There is plenty about Donald Trump here, whose danger to the free press McCraw concedes he was slow to acknowledge. His professional experience with Trump went back many years, and he adroitly tells the story of how Trump, in 2004, threatened to sue over the one slight he truly could not bear — that he was less wealthy or successful than he claimed. The Times had reported that his boast on “The Apprentice” that he was the “largest real estate developer in New York” was plainly false, by every objective measure. This was an intolerable slight, and it drew the future president’s wrath. But Trump’s outlandish claim was indefensible, and the matter was dropped.

Then there was the occasion when a portion of Trump’s 1995 tax returns showed up one day in a reporter’s mailbox during the heat of the 2016 campaign. McCraw describes the warring that ensued. Belligerent Trump lawyers threatened legal action, as usual. In the end, as in every other instance of high-decibel Trumpian legal threats, the dog barked but never bit.

One time, McCraw found himself front and center, instead of behind the scenes, and he became a viral sensation. The Times published an article during the presidential campaign about two women alleging that they had been groped by Trump. Trump’s legal team went into angry overdrive. McCraw wrote a brash letter, made public, essentially saying that groping allegations could not lower Trump’s reputation because, ahem, his reputation on such matters was already in the toilet. This earned the Times lawyer, briefly, some notoriety. Again, Trump never followed through on his threat to sue. There was also the famous anonymous Op-Ed The Times published in September 2018, much to the wrathful chagrin of the White House.

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But the Trump tales are not the only gripping stories here. McCraw tells of a high-stakes battle with the superlawyer David Boies when the reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey were on the eve of breaking their paradigm-shifting story about the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. The issues relating to The Times’s own involvement with Weinstein were thornier than many realized.

McCraw also takes time to meditate on journalistic practices and ethics. He is candid and cleareyed about the lean of his paper’s readers and its opinion writers. He says that by the “time of Trump’s election there was no doubt about the politics of our core readership: It skewed left, and, in any measure of its opposition to Trump, it went off the charts.” He concedes, moreover, that The Times’s “Op-Ed columns and contributors are overwhelmingly anti-Trump, every day.” But he is insistent about the overall political objectivity of the news people, the beat reporters. He argues that the everyday news folk, at The Times and elsewhere, are not generally partisan. He doesn’t claim that they are perfectly detached, disinterested, nonideological chroniclers. He acknowledges a certain lean on their part too. “Many journalists are biased,” he concedes, but “just not in the way that most people think about it.”

By McCraw’s reckoning, reporters tend to champion the underdog, and it is this worldview that skews their coverage. “The easy rap,” he writes, “is that most reporters lean liberal (true), and that dictates how they cover a conservative like Trump (false). … They believe, all other things being equal, that the little guy is getting screwed. … The reportorial default is to think that most regulations are good, the rich and connected don’t need more money or more power.” He insists, therefore, that any bias “is not a left or right thing.” As partial proof, he says, “based on nothing more scientific than my own conversations around the newsroom, Trump may actually have been better liked than Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio.”