On a quiet evening in late January, Doyle McManus, the Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, was straightening some papers and preparing to go home when Times reporter David Willman appeared at his door. Willman had spent the afternoon chasing rumors about a new inquiry by Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr. But no leads had panned out, and Willman decided to leave for the day. His trench coat was already on when he got a call back with the news: Starr had received approval from the Justice Department to investigate charges that the president of the United States had a sexual relationship with a White House intern and pressured her to cover it up. Willman rushed to McManus’s office. “I think we have a problem,” he said.
No small problem, McManus quickly realized. “This could be an atomic bomb,” he told an editor in a phone call to Los Angeles that night. McManus, ’74, who has written about Washington politics for 15 years, guided the coverage of what was about to become one of the biggest stories of the Clinton presidency. At around 9 p.m., he and Times night news editor Vicki Kemper conferred about how the paper should treat the story. McManus was troubled by some aspects – in particular, whether the Times should identify the intern, Monica Lewinsky, by name. “We didn’t know whether she was underage,” he says, “or whether she had been a victim in some way.” After foraging through rulebooks to parse the Times’s policies on such matters, McManus decided that the article would not name her. He left the office at 10 and called back from a cab to check developments. By then, Lewinsky’s lawyer had appeared on television using her name, and McManus agreed that the paper should now use it, too.
When McManus arrived in Bethesda, Md., where he lives with his wife and two daughters, he called up the finished article on his computer and then stayed on the phone with editors in L.A. until 1 a.m. “We were deliberately being careful and conservative about how we framed the story,” he says. “There was no reference to sex in the first several paragraphs. At the same time, I wanted the editors to read far enough to realize the potential impact of the story – that there were potential impeachment issues involved.” A few hours later, the presses rolled, and the Times had its scoop.
It was the latest coup for McManus and the Times’s D.C. staff of 36 reporters, the second-largest bureau in Washington. Appointed in 1996, McManus assigns articles, plans the bureau’s coverage – and writes his own pieces when he can. Under McManus, the paper last year won the George Polk Award and the Goldsmith Prize for its reporting on campaign finance abuses. Brookings Institution media critic Steve Hess has ranked the L.A. Times and Wall Street Journal bureaus the best in Washington.
Outside the office, McManus is a familiar voice and face to anyone who follows the talking head circuit. He provides political commentary for National Public Radio and is a regular panelist on PBS’s Washington Week in Review. His style – sober, understated – stands out amid the cacophony of Washington’s chattering class. “Doyle has the rare ability to sit back and just analyze clearly what’s happening,” says Jane Mayer, who coauthored with McManus a bestselling book on the Reagan presidency, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988. “He has a very sophisticated understanding of politics – he can see the chess game being played in a way that others don’t see as quickly.”
McManus, 45, got turned on to journalism as a freshman reporter at the Stanford Daily in 1970. The debate over the Vietnam War was raging in the press; Watergate burst open during his senior year. “It was enough to persuade me that doing quality journalism in America is a public good of the highest order,” he says.
After a Fulbright Scholarship in Brussels, McManus joined United Press International as a Brussels-based correspondent. He jumped to the Times in 1978 to be a general assignment city reporter and, in 1983, landed a spot in the Washington bureau, writing about foreign policy and the State Department. By 1994, he had covered wars in the Middle East and Asia, a revolution in Russia, and reported from more than 60 countries around the world. When Jack Nelson, the legendary Washington bureau chief for the Times, retired in 1996, McManus was tapped for the job. “I looked upon him as my successor even before I stepped down,” Nelson says. “He is extremely popular with the staff, in Washington and Los Angeles.”
McManus, like much of the Washington journalism establishment, has been preoccupied with the Lewinsky story since it broke. It’s prodded him to think about the role and ethics of the press. He concludes that his paper has, for the most part, made good decisions. “Yes, mistakes were made,” he says. “But the instances where quality newspapers printed stories that weren’t true – or stories that were true but on balance they wished they hadn’t printed – probably number fewer than a dozen.” The media’s devotion to Interngate may have outpaced the country’s interest in it, but McManus says that’s no excuse to abandon the story. “Our responsibility is to find as much truth as we can and put it out there, whether the issue itself is popular or not. I would much rather we publish too much than publish too little.”
Still, McManus does admit to some professional queasiness over the story. “There was a kind of paradox at work,” he says, scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad during an interview in his downtown D.C. office. “There was the thrill of the hunt, yes, but also the distress of stepping into uncharted territory. . . . We were ripping through firewalls at two-hour intervals.” In the early days of the scandal, he recalls, a veteran Times reporter told him that he had seen the term “oral sex” appear on the front page only twice in his career. “Once was tonight,” the reporter said, “and the other was last night.”
McManus looks forward to life after Monica. He’s working on a series of pieces on how economic globalization is changing U.S. politics. But he acknowledges that Washington-based news is becoming increasingly irrelevant to many Americans – and that as a result editors in Los Angeles may be less receptive to Beltway stories. Still, McManus isn’t ready to move back to Palo Alto just yet. “We’re now in an age of decentralization, which means that the central government is less central,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s trivial.”
McManus pauses to look out his 11th-floor window. It’s a view of, well, the U.S. central government. “If you wanted a vantage point, a listening post, a perch to try and figure out what’s going to happen,” he says, “this is a pretty good one.”
Romesh Ratnesar, ’96, is a writer-reporter for Time in New York.
