Mr. Mike Levitas

Mike Levitas, director of New York Times Book Development, said that the initial distress inspired by Mr. Raines' comments was unfounded."If you have imaginary fears that are based on a single quote that wasn't really revealing, there's no limit to what nightmare you can imagine," Mr. Levitas said."Why should The Times be held responsible for someone's fertile imagination?"

Ultimately, Mr. Raines' ambitions are to juice the Times Books imprint with a few of those staff-penned best-sellers that have typically escaped to other publishers-like Judith Miller's Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, published by Simon & Schuster-thereby raking in a little ancillary profit.

The op-ed editor of the Times, Mike Levitas is a real news-man.He came up in the 1950s when journalists were called reporters and they didn't take on airs and so-on.And so he said, "Hey, that is a great story.

Levitas, who plans to retire.
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She'll be a worthy successor to Mike Levitas, who founded our book development program five years ago and created dozens of titles during his tenure.
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Mr. Levitas, 72, became editorial director of Book Development at The New York Times in 1995, after having served as Op-Ed page editor since 1990.Among his many past positions at The Times were the editorship of the Book Review, from 1983 to 1989.He was named metropolitan editor in 1976 and editor of the Week in Review in 1977.

Earlier, Mr. Levitas was a news writer for the Voice of America and then a reporter for The New York Post, where he won a George Polk Memorial Award for investigative reporting on labor unions.

He also worked at Time magazine as an assistant editor before moving to The Times in 1965.A graduate of Brooklyn College, Mr. Levitas is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard and was a visiting scholar under the Woodrow Wilson fellowship program.He is the author of "America in Crisis" (Holt, 1969).