The crowd at the Society for Ethical Culture included former New York Times colleagues—Joe Lelyveld, Marcia Chambers, Linda Amster, Paul Goldberger, Mary Breasted, Mike Leahy, Clyde Haberman and Stephanie Lane; pundits like Katrina vanden Heuvel and Eric Alterman; 60's activists like Curtis Gans, and fellow white water adventurers like Carol Bellamy, Ellen Fleysher and Victor and Sarah Kovner.

The festivities began with a slide show (set to songs by the Rock Bottom Remainders) showing the writer-activist at every age, posing with everyone from Bill Clinton to Bill Moyers. The shot of her sporting a Fox News hat got the biggest laugh from the three hundred fans who had gathered to remember her.

Maya Angelou recalled how startled she was when she first met Molly and realized she was six feet tall.

“I knew she was white,” said Ms. Angelou. “I didn’t know she was so much white!” Nevertheless, Molly immediately dubbed the two of them “twins separated at birth.”

Ms. Angelou said there was only one source of frustration: every time she tried to introduce anyone to the magnificent Molly Ivins, she discovered that they were already old friends.

New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin remembered columns that could make you “laugh out loud”: “if a certain Congressman’s IQ dropped any further he’d have to be watered twice a day,” or the one about the Texas gubernatorial candidate who was “so afraid of getting AIDS while visiting San Francisco that when he was in the shower he wore shower caps on her feet.”

Mr. Trillin said her loyalty had “no bounds and no statute of limitations ... Reporters visiting Texas on a political story got from Molly not resentment about intrusion on her turf but a jolly welcome.”

Sitting in the audience, Joe Lelyveld echoed that memory: “She was just so incredibly generous,” said the former executive editor of the Times. “When I was writing a column for the Times magazine, she sent me a letter with the names of fifty people I should meet in Texas.”

Molly was my good friend for more than 30 years. When I moved to Paris a few years ago, Molly happened to be living there for a month. It was right after 9/11, and she insisted on meeting me on the street, outside my new apartment, to help me get five huge suitcases and a bicycle up the stairs. After coffee at a nearby cafe, she issued me one sleeping pill and sent me to bed for six hours. Then I met her on the Ile de la Cité for a magnificent Paris dinner. No one had had a warmer welcome since Americans troops reached the City of Light in 1944.

John Leonard described Ivins’ work as “an amphetamine rush of Rabelais, Mark Twain, Lily Tomlin, Lenny Bruce and Jeremiah - whether she was writing about George Bush, Clarence Thomas, country music or the White Trash Hall of Fame...Politics was the normal respiration of her intelligence. She never stopped being both funny and furious...The most important words she ever wrote were these:

Ivins was a digger and a thinker; she was fearless and selfless, and she was phenomenally focused. There were only three things she cared about: journalism, activism and friendship. And the way she kept the faith made her both a model and a reproach. A model because she lived to afflict the powerful and comfort the powerless; a reproach because she kept on writing and talking and fighting for the causes we had all embraced in the 1960's, long after most us had rechanneled our energies into much more selfish pursuits. “She gave her tired friends the goose to go on after we had abandoned hope,” said Mr. Leonard.

SHE EXCELLED AT THE MOST important test for every pundit: she was right more often about the vital issues of our time than almost any other columnist. This is how she warned against the consequences of a Bush presidency in the introduction to one of her books:

Calvin Trillin recalled Paul Krugman’s a column immediately after Ivins’ death. Mr. Krugman cited these examples of the Texan’s extraordinary prescience:

"So,” Mr. Krugman concluded, “Molly Ivins -- who didn't mingle with the great and famous, didn't have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special expertise on national security or the Middle East -- got almost everything right. Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those credentials do? With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong.”

The most poignant moments were provided by Eden Lipson, a former Times colleague and one of Ivins’ closest friends.

“A few years ago I finally realized that it was us, the cosmopolitan New Yorkers in the media capitol, with our literary and political gossip and hermetic chattering who were, in fact, provincial,” said Ms. Lipson. “ Molly was the one who saw America large and clear, who out-reported the mainstream media from Austin, who had a balanced and ultimately optimistic view of the world. Molly’s generosity was legendary, but in addition, she was brave. She went on book tours two and half times while on chemotherapy.”

Ms. Lipson was also diagnosed with cancer last year. Before it went into remission, Ivins came to visit her at the hospital. This is what she told her friend:

“Understanding mortality is entirely personal and won’t know it until you face it. The cancer will probably kill you in the end, but moving ahead, do as much as you can . . . until you can’t.”

“And then it’s okay to let go.”

In 1964, an Ohio rabbi named Arthur Lelyveld went to Hattiesburg, Miss., and started knocking on doors in black neighborhoods, encouraging people to register to vote. A local white man promptly bashed his head in with a tire iron.

A photograph of the blood-soaked clergyman, a bandage dangling over his mutilated face, flashed around the world as a searing reminder of the color-blind homicidal rage of white supremacy. As James Meredith has pointed out, whites were victims of segregation, too-if they were afraid to act against it, they weren't free. It was the field-execution murder of civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner a few weeks earlier that inspired Lelyveld to journey to Mississippi, and the rabbi recovered from his wounds to give an eloquent oration at Andrew Goodman's funeral.

The rabbi's son Joseph, then a young reporter, went on to become executive editor of The New York Times (1994 to 2001), a Pulitzer Prize winner (for his 1985 book Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White) and now author of Omaha Blues, a spellbinding memoir that explores the collision of memory with reality.

It must be hell for a Timesman to try to write a memoir. There's not really much fresh material to work with. Jack Kennedy dazzled you at a Cape Cod fish fry in 1960, but the crowd was thick and few words were exchanged. Lyndon Johnson screamed pungent oaths at you on the phone one day over a forgotten Vietnam story, but he did that to a dozen other guys in the Times newsroom, a.k.a. journalism's Mount Olympus. You yearned to go to Peking in 1972, but Nixon loathed your bosses for publishing the Pentagon Papers and he gleefully bumped all Times staff off the plane except Max Frankel.

You squeeze out a few pages on Scotty Reston's battles with New York and the baroque psychohistory of the Sulzbergers, stir in some color on your drinking problems and the desperate nightmare that was your first marriage, and, well, what are you left with? The stories behind how you wrote your stories-which aren't, as a rule, remotely as interesting as the stories themselves.

Mercifully, Joseph Lelyveld wastes little time on Times Byzantiniae, choosing instead to write a compact, episodic, intensely personal saga of family fractures and self-discovery. The springboards for the journey are devices that could be borrowed from a magical-realist or Nicholas Sparks novel: "The Deathbed" and "The Box of Letters". As the rabbi lay dying in a hospice, Joseph, now in his 60's, uncovered a collection of letters and personal papers in a trunk his father stashed away in his synagogue basement. They led him on a quest to find witnesses and more documents to try to reconstruct the story of his past, especially his rather desolate childhood.

The idea of conducting a thorough journalistic investigation of your own family is a frightening one. Shake many an American family tree and you'll unleash flocks of skeletons, Willy Lomans and Flem Snopses, scenes of Dickensian melodrama and Gothic horror. Mr. Lelyveld's journey provides several startling episodes, among the most poignant when he reads letters in which his mother confesses in real time what she thinks of him as a little boy, over a half-century earlier. Gradually, he found "it was possible to do a reporting job on your childhood, not to the point of total recall of course, but at least to a point where you could begin to see the cunning and willfulness of the selections of your own personal memory console."

The book focuses on four people: Mr. Lelyveld himself; his parents, ambitious New York intellectuals who met at Columbia University and spent several decades in a mostly doomed attempt at a relationship; and a charismatic family friend named Benjamin Goldstein, also a rabbi, who briefly served as a kind of surrogate uncle or stand-in father for the boy and whose exuberance contrasted with Rabbi Lelyveld's genial detachment. Popping in for a vivid cameo is a family friend, the legendary New York power rabbi Stephen S. Wise.

In 1931, Ben Goldstein took an appointment at Temple Beth Or in Montgomery, Ala., and he soon began orating for justice for the Scottsboro Boys, black men wrongly convicted of raping two white women on a train. Rule No. 1 for white citizens in this time and place (and many others, of course), especially Jews dangling on the fragile edge of the segregation moral fault line, was keep your mouth shut. Likely minimum penalty: You got run out of town on a rail. Maximum: You got yourself killed.

Goldstein kept right on speaking out over the distressed hushes of his fellow Jews, and predictably he was tossed out of Montgomery. His little crusade has a stark symmetry with Rabbi Lelyveld's sacrificial mutilation in Hattiesburg 32 years later as an act of pure moral courage. The nobility of both acts seems quixotic in retrospect only because of the infinitesimal number of other whites who dared act so freely. The vast number of Caucasian Americans in the South and the North-including any number of leaders like F.D.R., Eisenhower and J.F.K.-were delighted to stumble through life as de facto segregationist collaborators, rarely if ever lifting a finger to challenge the national theology of white supremacy.

But Mr. Lelyveld's research reveals that the friendship between the two rabbis was destined for a showdown over another titanic moral debate-the one over Communism. A dispirited Goldstein drifted into, of all things, the business of peddling Soviet propaganda films in Hollywood (now there's a high concept), and along the way he developed, like so many other brainy lefties of the era, a love jones for Joe Stalin. This triggered the opening of Goldstein's F.B.I. file and a confrontation with the elder Lelyveld.

Mother and father were mostly absent from Joseph's childhood, both emotionally and physically. The rabbi traveled the country organizing for Jewish groups, and the mother, Toby, a troubled, ambitious Shakespearean scholar, became so frustrated with her professional ambitions that she abdicated her parental role and bolted back to Columbia University to finish her doctorate and essentially exit the marriage. Young Joseph was shuttled from Omaha, where his father had a congregation, to a Seventh Day Adventist summer camp (also in Nebraska), to the distant, frightening landscape of Brooklyn to stay with his grandparents, eventually landing in P.S. 165 on the Upper West Side. Mr. Lelyveld's sketches of moments from his childhood are striking and lyrical, conjuring a searing portrait of the alienation and confusion of a boy cast adrift.

Memories are strange creatures-they appear uninvited, grab you by the throat, flood your senses and then shoot away in a microsecond, leaving few traces. Mr. Lelyveld explores some intriguing themes: How much do we really remember? Why do we forget? What would happen if we found documentary records or witnesses who could fill in missing pieces of our imagined family narrative? What hidden catastrophes would fly out?

At the bottom of Pandora's mythical box of sorrows were small slices of hope, and Mr. Lelyveld's memory box has some, too: fleeting moments of warmth and connection between his parents, secretly witnessing their stolen kiss on the living-room couch in a small, borrowed penthouse on West 84th Street. "I remember, too," writes Mr. Lelyveld, "my parents doing the samba at the center of a dance floor at a ridiculously extravagant bar mitzvah reception at the Waldorf. All the other dancers stepped back to gape. They couldn't get over the idea that a rabbi and his wife could throw themselves into the samba with such supple, unaffected zest."

Joseph Lelyveld tells his story with a similar kind of energy, and what he gives us is a haunting reflection on memories and why we polish some of them to a sweet golden haze.

William Doyle is author of An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962 (Anchor) and Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton (Kodansha).

That's not to say there weren't surprises and major unanswered questions contained within the Monday, May 21, announcement. Chief among the surprises was the news that Mr. Lelyveld, who turned 64 on April 5, planned to vacate the executive editor's chair this September, long before his 66th birthday in 2003, when Times policy dictates that he retire. Though it had been speculated that Mr. Lelyveld would move on before that date, few expected it would happen this year.

"There was surprise in that no one had known that Joe was going to leave so soon," a Times reporter said.

Mr. Lelyveld did not return Off the Record's calls for comment. But in a memo to the Times staff, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote that Mr. Lelyveld made the decision to retire early around the end of last year. "I spent a few weeks trying to talk him out of it," Mr. Sulzberger wrote, but by early January, a Times sources said, the executive editor and his boss had agreed that Mr. Lelyveld would step down in September.

Shortly before a 4 p.m. meeting Monday in the newsroom, Mr. Lelyveld met with the department heads to tell them of the decision. There, according to people present, Mr. Lelyveld said he was stepping down early so as to quell newsroom speculation about the transition. He told the Los Angeles Times the same thing: "If we didn't have mandatory retirement here, I would probably have wanted to stay another couple of years. But the approaching deadline gets into everybody's thinking, and people start becoming very worried about themselves and their own careers, and it takes the paper's focus off the news."

One Times editor speculated that Mr. Lelyveld simply felt the timing was appropriate. "I think Joe has a lot of pride, and he didn't want anyone thinking that he was hanging around until the last moment of power," the editor said.

Others at The Times , while not contradicting that reasoning, added that Mr. Lelyveld's departure makes sense considering that much of his institutional check-list has been completed. Though downplayed in public, The Times ' shut-out at the 2000 Pulitzers–the paper's first blanking in 14 years–had been seen as an embarrassment for Mr. Lelyveld, though the paper bounced back this year with two Pulitzers.

At the same time, sources said, Mr. Lelyveld may have felt that, internally, he had done as much as he could. It had been no secret that Mr. Lelyveld had been pushing Mr. Keller–a protégé of sorts–as his successor. When it became clear that Mr. Raines would succeed him, there just wasn't another major field left to conquer, they said, and he didn't want to get caught up in the succession intrigue any longer than he had to.

With Mr. Lelyveld set to move on and write books in his home upstate, the big question moves on to Mr. Raines and what his installation means to the future of The Times .

Curiously, Mr. Raines is a longtime Times man who retains something of a mysterious edge within The Times because of his eight-year absence from the news side of the operation. He began with the paper in 1978, after working at several Alabama and Georgia newspapers, and moved around the national-correspondent ranks until he landed in the Washington bureau. After working as the London correspondent for a year beginning in 1987, Mr. Raines became the Washington bureau chief before being tapped by Mr. Sulzberger as editorial-page editor in 1993.

"I think he's very much in the tradition of executive editors in that he's touched all the positions on the cross," said Susan Tifft, who co-wrote The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times with Alex Jones.

"Unlike some other executive editors, [Mr. Raines has] been in the inner circle for several years now," Ms. Tifft said. "He's very much been in training in the last few years. He's probably more prepared to lead than his predecessor."

But naturally, there are concerns. There has long been a faint yet persistent worry–an irrational one, insiders said–that a primarily domestically experienced editor like Mr. Raines might reduce the paper's international coverage, a Times hallmark. There is also the concern that Mr. Raines would seek to develop a star system similar to the one he was accused of cultivating as bureau chief in Washington, where Maureen Dowd rose under his watch. Ms. Tifft said that Mr. Raines has made efforts in recent years to address those concerns; still, some worry lingers that Mr. Raines could be a newsprint Louis B. Mayer.

As for the paper's overall tone, Mr. Raines has long developed a reputation as a clear-headed, occasionally pugilistic reporter and editor, known for his occasionally scathing editorial pages and his unapologetic indifference to journalistic navel-gazing and wonkish hand-wringing on policy issues. But as for whether those qualities would penetrate a Raines-led paper, one highly placed Times source urged restraint.

"Anyone who says they know what is happening, what Howell is going to do, is essentially just spinning, because no one knows," the source said.

Mr. Sulzberger did not formally offer Mr. Raines the job as executive editor until the morning of Friday, May 18. Afterwards, Mr. Keller was called to Mr. Sulzberger's home, where he was told of the decision.

The original plan was to keep this transition under wraps until late June, which would give Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Raines a chance to decide who was going to take over the editorial-page editor's and managing editor's positions–to date, unanswered questions both–as well as what Mr. Keller would do. Though Mr. Keller will continue as managing editor until Mr. Lelyveld steps down, traditionally the executive editor appoints his own managing editor, who serves as his deputy.

But there was a change of plan, and the announcement was rushed forward just a couple of days after Mr. Sulzberger had made up his own mind. Sources at The Times said that the announcement was made quickly because the news of Mr. Raines' appointment began to spread among the staff. At the Monday staff meeting, Mr. Lelyveld noted the fear of "leaks" getting out before the paper made it official, sources said.

The Times was right to worry. Several sources said that word was already out about Mr. Raines' selection at the Washington bureau. And Saturday in Brooklyn, at a going-away party for Times investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald–who is moving to Dallas but staying in his job–one Times staffer announced to the attendees that an announcement was coming on Monday naming Mr. Raines as executive editor, Mr. Eichenwald said.

On the other hand, The Times has managed to keep secrets in the past. In their book, Ms. Tifft and Mr. Jones wrote that Mr. Sulzberger first offered Mr. Lelyveld the executive editor's job during a walk in the snow in January 1994. The announcement that Mr. Lelyveld would succeed outgoing executive editor Max Frankel didn't come until April of that year. This time, it is clear, the paper couldn't keep the big switch so quiet.

It was getting late on the night of Friday, May 18, and The New Yorker 's literary editor, Bill Buford, was munching on roast beef as a high-calorie buffet of writers, including Norman Mailer, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Dave Eggers, milled about in his living room.

For the second year in a row, Mr. Buford had offered to host a party to kick off the weekend-long New Yorker Festival, even though his two-bedroom Gramercy Park apartment was, at least by Manhattan standards, a bit cramped. In preparation for the evening, Mr. Buford had packed up all of his furniture–save for a mattress, which he stowed in a hallway–and shuttled it out in order to make room for what he called "the greatest concentration of writers of fiction in the English language."

"Most of the cleaning-up was looking for manuscripts," Mr. Buford admitted, picking at a salad. Earlier in the day, in fact, Mr. Buford said that he'd found a five-book proposal by Mr. Rushdie lying amid the clutter.

The crowded feast in Mr. Buford's apartment, of course, was just a prelude to the jam-packed a-go-go to follow. The second New Yorker Festival sold out all 53 of its events to 15,000 people, who paid $15 to $85 for the chance to see famous novelists, along with New Yorker regulars like Adam Gopnik, Malcolm Gladwell and Roz Chast, hold forth. There was something almost Britney Spears-giddy about this public crescendo of reader devotion. Mr. Buford heaped praise upon the Festival's maestro, The New Yorker 's director of special projects, Rhonda Sherman.

"Rhonda's premise, which is sound, is if you can persuade the best serious writers all over the world to come to one event–plus just a little glamour–then you will create serious buzz," Mr. Buford said.

Tonight, said glamour and buzz was supplied not just by the roster of high-profile pens crammed into Mr. Buford's home, but also by the likes of Mr. Rushdie's writer, model and actress girlfriend, Padma Lakshmi (much of whom can be currently seen in the "Hollywood Starlets" pictorial supplement of the British magazine Arena ) and by the actor Steve Martin, he of the recent novel Shop Girl .

What did New Yorker editor David Remnick think of this starry weekend? "If you're asking me why this happened, I couldn't answer with absolute accuracy," Mr. Remnick said near the elevator. "All I could do is speculate. Obviously, there's a hunger for it."

Steve Wasserman, the books editor of the Los Angeles Times, was also on his way out with his girlfriend.

Mr. Remnick asked Mr. Wasserman, "They just had a book festival in Los Angeles that drew how many people?"

"One hundred and twenty thousand," Mr. Wasserman said. "And this is the land, it is thought, where people are more devoted to the cult of the body than the life of the mind."

"And they weren't all books about breast implants," Mr. Remnick said.

The elevator opened, with four new arrivals standing inside.

"Even if you're here just to crash," Mr. Remnick said, welcoming them, "Buford has booze–everything!"

Times sportswriter Buster Olney is apparently on a first-name basis with budding Seattle Mariners star Ichiro Suzuki. Covering the May 20 Yankees-Mariners game in a piece that appeared on May 21, Mr. Olney wrote, "Clemens retired Ichiro Suzuki leading off the game, mixing a couple of inside fastballs that spun Ichiro away from the plate …"

Hey, and remember the time that Roger threw a broken bat at Mike? Well, it's not exactly like that. As Mr. Olney explained in a different article published on the same day, the idiosyncratic Mr. Suzuki–who recently arrived in the major leagues from Japan–"is known by his first name." In fact, Mr. Suzuki went so far as to request that ICHIRO, not SUZUKI, be printed on the back of his Mariners jersey.

Still, Ichiro isn't Cher yet; for now, at least, the guy's got a last name. Is this the end of formality at The Times ? Toby Usnik, a spokesman for the paper, said: "It was an anomaly. It was one reporter's treatment for that day." In fact, Mr. Olney himself, writing on May 20, called Mr. Suzuki "Suzuki." So does Sam Howe Verhovek, The Times' Seattle bureau chief.

Mr. Usnik said that in the case of Mr. Olney's "Ichiro" articles, The Times ' copy department reviewed the matter and decided that Mr. Suzuki was entitled to whatever title he liked. Sort of. "The reporter noted that Suzuki–excuse me, Ichiro–likes to go by his first name," he said. But, he went on, "our practice with Ichiro Suzuki is to use 'Suzuki.'"

–Ian Blecher

But within The New York Times , many staff members interviewed said that the field has been narrowed to one. The general feeling on the paper is that the executive editor's job is Mr. Raines' to lose.

"There is a consensus that seems to be growing that it's going to be Howell," said one high-level Times staff member, who added: "I would be very surprised if it wasn't Howell. Some days I think he expects to be editor, and anybody who knows Howell knows he wants the job and thinks he deserves it."

Internally and psychologically, the staff of The New York Times is preparing to answer to Mr. Raines. "It's hard to imagine Howell not getting it," said another Times staff member.

Neither Mr. Lelyveld nor Mr. Raines returned Off the Record's calls for comment. For his part, Mr. Keller wasn't interested in addressing the succession issue. "Nice try," he said.

In the end, he choice of the next executive editor belongs solely to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and there is no indication that Mr. Sulzberger has made a decision. "Joeis63,"aspokeswomanforMr. Sulzberger told The Observer. "He can retire any time he wants before he turns 66. Aren't you getting ahead of yourself?"

Not really, considering how The New York Times reports on men and women in Washington and Albany and New York City battling for newsworthy positions. The executive editor of The Times has more influence on news coverage, and sometimes public policy, than any other news executive in the United States. The succession is considered far in advance; the saga of A.M. Rosenthal's retirement lasted for years. And when Mr. Lelyveld's predecessor, Max Frankel, decided he was going to retire, Mr. Sulzberger asked Mr. Lelyveld to be the executive editor seven months before Mr. Frankel stepped down in July 1994.

It is unclear exactly when the transfer of power will occur–the announcement is usually posted suddenly, without warning. Mr. Lelyveld does turn 65 in April 2002, but there is precedent at The Times for staying a bit longer, and he could possibly remain executive editor through the end of the calendar year.

The most common factor cited in Mr. Raines' favor is simply the age difference between him and Mr. Keller. There's a recent tendency at The Times to avoid having an executive editor serve as long as Mr. Rosenthal, who ruled from 1969 to 1986. Since The Times has a mandatory retirement policy, the 58-year-old Mr. Raines would hold the top post for about six years, versus the 12 years the 52-year-old Mr. Keller would have.

Mr. Lelyveld stepped up to bat in 1994.

"After Abe's long rule, they only wanted someone who would stay in the job seven or eight years, so Keller is the wrong age," said one Times staffer.

But more important, ultimately, is the close relationship between Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Raines, several sources at the paper said.

"Howell, I think, gets along with Arthur very well," said one Times staff member. "There seems to be a chemistry there that you don't see with Joe and Bill."

"People do notice that Howell seems to be on the same wavelength with Arthur," said another source, "which is expected, because the publisher does confer with the editorial editor about the editorial board."

At least some of the mutual affection between Mr. Raines and Mr. Sulzberger may be culturally based. Mr. Raines came up on the political track at The Times , helming the Washington bureau before he took his current job. Mr. Sulzberger also did a stint in the Washington bureau. The Southern charms of the Birmingham, Ala.-born Mr. Raines may also have worked to his advantage. "There is a long history of the Sulzberger family's fascination with Southerners," said one source.

The wacky, sometimes overheated speculation over editorial succession at The Times was in evidence following a recent party that Mr. Keller gave at his home in honor of Michael Oreskes, the former Washington bureau chief recently named assistant managing editor in charge of developing television projects for the paper.

The entire Times politburo showed up at Mr. Keller's Upper West Side apartment: Mr. Sulzberger, his wife Gail, Mr. Lelyveld and Mr. Raines. Some who attended took the choice of Mr. Keller as the party's host as a signal that he was being tested in the role of Times figurehead.

In toasting Mr. Oreskes, attendees said, Mr. Keller poked fun at television news– a gibe that was not exactly out of character for the managing editor, whom one attendee described as "legendary for off-key toasts." Although Mr. Keller declined to be interviewed for this story, the managing editor did say he wasn't making fun of TV at the party for Mr. Oreskes. But The Times ' internal speculators immediately saw it as evidence that Mr. Keller was out of sync with Mr. Sulzberger's aggressive plans for turning The Times into a multimedia news organization, with television projects as a prime assault weapon.

Another impediment for Mr. Keller's hopes, some Times sources said, is his indelicate handling of delicate situations. For instance, when The Times published its Editor's Note last September acknowledging problems in its coverage of Los Alamos spy suspect Wen Ho Lee–in which Mr. Keller had some responsibility–it included the following prickly line: "In those instances where we fell short of our standards in our coverage of this story, the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred to us only later."

Some read that as hanging the blame for the fiasco on Steve Engelberg, the editor in charge of the Wen Ho Lee stories. The immediate feeling at The Times, accurate or not, was that Mr. Keller was not adequately protecting one of his editors. To dispel that notion, Mr. Keller sent out a staff memo saying, "Joe and I have tried to make clear in meetings with staff what seemed obvious to us: that the paragraph referred to ourselves," and that Mr. Engelberg was not "the scapegoat for the shortcomings we acknowledged."

Taking Sides

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for his work in Russia in 1989, Mr. Keller would appear to be a natural heir apparent. His résumé at The Times has a lot in common with Mr. Lelyveld's. While Mr. Keller worked for several other papers before being hired by The Times in 1984, he was soon on the foreign-correspondent track, in Moscow and–like Mr. Lelyveld–Johannesburg, South Africa. Also like Mr. Lelyveld, Mr. Keller was named foreign editor after his stint as a correspondent. He was promoted to managing editor when Gene Roberts, Mr. Lelyveld's first managing editor, retired.

Traditionally, the Times power structure has broken between those who were brought up through the foreign desk, like Mr. Lelyveld and Mr. Keller, and those who came up through the national desk and the Washington bureau, like Mr. Raines, whose Pulitzer Prize was domestic and regional–a Times Magazine memoir, "Grady's Gift," about race relations in the South. He came up through newspapers in St. Petersburg, Fla., Birmingham and Atlanta. With the exception of a year as London bureau chief in 1987, his defining position at the paper–consistent with the territory he still administers with authority and humor–was running the Washington bureau , which is the white-hot center of the current New York Times .

Especially in recent years, The Times ' dominance over politics and national affairs –propelled in no small part by Mr. Raines and his stinging editorial-page criticism of the Clinton administration–has driven the paper. Recently–and certainly during the Clinton years–international news has taken a back seat, and so have Mr. Keller's chances to achieve dominance.

Much has been made of the fact that Mr. Raines was sent off to an executive-management course at Dartmouth during the summer of 1999. Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, the authors of The Trust , a history of the Ochs and Sulzberger families, wrote in The New Yorker : "When Lelyveld heard about that sabbatical, he sought–and got–assurances from Arthur that this did not indicate that a decision about the succession had been reached."

Whatever sending top editors to mini-M.B.A. courses indicates, last summer Mr. Keller got packed off to a course at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

"That made people go, ' Hmmm ,'" said one Times editor.

Consensus or not, sources at The Times say that Mr. Lelyveld still favors Mr. Keller as his next executive editor. "Joe is still absolutely determined to make Bill his successor," said one Times staff member. Last May, Mr. Lelyveld went on Charlie Rose's PBS interview program for a rare interview and addressed the succession issue.

"There are two conspicuous people, each highly ready to take over the paper, each of whom would do a first-class job," Mr. Lelyveld said. Mr. Sulzberger, he added, "has got an embarrassment of riches. There are even others who could easily be imagined stepping into the job. It won't be an easy choice...."

"So, there's an embarrassment of riches in terms of having people you could choose," Mr. Rose began, "either whether it's Howell Raines or whether it's Bill Keller or whether it is someone else?"

"Right," Mr. Lelyveld said, nodding. And Mr. Rose may have gotten the order exactly right, as the staff of The New York Times currently experiences it: Mr. Raines.

Or Mr. Keller. Or someone else.

Yet that certain je ne sais quoi that makes Public Lives a compelling, if avowedly quizzical, must-read Tuesday through Friday lies primarily in the window it provides into The Times ' on-going identity crisis. That and the strange enjoyment media mavens get out of scratching their heads and exclaiming, "Why'd they print that ?"

Mr. Lelyveld attests that he's "extremely happy" with Public Lives, an idea he willed into existence against much institutional resistance, including a bit of reluctance on the part of his Metro editor, Joyce Purnick, who took over the section in the middle of the column's gestation period. "I ran into Ben Bradlee and told him what we were doing," said Mr. Lelyveld. "And I said, we're not going to do gossip. He said, 'Yeah, yeah, that's what we said, too.' And we haven't yet."

To the readers of such curious little stories as the Dec. 15 tale of Miramax Films executive Tina Brown seeing one of her new boss' films, Shakespeare in Love , for the third time, this could be the problem. As Ms. Purnick, the current overseer of Public Lives, explained rather sternly: "Whether it runs on the front page or the editorial page, it has to conform to our standards. The same level of heavy reporting, no reliance on rumor, no floating of half-baked stories."

Which leaves some embarrassed Times editors grousing that what you're left with is "basically a contradiction in terms": a non-gossip gossip column that was designed to stay hip with what the readers want but which, when milled through the institutional intransigence of the paper, ends up more or less canceling itself out.

"There's a lot of things that happen at night," noted one Times man. "We're a staff of middle-aged people who go home at 6:30 after putting the nice paper to bed. The idea was to send people out at night, but it's very hard to find people here to do it." Ultimately, the editor added, it leads to "feeding from handouts from publicists."

The press agents don't mind that at all. "There's nothing I wouldn't give to Public Lives. It's The New York Times !" declared publicist Nadine Johnson. Of course, even if she does give it to them, they don't always print it, which explains why the brunt of Ms. Johnson's juicy bits end up in the New York Post 's Page Six–edited, as it happens, by her husband Richard.

Mr. Lelyveld decided The Times needed a new gossip column about two years ago. The idea was born out of the feeling that with a new stand-alone sports section, it would be harder to sell ads deep in Metro. "There was a feeling that Metro was too much government and crime and politics," said Mr. Lelyveld. Plus, "there was a feeling that we had never made as much of an effort on Chronicle as we ought to."

So, at the start of 1997, Metro writers Bruce Weber and Frank Bruni were dispatched to put together a prototype. "The marching orders were vague," said one person familiar with that incarnation. The project attracted the attention of New York magazine's Intelligencer gossips, who quoted a Times source saying, "A lot of writers at the paper feel it's beneath them." Perhaps with good reason. New York attributed Mr. Weber's on-the-record quotes to Mr. Bruni and had to run a correction.

The whole thing was put in turnaround for a couple months after that. Then in the spring of 1997, it re-emerged, with then-Metro editor Michael Oreskes leading the charge and Times magazine editor Adam Moss advising. "It was an effort to create a really rich Metro section that made you feel like you were dining on all of New York," said Mr. Oreskes, who admits to being a closet reader of People magazine.

To that end, Mr. Oreskes decided it was time to Meet the Gossips. "We were trying to understand what people were doing, what might be right for us to do," he said. "I think we were also giving serious thought to who we wanted to do it." Mr. Oreskes had breakfast or lunch with just about every one of them, including the Daily News ' George Rush and Joanna Molloy, MSNBC's Jeannette Walls, New York 's Beth Landman Keil, The Observer 's Frank DiGiacomo and former Washington Post Reliable Source columnist Lois Romano.

The Times seemed "very trepidatious about the idea of doing any kind of unsubstantiated quotes or sources," said one gossip. "They asked me what I thought of Matt Drudge. I said that The New York Times used unattributed sources all the time on the front page … They're so used to being spoon-fed information they don't know how to do unauthorized news there."

"It was very interesting listening to what they think about that kind of journalism," said Mr. Oreskes of his gossip dates. "Each of them had their own views on how they operated" in terms of "sourcing, standards, pejorative unattributed sources and pejorative tone."

Mr. Rush had breakfast with Mr. Oreskes at the Millennium Hotel that summer. "I think that Michael was running up against some resistance wondering if it belonged in the paper," he said. "He acknowledged that some people feel that The Times couldn't keep up its standards on the column."

"You can't abandon your standards in order to do things like this or it will become an embarrassment," Mr. Oreskes acknowledged.

Faced with these concerns, at least two of the columnists said they told Mr. Oreskes and Mr. Lelyveld that they didn't think The Times could do it. But Mr. Lelyveld wasn't about to be dissuaded. "He didn't like the idea that there was something The Times couldn't do," said one Times editor. "So he persevered."

The problem was, Mr. Oreskes was named Washington bureau chief, so he wouldn't be there to help Mr. Lelyveld with the birth. "I would have liked to have seen it though," he said. But that was left to his successor, Ms. Purnick. Shortly thereafter, according to Times sources, the project stalled. Again.

Ms. Purnick cops to being only a "casual reader of gossip." "I don't have a lot of patience for it," she said. "I used to work for the New York Post –even after [Rupert] Murdoch was there. I know what goes into Page Six. Plus, a lot of the people that gossip columns write about I don't much care for."

The pro-gossip crew had to regroup. The column eventually debuted with a rotating staff of three profilers–Metro feature reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, Joyce Wadler and David Firestone (who is leaving this month to join the Atlanta bureau)–and James Barron, a career-long Times man who had worked for the Styles section, on item duty. "It made sense to hire someone who had worked at The Times for a while and knew our ethic," said Ms. Purnick. (Mr. Barron did not return calls for an interview.)

However laudable that ethic, Public Lives' launch on Jan. 6, 1998, was not necessarily auspicious. There was a kids-say-the-darndest-things item on local labor leader Victor Gotbaum's 5-year-old granddaughter's eventual plans for higher office; the dual defection of Mark Golin and Catherine Romano from Cosmopolitan to Maxim (complete with a meticulous, two-sentence explanation of the chess term "castling," which Mr. Golin had used to describe their move); and a vague item about Felix Rohatyn's wife, Elizabeth, being "back in New York for medical reasons."

P.R. types were soon flocking to the column. On June 11, Bulldog Reporter , a newsletter for flacks, gushed: "If your client plays a role in a major news event but is too far behind the scenes to be the focus of a story, you won't find a better placement opportunity than on The New York Times ' Public Lives Page."

A year on, the city's gossips leaven their envy of The Times with contempt for the page. "I have to force myself to read it," said one. "I haven't really felt scooped that many times," said another. Neal Travis has described it as "insipid" in his Post column and Mr. Rush noted, "Even The Times is doing these flack-generated items that you'd think was beneath them."

It's not all bad. Mr. Barron gets some help from those reporters on staff who stumble upon stories when they do go out, and the column has been the site for several small news breaks. But in the end, it doesn't seem that different from the old Chronicle column. (Indeed, when asked about the difference between the two, Nadine Brozan, who wrote Chronicle for six years and now is on the religion beat, told Off the Record, "If you get the answer to that, I'd love to know it.")

However, it has its fans. "I think it's terrific," said publicist Bobby Zarem. "Everybody in the world mentions seeing it. It's widely read and important." And even inside the paper there's a feeling that the mini-profiles are a success–so much so that the format is going to be expanded to the National section on Mondays (without the frill of small items).

Still, for all the wry placements in the column, publicists don't seem to have much respect for it. "There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it," said one. "They can't capture the hyperbole of an event," said another. "They're more interested in the boldfaced names."

According to the calculations made in the Observer 500 list, an interesting selection of boldfaced names popped up in Public Lives: such non-notable celebrities as WABC anchor Bill Beutel, Steve Kroft, Dominick Dunne, Nina Griscom and Plácido Domingo made Public Lives' Top 10 list this year. Also popular: Robert De Niro, Rosie O'Donnell, Donald Trump and Nancy Reagan.

And so it's come to this. Publicists disrespect it by using it as a dumping ground, Times reporters and editors are hamstrung in their ability to report gossip by the paper's own ethical standards, and readers with enquiring minds are left to cock an eyebrow and periodically snort. Still, the powers that be don't seem to mind. As one Times source put it, "The expectations were low, so everyone thinks it's a smashing success."

Which isn't such a surprise when you consider how the column is perceived by its own custodian, Ms. Purnick. "The whole celebrity culture eludes me, so why should I read about it?" she states. "There. I've given you the perfect New York Times response."

When she arrives as editor of The Hollywood Reporter on Jan. 18, Anita Busch will finally be in a position to wreak revenge on her ex-employer, Variety . Ms. Busch left Variety in high dudgeon in September 1997 after a dispute with editor Peter Bart over a correction he ran regarding one of her stories. The thing is, she used to work at the Reporter , too, and loudly quit there to jump to Variety three years before in a dispute with another reporter. And in September, she loudly quit Entertainment Weekly after yet another editorial dispute.

Ms. Busch is regarded as one of the most dogged and skilled reporters on the film business beat, but by all accounts she is not an easygoing woman. "It wasn't the right fit for either of us at Entertainment Weekly ," she said. (James Seymore, EW 's managing editor, wouldn't comment.) "The way I was trained, my experience is in breaking news … It's great to be back in the breaking news business."

Her dislike for Mr. Bart, her former boss at Variety , is well known in the industry, as is her feeling that he plays favorites in the business and goes soft on people. "Peter likes to break stories, but if you're writing about Sony today, then you have to talk to them again next week," explained Dan Cox, Variety 's film editor. "It's not that we're sucking up to them." Mr. Cox added that newly heated competition with The Reporter would probably reduce Variety 's ability to hold certain items, like news of a pending deal, in exchange for an exclusive. Mr. Bart tried to remain diplomatic. "It'll be good, hopefully, to have some competition," he said. "I wish her the best. She's a good reporter." But he's perfectly capable of casting aspersions on her departure from Variety . "Whether she quit or was asked to leave, being a gentleman I won't comment on that," he said.

Ms. Busch's fiery reputation precedes her, of course. "Manage other people?" asked one Tinseltown journalist who has worked with her, "She can't manage herself." In anticipation of her arrival, Hollywood Reporter publisher and editor in chief Robert Dowling reorganized the staff so that there was a layer of management upon which she can stand and conceptualize. "I've always wanted her back here," he said.

The saga began in early 1997, when Mr. Mollenkamp was covering the tobacco story out of Bloomberg's Atlanta bureau, with Mr. Menn working out of Princeton, N.J., as his editor on the national desk. Both men worked with Bloomberg's Atlanta bureau chief, Mr. Levy, who in turn reported to Mr. Rothfeder, who was also in Princeton. After months of chasing the tobacco story, Mr. Mollenkamp hit upon a huge scoop: Major tobacco companies such as RJR Nabisco Inc. and Philip Morris Companies were engaged in settlement talks with several state attorneys general. After an edit from Mr. Menn and Mr. Levy, Mr. Mollenkamp's story hit the Bloomberg wires on Feb. 17, 1997. It was big news: National newspapers ran with it, and the next day, on word of the settlement talks, tobacco companies' stock prices shot up.

Mr. Menn, a former reporter, was so intrigued by the unfolding tobacco story that he gave up editing to help Mr. Mollenkamp chase news. Over the next few months, the duo, with Mr. Levy as their editor, kept Bloomberg out in front on tobacco industry coverage. Then, in June, the reporters had an idea: Why not blow up their wire stories into book form? Mr. Levy got on board, and together the team pitched the book project to their boss, Mr. Rothfeder, who gave the thumbs up. Bloomberg had a newly formed publishing arm, Bloomberg Press, set up to do just this sort of thing, and editors there thought the book would make a perfect quickie paperback. According to Bloomberg sources, the reporters were told that Bloomberg couldn't guarantee they'd be paid for The People vs. Big Tobacco but that work on the book might pay off later on, when raises were doled out. They were given four weeks to turn in a rough draft.

Working weekends and forgoing sleep, the team met its deadline. They then spent the fall revising the manuscript, with occasional input from Mr. Rothfeder, and over time, The People vs. Big Tobacco took shape as a plotted business thriller, worthy of hardcover.

It was during the late stages of the editing process, sources close to the project say, that Mr. Rothfeder broke the news that his name would also appear on the cover of the book as a "co-author." Those same sources put his contribution at about 10 percent of the total labor on the project. But Mr. Rothfeder had written books before, notably on computerization in the office in Privacy for Sale , and the publicity-minded people at Bloomberg thought his experience might help sales. Bloomberg sources say that Mr. Rothfeder agreed to list his name last, and that the reporters were assured they'd get to do most of the publicity. When it came time to shoot the author photo, the four men posed together.

The People vs. Big Tobacco was published on Jan. 26 to positive reviews. The Orlando Sentinel called it a "gripping read," and it was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review , The Economist and Business Week . Bloomberg even hired an outside publicity firm to promote the book. But soon, to the dismay of Messrs. Mollenkamp, Levy and Menn, colleagues say, Mr. Rothfeder assumed the position of sole spokesman. "You have four guys. They're not going to put us all on the air at the same time, so who do you pick?" Mr. Rothfeder explained. "The decision was to pick the senior man."

When word got back to the reporters that Mr. Rothfeder was telling his colleagues that he wrote the book from his underlings' notes, sources in the company said the reporters felt shafted. (Mr. Rothfeder could not be reached for comment by press time.) Incensed by the rumor, Bloomberg colleagues said, Mr. Mollenkamp quit the company for a job at The Wall Street Journal just as the book was preparing to ship. (Mr. Mollenkamp declined to comment.) Mr. Menn also had himself transferred to the San Francisco bureau, sources added, a continent away from Mr. Rothfeder's big foot.

Since the book came out, Mr. Rothfeder has kept a high profile, giving interviews to National Public Radio, Pacifica Network Radio and local television. And he was the only one of the "co-authors" to be interviewed by Bloomberg's radio and television networks.

Mr. Menn and Mr. Mollenkamp refused to discuss the way the book has been handled. Their editor and co-author, Mr. Levy, would only say, "In any collaborative effort there are bound to be conflicting views of self-importance."

Mr. Rothfeder, however, was more than willing to talk. He explained the unusual situation this way: "The culture at Bloomberg is, we're all one team and whatever we do we do for the good of the company. It's a different concept, but to me it's a much better concept.…The company pays us handsomely to work very, very hard … When our annual raises come up–and I'm responsible for their raises–that is being taken into account, and they're getting a little bit more of a raise because they published a book."

Based on the calculations of one prominent Manhattan literary agent, the Bloomberg tobacco squad should get more than a "little bit more of a raise." After doing the math on the book, which sells for $23.95, and including a conservative estimate for the paperback rights, the agent said that on the open market, The People vs. Big Tobacco "would have earned an advance of around $200,000." Indeed, the scuttlebutt at Bloomberg is that Mr. Menn and Mr. Levy have received that little raise. Mr. Mollenkamp, staff members say, is not cooperating with the publicity for the book.

When asked why Messrs. Mollenkamp, Levy and Menn did not get paid more for writing The People vs. Big Tobacco , Michael Bloomberg, chairman and chief executive of the company, said, "They get paid every month." Writing the book, he said, was "just part of their job."

Amid the fish tanks and snack machines in the Bloomberg offices, the book deal has staff members "outraged," according to one reporter. "Everyone thinks it's a raw deal," the reporter said. "If you want to do a book, you should probably quit your job."

The competitive pressures brought on by the Monica Lewinsky scandal recently resulted in a breakdown of civility between The New York Times and The Washington Post .

For years, The Times and The Post have had a working agreement to inform each other about what stories they'd be running on the next day's front pages. The papers would fax their front-page lineups to each other just after 10 P.M. every night, giving themselves plenty of time to match and, of course, give credit for any "'Holy shit!' stories," as one Times veteran put it. The papers once stationed runners in each other's lobbies to do the job and implemented the fax treaty, according to Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, because it "saves taxi fare."

The fax arrangement most often helps the papers match each other's obituary pages, reporters said, but occasionally it affects a big story. When The Times broke the news of Betty Currie's testimony, for example, Post reporters, working off the tip from the nightly fax, put together their own version of the story, which painted Ms. Currie as a reluctant witness.

However, the peace didn't hold during the short, scoop-driven news cycles of Zippergate. "The [ Post ] faxes started arriving later and later," said one Times insider. Soon, the papers came to a fax standoff.

"By the time their fax was coming, our paper was ready," said Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. "So someone here decided we'll hold on to our fax until we get their fax."

"As we got into this very competitive situation," said Mr. Lelyveld, "the thing broke down."

Part of the problem is that The Times , which until recently printed its Washington editions in New York and trucked them to Washington by the next morning, now prints its Washington papers in Springfield, Va. The new arrangement buys the paper a few extra hours of reporting time to compete with the locally printed Post on breaking stories.

The fax standoff lasted two days before a summit was called. Mr. Lelyveld and Post managing editor Robert Kaiser had a phone conference and "renegotiated" the agreement, according to Mr. Lelyveld. The terms? "We make the fax available, and they make the fax available," Mr. Lelyveld said.