastly larger scale"; noted that "Iraq's mutually hostile Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish elements were hastily thrown together when Britain and its allies carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I," that "Modern Iraq has little experience as a free and stable nation," and that "reconstituting it as a democracy could take years and a substantial American commitment." It also quoted Bush as saying, "Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable." The Times added, "The country should hold him to that." Taken together, they were cautious, sensible, and extremely prescient.]

But the page did accept the theory of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And then we wrote a thing saying we shouldn't have. And explained why we did, and why we changed our mind. ... And then for a long time we took the position that having gone in there, and having sacrificed all these lives—and not just Americans lives, but hundreds of thousands, certainly Iraqi lives—our first position was that we owed it to mankind, to the great karma of goodness, to do everything possible to make it work. ... Then we found ourselves in a place where, as long as there's a remote possibility of salvaging something less than complete disaster out of this, we're willing to stay, but argue for what we think the policy should be. And then finally we said, "Basta!" And it was a very simple lead: "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit." And we acknowledged in that piece that it was going to be a mess. And what we have been trying to explain to people since then is that those are not the consequences of withdrawal: They're the consequences of invasion. And that's where the debate is right now. We were attacked—that we were in favor of genocide.

So why is Kucinich the only Democratic candidate who seems to share this position, especially given the results of the 2006 election?

Doesn't Obama? I can't keep their positions straight. Isn't Obama in favor of withdrawal?

Yeah, but I don't think immediately.
I don't know, honestly. I don't know why Hillary can't say, "This is what I thought then, this is what I think now, and if I could go back and do it, I'd vote the other way."

We are 66 days, roughly, before the Iowa caucus. Is the New York Times likely to give voters guidance on who they should vote for?
Historically, we endorse before the New York primary.

Which is now moved up to ...
Which is now part of super-duper-zowie Tuesday. So, by any standard, we want to weigh in before that. We're not merely a New York newspaper anymore anyway. So we're talking about it. We've started our meetings. ... So far we've had Biden and Richardson. And we're working very hard on the Republicans. I know this is goofy, but we will pick a Republican candidate, too. We always do. My explanation to people is that we believe in democracy. That's pompous—it sounds awful. But it's true. ... If my system existed, there would be two levers next to each person's name, and you can only vote once—but you can vote no. And it counts as a minus. And if you end up with more minus votes than plus votes, then something bad has to happen to you, but I'm not sure what that is.

What did your father do to imbue you with the idea of becoming a reporter?
He started taking me on reporting trips when I was six. ... Then that whole reporting trip thing accelerated greatly from the time I was about 12. Every year we went away for a week or 10 days. My Dad would just take me out of school. The statement he made rather arrogantly was, "He'll learn a lot more from me then he's going to learn from you guys. It was with my dad and usually whoever was the national editor at the time. And they were amazingly tolerant of me—obviously, because they were sucking up to my father. But they were really nice. ... I went to a moon launch. [Times science editor] Hank Lieberman was sitting there doing the cigar-chomping thing. And I said to him, "How do computers work?" And he taught me about binary numbers, basically lights blinking on and off—and it was the beginning of my interest in computers. He made me understand that computers boil down to just one question: yes or no? Zero or one? Circuit open, circuit closed. ... And then watching the launch. It was very exciting, because they told me that the press trailers were in the "total destruct zone," so if the thing blew up, we'd all die. Which I thought was really cool.

Did your father try this with either of your older brothers?
No. In fact, when I wrote the eulogy for my father, I talked about this. And I discussed it with my brothers. And I realized now that maybe Dad was doing this deliberately. And they both just burst out in hysterical laughter. They said, "Everybody knew this but you—that you were the designated."

Was he like we knew him in the newsroom, or was he less volatile?
I think I said in the paper, as a father he was much like he was as a journalist.

The good parts?
And the bad parts. He was volatile and unreasonable and demanding and crazy. He used to quiz us on current events—for a quarter an answer.

Compared to almost all the other children of famous people I know—and your father wasn't the easiest of this bunch—you appear to have emerged more unscathed.
Is that right?

Yeah. For most of them, this was a terrible disability.
I guess I owe it to three people. My mother, who is an amazing woman, incredibly strong. My current wife. And this woman named Dr. Laurie Leitch, who was my therapist in Washington. Who I saw I think for seven years—including four and a half or five years of group therapy. And who really kicked my ass hard to get over being Abe's son and my first wife's husband.

Your current staff—all the ones I know—say you're a great boss.
Well, I try.

Is there a part of you that is frankly trying to be the "not Abe"?
Sure. Don't we try to be our not-parents in the way we do everything? I always say that parents have two beneficial functions: one, the example you want to follow, and the other, the example you don't want to follow—the parenting, and the counter-parenting.

Do you want to talk about your father's unlikely party affiliation?
His communism?

Yes.
That was quite a revelation. My father was a member of the Communist Youth Party, or whatever it was called at the time.

This was a letter that you found from your aunt?
It was a letter from my aunt Ruth, who I never met, to her husband, George Watt, who was fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the Abraham Lincoln brigade. And they corresponded. She wrote one day that she had gone down to youth headquarters. Because it was "Sonny's" first day as a party member.

And we're sure Sonny was Abe?
There is no other Sonny. That was him. [Andy asked his father about this several times before he died, but Abe always refused to discuss it.]

When did your father tell you that you were right about the war in Iraq?
My last conversation with him. My 50th birthday, at our house in the People's Republic of Montclair, NJ. The last liberal bastion. He had me pull up my chair to his and he leaned over and he said, "You know, you were right about Bush and this war, and I was wrong."

Read Charles Kaiser's new media column, Full Court Press