Close Enough to Call Back

In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum of The Times, for which he is curator.

There is a lot of drama in a new history of The New York Times, “The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn and the Transformation of Journalism,” by Adam Nagourney, a Times correspondent. Among the most anxious episodes was election night in 2000, which Mr. Nagourney called “a blur of changing headlines and stories rewritten in the space of minutes.”

The executive editor, Joseph Lelyveld, ordered two press stops: the first to declare George W. Bush the winner over Al Gore, the second to acknowledge that the race was too close to call. (The election effectively ended in Mr. Bush’s favor on Dec. 12, when the Supreme Court halted a recount of votes in Florida.)

Given the hairbreadth nature of the contest, the correspondent Richard L. Berke prepared several versions of the main election-night article. A “bells-and-whistles” version said flatly that Mr. Bush had been elected.

Mr. Berke, who is now the executive editor of Stat, a science and medical news website, was sequestered that night in an office away from the newsroom clamor. Shortly after 2 a.m., when it appeared that Florida was in the Bush column, he was instructed by his editor to file the “bells-and-whistles” version. He did. The edition went to press with the headline, “Bush Appears to Defeat Gore.”

Then Mr. Bush’s lead evaporated. “Joe ducked into the office,” Mr. Berke recalled in an interview last month. “He said, calmly, ‘I guess we have to stop the presses.’” The revised and final edition of the night carried what Mr. Nagourney called the “unsatisfying” headline, “Bush and Gore Vie for an Edge.”

Fortunately, no paper with the premature headline reached a newsstand or home-delivery customer. “With all that was going on that night, we were cautious in moving any copies,” Michael J. Connors, the managing director of production, said in an email last month. Bundles that had been loaded on delivery trucks at The Times’s printing plants in College Point, Queens, and Edison, N.J., were taken off and recycled.

A couple of hundred copies had been rapidly dispatched to The Times’s newsroom in Midtown Manhattan. Even these were recalled and recycled. “I saw big carts go down the aisle with stacks of the ‘bells-and-whistles’ version wrapped tightly in plastic,” Mr. Berke said.

Not every copy disappeared in the sweep, however. Posterity-minded souvenir hunters in the newsroom squirreled away a few papers from that short-lived edition. One was eventually donated to the Museum at The Times, where it is on exhibit. It’s only 23 years old but may be the rarest newspaper in the museum’s collection.