The Pulitzer Diaries: Inside America's Greatest Prize

by HOHENBERG JOHN

• ISBN13: 9780815603924
• ISBN10: 0815603924
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-04-01
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr

Summary

John Hohenberg--former administrator of the Pulitzer Prize from 1954 to 1976--refrained from publishing this work until the death of certain colleagues who figure prominently in some of the controversial events surrounding the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize.

Table of Contents

The Art of the Diarist	xi
PART ONE Expanding Horizons	3	(56)
1. The Big Prize	3	(5)
2. My View of the Prizes	8	(5)
3. An Atomic Crisis	13	(8)
4. New Times for the Prizes	21	(8)
5. Test for a Teacher	29	(10)
6. With Hearst in Moscow	39	(8)
7. The Kennedy Prize	47	(12)
PART TWO The Best of Times	59	(62)
8. A Question of Funding	59	(9)
9. The University Experience	68	(6)
10. In the Public Interest	74	(6)
11. Shuffling the Prizes	80	(8)
12. Presidential Politics	88	(7)
13. Press versus Government	95	(8)
14. The Soviet Challenge	103	(6)
15. Showdown	109	(12)
PART THREE The Prizes as History	121	(60)
16. The Greatest Sacrifice	121	(7)
17. Asian Dilemma	128	(8)
18. The Prizes and Vietnam	136	(9)
19. Honors for the Duke	145	(7)
20. Fifty-Year Reckoning	152	(9)
21. The Grand Show	161	(8)
22. Losing a Prize	169	(12)
PART FOUR Surviving the War	181	(66)
23. The Oldest Rebel	181	(8)
24. Turnabout	189	(7)
25. The War at Home	196	(8)
26. Another World	204	(8)
27. The Peace Riots	212	(8)
28. Tragedy at Kent State	220	(7)
29. Rommy	227	(9)
30. Saigon Revisited	236	(11)
PART FIVE The Trials of Peace	247	(57)
31. Life after Vietnam	247	(10)
32. Turmoil at Columbia	257	(8)
33. Watergate in Retrospect	265	(8)
34. The Awards under Fire	273	(10)
35. A Prize Solution	283	(7)
36. Beyond Defeat	290	(7)
37. Auld Lang Syne	297	(7)
Southern Exposure	304	(9)
Notes	313	(18)
Bibliography	331	(4)
Index	335

Excerpts

Chapter One

1 The Big Prize

Toward the end of my fourth year as a Columbia University professor, my dean asked me to join him at a meeting of the Advisory Board on the Pulitzer Prizes.

I wouldn't have much to do, he said. In my diary, I wrote that he'd suggested, "Maybe you can help me by taking a few notes."

It sounded interesting, particularly because I had no classes that sunny April morning in 1954, but I still had a large pile of student papers to read. No matter. The dean's business came first.

The dean, Carl W. Ackerman, had been running the Graduate School of Journalism for twenty years while also serving as the Pulitzer Prize board's secretary. He always said he liked the work, but now he was in poor health and near retirement.

On the way from our fifth-floor offices in the Journalism building to our ceremonial World Room two floors below, he explained that this session was to be the first of a two-day meeting of the Pulitzer board and probably would be devoted more to discussion than to voting. Most voting, he suggested, would come on the morrow.

At the time, he was carrying an armful of manila folders--the Pulitzer jury reports, he said--and a large book with the notation typed across its faded red cover on a white rectangle, "Minutes of the Advisory Board on the Pulitzer Prizes."

Once inside the World Room, I saw a group of men at an oval table in front of a stained-glass replica of the Statue of Liberty, set into a wall like a window. That, at least, was familiar to me. I'd obtained it as a deed of gift to Columbia from the mayor of New York City.

One of my earliest assignments after coming to Columbia at the end of a quarter-century's newspaper work had been to secure the Liberty Window for the journalism school. The gift was delivered before a city wrecking crew razed its home, Joseph Pulitzer's old New York World building, to broaden the approach of traffic to the Brooklyn Bridge. Mayor Robert F. Wagner, so the dean reminded me as we entered the World Room, would be with us on the morrow to re-dedicate the Window.3

But now, at their oval table, it was clear that the dozen members of the Pulitzer board wanted to get to work. I had a brief introduction from Dean Ackerman as the day's note-taker, then retired on a chair next to his beside the chairman, the second Joseph Pulitzer, a son of the donor, who was large, aging, and wore thick glasses. Like the chairman, ten of the others were newspaper executives who paid little attention to me. The only familiar face was that of the twelfth member, the Columbia president, Grayson Kirk.

Once Chairman Pulitzer called the meeting to order, the morning passed quickly enough in a discussion of various aspects of the jury reports Dean Ackerman summarized from the folders he had been carrying. Among the few arguments, various board members commented on the sickness that seemed to have overtaken American literature with the decline of the American novel--a supposition based on the fiction jury's failure to recommend any novel of the previous year for an award. But no matter how many board members offered proposals about books that few if any of the membership had read, the jury's "no award" remained intact.

There was similar dissatisfaction with the drama jury's recommendation of a light comedy, Teahouse of the August Moon, by a little-known playwright, John Patrick, which had been shown to a half-empty theater. But that jury report, too, remained firm.

Such details as these are not based on any miracle of total recall after so many years; instead, whatever notes I took for Dean Ackerman also were summarized in my diaries, from which this account is derived. In any event, all too often, I found myself so interested in the give-and-take around the table that my secretarial work suffered. But nobody except Dean Ackerman seemed to notice.

In a kindly way, now and then, the dean would murmur a reminder that he was depending on me to produce the minutes of this meeting, even though no voting would take place until the morrow. Still, before I quite realized it, the first day's session was over, the members of the board scattered, and the dean and I started for our offices after Chairman Pulitzer politely dismissed us with thanks.

Then, in the elevator that took us to the fifth floor, a curious thing happened--a scene so inexplicable at the time that I made no note of it when it happened but it still is vividly engraved in my mind. Instead of taking his manila folders of Pulitzer jury reports and the faded red book of Pulitzer board minutes back to his office, Dean Ackerman suddenly thrust the lot in my arms without a word. Just then, the elevator doors opened on the fifth floor and he scurried off along the corridor to his office as if the devil had been after him.

Not knowing what else to do, I took the documents and the minute book to my office, set them aside, and tried to fix my attention on reading and grading my latest set of student papers. But my mind wandered and I couldn't help wondering about the dean's behavior.

Next morning, when I joined the Pulitzer board in the World Room again, Dean Ackerman was nowhere in evidence and his chair was vacant. Chairman Pulitzer, seeming not at all surprised, motioned to me to sit beside him. As I took the seat the dean had occupied the day before, I felt others glaring at me suspiciously, except for President Kirk, who cheerfully nodded in seeming encouragement.

Then, as recounted in my notes, Chairman Pulitzer said without emphasis, "Proceed, Mr. Secretary." I didn't know what to do, and so I asked, as deferentially as I could, "How do you wish me to proceed, Mr. Chairman?" There was a ripple of amusement among the membership, in which the chairman seemed to share.

Pointing with a thumb and forefinger to his thick eyeglasses, the second Joseph Pulitzer explained something I should have known about his ancestry but didn't: "My eyesight is poor, a family failing, so I must depend on you to announce each subject for a vote, briefly summarize the pertinent jury report, identify any member with a conflict of interest, and ask him to leave the room. Then I shall do the rest."

Again, I saw President Kirk nod smilingly and proceeded to follow the chairman's directions, but scarcely with the aplomb of Dean Ackerman. For by this time, it had occurred to me that the dean's casual invitation to be a note-taker at the Pulitzer board meeting had developed into something more important, perhaps by chance, perhaps with serious intent. But there was no time now for philosophizing.

Mainly because of a quarter-century's tough discipline in reporting the news or batting out a breaking story on deadline, I followed Chairman Pulitzer's orders in introducing the essentials for each prize. Then, he took over for final discussion and a vote with graceful but praiseworthy firmness.

I had no problems, except for the fiction prize, which eventually was passed as the jury had proposed, and the drama award to the jury's choice, Teahouse of the August Moon, which was grudgingly accepted. There were, however, unanimous votes for such favorites as A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton for the history award, and The Waking by Theodore Roethke for poetry.

But the biography jury's nomination of The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles A. Lindbergh touched off a brief but uncomfortable silence that seemed for the moment, alas, to stump the chairman, who was also the editor and publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I couldn't help him; in fact, I wondered vaguely whether he might be an interested party to the jury's nomination, but decided not to act unless he voluntarily left the room.

The book in question featured the aviator's pioneering nonstop trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris on May 20-21, 1927, described twenty-seven years later in the book named after the little aircraft he had piloted. But at a quick glance around the table, I saw doubts about the jury's selection, and I'm sure Chairman Pulitzer hesitated for the same reason.

At a guess, I suspected the reaction had to do with Lindbergh's ambiguous views as an isolationist before World War II; either that, or his undisguised annoyance with American newspapers. Of the former, I had but a vague memory; having covered the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the murder of the Lindbergh baby, however, I had a lively recollection of the aviator's antipress attitude.

At Flemington, New Jersey, the scene of the trial, I remembered that the press photographers had been tireless in their daily pursuit of Lindbergh and his wife, the former Anne Morrow, before and after court sessions. One scene in particular lingered in my mind--Lindbergh backing away between a double line of press photographers, bent down with an overcoat covering his head, until he noticed all cameras were at the feet of the photographers. Angrily, he walked off in a huff--scarcely grounds for opposing his book any more than were his prewar visits to Nazi Germany. Whatever the reasons for Lindbergh's often irritating public behavior, particularly toward the press, the editors swallowed their undoubted prejudices and voted his book the biography award. The music prize went to Quincy Porter.

As for the press awards, some did not follow juries' recommendations, but the end results seemed creditable. Long Island Newsday's disclosure of a race-track scandal was given the public service gold medal. A newspaper in Vicksburg, Mississippi, won for its tornado coverage, the Philadelphia Bulletin for a numbers racket expose, and the Des Moines Register for the results of an FBI loyalty check. Three individuals also were given prizes--the veteran, Jim Lucas, for his war reporting; Herblock (Herbert A. Block) of the Washington Post for cartoons, and an amateur photographer for snapping a waterborne rescue. In my diary, I concluded:

April 23--Sometimes you have good days. Today was one of my best. In Dean Ackerman's absence, I acted as secretary of the Pulitzer board and ran the meeting for Joseph Pulitzer II, the chairman. President Kirk sat across from us at an oval table in the World Room.

It seems as if I'd done well enough because they elected me as secretary succeeding Dean Ackerman. It's only a one-year appointment, but I'm grateful for that. Chairman Pulitzer said I'd taken hold nicely, and Dr. Kirk seemed pleased. But most remarkable of all, I talked back to Arthur Krock of the New York Times--and got away with it.

As was explained to me later, I had an additional appointment as the day-to-day administrator of the awards for which I was at the time responsible, not to the dean, but to the president of the university.

Dean Ackerman never did explain why he decided the best way to break me in was to shove his papers in my hands in the elevator and let me struggle through the board meeting, not knowing what was to happen next. I suppose he wasn't sure whether I would qualify and didn't want to raise my hopes.

Anyway, as the board's records were to show, it was the first of fourteen such appointments annually for me, after which both jobs became mine permanently along with the tenured professorship. My Pulitzer service lasted until my departure from Columbia in 1976 for another honor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville--the occupancy of an endowed professorship there.

When Dean Ackerman finally turned up with a big grin that first year, it was as Mayor Wagner's escort into the World Room with his City Hall entourage after the board meeting. But neither took notice of me among the board members who were invited to the ceremonial dedication of the Statue of Liberty Window.

The mayor's address was eloquent, there were tears in Chairman Pulitzer's eyes, and President Kirk congratulated all of us at the Graduate School of Journalism on the tribute to our founder and the donor of the prizes bearing his name. After it was over, I made one more note in my diary. "It turned out to be a good day for the dean, too. He thoroughly enjoyed it."

Copyright © 1997 John Hohenberg. All rights reserved.