A TRIBUTE TO LEADERSHIP
Testimonials about courageous editors and publishers
‘Leadership is not professional. It’s personal. A great editor is in your face and in your life. You are terrified of him, and you love him.’
— Tom Oliphant on Tom Winship
By Scott B. Anderson
Assistant Professor
Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
At one of its annual conventions, the American Society of News Editors paid tribute to some of the newspaper industry’s greatest modern leaders, honoring them with short “Leadership Moments” sprinkled for inspiration throughout the three-day program.
Courage was a universal theme of the testimonials, from Katharine Graham’s jaw-tightened determination to rise above a crippling union strike, to Punch Sulzberger’s boldly historic decision to publish the Pentagon Papers and Bob Maynard’s passionate resolve to use diversity to save a deeply troubled newspaper.
Courage, too, powered the many editors who lead their newsrooms and communities during the Civil Rights turbulence in the 1960s. Editors such as Ira Harkey, Jr. who, Gene Roberts recalled, “became a pariah in his town” by supporting desegration at the University of Mississippi. “A bullet pierced the door of his newspaper; a shotgun blasted out a window of his home; a cross was burned on his lawn, but Harkey said in an editorial:
‘Ah Autumn. Falling leaves, the smell of burning crosses.’
Another courageous civil rights editor honored was Eugene Patterson, whom Roy Peter Clark noted in his obituary on Jan. 13 2013 wrote the remarkable column “A Flower for the Graves” as he sat crying, his daughter nearby, just hours after four young girls were murdered in a church bombing in Birmingham. “Only we can trace the truth, Southerner — you and I. We broke those children’s bodies,” he wrote in his Atlanta Constitution.
Great editors. Great leaders. Courageous men and women who, as John Carroll said about Creed Black, understood that “people don’t buy newspapers because the newspaper coddles them or because it seeks their permission before it runs a story, or because it panders to their prejudices. They buy it because it tells them important things without flinching, or shading the truth.”
We are proud to present these written and audio transcripts of the April, 2001 Leadership Moments in honor of some of our craft’s and nation’s greatest leaders — women and men who willingly and bravely faced personal injury, financial ruin, prison and being shunned in their communities because they believed so strongly in the right and the might of their journalism and decisions.
TOM WINSHIP
The Boston Globe
(Presented by Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe)
Please travel back in time with me across a generation of America’s racial divide. 1974 was any city’s worst nightmare and any editor’s greatest challenge. When a police-led motorcade of yellow school buses with a precious cargo of African-American kids chugged up the hill past a mob of angry white people into South Boston 27 years ago to begin the ugliest court ordered desegregation of a northern school system, the city wasn’t close to ready.
But Tom Winship was. Not merely to manage, but to lead — a newspaper as well as a city.
While the worst racial turmoil in more than a decade flared and politicians from city hall to the White House ran for cover or poured gasoline on the flames, Tom Winship put The Boston Globe literally in the line of fire with nothing more than the highest of journalistic values as the arrows in his quiver.
One enduring symbol of his leadership were the bullets fired into our building on two occasions by nightriders. The other is the Pulitzer Committee’s gold medal.
Leadership is often confused with management. Never by Tom Winship.
‘Winship would not pull a single editorial punch in cajoling a community to face its darkest angels and be better. Managers control, leaders build and accomplish.’
Of course he was prepared. Months ahead of time, he had recruited one of the best managers ever, Bob Phelps from The New York Times to supervise the coverage. People were dispatched all over the country to learn what the experience of desegregation was actually like for a community and a newspaper. He created a three-person desk to operate his coverage around the clock for a year and make sure that everything from the street, from the courts, the government and the schools themselves was part of one picture — not a story divided by departmental convenience.
A staff of more than 50 people, some of us already wasted by Watergate, was mobilized and organized for duty on a multi-angled story that would break in the middle of the pivotal post-Watergate political year. And when we thought we were winding down, he made us all assemble an encyclopedic reconstruction of that first year — more than 150,000 words that dug out all the stories we’d missed the first time around.
As one of those three people, what I still remember is not Tom’s preparation, but his presence. Leadership is not professional. It’s personal. A great editor is in your face and in your life. You are terrified of him, and you love him. He is never remote. He risks intimacy. Tom endured barrages every day from every player in this drama because he backed us every night, in printing every verifiable element of every situation. He would not pull a single editorial punch in cajoling a community to face its darkest angels and be better. Managers control, leaders build and accomplish.
For a manager, you obey. For a leader, you would commit a felony.
Boston just became a majority minority city. It’s a better place today. And Tom helped build the Globe as well as the town by insisting that each face itself. But a tale of great leadership can’t provide a formula. For this, as John Kennedy said of courage, each editor must look into his own soul.
KATHARINE GRAHAM
The Washington Post
(Presented by Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post)
Katharine Graham’s first leadership moment for me will always be her decision in 1963 to take the future of The Washington Post into her own hands after the tragic loss of her husband. Many of the world’s leading newspaper owners were circling National Airport just waiting for an invitation to land and talk to her about buying her newspaper.
But after that, her first decision that required enormous courage that I can remember was her approval of the landmark legal defense that the Washington Post lawyers had crafted to answer a subpoena by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew for all the documents we had supporting stories that eventually cost Agnew his job. We called it the Gray-Haired Grandmother Defense.
All reporters’ notes relating to Agnew became Katharine’s personal possessions, and asserting that she had ultimate responsibility for the custody of the notes, not the reporters. As Joe Califano put it, “It would be easy to put Cohen and Whitcover in jail; let’s see if they have the guts to put a gray-haired grandmother in the slam.”
She was perfectly willing to go.
Photo courtesy ASNE
Not too long after that, Katharine had her own great moment of courage in connection with the Pentagon Papers. You’ve heard Arthur Sulzberger’s talk about Punch’s courage, and it took a lot. But when the Post finally got their own copies of the Pentagon Papers five agonizing days later — talk about courage, just waiting five days was courage — after the Times had been enjoined from future publication, she was faced with her own dilemma. Her lawyers were telling her that we couldn’t publish because a federal judge had already found that the New York Times, in the New York Times case, the Pentagon Papers did in fact represent a threat to national security. We historians countered that we couldn’t let a New York judge decide what a Washington paper was going to print, and Katharine “Just Call Me Leadership” Graham backed her editors.
‘Katie Graham’s going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.’
— Attorney General John Mitchell
Then, soon after that, Katharine received the infamous threat from Attorney General Mitchell who screamed over the phone to Carl Bernstein “All that crap you’re putting in the paper, it’s all been denied. Katie Graham’s going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ, that’s the most sickening thing I ever heard.” I bet some of you forgot that, the full glory of that quote. Can you imagine any other, never mind Attorney General, in the last thirty years talking like that? That’s the most sickening thing I ever heard.
Finally, of particular interest to this audience came the awful pressman’s strike in October 1977, more than a year after Watergate. I don’t know how many of you ever saw the pictures of the damage done to the Washington Post pressroom that night — rollers slashed, Coke bottles thrown into the gears, fire started in the reel room, and fire extinguishers — fire extinguisher hoses cut to render them useless. They put us out of business.
Katharine’s decision was to get another edition on the streets as soon as possible and keep them coming for the next four-and-a-half months. Four-and-a-half months.
Few of her fellow publishers, especially those in smaller metropolitan areas, thought that this woman, whose pressroom was only a few blocks from the headquarters of the AFL-CIO, and she was probably the least experienced publisher any of them knew, few of them thought she would risk a strike. And let’s face it, few of them thought that Katharine Graham had the guts and leadership to pull it off. A liberal Democrat; a friend of labor leader George Meany; Georgetown social leader; blah-blah-blah, and only a woman to boot.
You could see the sadness and discouragement in Kay Graham’s eyes, but you could also see her jaw tighten with determination to get a paper out. Somehow, maybe in a couple of days. Then another, and another, and finally that determination put us back in business stronger than ever.
If her jaw hadn’t been set, nothing would have happened.
Like I always say, no editor, no reporter, no publisher, can ever match the power and determination of an owner. Ladies and gentleman, Mother Courage herself, Katharine Graham.
CIVIL RIGHTS ERA EDITORS
(Presented by Eugene L. Roberts of the University of Maryland)
There may never have been a time in national history when a small group of editors became as important or as influential as in the South during the Civil Rights Era.
The region’s political leaders, the vast majority of the South’s governors, senators and U.S. representatives played politics with the Supreme Court school desegregation decision, questioning whether it even had to be obeyed. A handful of Southern editors, probably no more than 20 at peak, placed the national interest above regionalism and argued that if the Supreme Court was not obeyed, anarchy would descend upon the country. Through editorials or columns, these editors spoke out and became voices of sanity in a period of political abdication from national responsibility. They were at odds with most of their readers. They risked advertising and reader boycotts. But they were forceful and often eloquent.
When political leaders like Harry Byrd of Virginia advocated closing schools to avoid school desegregation, Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News & Observer reacted with style. He noted that this — closing schools — might be worse even than what had befallen the nation during the Civil War. Because closing schools, he said, was something beyond secession from the Union. It was, he said, secession from civilization.
‘What were Lucy’s crimes? She was born black and she was moving against Southern custom and tradition, but with the law right on up to the United States Supreme Court on her side.’
— Buford Boone, Tuscaloosa News
When the University of Alabama expelled Autherine Lucy, a black student of the school for only three days, after riots by student and race-hater groups, Buford Boone of the Tuscaloosa News took on the university and the mob. “What were Lucy’s crimes?” he asked. Then he answered. “She was born black and she was moving against Southern custom and tradition, but with the law right on up to the United States Supreme Court on her side. What does it mean today at the University of Alabama and here in Tuscaloosa to have the law on your side? The answer has to be nothing, that is if a mob disagrees with you and the courts.”
(Read ‘A Flower for the Graves’ by Eugene Patterson.)
Some of the others — Harry Ashmore, the Arkansas Gazette and Ralph McGill and Gene Patterson of the Atlanta Constitution — became more than Southern leaders. They became national leaders, supporting federal action, troops if necessary, to uphold the law.
Editors like McGill, fearful at times that they were years ahead of their readers, denied that they were integrationists, only believers in the law. But ultimately, McGill said he was for integration, not just because it was the law but because it was the right and just position to take.
The editors took great risk. Hazel Brannon Smith watched the financial health of the Lexington Advertiser in Mississippi decline precipitously after she protested the sheriff’s shooting of a black man for making too much noise. The boycotts against her increased in intensity when she editorially attacked the white citizens council.
Ira Harkey, Jr., editor and publisher of the Pascagoula Chronicle in Mississippi became a pariah in his town and, ultimately, felt compelled to sell his newspaper. His offense: he opposed Governor Ross Barnett’s stop-at-nothing approach to preventing the desegregation of the University of Mississippi. A bullet pierced the door of his newspaper; a shotgun blasted out a window of his home; a cross was burned on his lawn, but Harkey said in an editorial, “Ah Autumn. Falling leaves, the smell of burning crosses.”
Humor, even in the toughest of times, kept the editors afloat. Two of the most courageous editors were father and son, Hodding Carter, Jr. and Hodding Carter III of Mississippi’s Delta Democrat Times. They never lost their ability to laugh or their sense of outrage at racial injustice, particularly the organized brand pushed by the white citizens councils.
After Hodding Carter, Jr. wrote an article for Look magazine detailing the dangerous menacing spread of a white citizen’s council, the article was branded on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives as a quote, “Willful lie by a nigger-loving editor.” And the House then voted to censure Carter. Carter’s reply in a front-page editorial was a classic. It said:
‘By vote of 89 to 19, the Mississippi House of Representatives has resolved the editor of this newspaper into a liar because of an article I wrote. If this charge were true, it would make me well qualified to serve in that body. It is not true. So to even things up, I hereby resolve by vote of one to nothing that there are 89 liars in the state Legislature. I am hopeful that this fever, like Ku Kluxism that arose from the same kind of infection will run its course before too long a time. Meanwhile, those 89 character mobbers can go to hell, collectively or singly, and wait there until I back down. They needn’t plan on returning.’
When it became popular among racists to refer to Ralph McGill as “Rastus Ralph,” McGill fought back. He named his little dog Rastus and trained it to bark whenever a telephone receiver was pointed at it. Thereafter, when he received harassing phone calls at home, McGill would say, “So you want to speak to Rastus?” and point the receiver at the dog and the dog would bark away.
The outcome of the civil rights struggle might have been different, and almost certainly, the South’s resistance might have even been more violent, had the editors not provided leadership at a crucial time.
In addition to the editors I named, there was Lenoir Chambers of the Norfolk Virginian Pilot; Sylvan Meyer of Gainesville Georgia and the Miami News; Coleman Harwell and John Seigenthaler of the Nashville Tennessean; C.A. “Pete” McKnight of the Charlotte Observer, Bill Baggs of the Miami News; Caro Brown of the Alice, Texas Echo; and John L. Harrison and Horance G. Davis, Jr. of the Gainesville Sun in Florida.
And let us remember, too, the editors of black weeklies like Emory Jackson of the Birmingham World in Alabama and Daisy Bates of the Arkansas State Press. They believed the time had come to end segregation in America. And they struggled fearlessly to hasten the end.
Think of the consequences if the Southern editors had not stood up and reached out to the rest of the nation, even at the risk of angering their readers and touching off reader and advertising boycotts. The gulf between the South and the rest of the nation might have grown wider. A stormy period in our nation’s history might have become even more stormy. Instead, segregation came to an end and our nation entered into a period of reconciliation.
Thank you.
BOB MAYNARD
Oakland Tribune
(Presented by Dori Maynard of the Maynard Institute)
In 1977, my father quit his job on the Washington Post to begin working on the institute that bears his name today. That following summer he and my mother went out to the Bay Area where she was running his summer program for minority journalists. And he began his day running around Lake Merrit looking up at the Oakland Tribune and thinking, “I want that paper.”
When they returned to Washington, DC that September, their old friend John Quinn called my father, told him that Gannett was thinking about buying the Oakland Tribune and asked my father if he had any recommendations for potential editors. He did. He had one — himself.
And in 1979 my father became the first African American editor of a major metropolitan newspaper. At that time the Oakland Tribune was considered the nation’s second-worst newspaper. Nobody would say what was the absolute worst newspaper. But the Oakland Tribune was so bad that when people would ask me what my father did, I would proudly tell them “he’s the editor of the umm hmm hmm.”
But he had a plan to change that and shortly after he was named editor, his then-publisher of the paper became so tired of my father’s frequent requests for this or that that he finally threw up his hands and facetiously told him “you seem to know what you need, just take care of it.”
So the next day my father called in a construction crew. And they tore down some walls and he built a new conference room.
Four years later he became the first African American to own a major metropolitan daily. And throughout his tenure with the Oakland Tribune he put together one of the most diverse newsrooms in this country.
Roy Aarons, who later went on to become the founder of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, was the executive editor. Eric Newton, who went on to create the contents of the museum, was the managing editor. And the late Charles Jackson, who in 1990 produced a package on racial profiling, was the city editor.
And in that conference room they conceived of coverage that cut across the five fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography, winning hundreds of awards including the Pulitzer Prize.
So when I think about the lessons my father left, I think about vision, boldness and a commitment to excellence. Those lessons are particularly important to us in the industry this year as we are faced with dwindling resources and a newsroom census that looks very little like the nation’s census. In fact the two are going in opposite directions.
As we move forward I know my father would say that if this industry is to survive and thrive this is the very time that we need a vision for the newsroom of the future and the boldness to finally make it so if we are to ever deliver on our promise of excellent, accurate, and credible journalism. For without diversity, we cannot have excellent, accurate, or credible journalism.
Nine months before he died, the economic realities of another recession forced my father to sell the paper. That could, to some, look like a failure. But nine years earlier there had been no other bidders for the Oakland Tribune. And indeed, during my father’s association with that paper, people regularly predicted that Oakland was going to become the first major metropolitan city to have no daily newspaper.
‘This country cannot be the country we want it to be if its story is told by only one group of citizens. Our goal is to give all Americans front door access to the truth.’
Today Oakland has a newspaper. And I believe that that is in large part a result of my father’s vision of a diverse newsroom that produced a paper that looked at the five fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography and so reflected its city’s vision of itself.
In those murky months before my father died, he promised the Freedom Forum that he would address a gathering of the Chips Quinn Scholars. As the time drew near it was clear that he was too ill to travel. But my father was determined to fulfill his promise. So he arranged to speak by speakerphone. In what was to be his last public address he said, “This country cannot be the country we want it to be if its story is told by only one group of citizens. Our goal is to give all Americans front door access to the truth.”
Today, I hope that all of us will commit to making my father’s goal a reality. So that together we can work to ensure that this industry survives and thrives. And if there is a leadership moment from my father’s life that I think we need to mirror right now, it is that determination to do what it takes to fulfill a promise.
Thank you very much.
CREED BLACK
Lexington Herald-Leader
(Presentation by John S. Carroll, Los Angeles Times)
Now I will submit to you that when it comes to worship of college athletics, no state is more depraved than Kentucky. Although you could make an argument for Alabama. To people in Kentucky, the wins and losses of the Wildcats are personal successes and failures and it’s impossible to overstate the visceral bond between the team and the people.
Well, in 1985 it happened. Two reporters, Jeff Marx and Mike York, discovered credible evidence that players were on the take and that their coaches were involved and it had been going on for years.
As a young editor, I turned to my publisher. I was observing not only what he advised me to do, but the manner in which he advised it. Without any apparent soul-searching, he simply said pursue the story, and if you can verify it, let’s publish it. It being a simple matter. Well, we did that. And the result was one of the biggest nightmares a publisher can have. More or less in order, these are the things that happened after this story was published:
- A circulation boycott.
- Advertising boycott.
- A public rally at which the angry speakers attacked the newspaper and hawkers sold caps and t-shirts and bumper stickers denouncing the Herald-Leader.
- A bomb threat that forced us to empty the building while the fire department using dogs searched the place.
- A rifle shot fired into the pressroom.
- Innumerable personal confrontations, such as the subscriber who lay in wait for his delivery man and pursued him down the block with an ax handle.
- Attacks by the electronic media.
Now, I don’t like the use of the word media to describe a variety of news outlets. But in this case, the radio and television stations spoke as one. Station executives who had never been on television before took to the air to denounce the paper’s treachery. One radio station that had a talk show on weeknights attacked the newspaper for nearly 90 consecutive nights. And not one radio or television station ever broadcast any serious consideration that what the newspaper said might have been true or significant.
During all this, no only did Creed not waiver, he actually seemed happy. He wrote a column saying that as a native Kentuckian, he expected the furor, but nevertheless he was disappointed.
As Creed’s editor, I will never forget his steadfastness in the face of this difficulty. And it extended far beyond the newsroom. During the difficult period, I had any number of visits from people in the circulation department or the production department or the advertising department saying that they understood why the newspaper had to publish the story and that they were proud that it did. That is a measure of Creed’s communication and leadership of the whole company.
A booster story on Page One.
Now such stories as that that occurred in Lexington are fairly commonplace. A couple of notable examples in recent years are Syracuse, NY and St. Paul, Minn.
‘. . .people don’t buy newspapers because the newspaper coddles them or because it seeks their permission before it runs a story, or because it panders to their prejudices. They buy it because it tells them important things without flinching, or shading the truth.’
In the case of Lexington, it produced what I consider an instructional footnote — if you’d been in Lexington in 1985 when Creed was leading the Herald-Leader, you would have thought that the relationship between the newspaper and the community was broken beyond repair. But in fact, the opposite was true. If you look at the whole decade of the 1980s, which spans this story neatly — the story appeared in 1985 — you’ll see that Sunday circulation went up by more than 60%. Daily circulation went up by nearly 30%, in spite of the fact that we’d killed the evening paper. The Herald-Leader made so much money that Knight Ridder would often send promising young executives to Lexington to see how it was done.
The lesson from this experience with Creed Black, as I interpret it, is that people don’t buy newspapers because the newspaper coddles them or because it seeks their permission before it runs a story, or because it panders to their prejudices. They buy it because it tells them important things without flinching, or shading the truth.
Those of us who were in Lexington in 1985 under the leadership of Creed Black never forget what the paper did, how the community exploded, how our publisher held firm. It is a privilege, therefore, 15 years after the fact to express this public word of gratitude to my old publisher, Creed Black
KAY FANNING
Anchorage Daily News
(Presentation by Howard C. Weaver, the Sacramento Bee)
Perhaps we should date Kay Fanning’s leadership moments from that day when she walked away from her desk in the news library at the Anchorage Daily News to take over for the editor and publisher, her husband, who had just died at his desk in the newspaper office.
It would have been predictable for an untested publisher at a struggling No. 2 newspaper to chart a course designed for minimum boat rocking. In a small town dominated by a larger competitor whose publisher was also the Chamber of Commerce president, many would have spoken more of discretion than of valor. Not Kay Fanning.
When it seemed like all of Alaska was celebrating the imminent arrival of TransAlaska Pipeline construction crews, she commissioned a long, tough-minded series on Arctic oil exploration called “Oil on Ice” that later became a Sierra Club battle book. While much of the state wrestled with subtle discrimination and outright racism involving Alaska native people, she stood behind the reporters who had produced a groundbreaking series called “The Village People” chronicling conditions in the rural Alaska bush.
Her willingness to stand up in the face of extraordinary special interest pressure was nowhere better demonstrated than in her insistent championing of the investigation of Alaska’s Teamsters Union, which was the 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner for public service.
In a newsroom with fewer than two dozen staff, she assigned two of us full-time to that project. In a state where the Teamsters Union had clout equally prevalent in the Legislature and the marketplace, she insisted on a thorough and an honest examination.
‘Her leadership moment has truly stretched across many decades.’
Reports of economic retribution against her paper persisted for years afterward. The payoff for such bravery was not immediately apparent. The same year her newspaper won Alaska’s first Pulitzer Prize, she was forced to lay off 40 percent of the staff and appeal to the community for contributions to keep publishing. But publish she did.
And her Anchorage Daily News — since 1979, a McClatchy Newspaper — later prospered mightily, eclipsing its once dominant rival and winning another Pulitzer Prize enroute to becoming the state’s preeminent publication.
Kay Fanning, the first woman President of ASNE, left the Daily News in 1983 to edit the Christian Science Monitor and she died last October in Boston. But she lived to see the fruits of her endeavors in Anchorage. Her leadership moment has truly stretched across many decades.
ARTHUR O. SULZBERGER
The New York Times
(Presentation by Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.)
Yesterday afternoon, those of you lucky enough to hear Michael Useem learned about the power and danger of what he calls leadership moments — situations that pose enormous challenges to individuals and to institutions.
Thirty years ago, The New York Times and its publisher, my father Punch Sulzberger, faced just such a defining moment. When Neil Sheehan, a correspondent in our Washington bureau was given a copy of a 47-volume top secret study of the Vietnam War, Punch and The Times were faced with a momentous decision. While it was clear that publicly revealing the Pentagon Papers, as they would become known, could have profound consequences, I doubt that anyone fully understood the extent of the leap that was being taken into the journalistic and, later, the legal void.
Five years ago at a dinner for the Committee to Protect Journalists, my father recalled both the pride and apprehension he felt as The Times worked its way toward a decision to publish. Our brilliant editor Abe Rosenthal laid out the newsroom’s plans for him, complete with an offsite newsroom and composing room to maintain secrecy. “The more I listened,” my father recalled, “the more certain I became that the entire operation smelled of 20-to-life.”
‘What became clear after reading [the papers] was that these were extraordinary documents proving deceit of the American people by their elected representatives. I had no doubt but that the American people had a right to read them and that we, at The Times, had an obligation to publish them.’
Yet, this ex-Marine would not be intimidated by real or imagined threats of civil or criminal liability. Punch gave the go-ahead to publish what may have been the most controversial leak in the 20th Century. And as a result, fundamentally transformed the relationship between the news media and government.
Today, our profession faces another version of this leadership moment. Last year, in an all but secret proceeding, Congress passed the Intelligence Authorization Act, which, had it become law, would have criminalized all unauthorized disclosures of classified information.
For the first time in our nation’s history, we would have had our version of Britain’s Official Secret’s Act. As any of us who have reported from the U.K. knows, this would have severely restricted our readers’ ability to know what their elected representatives were doing for them or to them.
Fortunately, members of our industry, under the leadership of Bo Jones, Publisher of The Washington Post, banded together and helped persuade President Clinton to veto this insidious bill. With the change in administration, I fear this legislation may be reintroduced. If it is, all of us — all of us — must step up to our leadership moment and make sure that everyone understands what happens to societies that allow secrecy to pervade and cloak their public affairs. We can point to the Pentagon Papers, as we strenuously argue why it is so absolutely necessary for journalists to continue to shine a bright light on the day-to-day operations of government.
Looking back over three decades, my father said of the Pentagon Papers, “What became clear after reading them was that these were extraordinary documents proving deceit of the American people by their elected representatives. I had no doubt but that the American people had a right to read them and that we, at The Times, had an obligation to publish them.”
We, in the press, will always have such an obligation on behalf of our profession, of our readers and of our democracy. If need be, we’ll call on the services of such war-horses as Walter Cronkite and Punch Sulzberger. The other side won’t stand a chance.
(Listen to Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.’s tribute to his father)
JOHN S. KNIGHT
Akron Beacon-Journal
(Presentation by Robert H. Giles, the Nieman Foundation)
In 1967, John S. Knight was 73 years old and still writing The Editors Notebook, a Sunday column he had started in 1930 at the Akron Beacon Journal, which now reached a national audience.
The notebook was where JSK spoke his mind with blunt honesty, often to the discomfort of his social peers at the country clubs and business peers in the boardrooms. Writing the notebook was a ritual we observed every Thursday at the Beacon Journal. At precisely 9 a.m., Knight would stride purposely through the newsroom, dressed like a banker, jaw set for action. He entered his office in the corner of the newsroom and closed the door. There were no interruptions, except at noon when his secretary, Lillian Brenner, would deliver a hot dog from a sandwich shop across the street, kept warm in a silver service. At 3 p.m. the door would open and Jack would emerge, copy in hand, ready for discussion and editing.
In 1967, public sentiment was building against the war in Vietnam. But by then, Jack Knight had been warning against U.S. involvement in Indochina since 1954. By early 1967, he saw the war as a quagmire and wrote with passionate indignation, “Either our government has no well-defined policy or stands guilty of lying to the people or both.”
In August, Knight was one of 23 Americans appointment by President Johnson to observe the national elections in South Vietnam. He was the lone opponent of the war in the group. If LBJ thought the experience would soften his criticism, it did just the opposite. Gene Patterson of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution initially thought Knight was just a dove. “But I was wrong,” he said later. “He was a journalist, always probing for fresh information and new insights.”
‘Although the right of dissent is clearly set forth in our Bill of Rights, there are those who would deny this right to others who view U.S. involvement in Vietnam as a grim and unending tragedy.’
Knight recorded extensively during his Vietnam trip. And what he saw and heard merely deepened his skepticism. “The American people,” he wrote, “can’t understand why the lives of our young men are being sacrificed to keep unscrupulous South Vietnamese politicians in power. We are paying a tragic price for what may prove to be an unattainable goal.”
Back home, he denounced the rise of anti-intellectualism as a corrosive side effect of the war. “Although the right of dissent is clearly set forth in our Bill of Rights,” he wrote, “there are those who would deny this right to others who view U.S. involvement in Vietnam as a grim and unending tragedy.”
Knight’s vigorous defense of free speech angered the powerful pro-war factions that wanted to smother dissent. And they could not understand how this editor, a man of elegant taste and old-fashioned virtue, could take the side of rebellious youths who smoked pot and wore the American flag on their tattered jeans. To his critics, he replied, “As an opponent of our involvement in Vietnam since 1954, I have neither enjoyed criticizing three presidents nor accurately predicting the consequences of their policies.” When the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing was awarded to Jack Knight the following May, the Pulitzer Board noted the clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning and power to influence public opinion.
For this plain spoken Ohio editor, by then a national figure as chairman of Knight Newspapers, the prize was an affirmation of the virtue of speaking one’s mind with clarity and honesty.
AL NEUHARTH
USA Today
(Presentation by Michael G. Gartner)
Hwas raised in the toughest of times, the Depression, in the toughest of places, the wind-ravaged prairies of Dakota, in the toughest of circumstances by a poor and uneducated single mother who was widowed when her son was just two years old.
He should have grown up to be, like others in those circumstances, a cautious man who would never stray far from home.
But Al Neuharth started taking risks early, forging a career that changed the world of newspapering.
There were four major trends in newspapering in the last half of the last century.
Publicly held corporations began gobbling up papers big and small, a trend personified by the Gannett Company led by Al. Newsrooms began adding women and minorities to change the face, not only of the newsrooms but also of the news they produced. A trend led and demanded and enforced by Al.
Newspapers began to add color and graphics and pizzazz to appeal to readers in a hurry. A trend all but invented by the USA Today newspaper that Al founded.
And newspapers began to take advantage of new technologies to gather print and distribute the news, a trend invented elsewhere but embraced and refined by the company run by Al.
Then he re-directed a foundation to ensure the continued flow of minorities into newspapers; the continued fight to defend the First Amendment; the continued quest to explain our past while we invent our future; and the continued effort to explain and maybe export freedom to other nations.
All of this was done by a man who grew up in a household where German was the main language.
Indeed, to Al Neuharth, English is a second language. Perhaps that explains his columns.
DAVID OFFER
(Presentation by Robert F. Brandt of Newsday)
The Thursday before Labor Day, the publisher of Stars and Stripes newspaper, Thomas Kelsch, called the paper from the American Forces Information Service and he ordered a story spiked. It was a story about an alert to deploy a Patriot missile battery from Germany to Israel. A story that in the past was routinely reported out by the Pentagon with wire service photos. And in this case was being told to the reporter, though unofficially, by US military personnel in Europe.
Executive editor of Stars and Stripes Dave Offer was informed and called Kelsch at AFIS. And he told him his action was unacceptable and violated their own personal agreement about his employment there.
After the conversation, Dave typed his resignation and he put it in his pocket. Kelsch returned to Stars and Stripes and he entered into Dave’s office where two key editors were discussing the situation with Dave, one in residence and one in Europe. And he said that he had received — this is Kelsch — said he had received a classified briefing that convinced him that lives could be lost if the story ran. After another heated conversation, Kelsch again refused to run the story.
Dave left the office and he went to close on his new home in the Washington area. And informed his wife, Susie, about his impending resignation.
Later that evening, Dave was awakened by a call from the editors at the office to tell him that the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post News Service had the story. And that the publisher, Kelsch, had been informed about the story and that he instructed it to be run in the next edition, which was the Pacific edition then going to press.
The next morning when Dave came into the office, there was a firestorm among his angry staffers. Dave told Kelsch they intended to run the staff story and that he intended to run a story beside it about Stars and Stripes being censored. Kelsch responded that he did not know if they would be allowed to do that. He cited a Pentagon directive that prevented the paper from publishing original classified information. Kelsch went to check with his boss. An hour later he returned and ordered that the staff story be spiked and that the service’s story be run.
Dave resigned.
It was the Friday before Labor Day, the morning after he had closed on his house with his wife. Dave had left behind a newspaper job in Newport, RI and Susie had left behind her business in Newport. Now neither of them was working. And that situation continues.
I spoke about ten to twelve days ago with Doug Clawson, who is the managing editor of Stars and Stripes. He said he misses Dave. And he said that the fight for the First Amendment at the Stars and Stripes was a daily fight. He said that the decibel level of that fight had grown exponentially. And that he was on the map, his newspaper. He said the lines were much clearer now. He said Dave’s sacrifice was our gain.
He said that just that day, a few hours before I talked to him, that a new Pentagon directive had come down into his office, and that that directive allowed for the publication of original classified material. He said it was no longer banned at their newspaper. And Dave I thank you for this, for your courage, and your conviction. Could you please stand up and be recognized.
(Listen to Robert Brandt’s tribute to David Offer)
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Among the most inspiring moments I’ve ever had while attending American Society of News Editors conventions since the mid-1990s were 10 “Leadership Moments” that were part of the 2001 program in Washington, D.C.
Intermittently over three days, a score of the most courageous editors and publishers of our time were honored with 2- to 10-minute rousing testimonials by colleagues who worked with them or were close to them.
I was so moved by the tributes, which were a new feature for ASNE that year, that I spent hours editing conference tapes to extract the testimonials and offered the digitized sound files to ASNE for its website, along with some of the transcripts I’d done.
As 2013 dawned, I got to thinking about those remarkable editors and publishers and wondered what leadership advice they might have in these days of imploding traditional media and the state of flux of journalism’s business model.
I discovered that the transcripts and audio had become tucked out of sight after a few server changes and redesigns at ASNE’s site, and I offered to bring them back to digital life so they could again be shared as a source of inspiration and motivation. I first produced a package on my web site, and have decided to now share their tributes on this new story-focused platform that I can imagine each of these editors might have used.
Thanks to ASNE for sharing the images and transcripts — and to former ASNE staffer Craig Branson, who did the original web production.
I hope you find them as powerful, moving and inspiring as I have for the past dozen years.
P.S. The newspapers and organizations listed for each of the speakers was accurate at the time they gave their speeches; many have since moved on. I thought it important to give the context from which they were speaking in 2001.
P.P.S. If memory serves, it was fabulous longtime ASNE member Deborah Howell who took the lead in organizing these leadership moments for the 2001 convention. The former Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press and Newhouse News Service editor (and later Washington Post ombudsman) was a tireless worker — and board member — for ASNE. She died in a pedestrian accident in New Zealand in 2010.
