DailyNewsGems

Book Review: How the New York Times Survived Scandal and Scorn

Veteran journalist, Adam Nagourney, (a New York Times’ staff writer since 1996), undertook a mighty tall order; chronicling The New York Times during some of its most tumultuous years of its 172-year history, roughly from 1977, through the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

The finished product was titled “The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism.”

It was published in September.

The book is an independent work, the Times did not authorize it.

During his meticulous and scrupulous research and countless person to person interviews, I’m sure it wasn’t easy for the well-respected Nagourney to open up old wounds, recount bitter feelings, bruised egos, spilled blood, and describe careless journalistic practices at a newspaper he works at.

Fortunately for him, most of the journalists Nagourney writes about have long left the building.

A. M. Rosenthal was executive editor of The New York Times from 1977 through 1986.

Photo Credit: Associated Press

***

Fittingly, Nagourney begins his history of the Times recounting the reign (or to some, the “reign of terror”) of A.M. (aka “Abe”) Rosenthal and his appointment as executive editor in 1977.

By the time he retired in 1999, Rosenthal completed a 55-year career with the Times as reporter, foreign correspondent, metropolitan editor, assistant managing editor, associated managing editor, managing editor, executive editor, and finally columnist, His final op-ed column appeared on November 5, 1999, along with a biographical sketch of his career written by Clyde Haberman.

As the reader quickly discovers, so much of how the Times changed and progressed over the decades was in reaction to how things were run during the Abe Rosenthal era. Not many can deny that Abe Rosenthal, despite his and volcanic personality and tyrannical rule, made the Times a better paper, he scoured the country for the some of the most talented journalists and expected they live up to their top billing and his high expectations.

As Nagourney wrote: “Rosenthal believed that the Times was different from every other newspaper and that it was obliged to stand apart from, and to rise above, the world it was chronicling.”

Abe Rosenthal’s court, however, appeared limited to the well-established conventional writers and editors, those considered outside the box had limited opportunities to advance.

This was certainly true for any journalists who happened to be gay. Nagourney writes how Rosenthal questioned the standards editor, Allan M. Siegal, whether he was hiring a cluster of gays on the metropolitan and national desks? Siegel responded he wasn’t intentionally hiring gays, but he wasn’t excluding them either.

Rosenthal held strong convictions (beliefs apparently shared by publisher at the time, Punch Sulzberger) that gays represented a seditious force in the newsroom, which, if left unchecked, will affect the content of the paper subversively.

It wouldn’t be until Max Frankel (1986-1994) took the reins from Rosenthal as executive editor would gay issues and the AIDS epidemic be given the coverage it deserved. Frankel promoted deputy national editor Jeffrey Schmalz to give readers a more comprehensive overview of HIV/AIDS and its impact on the LGBT community.

Schmalz, who was gay, was diagnosed with AIDS himself, writing about it in 1992 and ultimately dying from complications of the disease in 1993. He was 39.

Frankel was additionally the editor who relaxed some of the more austere editorial policies under Rosenthal by letting reporters, for example, have more than one byline in the same day’s paper, along with allowing multiple bylines to a story, something reporters vigorously pushed for.

Women, too, were given short shrift before and during Abe Rosenthal’s reign.

A Women’s Caucus in 1972 was formed, which found there were 385 men on the Times’ staff compared with only 40 women, 11 of the women were in the family and style pages. There were no women executives listed on the masthead, the 11-member editorial board didn’t include a woman, and there were no women photographers, and no women columnists.

While working on the metro desk, Anna Quindlen (later an op-ed columnist) was seven months pregnant when editor, Arthur Gelb, approached her station to ask “So, this is the last one, right? “

Appointing women and minorities to senior positions became a high priority for Max Frankel, along with Arthur Sulzberger Jr. when he succeeded his father as publisher.

Soma Golden Behr was the first female national editor; Gerald Boyd was promoted to managing editor in 2001, becoming the first African-American on the Times’ masthead.  Prior to that, Bob Herbert was named a Times’ op-ed columnist in 1993, while Margot Jefferson earned a Pulitzer in 1995 as a Black critic on cultural criticism.

The New York Times’ website went live at 11: 59 p.m. on Friday, January 19, 1996. 

As the Times slowly made the migration from print to the Internet, Nagourney’s book takes on a decidedly more dramatic tone and the stories and characters he writes about become all the more juicier.

Howell Raines, executive editor, arm raised at center, celebrated a record number of Pulitzers in 2002, at the desk of Allan M. Siegal, an assistant managing editor.

 Photo Credit:  Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

 ***

Nagourney writes that soon after Howell Raines was promoted to executive editor in 2001 and led the Times to a record 7 Pulitzer Prizes for its 9/11 coverage, the House that Adolph Ochs built began to crumble, one brick at a time, igniting a nationwide scandal when the Times internal editorial flaws were exposed.

The first major scandal involved a young Black reporter, Jayson Blair, who after serving his internship was promoted to a full-time reporter in January, 2001.

He turned into a prolific reporter with his byline appearing in over 750 stories in just under five years. Eventually, more and more of the details in his stories began to be questioned by editors.

An internal investigation found problems with at least 36 of the 73 articles Blair wrote for the Times. He fabricated some quotes, wasn’t even in cities he claimed to have been in; and most damning of all-he lifted passages from a San Antonio Express-News article.

On May 2, 2003, the Times published an article announcing Blair’s resignation and chronicling his acts of “journalistic fraud.” 

The next major scandal involved the Times’ national security correspondent, Judith Miller, who after 9/11 began quoting from some purported reputable sources of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq; many of the stories were splashed on page one of the Times.

As history proved, there were no WMD’s in Iraq, triggering complaints from Times’ staffers and media critics why her Iraq articles weren’t scrutinized more closely.

It turned out to be another major embarrassment for the Times.

In an attempt to defend her journalistic integrity, Miller wrote: “The experts and the journalists who covered them we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could."

But as Nagourney points out, other newspapers didn’t botch the WMD story as badly as the Times did.

Judith Miller resigned from the Times on November 9, 2005.

The Times first public editor, Daniel Okrent (appointed by executive editor Bill Keller), attempted to untangle the lapse of sound editorial judgement in an article (Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?) published on May 30, 2004. 

Interestingly, both the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller debacles, may be attributable to Howell Raines, who pressured subordinates extremely hard to promote more minorities; and for the national desk to press harder on Iraq and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In their quest to meet Raines violent demands, they overlooked important tenets of journalism: truth and accuracy.

Former executive editors of The New York Times, from left to right: Dan Baquet (2014-2022), Jill Abramson (2011-2014), Bill Keller (2003-2011)

Photo Credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times/Redux

***

After the resignation of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd on June 5, 2003, the baton was passed to the well-seasoned and Pulitzer Prize winning Bill Keller, who did a remarkable job of restoring credibility to the Times. First, by hiring a public editor and then on May 9, 2005, appointing an internal committee to examine how the Times could regain reader’s trust.

Their findings would be made available on the Times' company website at www.nytco.com.

Nagourney devotes the final chapters of his book examining how the Times navigated a new reality to the newspaper industry--for better or worse--how readers rely more and more on the Internet, podcasts, blogs, etc., for their news.

Seeing the writing on the wall and in a fight for its own survival, as readers spent more time online than reading the print edition, the Times unveiled a metered model on January 20, 2010 (that would begin in 2011), charging readers for access to the Times, which would empower NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business.

The pay model has been a rousing success. As of Q2 2023, The New York Times Company registered 9.2 million digital only subscribers.

When Jill Abramson (the first female executive editor in the Times’s history) succeeded Bill Keller as executive editor in 2011, reporters were now expected (at the urging of new CEO Mark Thompson) to tweet more often, spend time on podcasts, videos, web articles, mobile apps, and engage with their online audience in addition to their responsibilities to the print edition of the paper.

It was a tall order; and it was a facet of the new journalism that executive editor Jill Abramson took a rather dim view of.

It was Abramson’s contention that the extra online responsibilities would be putting too much of a burden on reporters to such an extent that it would compromise the quality of a completed story or project.

Nagourney wrote: “Abramson didn’t want the Times to become a news organization measured by traffic and clicks or where reporters and editors were expected to come up with revenue-producing ideas.” “She believed,” Nagourney explained, “in guarding the sanctity of the newsroom because that had been her life and career in newspapers.”

It would take Abramson’s successor (after her dismissal in 2014), Dean Baquet, to act as a bridge between the editorial and business side of the paper, and embrace the new technologies in order to increase revenue in the midst of declining print circulation. Unlike Abramson, Baquet never saw the digital side of the Times as a threat to the quality of the product.

On May 5, 2015, for the first time since 1946, Baquet eliminated the page one print edition meeting among editors of different desks in order to devote more time and energy to the digital product. He did this for a good reason. Weekday print circulation was 603, 700 in 2015, down from 648,900 the year before. Paid digital circulation, by comparison, leaped from 1,094 in 2015, up from 910,000 the year before.

Nagourney ends his book with the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45^th U.S. President, winning the Electoral College with 304 votes compared to 227 votes for Hillary Clinton. 

It was a red wave stunner, to be sure, so much so that the Times had a headline all ready to go on the anticipated election of Hillary Clinton: “MADAME PRESIDENT!”

As soon as it was clear Trump captured the presidency, Times’ staffers were caught back on their heels, scrambling, and trying to piece together a biographical profile of the controversial real estate mogul to post on the Times’ website.

With the election of Trump, politics was becoming more divisive and polarized.  

Readers, and even Times’ employees, were pushing for the paper to step away from “detachment,” and embrace a more “adversarial” brand of journalism, which would better reflect the polarized times the country was living in.

Such thinking was utterly at odds with what Abe Rosenthal believed in.

Nagourney recalls that in 1968, Rosenthal was bothered at the stories being filed at the 1968 Democratic National Convention by the Times’ staff writers. He felt the reporting was too slanted, the tone of the reporting appeared overwhelmingly to side with the peace demonstrators, while condemning the brutality of the police amidst the mayhem and chaos on the streets of Chicago.

“Do we become part of this movement, or do we report this movement?” Rosenthal asked.

Maybe such a critical question posed by Abe Rosenthal over 50 years ago is something the Times in 2023 should ponder more often in an age of extremism, divisiveness, and as more and more news organizations push an agenda.

 

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

November 4, 2023

 

NOTE: When researching and compiling a New York Times chronology, back in 2001, on the paper’s 150-year anniversary, I consulted the following resources.

Bibliography

Andriote, John-Manuel. Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco. New York: Harper Entertainment, 2001.

Berger, Meyer. The Story of The New York Times, 1851-1921 New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951.

Dates, Jannette L. and Barlow, William. Split Image: African Americans In The Mass Media. Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1990.

Davis, Elmer History of The New York Times, 1851-1921. New York: The New York Times, 1921.

Diamond, Edwin. Behind the Times: Inside The New York Times. New York: Villard Books, 1994.

Goulden, Joseph C. Fit to Print: A.M. Rosenthal and His Times. Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1998.

Kahn, Roger. "The House of Adolph Ochs." Saturday Evening Post. October 9, 1965.

Kane, Joseph Nathan. Famous First Facts: A Record of First Happenings, Discoveries, and Inventions in American History. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1997.

Kass, Stephen L. and McCarroll, Jean M. "Westway Redux?" New York Law Journal. June 23, 2000.

Kihss, Peter. "Harlem Riots Spread Over 3 Decades" The New York Times, July 20, 1964.

Kirkpatrick, David D. "Publishers Set To Remove Older Articles From Files." The New York Times June 26, 2001.

Meadow, Charles T. "Online Database Industry Timeline." Database. October, 1988.

Mencken, H.L. The American Language: An Inquiry Into The Development of English In The United States. New York: Alfred-A-Knopf, 1963.

Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism: A History, 1690-1960. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Salisbury, Harrison E. Without Fear or Favor: An Uncompromising Look at The New York Times. New York: Times Books, 1980.

Shepard, Richard F. The Paper's Papers: A Reporter's Journey Through the Archives of The New York Times. New York: Times Books, 1996.

Talese, Gay The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World, World Publishing Co. 1969

Tifft, Susan E. and Jones, Alex S. The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times. Boston: Little Brown, 1999.

Recommended References

Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Johnson, Gerald W. An Honorable Titan: A Biographical Study of Adolph S. Ochs. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946.

Ostrander, Stephen J. "All the News That's Fit to Print: Adolph Ochs and The New York Times." Timeline (a publication of the Ohio Historical Society), 10, no 1 (Jan./Feb.1993).

"150th Anniversary 1851-2001: From The Newspaper To The Information Age" (A special section published November 14, 2001). The New York Times.

Gelb, Arthur. City Room. G.P Putnam's Sons, 2003.

Frankel, Max. The Times of My Life and My Life With The Times. Dell Publishing, 1999.

The One That Got Away:  A Memoir by Howell Raines. A Lisa Drew Book, 2006.

  

Most Viewed Online Stories of 2021

A mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump climb through a window they broke as they storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Photo Credit: Leah Millis/Reuters

***

Remarkably, most of us made it through 2021 in one piece with our Republic still intact despite an unprecedented Capitol Hill insurrection, which some equate to 9/11.

On January 6, a mob of protesters leaving a Donald Trump rally, upset from the results of the 2020 presidential election, which resulted in a Joe Biden victory, stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C., the cradle of democracy, and assaulted law enforcement officers, vandalized property and occupied the building for several hours. Five people died, including several being injured before order was restored.

Two days after the insurrection, Twitter suspended Donald Trump’s account in order to prevent any “further incitement of violence. "

Just when we thought we licked Covid-19 after getting our miraculous vaccine shots (the acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus), a Delta variant emerged threatening more lives and leading to more restrictions and safeguarding, including wearing more masks.

Combined with last year’s fatalities, the U.S. is nearing 800,000 deaths from Covid.

“Seventy-five percent of people,” The New York Times recently reported "who have died of the virus in the United States — or about 600,000 of the nearly 800,000 who have perished so far — have been 65 or older. One in 100 older Americans has died from the virus.”

Soon after President Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46^th U.S. President, he made good on his pledge to completely pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan after 20 years, a senseless engagement (to many) which cost the U.S. $2 trillion (Afghanistan and Iraq combined), with 2,461 U.S. service members killed, 20,000 injured, and another 3,846 U.S. contractors killed.

Despite the cancelling of the Tokyo Olympics last year due to the global pandemic, the Olympics finally took place in Tokyo (July 23-August 8) with the United States earning the most medals: 39 gold medals, 113 in total, while China finished second with 38 gold medals, 88 altogether.

The most disappointing blemish on the Summer Games was that no international guests (including spectators) were permitted to attend the Games, due to COVID travel restrictions.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, right, prepares to board a helicopter with his daughter Michaela Cuomo after announcing his resignation, Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021, in New York.

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig

***

Unquestionably, one of the most scandalous stories of the year that splashed across many page one headlines was New York Governor Andrew Cuomo resigning his office (August 10) soon after New York Attorney General Letitia James released a report that found that the New York Governor sexually harassed 11 women, and according to the damning report, created a "hostile  work environment.” 

Before recessing for the Thanksgiving holiday, President Biden witnessed the successful passage of his ambitious infrastructure bill (“Build Back Better”) in Congress, which he described as a “once-in-generation investment in America.”

After a razor thin vote in the House of Representatives on November 5 (228-206) the infrastructure bill will invest hundreds of dollars to upgrade physical infrastructure, including roads and bridges, railways, airports, and water systems. The plan additionally invests tens of billions of dollars to modernize the U.S. electrical grid, aggressively embrace electric vehicles, and significantly expand broadband internet access.

The great Tom Brady clearly proved he’s the Eveready Battery of professional sports, who at age 43, won his seventh Super Bowl ring, leading the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a convincing 31-9 pounding  of the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV (55) at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, Florida. It was the first time in Super Bowl history a team has won in its home stadium.

So, those are just a brief assortment of the most dominating stories of the year.

To get an idea what stories interested readers the most in 2021, I checked in with some major news organizations to see what articles drove the most traffic to their home pages.

Here’s the list of news organizations who responded to my email.

CNN: January 6 Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

CNN’s Top Video: Surfside, Florida Building Collapse

Los Angeles Times: Tracking the Coronavirus in California 

Fox News: Democrat Jon Ossoff Projected to win Georgia Senate Runoff Election over Republican David Perdue

Open Secrets: Trump’s Political Operation Paid More than $3.5 million to January 6 Organizers

ProPublica: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

The Marshall Project: The Controversial Version of the U.S. Flag has been Hailed as a Sign of Police Solidarity and Criticized as a Symbol of White Supremacy

Fortune: A Shock is Headed for the U.S. Housing Market

ESPN: Tiger Woods Recovering from Lengthy Surgery to Repair Significant Injuries to Right Leg

Weather Channel: Hurricane Ida: New Orleans to New Jersey

Texas Freeze

Hurricane Elsa

Western Wildfires

Megadrought in the West

Yahoo News: Trump Supporters Storm Congress, Halting Electoral Vote Certification Debate

Google: Year in Searches

Google: Top Trending News and Searches for the U.S. and Globally

GLOBAL: 

Searches 

1. Australia vs India
2. India vs England
3. IPL
4. NBA
5. Euro 2021
6. Copa América
7. India vs New Zealand
8. T20 World Cup
9. Squid Game
10. DMX

News: 

1. Afghanistan
2. AMC Stock
3. COVID Vaccine
4. Dogecoin
5. GME Stock
6. Stimulus Check
7. Georgia Senate Race
8. Hurricane Ida
9. COVID
10. Ethereum Price

U.S. Searches

1. NBA
2. DMX
3. Gabby Petito
4. Kyle Rittenhouse
5. Brian Laundrie
6. Mega Millions
7. AMC Stock
8. Stimulus Check
9. Georgia Senate Race
10. Squid Game

News 

1. Mega Millions
2. AMC Stock
3. Stimulus Check
4. Georgia Senate Race
5. GME
6. Dogecoin
7. Hurricane Ida
8. Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict
9. Afghanistan
10. Ethereum Price

Source: Global Communications and Public Affairs at Google

Twitter: Year-in-Review:

Tik-Tok Year-in-Review 

Meta (formerly Facebook): Widely Viewed Content Report: What People See on Facebook

Linkedin Year-in-Review: Data Facts

Spotify Year-in-Review

---Bill Lucey

[email protected]

December 13, 2021

 

The New York Times Op-Ed Page is Retired after 50 Years

The digital age has tossed another print newspaper feature to the dustbin, much like the pica pole and the AP teletype machine.

According to New York Times Opinion Page editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, the paper has retired the term, “Op-Ed” and replaced it with the label “Guest Essays.”

Kingsbury considers Op-Ed, outdated and “clubby newspaper jargon,” now that a great many readers have migrated to the web and no longer feast their eyes on the editorial page. Readers are now greeted with a battalion of opinion columns, mountains of columnists, who appear to have hijacked the Times’ home page. Op-Ed means opposite the editorial page, and not as many readers think, opposing viewpoints (of the Editorial Page) or even, opinion and editorial.

The New York Times “Op-Ed” page was officially launched on September 21, 1970 . Guest columnists included: political scientist and National Security Advisor to President Johnson, W.W. Rostow, novelist Han Suyin, and mystery novelist and journalist, Gerald W. Johnson.

Soon after the New York Times rolled out their Op-Ed pages, other newspapers across the country fell in line with their own pages and guest columnists.

But not all newspapers followed the same format. In the 1970’s, the Chicago Tribune’s Op-Ed page showcased more liberal opinions to counter the Tribune’s “staunchly conservative views.” In the early 1980s, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, at least for a short time, dressed their op-ed page with more local writers, rather than syndicated writers. Former Plain Dealer editorial director, Mary Anne Sharkey, said the Plain Dealer set up a "Board of Contributors." “We actively recruited different voices from the community to contribute op-eds or essays,” Sharkey explained, “most were good writers and did not require a lot of editing.” The Board didn’t allow politicians to become board members, “but we did have representatives of the arts, business, clergy, activists, and a mix of women and minorities. I added a few more women because I felt the board was not diverse enough” Sharkey said.

Similar to The Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times op-ed actively promoted more local opinions.

Editor Herbert Bayard Swope created the Op-Ed page in 1921 for The New York World

Photo Credit: Ray and Judith Spinzia Collection

***

The first Op-Ed page was actually hatched 100 years ago, not from the New York Times, but from the New York World, whose editor, Herbert Bayard Swope, in 1921, came up with the idea of having a full page of columnists offering opinions on news topics. The page was called Op-Ed. Unlike today’s Op-Ed pages, however, the New York World didn’t publish unsolicited manuscripts; rather, they relied on in-house staffers from a mighty group of writers, which included: Heywood Broun, Alexander Woollcott, Deems Taylor, Harry Hansen, and Franklin P. Adams.

Why did the New York Times decide to launch an Op-Ed page?

Editorial Page Editor John B. Oakes pushed for an Op-Ed page for The New York Times since the early 1960s

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

***

According to a number of news accounts, the idea of featuring a page of columnists opposite the editorial page, came from editorial page editor, John B. Oakes, (aka “Johnny”) himself who in the early 1960s, received a long opinion piece from a Suez Canal Company representative about the Egyptian government’s seizure of the canal. There was no space for this piece in the Times, so Oakes began his campaign for an Op-Ed page. His pitch fell on deaf ears from publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger who wanted the page opposite the editorial page reserved for the obituary page, which was bringing in lucrative income.

The idea for an Op-Ed page was kicked around for a few more years without anything being resolved.

A major breakthrough came in 1966, when the New York Herald Tribune folded. The Tribune featured guest columnists from time to time and its editorials tended to have a conservative viewpoint, in contrast to the Times signature liberalism. This opened up an opportunity for Oakes to press again for an Op-Ed page, featuring conservative viewpoints. In addition to Oakes lobbying the publisher, assistant managing editor Harrison Salisbury was a strong advocate of the Times “providing a platform for responsible conservative opinion.”

After some administrative haggling, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the Times publisher, gave the green light in 1970 to introduce an Op-Ed page, moving the obituary page to another section of the paper. Harrison Salisbury was the first opinion page editor under the direction of John B. Oakes, the editorial page director. The Times paid its contributors $125, which is about $700 in today’s dollars.

The Op-Ed page, as it turned out, was a smash success. In its first six months, the page reportedly produced a net profit of $112,000 (on $264,000) in revenue. The Times receives approximately 1200 op-ed submissions each week.

At first, the Times wanted to feature offbeat or whimsical essays from its contributors; so that readers would be given a break from the political and international news driving the day. It didn’t take long, however, before the Times Op-Ed, touched on many of the most explosive issues of the 1970s, including Vietnam, Watergate, Civil Rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), among other issues.

Despite the sound diversity of opinions from a wide range of celebrities, politicians, scholars, and columnists, the last 50 years wasn’t without its share of controversy.

One of the most controversial op-eds was written by Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, (a Pulitzer winner in 1976 for his coverage of the Communist takeover in Cambodia). In 1985, he fell out of favor with the Times editors for writing about the proposed underground highway, known as the Westway Project, in which he attacked "New York newspapers" (meaning, The Times) for failing to adequately report on the billions worth of overruns the project was costing.

On April 21, 1991, New York Times op-ed columnist, Anna Quindlen, put her job on the line when she criticized her own paper for their coverage of Patricia Bowman , the woman who who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape. The Times profile on Bowman implied her poor driving record and sexual history, which was described as a "wild streak," cast a shadow over the validity of her charge. Quindlen accused her editors of sexism and of falling below their normal high standards when they identified her simply because of the high visibility of the Kennedy name; and because another media competitor, NBC, already revealed her identity. Quindlen never mentions Bowman's name. Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones in "The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times," report that after Quindlen’s column was published, the Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr came by her desk (so everyone could hear), put his arm around her and complimented Quindlen on her column.

The reliability of Judith Miller’s sources during the Iraq war, prompted, op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd to blast her co-worker. Dowd’s column began, "I've always liked Judy Miller."  Dowd questioned Miller’s credibility as a journalist by acting as a pawn for the Bush administration's "Weapons of Mass Destruction" propaganda. She ended her column by suggesting the Times' integrity as an institution would be seriously comprised if Judy "Run Amok," should ever step foot in the Times newsroom again.

The beginning of the end for the Times Op-Ed pages may have been the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s inflammatory essay, 'Send in the Troops', in which the Arkansas Republican pushed for federal troops to respond if there was violent rioting in major U.S. cities. Despite the publisher of the Times, AG Sulzberger, approving the essay, Twitter exploded over the Times publishing such a reckless column. The storm of controversy forced Editorial Page Director James Bennett to resign after receiving so much backlash on Twitter as well as from Times employees.

A month later, Bari Weiss, the paper’s op-ed page editor, posted her resignation letter online in which she accused her colleagues of “constant bullying by those who disagree with my views.” She additionally described the Times as a 'hostile work environment' and criticized the Times management for allowing her coworkers to “publicly smear” her on Twitter

So, as the Times opinion page enters a new era, many wonder whether the “Guest Essays” will vary much from the Op-Ed page of the last 50 years?

Kingsbury indicated in her column that the Times would continue to “seek out opposing views for its guest essays,” but she did underscore that “we have our thumb on our scale in the name of progress, fairness, and shared humanity.”

 

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

May 2, 2021

 

Noteworthy New York Times Op-Ed essays

American Culture: October 20, 1973, “On to Disneyland and Real Unreality" by Toni Morrison.

Humor: July 15, 1972, “A Guide to Civil Disobedience’’ by Woody Allen

Censorship: February 17, 1989: “India Bans a Book” By Salman Rushdie who discusses the Indian Finance ministry banning his novel “The Satanic Verses” under the Customs Act. Rushdie had been in hiding since Iran threatened his life, claiming “The Satanic Verses’’ blasphemed Mohammed.

American Culture: January 16, 1974 “Downhill All the Way” by E.B. White, essayist and poet on his whimsical recommendations for 1974.

Vietnam: May 17, 1975: “The Demise of South Vietnam’’ by William C. Westmoreland, a retired general who headed the United States forces in Vietnam.

Kent State Shootings: May 4, 1972: “Kent State: May 4, 1970’’ by Arthur S. Krause who had a daughter killed at Kent State.

Watergate: January 11, 1974: “A Soliloquy” by Clare Boothe Luce, playwright and journalist on whether to impeach Nixon.

Women's Equality: March 19, 1976: “200 Years of Sexism Rampant” by Letty Cottin Pegrebin, editor of Ms. Magazine

Civil Rights: January 16, 1989: “King’s Heritage’’ (race relations in America) by author Taylor Branch

AIDS: November 27, 1985: “Get Moving on AIDS” by Robert E. Pollack, dean of Columbia College of Columbia University, advocating an effective vaccine against HTLV III, the virus that causes AIDS.

9/11: "Correspondent; America's Emergency Line: 9/11" by Bill Keller--the first time the term "9/11'' is used in a newspaper column.

Media Corporate Culture: March 10, 1987: “From Murrow to Mediocrity” by Dan Rather on over 200 employees losing their jobs so that executives can earn more profit. 

Italian-American Stereotypes: July 24, 1972: "We Might Call This The Politics of Fantasy" by Frank Sinatra

The Great Recession: August. 13, 2010 "Obama’s dreadful job on the economy" By Bob Herbert

Global Warming March 19, 1989:  "An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen" by Tennessee Senator Al Gore

When Bombs and Bullets Rained Down on Cleveland

Bombs and bullets used to hold a great deal of sway in Northeast Ohio.

Especially when you had ringleaders like John Scalish, James “Jack White” Licavoli, Angelo Lonardo, Carmine "The Bull" Agnello, and “Irish” Danny Greene.

There was yet another: Alex Shondor Birns, a Jewish gangster in Cleveland who rose to become Cleveland’s Public Enemy No. 1; a ruthless if charming racketeer who might have been responsible for the murder of as many as a dozen people in Cleveland, cold blooded murders, that in most cases, went unsolved.

Recently retired Lyndhurst Police Chief Rick Porrello, author of “The Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia” and “To Kill the Irishman: The War that Crippled the Mafia,” has recently published “Bombs, Bullets, and Bribes: The True Story of Notorious Jewish Mobster Alex Shondor Birns."

As Porrello so meticulously chronicles in his smartly written book, Birns criminal footprints in Cleveland stretches back to the Prohibition era.

He was born Szandor (Hungarian for Alexander) Birnstein in either 1905 or 1907 in Lemešany, a village in eastern Slovakia.

His friends called him “Shon.”

His family made its way to Cleveland (E. 59^th Street) when he was only a year old; where they ran a bootlegging business. His mother was killed when the still exploded in their home. Without a mother to look after him, Birns spent time in a Jewish orphanage.

Birns journey into Cleveland’s criminal underworld came thick and fast after dropping out of high school after the 10^th grade.

By 1925, age 19, he was shipped off to a Mansfield Reformatory for auto theft; less than ten years later (1933) he served 30 days in a Workhouse for assault and 60 days for robbery.

After educating himself, navigating the highways and byways of the mean streets of Cleveland, first by running a pool hall at E. 55^th and Woodland Avenue, Birns found his footing venturing into ‘’numbers’’ or “clearinghouse’’ racket, which amounted to an illegal lottery, the same kind of gambling which is now legal in 45 states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Birns additionally became skilled at muscling payments from slot machine owners.

Along with his gambling operation, he operated a number of prostitution rings throughout Cleveland; he usually paid police handsomely to avoid raids of his brothels.

Like any successful mobster trying to avoid running afoul of the law, Birns wrapped himself in legitimate business operations. In his case, nightclubs, most notably the Ten-Eleven Club on Chester Avenue; later, the Alhambra at East 105^th Street, popular establishments where Birns mixed with and charmed the major power brokers of the city, including the police and the press who were rarely issued a tab.

Reporters loved Birns, as Porrello tells it, because he made great copy to fill their newspapers; police, some police, that is, loved him because they had their palms greased when Birns was charged with criminal activity.

Remarkably, Porrello underscores through all of his crimes, murders, bombings and other criminal activity, and all the times he was hauled in front of a judge, Birns was only convicted of three felonies in his storied criminal life. The last was in 1965, when he tried to bribe a Parma detective. For that, he was paroled from the Marion Correctional Institution in July, 1971

Birns stabbed a man to death in 1929, but walked away free; he was charged again with a shooting in a speakeasy, but was acquitted; in 1931, he robbed a candy store for $1300, but was yet again acquitted. He also broke the jaw of a cab driver without any criminal prosecution.

Even Cleveland safety director Eliot Ness had his crew hoist a ladder in attempt to catch Birns and his organization booking bets. It was unsuccessful.

For the most part, Birns avoided jail time through bribes and keeping his mouth shut. The local newspapers often splashed with pictures of him leaving the courthouse with a devilish smirk on his face after prosecutors failed, time and time again, to make a crime stick.

One powerful police officer, Captain Louis Cadek, regularly lined his pocket taking payments from Birns in exchange for steering police away from Birns’ crooked operations. These were known as officers ‘’on the pad.” The law eventually caught up with Cadek. In 1936, he was convicted on four counts of bribery and sent to prison.

As Plain Dealer reporter Christopher Evans once wrote: “witnesses had a habit of turning up dead or at least badly injured, and juries almost always seemed to deadlock on the most clear-cut cases.”

In many ways, Birns resembled another infamous gangster, Al “Scarface’’ Capone, who ruled Chicago’s south side with an iron fist during Prohibition.

Much like Capone, Birns dressed for success. He was often seen around town mixing with cronies at the Theatrical Grill on Short Vincent, brandishing expensive cigars, wearing brilliant ties, suede and leather shoes, and stylish, well-tailored suites.

Similar to “Big Al,” Birns, though a hardened criminal, unveiled a charitable streak. Capone was widely remembered for providing three meals a day at his soup kitchens in Chicago during the Great Depression. In 1944, there was a tragic East Ohio Gas explosion in Cleveland, killing 135. Birns had his staff at his Ten-Eleven Club working around the clock feeding police and fireman, and those in need of a meal.

Both Capone and Birns would serve time for income tax evasion. Birns, was in fact charged with income tax evasion on three different occasions: in 1948, 1949, and 1950. He served a total of three years in prison.

In addition to both being christened Public Enemy No. 1, Capone and Birns resembled each other in another important way: they knew how to settle scores if you double-crossed them or owed them money.

The 1929 St Valentine’s Massacre in which Capone’s henchmen took out seven members of Chicago’s North Side Gang is one such extreme example of Capone settling scores.

When world renowned boxing promoter Don King (who cut his teeth operating the numbers racket in Cleveland during the 1950s) refused to keep paying Birns protection money, King soon found his front porch (and part of his living room) blown up with a stick of dynamite.

When Birns absorbed a bullet from the gun of a bouncer at a nightclub in 1934, Birns returned the favor, only this time, killing the bouncer while he was driving his car a few months later. Police were never able to pin the murder on Birns.

The body of Mervin Gold, found in the trunk of his own car on Chagrin River Road in Solon, Ohio.

Photo Credit: Cleveland Public Library, Photograph Collection

***

Arguably, one of the most sensational cases of Cleveland’s unsolved murders centers on the killing of Mervin Gold, a financial manipulator, twice convicted on fraud, who in July, 1963 was found in the trunk of his own car on Chagrin River Road in Solon, Ohio.

According to Gold’s wife, her husband, Mervin Gold was on his way to meet Shondor Birns on the night he went missing. His wife presented police with a document left behind in his briefcase at home, which was an affidavit, showing that Gold received stolen bonds from Birns himself.

Much like he had in the past, Birns arranged an air-tight alibi, saying he was nowhere near the murder and was with another woman of “fine character.”

At the Coroner’s inquest, Birns took the fifth 90 times. Gold’s murder remained unsolved and the case was dropped due to lack of evidence.

Cleveland Police Detective inspect Birns' demolished Lincoln Continental

Photo Credit: Cleveland State University Cleveland Press Collection/Rick Porrello

***

The moral of the story of Cleveland mobsters, undoubtedly must be: If you live by the bomb, you die by the bomb.

On Holy Saturday night, March 29, 1975, Alex (Shondor) Birns, 69, was the victim of a horrific bomb explosion after turning the key in the ignition of his Lincoln Continental after exiting Christy’s Bar at W. 25^th Street and Detroit Avenue. His body was blown through the roof of the car; parts of his body could be found next door at St Malachi Church where parishioners were gathering for the 8. p.m. Holy Saturday Vigil Mass.

Cleveland’s Public Enemy No. 1 was buried on April Fool’s Day, of all days, at Hillcrest Cemetery in Bedford Heights.

Not until 1983 would a Plain Dealer article link Birns murder to members of the Hells Angels.

Two years later, another notorious Cleveland mobster, Danny Greene, met a similar fate. After leaving the dentist’s office in Lyndhurst on October 6, 1977, a bomb planted next to Greene’s car exploded, killing the Irishman immediately. The bomb was thought to have been planted by hitman Ray Ferritto.

After the Danny Greene murder, the thuggish mobsters that lurked on Cleveland streets began to fade away as law enforcement agencies became more circumspect and the FBI became more aggressive in dispatching organized crime task forces to major U.S. cities.

Most successful in combating organized crime, not only in Cleveland, but in major cities nationwide has been the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute (passed into law in 1970), which has provided the FBI with indispensable tools to operate undercover operations, use court-authorized electronic surveillance, and recruit informants, cooperating witnesses, and consensual monitoring. 

What makes “Bombs, Bullets & Bribes’’ so fascinating is its author, Rick Porrello, actually has skin in the game.

His grandfather, Raymond Porrello, and his six brothers, the ringleaders of a prominent crime family, were involved in the beginnings of the Cleveland Mafia during Prohibition, most prominently on East 110th and upper Woodland Avenue. Raymond Porrello, Rosario Porrello (a great uncle of Rick Porrello), along with one of their henchmen, Dominic Gueli were gunned down in a cigar shop on E 110th and Woodland, in a spot that came to be infamously known as ``Bloody Corner.”

Porrello, unlike his grandfather and his great uncles, has been on the right side of the law his entire life, as a Lyndhurst Police Officer for 31 years, the last ten years as Police Chief before announcing his retirement.

Unlike most organized crime historians, Porrello is able to write about his subjects having developed keen perspectives from both sides of the fence.

A rare attribute, indeed.

For anyone interested in learning about Cleveland’s social history during a time when mobsters, racketeers, bombs and bullets were symbolic of the criminal underworld, this splendidly written and well researched book is just what the doctor ordered.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

December 29, 2019

 

Who Belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Journalists?

While scanning my Twitter feed, a picture of Mount Rushmore, sculpture in the Black Hills in Keystone, South Dakota popped up.

Mount Rushmore, of course, features 60-foot sculptures of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865).

This got me to thinking, what if there was a Mount Rushmore for journalists? Which individuals would best represent the very best of American journalism?

So, I checked in with some prominent journalists to ask who they would put on Mount Rushmore, high above the dense forests and pristine streams of South Dakota.

Before getting to their personal preferences, I listed the four individuals who I thought best represented the "growth, development and preservation'' of American journalism, along with brief biographical sketches.

• Adolph S Ochs

When newspaper publisher and Cincinnati, Ohio native, Adolph Simon Ochs, age 36, bought the New York Times in 1896, he took over a publication whose circulation had plunged to 9,000 readers; with outstanding obligations of $300,000, while losing $1,000 a day.  In addition, it had a number of competitors to contend with.

Unlike other New York City dailies that were blatantly partisan, Ochs insisted his paper concentrate on objective reporting, and steer away from the sensational reporting involving murders, macabre crimes, and the “if it bleeds it leads,” mentality practiced by its chief competitors. He also reduced the price of the newspaper. As a way of consolidating its editorial independence, the Times refused advertising dollars and contracts from governments.

The New York Times under Ochs’ stewardship became the first national "newspaper of record." From 1896 to 1935 daily circulation increased dramatically, so much so that by the 1920s, the newspaper had nearly 800,000 readers.

Ochs was additionally instrumental in keeping his paper up to date with all the latest technology, giving the paper a fresh new look.

Descendants of Ochs still reside over the Times to this day and he will be glad to know his newspaper is still a powerful and influential news source in the 21^st century with a daily circulation of well over one million subscribers. The Times, moreover, have won 94 Pulitzer Prizes, a record seven in 2002 alone.

• Dorothy Thompson

International correspondent and political commentator, Dorothy Thompson, was known to many as the “First Lady of American Journalism”.

Before moving to New York City and launching her journalism career in 1917, she was a fierce Suffragist soon after graduating from Syracuse College in 1914.

During World War I, she became a foreign correspondent, first reporting from Vienna, then was named bureau chief in Berlin during the 1920s for the New York Evening Post.

She was one of the first American correspondents to warn of the terror Adolf Hitler would unleash on Europe. She wrote that the "National Socialist Revolution in Germany would prove to be the most world disturbing event of the century and perhaps of many centuries."

Thompson was back on American soil in 1936; and soon unveiled her widely read "On the Record" syndicated column which ran in the New York Herald Tribune and more than 150 other newspapers from 1936-1958.

Time Magazine ran a cover story on her on June 12, 1939, and described her and Eleanor Roosevelt as being “two of the most influential women in the country.”

• David Broder

David Broder, the "Dean of the Press Corps'' as he was dubbed, covered 11 U.S. Presidents in his famed reporting career, beginning with the Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“The high priest of political journalism “(another of his affectionate nicknames), first landed at the Washington Post in 1966. Previously, he reported for The New York Times, Washington Star and Congressional Quarterly.  He was one of the most prominent political scribes in the nation's capital, who cultivated, according to those who knew him best, some of the most authoritative and wide-ranging sources, from little known precinct officials to senior members of the U.S. Congress. Broder traveled more than 100,000 miles a year on his political beat.

Dan Balz, Chief correspondent covering national politics, the presidency and Congress for the Washington Post, once wrote that Broder "knew the details of everything but never lost sight of the big picture. In an era in which political reporting has become more and more focused on minutiae,'' Balz explained, "he kept his focus where it belonged — on the events and forces that move ordinary Americans and shape history.”

Mr. Broder was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in May 1973 for distinguished commentary, for explaining the importance of the Watergate scandal in a "clear, compelling way."

In a 1990 survey by Washingtonian Magazine, opinion-page editors of the largest 200 newspapers rated Broder as "Best Reporter," "Hardest Working" and "Least Ideological" among 123 columnists.

• Jimmy Breslin

Jimmy Breslin, who began his newspaper career as a sportswriter for the New York Herald Tribune, soon segued into a brash street-wise city reporter and columnist, who didn't write about the rich and famous--but rather--gave voice to the down and out raging through the city, the infamous, marginalized, the unscrupulous, and the deadbeats of society.

Writer Pete Hamill once said of Breslin, "I think he believes that it is his responsibility to let the voiceless have a voice. He's definitely not interested in interviewing [then U.S. Secretary of State] George Shultz."

In 1970, Breslin was viciously attacked by American mobster Paul Vario, who was later portrayed by actor Paul Sorvino in the Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas. 

After the Herald Tribune folded, Breslin wrote for the New York Post from 1968-69; then the New York Daily News, from 1978-88, before landing at Newsday in 1988, where he stayed until writing his final column (as a staff member) on November 2, 2004.

The Queens native won a Pulitzer in 1986, when he was with the New York Daily News for a series of columns which "consistently championed ordinary citizens." In an interview, he said he wasn't surprised he won a Pulitzer, but was surprised " he hadn't won at least five Pulitzer's by now."

Some of Breslin's most noteworthy columns, include: interviewing the $3.01 gravedigger, Clifton Pollard, at John F. Kennedy's funeral; and in 1977, covering David Berkowitiz, the infamous "Son of Sam" who was terrorizing the New York City streets. Berkowitz began writing personal letters to Breslin.

Breslin, along with writers Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and others, have often been credited with being the early pioneers who ushered in "New Journalism," that is, a new breed of gifted writers who reported on the social and cultural earthquakes of the 1960s and '70s in newspaper and magazine journalism that read like compelling fiction.

Outside of the newsroom, Breslin wrote a number of books, including: "Can't Anybody Here Play this Game." (about the hapless 1962 New York Mets), "World Without End, Amen: A Novel" "Table Money," the biography "Damon Runyon: A Life," and "I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me," a memoir about his 1994 brain surgery.

Responses from Journalists on Who Should Be Included on the Mount Rushmore of Journalists?

• ) 1.) Horace Greeley 2.) Walter Lippmann 3.) James Reston 4.) Murray Kempton,

—Sam Tanenhaus, American historian, biographer, journalist, and former New York Times Book Editor. He currently is a writer for Prospect, a monthly British general interest magazine.

 

• ) 1.) Ralph McGill would be up there. 2.) H. L. Mencken 3.) Mike Royko.... Still thinking...."

—Bob Ryan, Sports columnist emeritus for the Boston Globe.

 

• ) 1.) Murray Kempton 2.) Nina Bernstein. 3.) Tom Robbins.

 —Jim Dwyer, reporter and columnist for The New York Times

 

• 1.) Don Graham) 2.) James Reston 3.) Katharine Graham 4.) Ben Bradlee  5.) Neil Sheehan 6.) Bob Woodward

—David Ignatius, associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post. 

 

• "I might add Otis Chandler "

—Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times

 

• ) 1.) William Allen White 2.) Edward R. Murrow 3.) Lincoln Steffens 4.) Dorothy Thompson

—George Vecsey, New York Times sports columnist

 

• ) 1.) Ben Bradlee  2.) Abe Rosenthal 3.) Murray Kempton 4.) Mary McGrory

—Warren Hoge, former New York Times reporter and currently vice president for external relations at the International Peace Institute, a New York-based think tank.

 

• ) 1.) Meyer Berger 2.) Edward R Murrow 3.) David Halberstam 4.) Thomas Nast

—Doug Clifton, former executive editor of The Miami Herald and Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

• "I’d be happy with Katharine Graham up there solo"

—Anne Kornblut, a Pulitzer Prize–winning recipient at the Washington Post, currently serving as director of strategic communications for Facebook.

 

• ) 1.) Murray Kempton 2.) A.J. Liebling 3.) I. F. Stone 4.) Edward R. Murrow 5.) Ida B. Wells, 6.) James Gordon Bennett 7.) Don Hewitt 8.) Adolph Ochs

—Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent for The New York Times

 

• ) 1.) Ida Tarbell  2.) Carol Loomis 3.) Bob Woodward

—Clifton Leaf, Editor for Fortune Magazine

 

• 1.) Max Frankel ) Ben Bradlee 3.) Kay Graham

—Norman Ornstein, political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

 

• ) 1.) Bob Woodward (and Carl Bernstein) 2.) Mike Royko  3.) Jimmy Breslin 4.) Katharine Graham /Adolph Ochs “in owner wing.”

—Dave Hyde, award-winning sports columnist for the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper, the main daily newspaper of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

 

             —Bill Lucey

            [email protected]

            October 4, 2018

Mourning the Loss of Stiff Newspaper Competition in NYC

Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune was highly recognized for her front-line reports of the Korean War in the 1950s, which earned her a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

Photo Credit: Life Magazine

***

Whatever became of the once thriving newspaper market in New York City?

Despite the mass migration to the Internet over the last two decades, you would think in a city of over 8 million inhabitants, New Yorkers, at the very least, could support two major dailies aside from the gargantuan, financially secure, New York Times.

Apparently not.

In its second quarter of 2018, The New York Times has more than 3.8 million total paid subscriptions of which 2.9 million are digital-only with operating profit leaping to $40 million from $26.5 million in the same period of 2017.

In June, the N.Y. Daily News slashed its editorial staff in half to focus on breaking news at the expense of local news and sports.  According to regulatory filings, the Daily News loses about $30 million a year.

In addition, the Tronc owned tabloid has seen its daily circulation dwindle to 200,000 from a once robust one million readers; while its online traffic to its website has plunged 30 percent.

In 2013, Gabelli & Co media analyst, Brett Harriss, estimated News Corp.’s New York Post loses $110 million a year.

New Yorkers suffered another mighty blow when it was learned at the end of August that the Village Voice, founded as a nickel alternative news weekly in 1955 by three New Yorkers: Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher, and Norman Mailer, announced it was ceasing operation. In April, 2017, the tabloid known for its lively counterculture coverage ended its print edition to focus on online content.  Declining revenue, stiff local competition for classified advertising revenue, high staff turnover, and the departure of prominent writers were the reasons most cited for its collapse.

Interestingly, just as I was reading about the calamitous financial state of the newspaper industry in New York, I stumbled on a reference to a book I never read before: “The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune’’ by Richard Kluger, a former New York Herald Tribune and Wall Street Journal reporter. He left journalism to concentrate on writing books. His 1996 examination of the tobacco industry, "Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris," earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1997.

“The Life and Death of the Herald Tribune” is hardly a new book.  It was actually published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1986, over thirty years ago.

Though an oldie, it’s certainly a goodie.

The New York Herald Tribune was published between 1924 through 1966. Its 20-story building was located at 230 W. 41st Street.

The Herald Tribune came about as a result of the merger between The Herald founded by James Gordon Bennett in 1835 and the Tribune founded by Horace Greeley in 1841.

Before the merger, like the Tribunes of ancient Rome, Greeley, as founder of the New York Tribune, or so it has been told, would serve the common people in the defense and promulgation of their rights. The Tribune was a Whig paper dedicated to abolishing slavery and prohibiting liquor. It also became the voice of the Republican Party.

The New York Herald under James Gordon Bennett earned its stripes for its crime coverage, the more lurid the better, and sensational crimes, such as the killing in 1836 of 23-year-old Manhattan prostitute Ellen Jewett, whose body was hacked to death, including suffering partial burns to her body on 41 Thomas Street, about six blocks from City Hall.

As I made my way through this rich and colorfully written history of the Tribune, its celebrated tradition, prize-winning writers, its biting editorials, and thorough foreign coverage, especially its unmatched war coverage, I gained a much greater appreciation of its pioneering journalists and its reverence for editorial integrity.

During its celebrated history, the Herald Tribune won nine Pulitzer Prizes for exemplary journalism.

This was a newspaper, after all, which featured Emma Bugbee, who became the first female reporter at the Herald in 1911 and would remain at the Herald Tribune for 55 years, covering the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt. a number of political conventions, and most prominently, the women’s suffrage hike from Manhattan to Albany in 1912.

Another revolutionary journalist at the Herald Tribune was Marguerite "Maggie" Higgins, who remained at the paper from 1942-1963, principally as a war correspondent, covering World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, and is credited for blazing a new trail for female war correspondents.

Higgins was the first woman, moreover, to win a Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Correspondence awarded in 1951 for her coverage of the Korean War.

Highly touted Herald Tribune foreign affairs reporter, Ralph Barnes, in 1935, through shear dogged reporting, unearthed much of the twisted mind set of the Nazi regime, particularly surrounding Adolf Hitler's blatant anti-Semitism. Later, he covered the “The Munich Agreement” (permitting Nazi Germany's annexation of portions of Czechoslovakia) in 1938.

On November 17, 1940, Barnes boarded a British bomber to report on Benito Mussolini's invasion of Greece. The airplane crashed in Yugoslavia, killing Barnes and three Royal Air Force crewmen. The Salem, Oregon native is remembered for being the first war correspondent killed during World War II.

In addition to its brilliant war coverage, the Herald Tribune hired some of the most gifted and shrewdest editors in the business.

Stanley Walker, for example, was the city editor of the Herald Tribune from 1928 through 1934, during the paper's golden age. Walker strongly believed reporters did their best work during the ages of 25-30 when journalism was still an adventure for them. "After that," Walker maintained, "it would become too much of a grind to pursue sources day and night all over town." Walker was heralded for his keen attention to detail when reporters submitted a story and ferreting out abuses of the English language. Among Walker's stern rules of thumb to his young reporters, included:  "Pick adjectives like you would a mistress or a diamond; too many are dangerous and produce diminishing returns."

 And "fancy writing is a sign of an insecure craftsman." Another: "let the verb tell the story."

The Trib's night city editor, Lessing Lanham (Engel) Engelking, preached, "The right verb is the shortest path to maximum impact."

James Bellows, editor of the Herald Tribune from 1961 through its closing, developed a predilection for taking a chance on young writers, encouraging them to write in a style that best worked for them. Bellows was instrumental in hiring what might be considered the “Murderers' Row” of writers, including, Gail Sheehy, Thomas Wolfe (later would write “Bonfire of the Vanities”), and a young, brash, Irish-American reporter, Jimmy Breslin, who joined the staff in the middle of 1963.  As Kluger tells it, Breslin found his unique writing style early in his career, usually siding with the "debtors and deadbeats, the impoverished, trapped in criminality."

New York Herald Tribune columnist Jimmy Breslin found it difficult to produce copy unless "goaded" by a fast approaching deadline.

 ***

Dan Blum, assignment editor on the Herald Tribune’s metro desk, once described Breslin as "noisy, aggressive, argumentative, hostile and obscene-he threw daily tantrums. He was great and wanted everyone else to know it. He was an immense pain in the butt, the Maria Callas of the city room, but she was worth the trouble."

Walter Arm, a reporter for the Herald Tribune for 25 years, was considered one of the finest police reporters in town.; and Nathaniel Fein was a photographer for the New York Herald Tribune for 33 years (1933-1966), capturing some of the biggest newsmakers of the age, including Albert Einstein, Ty Cobb, Queen Elizabeth, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, William Westmoreland, Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Schweitzer, Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg. Fein is best known, of course, for photographing the frail, cancer stricken, Babe Ruth on his final appearance at Yankee stadium, which earned him the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph "The Babe Bows Out."

Those who work hard, usually play hard. The Herald Tribune was frequently described as a “hard-drinking staff,” who often could be found whetting their whistle at the Artist and Writer's Restaurant at 213 W. Fortieth Street, affectionally known as "Bleek's,'' for its owner, Jack Bleek.

Much like the news department, The Herald Tribune's Sports Department was blessed with a number of talented journalists, including its editors.

Roger Kahn (who would write “Boys of Summer”), was a former Herald Tribune copy boy who would cover the Brooklyn Dodgers for the Tribune in 1952 and 1953 before becoming sports editor of Newsweek in 1956.

Stanley Woodward, arguably journalism's most famous sports editor, who during his tenure wanted to compete head on with the New York Times by “out-writing them.” Woodward brought Red Smith to the Herald Tribune in 1945. In a 1933 column of his, Woodward coined the word, “ivy’’ in reference to Ivy League schools.

A reporter once wrote the following sentence after a college football game: "The second half saw the tide of the game turn." Woodward immediately jumped on the reporter's misguided sentence. " A period of time cannot see anything; do it again and I'll jump out of the window."

One thing the Herald Tribune never lacked was compelling, widely read columnists, like Walter Lippmann, who won two Pulitzer’s for the Herald Tribune (1958 and 1962), Joseph Alsop ( a top insider of Washington politics), and Evans and Novak (Rowland Evans and Bob Novak) who beginning in May, 1963 introduced their "Inside Report," a popular column noted for bashing the tenets of liberalism and taking a hard line against the Soviet Union, subjects, amazingly, rarely touched upon by their contemporaries. Humorist Art Buchwald was another widely publicized columnist.

The Arts Department at the Herald Tribune took a back seat to no one.

Judith Crist was with The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter, film critic and arts editor for 22 years. She was the first woman to become a full-time film critic at a major American newspaper. She broke from other film reviewers by writing scathing reviews of “Spencer's Mountain,” “The Sound of Music”, and “Cleopatra,” among other Hollywood classics.

Film director Billy Wilder once said that inviting Crist to review a film was "like asking the Boston Strangler for a neck massage.”

Eugenia Sheppard revolutionized fashion reporting by introducing a women's fashion page in 1956 accompanied with a column, "Inside Fashion."

Virgil Thomas was the New York Herald-Tribune's music critic from 1940 to 1954, and according to Washington Post writer Tim Page, "was a force in American cultural life." Much like Judith Crist, Thomas broke from contemporaries by puncturing the "masterpiece syndrome."  In his very first review for the New York Herald Tribune in 1940, he wrote that the "New York Philharmonic was no longer a part of the city's intellectual life."

Book Week attracted a number of distinguished intellectuals and literary giants to review books, including Mark Twain, Henry James, Grantland Rice, Don Marquis, Ivan Turgenev, Stephen Crane, Robert Benchley, Henry Morton Stanley, and Richard Harding Davis.

Much like the way daily newspapers websites tarnished the quality of reporting, by rushing to get content online, the Herald Tribune followed a similar path.  In 1950, in hopes of beating their competitors to the punch, they introduced an 8 p.m. “Early Bird” edition. As Richard Kluger wrote: "The hallmark of the Tribune had always been good writing and good editing. Which went by the wayside when it launched its Early Bird edition." "The edition," Kluger noted, "curtailed research and churned out hastily and incomplete stories. Editorial integrity was sacrificed to boost circulation.”

But this would be just the beginning of the end for the Herald Tribune.

Under publisher Ogden Reid (1955-1958), the Herald Tribune’s profits vanished by 1957.

By 1963, the New York Times gobbled up 40 percent of the advertising revenue in the area; with the Daily News, (a solid money maker) 24 percent, while the other four papers scrambling for the other third. The Herald Tribune lost $4 million in 1963.

In addition, a 1963 Gallup Poll reported that readers preferred the New York Times to the Herald Tribune, largely due to its comprehensive and diverse coverage.

The final, crushing blow to the Herald Tribune was the 114-day newspaper strike of 1962-63, a strike which involved 10 unions and seven daily newspapers, including the New York Times, the N.Y. Daily News, the N.Y. Post and the New York Herald Tribune.

When the strike ended, the Herald Tribune's circulation was down 92,000 copies, forcing them to raise the price of the paper to a dime. More importantly, during the lengthy strike, readers found they could get along without a newspaper and increasingly began to turn their attention to television for the latest news. As of September 30, 1963, circulation of six daily New York papers were down 11.9 percent on weekdays and 8.3 percent on Sundays, according to reports from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Loss of readers, revenue, advertisers, and an outdated printing plant all factored into the Herald Tribune’s decision to cease operation. Its final edition was April 24, 1966, leaving New York City with only four major dailies: The New York Times, N.Y. Daily News, the N.Y. Post, and World Journal Tribune in the afternoon. The World Journal Tribune folded on May 5, 1967.

Imagine, in 1923, New York had 17 daily (English language) newspapers.

After the Herald Tribune folded in 1966, the Washington Post and New York Times each acquired one-third of the newspaper from Whitney Communications. In 1991, they became co-owners when they bought out the Whitney shares. And on October 22, 2002, The New York Times’ bought the Washington Post's share of the International Herald Tribune for less than $75 million.

As testament to the enormous talent housed inside the Herald Tribune newsroom, four writers for the paper, after it folded, went on to win Pulitzers, including Jimmy Breslin, Red Smith, art critic Emily Genauer and Art Buchwald.

So, after finishing Richard Kluger’s scrupulously researched, brilliantly written history of the New York Herald Tribune, I can’t help but mourn the immense talent that has gone down the drain at the N.Y. Daily News and the Village Voice in a city that was once fertile ground for talented reporters and thriving newspapers.

-30-

—Bill Lucey

[email protected]

September 11, 2018

How Newspapers Reacted to Chappaquiddick in 1969

 

Sometimes, it’s impossible to burn bridges.

With Sen. Edward Kennedy having passed away nearly 10 years ago, and the tragedy of Chappaquiddick nearly 50 years old, you’d think the scandal that erupted after that muggy July weekend in 1969 would be but a distant memory by now.

But like a bad check, it has returned.

Thanks to director John Curran, the motion picture “Chappaquiddick” (written by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan) and produced by Entertainment Studios, hits theaters nationwide on April 6.

The film explores the mysterious events surrounding the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne (played by Kate Mara) after Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass., landing upside down in eight feet of water.

According to published reports, Curran avoids indicting or absolving Kennedy in the film. After depicting the facts of the case, the New York born director and screenwriter leaves it up to the audience to draw their own conclusions.

What exactly happened at Chappaquiddick?

The Chappaquiddick incident couldn’t have come at a worse time for Ted Kennedy, who was only 37 at the time. His star was rising in the U.S. Senate and was being heavily favored by most public opinion polls as the candidate most likely to be nominated by the Democratic Party for the 1972 presidential election.

But then, in a blink of an eye, his hopes and dreams were shattered on that fateful July weekend in 1969, just two days before the Apollo 11 Moon Landing.

Ted Kennedy's submerged 1967 Oldsmobile and a picture of Mary Jo Kopechne who drowned in the car. She was 28.

***

On the weekend of July 18-19, 1969, Sen. Kennedy invited six women who had worked for his late brother Robert to attend a reunion at the annual Edgartown Yacht Club Regatta race (a sail boating race) to honor their supervisor, Dave Hackett.

The party or cookout (after the race) took place at a rented cottage on Chappaquiddick Island, accessible by ferry from the town of Edgartown on the nearby larger island, Martha's Vineyard.

The party was attended by six married men (including Sen. Kennedy) and six unmarried women.

Sometime during the evening on July 18, Sen. Kennedy claimed he wanted to head back to the Shiretown Inn in Edgartown.

According to testimony, one of the campaign workers at the reunion, Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, feeling tired, expressed to Mr. Kennedy that she would like to catch a ride with him so that she could catch the ferry, which was closing at midnight.

For reasons never fully explained, Kopechne, left behind her purse and hotel room key at the cottage. She also never informed anyone that she was leaving.

After the young campaign worker hopped into the car with the senator, what exactly took place over the next few hours is a matter of speculation.

Kennedy maintained that they were driving toward the ferry but made the wrong turn on Dike Road (an unlit, dirt road) that led to Dike Bridge. Moments before reaching the bridge, according to his testimony, he slammed on the brakes, before driving off a side of the bridge, landing upside down in eight feet of water of Poucha Pond.

Many question the “wrong road’’ scenario, reasoning that it would be virtually impossible to have turned on Dike Road without immediately being aware of the mistake.

The biggest shroud of mystery centers on why it took the senator nearly 10 hours to report the accident?

He testified that he made seven or eight attempts to dive into the water to rescue Kopechne but had trouble breathing. So, he began walking and running for help, but couldn’t make out any shapes and was only able to stay on the road from the silhouettes of the trees.

But evidence subsequently emerged that Kennedy would have, in fact, come across at least three lit cottages (only 500 feet from the bridge) where he could have asked for help.

Kennedy described that night as a "jumble of emotions-grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock.”

According to medical reports, he suffered a concussion.

The fire department dispatched a diver, Capt. John Farrar, to recover the body submerged in the pond. He told reporters, she, [Kopechne] "was in what I call a very conscious position, meaning she’d been alive and functional after the car had entered the water, roof first. Her head was at the floorboards, where the last bit of air would have been. It seems likely she was holding herself into a pocket of air to breathe.”

The diver thought the car Kennedy was driving “must have been going at a pretty good clip to land almost in the middle of the channel.” He also said that had he been called soon after the accident, “there was a good chance the girl could have been saved.”

Kopechne’s body was recovered at 8:45 a.m., the morning after the accident.

Edgartown Police Chief Jim Arena, filed a complaint in Edgartown District Court, charging Kennedy with “leaving the scene of an accident without negligence involved.” The special prosecutor, in his report, stressed that Kennedy had been driving “with extreme caution” at the time of the accident.

More alarm bells were set off when it was learned that an associate medical examiner took less than five minutes to determine Kopechne’s “death by drowning,” while never fully undressing her, and never turning her body over from front to back. He said no autopsy was needed.

The chief medical examiner who was off duty at the time of the drowning, told reporters that there was no conclusive evidence of death by drowning. Contradicting the associate medical examiner, he said, “we don’t know if the girl died of a heart attack, stroke, or from drowning.”

Within hours of Kopechne's death, K. Dun Gifford, a Kennedy aide, flew a chartered plane into Edgartown (the Martha's Vineyard town of which Chappaquiddick is a part), with orders to get her body off the island, beyond the state’s jurisdiction.

When Kennedy finally did arrive at the Shiretown Inn (after swimming or paddling a boat through the 500-foot channel), he reportedly made 12 calls from a pay phone before giving his statement to police.

Cynics question if the senator was really in a state of “exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock,” how could he have made so many phone calls?

In 1969, Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his wife, Joan, after a court appearance on the Chappaquiddick Island car accident.
Photo Credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times

***

Since it took the senator more than a week to address the tragedy in public, rumors about the accident were running wild, including rumors that Mary Jo Kopechne was pregnant and the car plunging off the bridge was no accident. Others picked up whispers that Joseph Gargan, a Kennedy cousin, was initially willing to take the rap for Ted Kennedy.

There was also the "third girl in the car'' theory advanced, which suggests that Rosemary (“Cricket”) Keough, one of the girls who attended the cookout, was in the car with Kennedy, and Kopechene was sleeping in the backseat. When the car was recovered, Keough's handbag was found in the car.

Deputy Sheriff Christopher "Huck" Look acting as a special officer for a private party the night of the accident, came forth with testimony that between 12:30 a.m. and 12:45 a.m. he noticed a dark car approaching the intersection of Dike Road. The car, according to Look, was driven by a man with a female passenger in the front seat. The car drove onto the private Cemetery Road and stopped. He thought they were lost and approached the car. The driver then put the car in reverse and headed east toward the ocean (not the ferry), along Dike Road. The Deputy Sheriff said he did catch a glimpse of the license plate of the car, which he thought began with an "L" and contained two "7's, which did indeed match Kennedy's license plate number: L78-207.

Look reportedly said he saw "a man driving . . . someone next to him" and possibly (although he wasn't 100 percent sure)"someone else in the back seat."

Look's testimony punched damaging holes in Kennedy's testimony that they were headed for the ferry. It also contradicts the time element, suggesting that Kennedy had been with Kopechene for more than an hour before the car plunged off the bridge.

On the 25th anniversary of Chappaquiddick, the BBC developed a theory that when Kennedy was driving Kopechne, he noticed an off-duty police officer in his patrol car. Alarmed that the officer may question why he’s in the car with a young beautiful woman, Kennedy got out of the car and returned to the party. And it was Kopechne who then took over the wheel of the car before driving off the bridge. For those who subscribe to this theory, this would account for the long gap between the drowning and when Kennedy reported the incident to police.

Whatever conspiracy theory anyone clung to, the end result was that on July 25, 1969, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident. He received a two-month suspended sentence, and had his license suspended for a year.

The Massachusetts senator resumed his senatorial duties at the end of July, 1969.

Case closed.

Though the circumstances surrounding the drowning was never prosecuted, the younger brother of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy was never able to carry the torch of the Kennedy legacy that would propel him into the White House.

Ted Kennedy did go on to have a remarkable career in the United States Senate as the “Liberal Lion,” rising to senior Democratic Party member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee; the Immigration Subcommittee; and the Armed Services Committee. In 2006, Time Magazine named him as one of America’s top 10 senators.

Still, Chappaquiddick forever hung over him like a dark, ominous cloud.

The Chappaquiddick scandal ultimately derailed his attempt to unseat Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. After losing 24 primaries to Carter (he won 10) Kennedy dropped out of the race, never to throw his hat into the ring again.

To get a sense of the newspaper coverage Ted Kennedy received in the weeks and months after Chappaquiddick, I gathered some snippets of columns in 1969 from a variety of newspapers.

Press Reacts to Chappaquiddick

"For the third time in less than six years, sudden death has touched the Kennedy family and thereby altered everyone's picture of the American political future."
-David S. Broder, The Washington Post, July 27, 1969

"One need only to look at what the handsome Massachusetts senator has been, or might be, accused of to realize that once all the legal questions are cared for the important accusations against Kennedy will probably be the kind that never get tried in any place but the court of public opinion."
--Carl Rowan, Chicago Sun-Times, September 7, 1969

"Every passing day for the last seven weeks Edward Kennedy has been faced with a dilemma more cruel and oppressive than it was the day before. For it has become increasingly likely that for him to survive in public life and be allowed merely to serve what he regards as the continuing causes of his dead brothers-let alone achieve the Presidency--there can be no escaping a candid and complete account of his behavior before and after the accident on Chappaquiddick Island in which Mary Jo Kopechne drowned."

--Joseph Lelyveld, New York Times, September 7, 1969

 "Instead of a more complete explanation that might wipe away those doubts, Kennedy has chosen silence--amid hope by some of his supporters that time will erase memories of the tragedy. Therein lies Kennedy's political trap. His refusal to talk will receive nationwide exposure at the inevitable first confrontation between Kennedy and the press. That can only multiply suspicions that there was something to hide on Martha's Vineyard."
--Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1969

"If the political consequences of Edward Kennedy's personal difficulties prove as disastrous for him as seems indicated, the likelihood of his being the Democratic nominee for President in 1972 is greatly diminished and perhaps destroyed. This could have extraordinary consequences for American politics."
--Tom Wicker, The New York Times, July 27, 1969

"The power of genuine tragedy, as defined by Aristotle and understood by every later generation, lies in its demonstration that even the mighty and powerful among us are, because they are mortal and have flaws, liable to suffer judgements that no human standard of justice would impose."
--David S. Broder, The Washington Post, July 31, 1969.

The real test is not really here in a courtroom in Edgartown or in the Supreme Judicial Court in Boston. What is at stake here is the public man's credibility--whether the public really believes that Sen. Kennedy has leveled with them in this case."
--Robert Healy, The Boston Globe, September 3, 1969

"The other Bostonian, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would have been intrigued by the Kennedy triumphs and the Kennedy tragedies. In his essay on the duality of life, he argued that every human excess causes a defect, and every defect an excess; every good an evil; for everything you have missed, a gain, and everything you have gained, a loss."
--James Reston, The New York Times, August 15, 1969

"Whatever the answers, one can reasonably conclude that Kennedy-by his own words-showed that in this episode, at age 37, he could not command himself in a critical situation. It was bad luck for him, perhaps, to have been in a dazed condition and to have to rely on sycophants like Markham and Gargan for counsel during those horrible hours. Too bad there wasn't a hard-nosed guy around to coldly tell Teddy the score. It is also clear that the power of the Kennedy name and wealth provided a treatment by the law which ordinary citizens don't enjoy. Big names cow small-town cops."
--Nick Thimmesch, Newsday, August 1, 1969

"What he now faces is a very long struggle. His assets are his name, his talents and his wealth. His liabilities are Chappaquiddick. He will now have to make it more or less on his own. Chappaquiddick having apparently broken the natural line of succession. If, over the next four or five or ten years, he is able to show by his achievements a sobriety of purpose, a strategic manliness, a sense of destiny and resolution, then he will transcend the affair” [of July 18 ].
--William F. Buckley Jr., Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1969

"Kennedy will come back with the passage of time. Someday he will be effective again in the Senate debates that he will have to pass up in the immediate future. Until then, however, there are painful reminders that one of the voices which carried some authority in the Senate won't be effective."
--Reg Murphy, the Atlanta Constitution, July 31, 1969

"Like all strong men whom an unkind fate forces to traverse the valley of the shadow, the senator himself further seems to have gained in strength and self-knowledge. If the present chapter ends as seems most likely, he will thus appear in the next chapter as a major leader of very special promise. And if one may look ahead, a major leader is likely to be badly needed in 1976."
--Joseph Alsop, Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1969

***

 Chappaquiddick Facts

"Chappaquiddick" is an Indian word that means “separate island."

The automobile Ted Kennedy was driving the night of the accident was a 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88. License Plate Number: L78 207 .

Mary Jo Kopechne’s blood-alcohol level at the time of death was determined to be .09 percent.

Edgartown Police Chief Jim Arena took a written statement from Kennedy after the accident. He never administered a test as to determine whether he had been drinking.

Ed Hanify, Kennedy's lawyer, made arrangements to have the senator's car destroyed by a compactor. Mary Jo's clothing that she had worn that night—including a blouse that had bloodstains on the back—was burned.

Senator Ted Kennedy's televised address (July 25th) to the nation in 1969 was delivered in the library of his father's house. The speech was written chiefly by Ted Sorenson, President John F. Kennedy’s principle speechwriter.

In addition to Mary Jo Kopechne's, the other women at the party on the night of the accident were: Susan Tannenbaum, Esther Newberg, and Rosemary Keough. Two others, Maryellen and Nance Lyons, arrived the next day. They were known as "Boiler Room Girls," for working the phone room (boiler room) for delegate counts during Bobby Kennedy's 1968 ill-fated presidential run.

Also present at the party were Kennedy's cousin, Joseph Gargan, and Paul F. Markham, previously, a U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Attorney Charles Tretter, Raymond La Rosa, and John Crimmins (Kennedy's part-time driver).

The people who gathered at the Kennedy compound (Hyannis Port, Mass.) after the tragedy were: Ethel Kennedy, Harvard Prof. Arthur Schlesinger, Stephen Smith (business and campaign manager to Kennedy), former Sec. of Defense, Robert McNamara, Theodore Sorensen, Burke Marshall (Kennedy family lawyer), and Richard Goodwin (speech writer to the Kennedy's).

Kopechne remained in the car until her body was recovered by a Fire Department diver at 8:45 the next morning.

When Kennedy reported the accident to the Edgartown police, it was 9:45 a.m. -- some nine or 10 hours after he left Kopechne in his car.

Ted Kennedy's wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy, suffered her third miscarriage a month after the incident at Chappaquiddick.

The Kopechnes family reportedly received a financial settlement of $140,923 through a Kennedy insurer.

***

Additional Reading on Chappaquiddick

Chappaquiddick FBI Files

Excerpts from the Testimony of Senator Kennedy at Inquest into Kopechne Death (New York Times).

What Happened at Chappaquiddick By Vivian Cadden, McCall's. August 1974

The End of Camelot, Vanity Fair Magazine, September, 1993 

Chappaquiddick's unanswered questions By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, July 21, 1994

NOTE: I’d like to express my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to the kind folks at ProQuest for allowing me to access the Los Angeles Times Historic Archives. Thanks too to Rick Mastroianni, Research and Library Director, at the Newseum, for providing me with some historic pdfs from 1969.

--Bill Lucey
April 2, 2018

[email protected]

 

 

The Washington Post Soars to New Heights in 'The Post'

 

“The Post,” Steven Spielberg’s political thriller of a film, centering on the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, initially by the New York Times, then the Washington Post, appears to be a smash hit.

Over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, the film generated $18.6 million from North American theaters, coming in second behind “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.” “The Post” is additionally being met with enthusiastic reviews from a number of film critics.

Among other accolades, at the 75th Golden Globe Awards, the film received six nominations: Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, Best Actress – Drama for Streep, Best Actor – Drama for Hanks, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score.

Much like he did with “Lincoln” (in nabbing Daniel Day-Lewis to play President Abraham Lincoln), Spielberg went to the top of the mountain in search of star-studded talent, this time convincing Tom Hanks to play the tough as nails executive editor of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, and Meryl Streep to unveil her interpretation of Katharine “Kay” Graham, publisher of the Post.

How believable were they in their roles?

Author and journalist, Sally Quinn, the third wife of Ben Bradlee, who writes a blog about religion  , responding though an email, wrote that she enjoyed “The Post” immensely and thought Hanks did an incredible job portraying her former husband, so much so that she cried while watching the film.

Author and Washington based journalist, Jim Mann, who worked briefly on the Watergate scandal while at the Washington Post, thought Streep's “rendition of Graham was close to perfect.”

Even actor Michael Stuhlbarg's depiction of Abe Rosenthal, the irascible managing editor of the New York Times, met with rousing approval from a family member.

Andrew Rosenthal, former Editorial Page editor of the New York Times, (now a regular Op-Ed columnist ), thought Stuhlbarg was magnificent, but admitted his disappointment that a larger scene in the movie involving his dad, was left on the cutting room floor.

With a hefty $50 million budget to work with, Spielberg didn’t spare any expense, going to great lengths to make sure select scenes and the general landscape presented in the film was a true reflection of the early 1970s.

The newsrooms of both the Washington Post and New York Times, for example, depicting predominantly white men in white shirts, clacking away at their typewriters, using their rotary dial phones, while flipping a lighter, and firing up a cigarette, was convincingly presented.

Even the film’s exterior panoramas of the New York Times former building at 229 West 43rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue near Times Square in Manhattan (from 1913 through 2007), looked like it was the real deal. Through the magic of Hollywood, however, Spielberg’s production company used The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen building in mid-Manhattan (20 West 44th Street, New York) as the Times’ former headquarters. The Times signature 300-foot-long array of globe lights, that was prominently featured outside its old building, were the original fixtures kept by the Times.

Incredibly, it’s been almost 50 years since the Pentagon Papers were published, and what an uproar it caused at the time, pitting the Government against press freedoms provided by the First Amendment.

Many of the press liberties that are taken for granted today, came as the result of hard fought, gutsy battles, of two newspapers and their indomitable editors.

When Neil Sheehan’s first batch of revelations from the Pentagon Papers splashed across the front page of the New York Times on June 13, 1971, newspapers were put on a collision course with the Richard Nixon administration.

After the third instalment of the Times expose, the U.S. Department of Justice secured, through the U.S. District Court, a restraining order on the Times’ from publishing classified material (on the grounds the material would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to U.S. national defense interests”), essentially shutting down the paper from publishing the Pentagon documents.

Bradlee thundered that the ruling represented, "a black mark on the history of democracy.”

Five days later, the Post, undaunted, despite the temporary restraining order imposed on the Times, decided to charge ahead and publish their own analysis of the Pentagon Papers, which unlike the Times, did not reprint classified documents, but paraphrased or quoted select sentences from the study. In particular, the Post articles highlighted the deep divisions between the State and Defense Departments with its policy in Vietnam. The Post analysis also cast President Johnson in an unfavorable light, documenting the lengths to which he went to escalate the war.

As enlightening as the publication of the Pentagon Papers proved to be, things, nonetheless, looked mighty bleak for the Times and Post and the freedoms once taken for granted under the First Amendment.

15 stormy days would ensue before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision, a favorable ruling (6-3) for the press, ruling that prior restraint was unconstitutional and further asserting, that “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

Ben Bradlee and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham celebrated the 1971 ruling allowing publication of the Pentagon Papers. Photo Credit: Associated Press

 

As brilliant as the Times and the Post’s reporting was, it’s worth emphasizing that such an expose wasn’t possible, but for a brave, courageous Pentagon analysist (superhawk turned superdove), Daniel Ellsberg, stepping forward and going public with 4,000 pages, and 2.5 million words of critical Pentagon history, releasing copies first to the Times, then to the Post.

It was Ellsberg’s hope that the release of this Pentagon study, officially titled, “History of the United States Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy" commissioned in 1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, would convince President Nixon to change his Vietnam policy.

Among other troubling revelations, the Pentagon Papers showed that the Truman Administration provided military aid to France in its colonial war against the communist-led Viet Minh, directly involving the United States in Vietnam; and that President Lyndon B. Johnson ramped up the war against North Vietnam, while planning to wage a covert war in 1964, a full year before the U.S. involvement was publicly revealed. The Pentagon study additionally documented disturbing cases of deception by the Johnson administration, by, for example, withholding vital information from Congress and the public, critical information, which raised serious questions about the effectiveness of the U.S. government’s course of action in Southeast Asia.

Knowing his treasonous actions would more than likely land him in jail, Ellsberg wasn’t surprised when he was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, along with other charges of theft and conspiracy, which carried a total maximum sentence of 115 years.

The charges against the former RAND Corp. employee, however, were dismissed on May 11, 1973. on grounds of "improper Government conduct shielded so long from public view," as ruled by United States District Court Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr.

Another highly invasive abuse of power directed at Mr. Ellsberg happened on September 3, 1971, shortly after the Pentagon Papers went public, when H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's top advisor, ordered the break in of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. The burglars photographed files, but found nothing damaging on the former Pentagon analyst. The Nixon administration rationalized such action on the peculiar grounds that Ellsberg threatened national security.

After seeing the film, I now understand why Mr. Spielberg made the Washington Post the center of this film, and not the New York Times.

The Pentagon Papers clearly raised Ben Bradlee and the Washington Post’s stature to new heights, demonstrating their fearless resolve not to be bullied by the White House in withholding the truth from its readers.

Prior to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Star had a higher circulation than the Post. Kay Graham’s paper was no longer a local paper, they were now a prominent national paper.

Though the Times would win a Pulitzer Prize for the Pentagon Papers in 1972, only a year later, the Post would scoop its chief rival and win a Pulitzer for the Watergate scandal, a triumphant moment for the Post in which Bradlee roared, ''Eat your heart out, Abe Rosenthal, eat your heart out!"

The Post's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, permanently changed "the ethos of the paper and crystallized for editors and reporters everywhere how independent and determined and confident of its purpose the new Washington Post had become,’’ Bradlee would wrote in his memoirs.

Bradlee also wrote that the Post had become, “a paper that stands up to charges of treason, a paper that holds firm in the face of charges from the president, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General, never mind an assistant attorney general. A paper that holds its head high, committed unshakably to principle.”

Katharine Graham, the heroic publisher, who ultimately gave the green light to publish the papers (“OK...let's go, let's publish”), writes in a book she wrote about the Pentagon Papers, that when national editor Ben Bagdikian came back to Washington with a suitcase full of Pentagon documents from Boston (given to him by Ellsberg) and called the executive editor to ask whether they should publish, Bradlee purportedly responded, "If we don't publish, there's going to be a new executive editor at the Washington Post."

That quote, Graham readily admits, might be apocryphal, but she said it certainly sounded like something Ben would say.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

January 18, 2018

 

Further Resources

• Pentagon Papers (National Archives)
• Time Magazine, June 28, 1971: The Pentagon Papers: The Secret War

 

Journalists Reveal Favorite Apps/Websites and Cool Tools

 

Photo Credit: Denver Post

***

Exactly how do you swallow your news these days?

Do you still prefer the morning newspaper print edition; or do you prefer to just reach for the remote and flip on CNN for finding out what’s going on in the world?

Or are you like a growing population of adults, who like to receive their news in real-time on their mobile devices, while making a mad dash to work, waiting in a ridiculous long line at the supermarket, or while munching on a sandwich?

According to the Pew Research Center , “more than eight-in-ten U.S. adults now get news on a mobile device (85 percent), compared with 72 percent just a year ago and slightly more than half in 2013 (54 percent).”

Pew additionally reports that in 2016 , just two-in-ten U.S. adults regularly get news from print newspapers, a steep plunge from 27 percent in 2013.

Despite the seismic shift to mobile devices for obtaining news, television, by far, remains the most popular medium. As many as 57 percent of U.S. adults are regularly exposed to TV-based news, either from local TV (46 percent), cable (31 percent), network (30 percent) or some combination of the three.

Since the migration to mobile devices for consuming news is growing more robust by the day, I thought it would be fun to check in with some leading and popular gatekeepers (who better?) to share what apps or online sites they are most fascinated with.

So, what follows are some responses that flew back to my inbox after I emailed a number of prominent journalists to ask if they would consider sharing their favorite apps, cool tools, or websites.

George Stephanopoulos,  co-anchor of Good Morning America, and the host of ABC's Sunday morning This Week, replied that he gravitates toward Vox, TalkingPointsMemo and the National Review .

Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times said that in addition to his own paper's app and the Washington Post's app , he's a big admirer of the Quartz app, a website owned by Atlantic Media Co., which is comprised of former reporters from Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The New York Times.

Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington D.C. conservative think tank, is a huge fan of the Washington Post blog, The Plum Line (administered by Greg Sargent), The Daily 202 (or Power Post) also from the Washington Post, along with Jonathan Bernstein's sharp analysis at Bloomberg. 

Tom Meagher, deputy managing editor at The Marshall Project , a nonprofit, nonpartisan online journalism organization focusing on issues related to criminal justice in the United States, replied that he's become a big fan of the podcast "Bombshell" from "War on the Rocks." "It's more analytical than straight reporting," Meagher informed me, "and it's focused primarily on foreign policy, national security and diplomacy." 

Michael Shear, New York Times White House correspondent said his favorite is an election map by Zentropy Software. 

According to Shear, “In election years I use it all the time to keep track of electoral votes and to play with various scenarios."

Sheila Krumholz, Executive Director at Center for Responsive Politics , informed me that Ballot Ready is a new award-winning site that she's become familiar with. Ballot Ready is an online voter guide to local elections.

Jonathan Karl, Chief White House Correspondent for ABC News in Washington, D.C., highlighted NPR One, among others, as one of his all-time favorites for keeping informed. NPR One is an audio app, which provides stories and podcasts from NPR, your local public radio station, along with other outlets.

Kimberley Strassel, Potomac Watch columnist for Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, regularly visits RealClearPolitics , a Chicago-based political news and polling data aggregator formed in 2000 by former options trader John McIntyre and former advertising agency account executive Tom Bevan.

Jack Shafer, POLITICO's senior media writer finds TweetDeck to be enormously useful. TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts in which users can monitor and tweet from multiple accounts simultaneously.

Shafer also appreciates the utility of Microsoft’s OneNote , a computer program for gathering users' notes (handwritten or typed), drawings, screen clippings and audio commentaries.

Shafer says he's been able to store clips of his at OneNote, going back to 2008.

Jennifer Manning, Congressional Librarian at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in Washington D.C., says that in addition to the Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress , she has heaps of praise for LegiStorm , home of congressional press releases, tweets, the most up-to-date and accurate staff contact information, and oodles of other important legislative issues.

The Reference Office at the U.S. Senate Library in Washington D.C., were kind enough to offer some of their favorites for finding the most up-to-date legislative information, including the Congressional Record , Congress In Your Pocket , TrackBill , CQ Roll Call , The Hill , and Politico .

For those hard-core news junkies, policy wonks, and number crunchers, who like to get into the weeds when untangling news, Edwin Bender, Executive Director of Follow the Money  and his staff, recommended some truly groundbreaking sites for presenting news in the digital age.

For starters, Bender is a big promoter of Digital Democracy who he feels are on the cutting edge of 21st Century transparency; though they are just in in their “start-up” mode with only two states.

"Because California has no record of committee hearings", Bender explained, "DD is videoing all, transcribing testimony, indexing content by subject, speakers, etc., and making it all available via its site. It’s also developing an “alignment index” that shows when legislation correlates with the interests of outsiders."

DD streams Follow the Money's data to its site to inform its users with the hope that Power Mapping tools will ultimately become available to the public. "CalMatters and the Texas Tribune are likely collaborators," Bender added.

Pete Quest, from Follow the Money, recommends the Center for Public Integrity's new search tool for tracing "Dark Money," to discover the money nonprofits are giving each other. 

Quest is also a fan of  Good Jobs First ,which provides a nifty online tool to track corporate tax breaks or other corporate economic incentives states provide. 

Yet another online tool shared by Quest is the Campaign Finance Institute's interactive tool  for examining how different campaign finance policies might affect small donor participation. And at the bottom of page 2 of CFI's study of Party Contribution Limits and Polarization users will be able to examine the causes of legislative polarization.

Calder Burgam, Researcher and Outreach Specialist at National Institute on Money in State Politics plugged a couple of news sites which used the Institute's data in a remarkably innovative way.

At WRAL.COM for example, whenever they publish an article that includes a state legislator, readers can hover over the legislator’s name to see a list of their top contributors.  Such as this example .

Burgam also enjoys the Legislative Navigator created by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which compiles the latest information on bills being considered, along with important contribution data. Here's an example of AJC's Bill Page. And by clicking on a legislator, you're taken to a Profile Page , which includes district information, voting record, and campaign contributions.

According to Burgam, "these examples represent ways traditional news organizations can adapt and provide easy to access and valuable context for their readers. And the great thing is, any organization with access to a computer programmer can implement tools like this."

Finally, Denise Roth Barber, Managing Director at the National Institute on Money In State Politics, recommends LittleSis , a free database noting the connections between powerful people and organizations.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

July 13, 2017

Hurricane Hoynsie Lands in Northeast Ohio

Paul Hoynes high heater took everyone by surprise.

The award winning veteran baseball writer for Cleveland.com is getting walloped by readers (and at least two members of the Cleveland Indians) for writing after the Tribe's 1-0 win over the Detroit Tigers on Saturday that their post-season is over before it began, now that they're without two starting pitchers: Carlos Carrasco (broken hand) and Danny Salazar (mild forearm strain).

``Sept. 17: Remember the date because that's when Indians' postseason dreams ended before they began'' was the screaming headline that took Northeast Ohio by storm.

His column  has already generated over 500 reader comments, a vast majority outraged that Hoynes has given the team zero chance of success in the post-season, assuming they seal the deal. 

The Indians magic number for clinching the American League Central Division title is 7.

One reader wrote: ``September 18th: The day Paul Hoynes' relevance ended in Cleveland.'' Another wrote: ``Love the positivity bro. Indians are going to the postseason and you're still finding something to cry about. But, you are an opinion writer, not a real journalist, so I understand.''

But not all readers vented their wrath at Hoynes. One reader wrote: ``Sports journalists are not members of the teams that they cover, nor do they wear cheerleading outfits or "Party At Napoli's" teeshirts. They are paid by their employers to report on teams and make objective judgements. They are also paid according to the number of clicks their stories receive on sites like this one.'' Another: ``Unfortunately I agree with him. Especially after watching Bauer's meltdown yesterday.''

And the anger directed at Hoynes has now extended inside the Indians clubhouse.

Cleveland's starting pitcher Trevor Bauer took to social media to call the baseball writer a ``coward''  while the Indians second-sacker, Jason Kipnis, was a bit more diplomatic-wondering why Hoynes just doesn't kick back and write from home if he's so sure what's in store for the Indians in October. 

Anyone who knows Paul Hoynes knows he's far from a coward.

Hoynsie will be in the Indians clubhouse on Tuesday, come hell or high water, to do what he does best: reporting on the Cleveland Indians, even if he’s a pariah.

This is a beat writer, after all, who was physically attacked by Mel Hall in the 1980s after something he wrote about the Indians outfielder. It took Otis Nixon to pull Hall off of Hoynes.  Indians erratic closer John Rocker (in 2001) took exception to something Hoynes wrote about him; invited him into the weight room and slammed the door. ``Rocker scared me a lot more than Mel,'' Hoynes once told me.

So how upset are the Indians organization over Hoynes dim view of the Indians post-season chances?

Bob DiBiasio, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs for the Cleveland Indians, expressed through an email that ``we all agree he [Paul Hoynes] is entitled to his opinion and would never expect him to be a PR-agency for the ball club. And he should never expect a pass from our players or fans for writing something they disagree with, just because he is a beat writer. That’s part of the job as well. And he knows that.''

No matter your opinion of Hoynes’ comments, it would be childish to think this battle tested, well respected writer, considered by many to be one of the best baseball writers in America, is criticizing the Indians purely out of vindictiveness.

Hoynsie calls them as he sees them, that's what he's paid to do. He would lose his license if he didn't.

Dan Shaughnessy, sports columnist for the Boston Globe, said, ``Hoynsie is one of the best. His opinion means something. And it's only bloody sports. What amazes me is that fans have become such babies and want only cheerleaders. Pathetic. Those folks need to grow up.''

Former Plain Dealer Investigative reporter Walt Bogdanich, now with the New York Times, echoed Shaughnessy’s sentiments.

``As a fan,'' Bogdanich said, ``I want Hoynes to tell me what he thinks.  Why else would I read him? I appreciated his honesty and, I might add, his courage, since walking back into that clubhouse, as surely he must, will be unpleasant.''

While most applaud Hoynes journalistic boldness and astute observations, I have to admit I'm a bit surprised he was so quick to count the Tribe out.

One thing sportswriters and opinion columnists don't have at their disposal is a crystal ball. No one can predict the mines and traps a team has to endure to finally claim a championship ring.

Few expected the New York Giants to sweep the Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series, a team that lost only 43 games during the regular season with two 20-game winners in Early Wynn  and Bob Lemon; and a third pitcher, Mike Garcia, with 19 wins.

And who would have thought the 1971 Baltimore Orioles with four 20-game winners on their staff would be stunned by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series?

To use that tired old sports cliché: ``That's why they play the games.''

Hoynes’ ``they're down for the count’’ commentary also surprised me once I thought about how the Indians must have felt after reading it.

Consider: The Indians busted their behinds since March with hopes of unseating the World Series champion Kansas City Royals and knowing the Detroit Tigers were entering the season with a formidable $200 million payroll.

The Indians set a franchise record 14 straight victories. Despite losing their slugging left-fielder Michael Brantley for most of the season, they produced MVP like years from Mike Napoli, Jose Ramirez; the human highlight reel Francisco Lindor has already risen to rock star status at the tender age of 23, while Tyler Naquin has flirted with rookie of the year honors. The bullpen seems primed for the post-season with Indians manager Terry Francona mix and matching with Bryan Shaw, Andrew Miller, and Codie Allen.

Despite all these spectacular accomplishments and with the team on the verge of clinching their first division crown in nine years, Paul Hoynes in a stroke of pen, seemingly wipes that all by stating the Indians season is over before it began.

I can certainly understand why to some members of the Indians (and most of the fans) the column seemed like a poke in the eye.

Understandably, the Indians have incurred crushing blows in losing their two starting pitchers.

But in fairness to pitchers Mike Clevinger and Josh Tomlin, both have earned the right and deserve the respect to prove they can help keep the ship afloat during the stormy high winds of the post-season, before a scribe passes judgement even before their journey has begun.

That’s why they play the games.

 

-Bill Lucey

[email protected]

September 20, 2016