Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (113 page)

This episode has worried me over these years. How could I justify this suppression to myself? Oddly enough, I never really found a rationale for that until recently.

Washington Post
reporter Milton Coleman once quoted Jesse Jackson using words like “Hymies” and “Hymie-town,” which created a political sensation. But it developed, from Coleman’s later account, that Jackson had preceded his anti-Semitic remarks by asking, “Can we talk ‘black talk’ for a minute?” And Coleman had let Jackson go on talking “black talk.” I don’t think Coleman should have reported what followed, because a reporter is not just a reporter. There are other circles of which one is a member. And isn’t asking to talk “black talk” like saying, “It’s off the record”?

The Jackson-Coleman incident, some thirty years later, may have illuminated for me—maybe I’m rationalizing—why I could not expose the emigration of Jews from Poland. If I hadn’t spoken Yiddish, I wouldn’t have had the interview. Maybe this was like “black talk.” It summoned you to membership in some other group beyond being just a reporter. And the older I get, the more I begin to realize that life isn’t that simplicity of the young reporter saying, “Out of my way, Bud, I want that story, and if I get that story, there it goes.” I have a greater and greater sense of complications.

Well, at seventy-five, I end up not having many problems like that, thanks to NPR and its wonderful way of dealing with me. I don’t have the tyranny of bright lights and sound bites. Radio analysis is a simple matter of sitting down and writing it, and, if it seems to be in reasonable English, and if it’s not too long, it goes on the air and maybe makes a small contribution to understanding. I’m still in a profession I love, always have loved, always will love. My profession may have become a tail on a big kite—the media industry. But at seventy-five I still see journalism as a noble and ennobling profession.

John Carroll, editor of the
Los Angeles Times
and before that of the
Baltimore Sun
, served on the Pulitzer Prize Board for nine years, the last—2003—as chairman. As one who served eight of those years and followed him as chairman (the tradition is up and out), I can report that Carroll is not only a remarkable judge of journalism but also a worthy ally or adversary in the illuminating and lively discussions of books, plays, and compositions that take place in that most leakproof of sanctums.

When the award certificates are handed out at a luncheon in the Low Library of Columbia University in New York, the outgoing chairman usually makes a brief speech of welcome to the assembled editors, reporters, artists, poets, dramatists, composers, authors, and photographers, along with their proud publishers, agents, and families. On May 30, 2002, in the aftermath of the year that saw journalists cover the September 11 attacks, Carroll decided to open a permissible window on the board’s secret deliberations, thereby to examine the impact of the awards on recipients and to gently remind the much-feted winners that “we sever our roots at our peril.”

***

ON BEHALF OF
the Pulitzer Prize Board, a warm welcome to all. To the winners, I offer the board’s congratulations and thanks. Thank you for your illuminating work. And thanks, especially, for affirming, in a year disfigured by terrorism, the vitality—indeed, the necessity—of journalism, arts, and letters.

This is, despite it all, a happy day, and we should have no reservations about celebrating it robustly. Dreadful as September 11 and its aftermath have been, we are not defeated, or cowed, or reduced to a state of permanent mourning. It has been said before, and on this occasion it bears repeating: We defy our attackers by living life to the fullest.

I feel particularly heartened by this year’s accomplishments in journalism. In recent decades, and especially in the nineties, we in journalism have seen a contagion of dubious practices: Sensationalism. Obsession with celebrity. The favoring of splashy design and bright color over meaningful content. The routine trumping of journalistic values by business decisions. The neglect of such traditional topics as government and foreign affairs, which are—or were, before September 11—disparaged in some newspaper-owning corporations as boring and old-fashioned.

This was a year when the sky twice went dark, first with smoke from the World Trade Center, and then with journalistic chickens coming home to roost. What a welcome sight, those chickens! What vindication! Newspapers that had stayed the course, never wavering in their mission of giving citizens the information they need to govern themselves, were richly rewarded. They were rewarded not merely with Pulitzer Prizes but, more importantly, with the respect and heartfelt gratitude of their communities.

This is especially true of the
New York Times
, which distinguished itself this year with seven awards. And it is also true of other newspapers,
large and not-so-large, which did so much to untangle and explain the shocking and confusing events of September. Some journalists risked their lives, and thousands, in newsrooms across the country, worked long hours, long weeks, long months, investing their talents and their skills and their hearts in the pages of their newspapers. Today, in those newsrooms, there is pride. It is a well-earned pride, and it deserves to be celebrated.

In literature, music, and drama, with their longer periods of gestation, we have yet to feel the full effect of September 11. The terror and its aftermath will no doubt ripple through our books, poems, plays, and music for many years to come, just as the ripples of earlier American traumas pervade the work we celebrate today.

We have, for example, a book that takes us back to Birmingham, Alabama, recounting another terror in America, the oppression and bombings of the civil rights period. Going back still further, we relive the birth-trauma of our nation as it played out in the memorable life of John Adams. In the future, we will rely on you, our writers and playwrights and poets and composers, to help us grasp the full meaning of September 11.

At first glance, one might wonder what else these diverse works of journalism, letters, and the arts might have in common. Is this just a grab bag of awards we present every year? Or is there a unity in the Pulitzer Prizes?

What they all share, all twenty-one of them, is this: a moral vision. Each of these works is animated by an ardently held view of what constitutes right in this world, and what is wrong. That moral vision, and the skills one needs to give it voice, are what we celebrate today.

Some of our winners might be wondering how it came to pass that they, of all people, are being recognized with Pulitzer Prizes. Others, of course, may be wondering what on earth took us so long. Either way, here’s how it happened.

In each of the twenty-one categories, there is a jury. The jurors range in number from three to five, depending on the volume of submissions. Each jury picks three finalists. Then the Pulitzer Board convenes to select the winners.

As a member for eight years, I can tell you that the heavy lifting for the board begins in December. And I choose the phrase “heavy lifting” deliberately.

Shortly before I joined the board, one of the finalists was a book called
The Ants
, which was, as you might imagine, a book about ants. A board member from Iowa dutifully went to his local bookstore, not optimistic about finding a copy of
The Ants
in Des Moines. But there it was, deep in
the back of the store, a huge tome, a true doorstop of a book. He lugged it up to the cash register, paid for it, and as he was leaving he heard the clerk holler to a colleague, “Hey, somebody bought one!”
The Ants
, incidentally, was a winner in 1991.

Thus, with the purchase of the books in mid-December, does the board set off on its annual marathon, reading fifteen books and thirty-three journalistic finalists (some of which are as long as books), seeing or reading three plays, listening to three music CDs, and viewing three finalists in editorial cartooning and six in photography.

In early April we gather in the World Room of the Columbia journalism school for two days of discussion and decision making. The debate is robust, characterized by passionately held views and, on occasion, good-natured ridicule. Such open expression is made possible by the understanding that whatever is said in the World Room will never be repeated outside.

What result does all this produce?

In my opinion, the board’s judgment in the journalism categories tends to be very good, though of course not infallible. In the letters, the Pulitzer Prize is not an award for scholarship or original research. Although the board does include scholars with the best of credentials, it consists mostly of newspaper editors, who tend to know a little bit about a lot of things but are manifestly not experts. I think of it as a book club, a group of intelligent laymen who make recommendations on books that other intelligent laymen might benefit from reading.

Each year’s decisions tend to prompt protests on behalf of those who didn’t win, or against those who did. Sometimes the critics have a point. Yes, the board is human. But, lest I proceed too far down this path of self-criticism, I want to proclaim my confidence that this year the board got it entirely right, every single person we are about to honor is truly worthy.

What does it mean to you, to have won a Pulitzer Prize?

The Pulitzer Prizes reward past work, but their hope is to foster even better work in the future—better work by those who aspire to win, and also by those who have already won. That hope of the founder, Joseph Pulitzer, is amply fulfilled by two of today’s recipients. Tom Friedman of the
New York Times
is collecting his third Pulitzer, a rare achievement, and David McCullough, is receiving his second. In conferring the prize, I’m not overly concerned that either of these two writers will spend much time resting on his growing heap of laurels.

Others, particularly those who receive the Pulitzer at an early age, have been known to make the age-old mistake of believing their own press notices. The result can be harmful. I can describe the symptoms, as
they appear among newspaper journalists: Lots of speaking engagements. Very few published stories. A disdain of the mundane tasks that often, for better or worse, constitute daily journalism—tasks like writing an obituary, tracking down an elusive middle initial, or standing in the rain waiting for someone who probably won’t talk to you anyway.

The first Pulitzer winner I knew well was Acel Moore, who in 1977 won for investigative reporting at the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Acel had earned it. He had no college degree, and only after a long apprenticeship as a clerk was he promoted to reporter. He was, in short, a man who had written his share of obits, which, often as not in Philadelphia, were phoned in by a large funeral home called Levine’s.

When word reached the newsroom that Acel had won a Pulitzer, we all cheered and clapped him on the back and drank champagne, and then his phone began to ring with calls from well-wishers.

One reporter, a charming rascal named John Corr, slipped to the back of the newsroom and dialed Acel’s extension.

Acel picked up the phone, thinking it was yet another well-wisher. Instead, the voice on the phone said, “Hey Acel, this is Bernie at Levine’s. I got one for you.”

Acel paused, no doubt pondering whether his post-Pulitzer life would include taking obits, from Levine’s. Then, with resignation in his voice, he responded: “Okay, lay it on me.”

That, I submit, was the correct answer. Few of us are brilliant enough to transcend the drudgery of our chosen craft. If we shun the mundane, if we partake only in the glamour of the job, we risk forfeiting all those skills and attitudes and connections that got us here in the first place.

We sever our roots at our peril….

I would like to conclude my remarks by expressing two hopes for our winners. My first hope is that this award will inspire you to achieve still more, and to derive even greater satisfaction from it. May this day prove to be a beginning, not an end.

And second, my hope is that this day—the thirtieth of May, 2002—will prove to be the happiest of days for you, unclouded by worry. People who achieve much tend to be their own cruelest bosses. Give yourself the day off. Don’t worry about that next book, or that next story, or that next poem. Make it a day of sheer joy. Truly, you have earned it.

Here is Demosthenes’ “On the Crown”—reputedly the greatest oration by the greatest orator of the ancient world. Judged by modern standards, it is not such a great speech—too obviously self-serving, replete with obscure references, and too long even in this edited form. But this classic of rhetoric must be judged, and remembered, in the context of its time—delivered in Greece in 330
B.C.
—when few men could assemble their thoughts, devise an argumentation strategy, and speak out to persuade their audience as this man did.

Demosthenes of Greece, an agitator and statesman, pitted his lifetime’s oratory and ideas of freedom against Philip of Macedon, a general with a lust for world conquest. As Macedonia encroached on Greece, Demosthenes loosed a series of denunciations at Philip (from whose name we get the noun “philippic”), defining the difference between civilization and barbarism, but the word could not stop the advance of the sword. “We shall go to war, I am told, when it is necessary,” said the orator, who perfected the interrogative technique. “If the necessity has not come yet, when will it come?” It came and went; Philip was victorious, and Demosthenes lived his final years in a repressed nation-state.