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By Douglas McCollam,. Columbia Journalism Review (CJR)
America's Premier Media Monitor
Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism
New York, New York, Issue 6/Nov-December 2003
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If you get off the elevator on the eleventh floor of the New York Times
building, and head down a long hall leading toward the executive dining
rooms, you pass under the fixed gaze of some of the finest journalists in
American history. Along the walls hang portraits commemorating all
eighty-nine Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the Times to date, including those
given to such notable lights as Thomas Friedman, Anthony Lewis, J. Anthony
Lukas, and David Halberstam.
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Walter Duranty
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As you enter the hall, just past the portrait of Russell Owen, whose
dispatches from Admiral Byrd's 1928 Antarctic expedition riveted the nation,
you come to the picture of Walter Duranty, a balding Englishman who served
as the Times Moscow correspondent from 1922 to 1934. In 1932, at the age
of forty-seven, Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer for a series of stories
that the board thought showed a "profound and intimate comprehension of
conditions in Russia," consistent with "the best type of foreign
correspondence." Next to Duranty's portrait appears the following note:
"Other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."
Revoking a vintage Pulitzer seems a tricky matter
Indeed they have, and this year, more than seventy years after Duranty won
the prize, both Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, and
members of the Pulitzer board have found themselves inundated with letters,
postcards, faxes, e-mails, and phone calls demanding that Duranty's prize be
returned or revoked. The campaign has left some of its targets mystified.
"The whole thing is just odd," says Andrew Barnes, chairman and chief
executive officer of the St. Petersburg Times, who has served on the
Pulitzer board for seven years. David Klatell, who was on the board for a
year as interim dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, also was a
bit stumped when he began receiving the letters last fall. "It's been a
fairly massive writing campaign," says Klatell, who estimates that he and
Sig Gissler, administrator of the prizes, have received tens of thousands of
cards and letters. "Whoever funded it has spent a good deal of money,"
Klatell says.
The ongoing effort is actually a joint project of several Ukrainian groups
worldwide, spearheaded by Lubomyr Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil
Liberties Association. A principal architect of the campaign in America is
thirty-five-year-old Michael Sawkiw Jr., president of the Ukrainian Congress
Committee of America, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.
Sawkiw, an American whose parents emigrated from Ukraine after World War
II, says he recommended the campaign to his board of directors as a way to
commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine, an
event some historians consider the greatest man-made disaster in history.
When we met for drinks in Washington (vodka, of course), Sawkiw was
adamant that Duranty and the Times were coconspirators in what he calls the
Ukrainian "famine-genocide." Well-groomed and affable, Sawkiw nonetheless
exuded intensity when he spoke of his determination to see Duranty stripped
of his honor. "It's a cop-out just to say 'others dispute' Duranty's
reporting," Sawkiw said with just a hint of a Ukrainian accent. "That
doesn't get the Times off the hook!" Other Ukrainian activists I spoke with
were even more blunt: "Duranty and the Times have blood on their hands and
the only way they can wash it off is to return that prize and apologize for
what they did," says Peter Borisow, whose parents survived the famine.
Both Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and his father, Arthur Sulzberger Sr., the
previous publisher, declined to be interviewed for this article, but a Times
spokesman, Toby Usnik, did e-mail a statement, saying, in part, that the
Times has "reported often and thoroughly on the defects in Duranty's
journalism, as viewed through the lens of later events." Among the Times's
reports on Duranty's failings was a 1990 editorial that chided him for his
"indifference to the catastrophic famine . . . when millions perished in the
Ukraine."
Max Frankel, who was the executive editor when that editorial ran, recalls
consulting with the senior Sulzberger, then the publisher, on returning
Duranty's prize, but says the feeling was "it was history and what was done
can't be undone, but if the evidence was he didn't deserve the prize or was
wrong with his coverage we'd give it back." In the end, Frankel says, the
decision was made to put the disclaimer on Duranty's portrait in the
Pulitzer gallery and leave it at that. In its statement the Times seems to
put the onus for revoking the prize on the Pulitzer board, noting that it
has reviewed the Duranty award in the past and taken no action.
In April the board voted to consider the question again, forming a special
committee to investigate, a step it hasn't taken in the past. Gissler, who
became administrator of the prizes in 2002, says the committee was not
formed in response to the letter-writing campaign, which he says didn't
start in earnest until around May of this year, but because the board views
the allegations against Duranty as serious enough to merit an in-depth
inquiry. The special committee is scheduled to make a report to the full
board at its November meeting. The committee's preliminary findings were
being circulated as I worked on this article, but Gissler declined to make
it available, nor would he comment on the substance of the controversy.
Most of the twenty-two other present and past board members I contacted were
similarly mum, including William Safire, the Times columnist who currently
co-chairs the Pulitzer board, and Richard Oppel, the editor of the Austin
American-Statesman, who heads the special investigative committee. Rena
Pederson, editor at large of The Dallas Morning News, who co-chairs the
Pulitzer board with Safire, would say only that the Duranty controversy is
"a serious issue that we are looking at in the most thoughtful way
possible." Nicholas Lemann, who joined the board in September as a nonvoting
member by virtue of his new position as dean of Columbia's journalism
school, said he has definite views about the Duranty matter, but couldn't
comment because the board, in its private deliberations, might ask for his
opinion.
Not everyone was reticent. Barnes of the St. Petersburg Times said he feels
strongly that reopening the Duranty case is a bad idea. "There have been
many prizes during my tenure where you could look back and ask 'Is that the
best we could do?'" says Barnes. "I can't imagine what good this will do."
In the eighty-seven-year history of the Pulitzer Prizes, no award has ever
been revoked. In 1981 The Washington Post declined to accept a Pulitzer that
had been awarded to reporter Janet Cooke after it became clear that her
story about an eight-year-old heroin addict had been made up. The Pulitzer
board then withdrew the prize. But revoking a vintage Pulitzer seems a
trickier matter. "It's an extraordinarily difficult thing to recreate the
historical and intellectual context in which many of the Pulitzer jurors
were working," says David Klatell.
To get a clearer idea of the issues facing the board, I spent some time at
the Library of Congress researching Duranty and his work. In addition to the
thirteen stories he wrote in 1931 that were the basis for his 1932 Pulitzer,
I also read dozens of other dispatches he filed before, during, and after
the Ukrainian famine, as well as accounts of Duranty by colleagues and
historians, and a good deal of his autobiographical writing. The picture
that emerged was sufficiently complex to make me not envy the Pulitzer
board's task.
While it's clear that much of Duranty's reporting was suspect, it's also
clear that he and other correspondents in Moscow operated under censorship
rules akin to those governing reporters at the front lines of a war - which
was exactly how the Soviets viewed their revolutionary struggle. Later Times
Moscow correspondents, such as Harrison Salisbury (who resides in Pulitzer
Hall with Duranty), would defy Communist minders and be barred from the
country for their trouble. Duranty worked within the system, trading softer
coverage for continuing access. Deciding whether that exchange ended up with
the Times substantially whitewashing Soviet atrocities requires a closer
examination of Duranty's work.
When Walter Duranty left the Times and Russia in 1934, the paper said his
twelve-year stint in Moscow had "perhaps been the most important assignment
ever entrusted by a newspaper to a single correspondent over a considerable
period of time." By that time, Duranty was a journalistic celebrity - an
absentia member of the Algonquin Roundtable, a confidant of Isadora Duncan,
George Bernard Shaw, and Sinclair Lewis. He was held in such esteem that the
presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt brought him in for consultations
on whether the Soviet Union should be officially recognized. When
recognition was granted in 1934, Duranty traveled with the Soviet foreign
minister, Maxim Litvinov, to the signing ceremony and spoke privately with
FDR. At a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York held to celebrate the
event, Duranty was introduced as "one of the great foreign correspondents of
modern times," and 1,500 dignitaries gave him a standing ovation.
In Moscow, Duranty was known as "the dean of foreign correspondents," and
was renowned for his lavish hospitality. In an austere city, he enjoyed
generous living quarters and food rations, as well as the use of assistants,
a chauffeur, and a cook/secretary/mistress named Katya, who bore him a son
named Michael. Duranty, who had a wooden left leg caused by a train
accident, was driven through the streets in a giant Buick outfitted with the
Klaxon horn used by the Soviet secret police. His competitors gossiped that
these perks were allowed because of his cozy relationship with the Soviet
government. Eugene Lyons, a United Press correspondent, even suspected that
Duranty might be on the Soviet payroll, but no evidence of that seems to
exist.
Still, many then and later wondered if the status Duranty enjoyed in Moscow
led him to curtail his coverage of the Soviets. Malcolm Muggeridge, a
correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, would later call Duranty "the
greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism."
Joseph Alsop would tab him a "fashionable prostitute," in the service of
Communists. And S. J. Taylor's 1990 biography of him would be titled
"Stalin's Apologist."
This was all a long way from where Duranty started. Before going to Russia -
as he later wrote - he was "viciously anti-Bolshevik." In fact, when he
arrived in Moscow in 1921 (to cover a famine, ironically enough), the
Soviets almost denied Duranty a visa because of his record of antagonizing
them in print. But soon after his arrival, Duranty's attitude changed. He
came to see the Soviets as "sincere enthusiasts trying to regenerate a
people who had been shockingly misgoverned." He was hardly alone in this
view.
In the early 1930s, capitalism was at a low ebb, with depression-era
unemployment in most industrialized countries approaching 25 percent. For
many, especially among the educated elite, communism became a fashionable
alternative to capitalism, as well as a bulwark against the rising tide of
fascism. The nascent Soviet Union was seen as a grand, romantic experiment,
one that carried the best hopes for the mass of humanity. Unlike many
writers and journalists who went to Moscow at the time, Duranty was not a
communist or even blind to the Soviet excesses; he simply excused the forced
labor camps, property seizures, and political purges as measures necessary
to drive a backward country into the twentieth century.
"You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs," was a phrase many
remembered Duranty using to excuse Soviet tactics, but in his 1935 book "I
Write As I Please," he gave a fuller account of his thinking: "Even to a
reporter who prides himself on having no bowels of compassion to weep over
ruined homes and broken hearts, it is not always easy or pleasant to
describe such wreckage, however excellent may be the purpose . . . . But
what matters to me is the facts, that is to say whether the Soviet drive to
Socialism is or is not successful irrespective of the cost. When, as often
happens, it makes me sick to see the cost, I say to myself, 'Well, I saw the
War and that cost was worse and greater and the result in terms of human
hope or happiness was completely nil.'"
This perspective is evident in the 1931 series of articles that won him the
Pulitzer. The stories sought to explain the impact of the first five years
of "Stalinism" (a term Duranty is credited with inventing). In the series,
Duranty explained that Stalin was focused on domestic progress, as opposed
to Lenin's earlier emphasis on achieving a world worker revolution.
Stalinism, Duranty wrote, was marked by unprecedented invasion into every
aspect of life in the country. "The Stalinist machine is better organized
for the formation and control of public opinion than anything history has
hitherto known," Duranty wrote in one piece.
In another, about the forced collectivization movement in agriculture, he
noted that while it was based in theory on producing more food to feed a
hungry nation, the reality "is that 5,000,000 human beings, and 1,000,000
families of the best and most energetic farmers are to be dispossessed,
dispersed and demolished, to be literally melted or 'liquidated' into the
rising flood of classless proletarians." In general, Duranty wrote,
Stalinism was not unlike the iron rule of the tsars, and was "an ugly,
harsh, and cruel creed . . . flattening and beating down with, so far, no
more than a hope or promise of a subsequent raising up. Perhaps this hope is
vain and the promise a lie. That is a secret of the future."
Taken together the thirteen articles (eleven were part of a series,
datelined from Paris, that ran in June of 1931; the two others were separate
stories), are a sometimes prescient exploration of a kind of totalitarian
government the world had never seen before. Duranty's writing style is often
stilted, and the stories are flawed in many respects, but overall seem
sound, and even include notes of moral condemnation rarely found elsewhere
in his work.
The same cannot be said about Duranty's coverage - or lack of coverage - of
the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine. After five years of brutal agricultural
collectivization, Stalin increased the grain quotas due from Ukraine despite
a poor harvest year. When it became evident that the quotas would not be
met, Soviet troops and party activists swept through Ukraine tearing apart
peasant farms looking for secret grain hordes. They stripped the people
clean and the result was catastrophic. Though no reliable census data are
available, most historians now estimate at least 5 million people starved to
death. Ukrainian groups put the figure at 7 million to 10 million and
passionately believe it reflects a deliberate campaign by Stalin to break
resistance to the Soviets in Ukraine and obliterate the Ukrainian identity,
though not all historians agree with that interpretation.
Duranty's stories begin to describe the food problem in August 1932. By
October, he reported that Ukraine's harvest was coming in at only 55 percent
of 1931 levels, and in November he wrote a series on the food shortage
"crisis." But the articles largely parroted the government line about lazy
peasants and "kulak" class enemies in the provinces being the cause of the
problem. All the stories are datelined in Moscow, and Duranty goes to some
lengths to play down the crisis. "There is no famine or actual starvation,
nor is there likely to be," Duranty wrote in words that are now used against
him. But just a couple of lines later in the same story he notes, "but it is
a gloomy picture, and as far as the writer can see, there is small sign or
hope of improvement in the near future."
Even these toned-down reports, however, were apparently enough to draw the
ire of the Soviet government. In a meeting with the British ambassador to
Moscow, William Strang, Duranty said government officials had threatened
that his food shortage stories could result in "serious consequences" for
him because they endangered recognition of the Soviet Union by the United
States. Duranty told Strang he was afraid his visa would not be renewed.
About a week after the series ran in November, Duranty filed a story from
Paris about the censorship issue, saying his position had grown "delicate
and difficult." But, he hastened to add, the censors were generally
reasonable. It's clear he was trying to serve two masters.
By early 1933 word of the famine in Ukraine was leaking into the Western
press. In March Malcolm Muggeridge bought a train ticket from Moscow to Kiev
(without informing the Soviet press office) to check out famine rumors.
There he found the population starving to death. "I mean starving in its
absolute sense; not undernourished," he wrote in reports that were smuggled
past the censors. Worse, Muggeridge found grain supplies that did exist were
being given to army units brought in to keep starving peasants from
revolting. Upon his return to Moscow, Muggeridge informed the British
embassy that the situation was so bad he wouldn't have believed it if he had
not seen it in person. Embittered, the idealistic Muggeridge left the Soviet
Union, convinced he had witnessed "one of the most monstrous crimes in
history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to
believe it ever happened."
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Confined to Moscow and perhaps alarmed at being scooped, Duranty began to
openly criticize the famine reports. Muggeridge's stories were followed by a
similar one from Gareth Jones, a secretary to the former British prime
minister David Lloyd George, who had made a three-week walking tour of
Ukraine. Duranty attacked Jones in the Times as naive and dismissed his
article as another in a long line of failed predictions of doom for the
Soviets. Duranty wrote that he had made his own "exhaustive" inquiries
around Moscow. Based on those he could report there was a serious food
shortage but "no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is
widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."
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Gareth Jones
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While conditions were bad, Duranty went on to write, there was no famine. As
S.J. Taylor notes in Stalin's Apologist, the Timesman was "cutting semantic
distinction pretty slim" and his downplaying of the famine was "the most
outrageous equivocation of the period" - one that Gareth Jones did not let
Duranty get away with. In a long letter to the Times published in May 1933
Jones wrote that during his weeks in the countryside he visited twenty
villages and talked with hundreds of peasants. In Moscow, he discussed the
tragedy with consuls from twenty or thirty countries, all of whom supported
his view that a massive famine was under way. Further, Jones said,
censorship in the Soviet Union had turned correspondents into "masters of
euphemism and understatement" so that "famine" became "food shortage" and
death from starvation became "widespread mortality from diseases due to
malnutrition."
When travel restrictions were eased, Duranty finally made his own tour of
Ukraine. In late August of 1933, at the start of a bumper harvest, he was
able to report that "any report of a famine in Russia is today an
exaggeration or malignant propaganda." In the same story, however, he noted
that the food shortage had previously caused "heavy loss of life" in the
region, at least trebling the normal death rate. In an editorial the next
day, the Times noted that Duranty's figures suggested that the "famine must
have taken at least 5,000,000 lives and perhaps twice as many," an estimate
very much in line with what historians would later conclude. The editorial
goes on to note that the United States in 1933, despite the Depression, had
a surplus of 350 million bushels of wheat that could be used to offset the
famine. But it was already too late.
Do these failings mean that Duranty should be stripped of the Pulitzer? That
was certainly the conclusion of Mark von Hagen, a Columbia University
history professor the Times hired to analyze Duranty's work. In an
eight-page report that leaked to The New York Sun in late October he blasts
Duranty's reporting as uncritical and unbalanced. In a July 29 letter to the
Pulitzer board, forwarding the report, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote that the
Times had often acknowledged Duranty's slovenly work, but argued that the
board might set a bad precedent by revoking the award. Sulzberger wrote that
the Times would respect whatever decision the board made, but cautioned that
revoking the award was somewhat akin to the Stalinist urge "to airbrush
purged figures out of official records and histories."
Von Hagen's report examined the totality of Duranty's reporting in 1931, and
found that he frequently hewed to the party line and excused or explained
away Soviet excess. In this, von Hagen notes, Duranty was not unique. But
his report does not focus on the thirteen stories cited by the Pulitzer
committee as the basis for the prize (he cites only six of the thirteen and
one of them favorably).
If the case for revoking the prize is based solely on the series that
Duranty won for, then it is less compelling. If it is based instead on the
totality of his reporting, then the prize should probably be revoked.
Duranty did not simply write watered-down stories about the famine. Others,
including later critics like William Henry Chamberlain of The Christian
Science Monitor and Eugene Lyons of UP, filed similarly bland reports,
correcting the record only after they were out of the country. No one, it
appears, both reported the depths of the famine and managed to stay inside
the Soviet Union.
But Duranty did more than equivocate; he repeatedly cast doubt on whether
the famine was taking place, relying on scarcely more than official Soviet
press reports. In so doing he allowed himself to become a vehicle of Soviet
propaganda. When he was finally allowed to tour the region in September of
1933, Duranty played up the big harvest that was by then under way, and
wrote that "the populace, from the babies to the old folks, looks healthy
and well nourished." But writing of the same trip years later, in 1949,
Duranty recalled that he had driven "nearly two hundred miles across the
country between Rostov and Krasnodar through land that was lost to the weeds
and through villages that were empty."
That was also the image Duranty gave to the British ambassador, Strang, and
others shortly after his return to Moscow. "The Ukraine has been bled
white," Duranty is reported as saying to Strang in a diplomatic dispatch to
London dated September 30, 1933. Duranty ventured to Strang that it was
"quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or
indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year."
These sentiments, needless to say, never appeared under Duranty's byline.
Researchers who have investigated Duranty's career have found that certain
editors at The New York Times did have doubts about his coverage of the
Soviet Union, but never acted to recall him. Times editors were aware of
famine reports in other newspapers, and even ran editorials and stories
contrary to Duranty's coverage in the Times. Those who wish to see Duranty's
Pulitzer revoked point to a 1931 State Department memo from the American
ambassador to Germany on a meeting he had with Duranty in which Duranty
supposedly said that by agreement between the Times and the Soviet
government, all his dispatches reflected the Soviets' official position.
Though the report appears genuine, it's hard to know how much weight to give
it given the lack of other supporting evidence and the tone of the Times
coverage. Certainly Duranty's dispatches were contorted to get past the
censors, but the Times headlines on his stories were often harsher in tone
than the articles under them. The paper had a long record of anti-Soviet
coverage and took a much harder editorial line against the Soviets than
Duranty did, leading to a somewhat inconsistent picture during Duranty's
tenure.
That tenure ended in early 1934, when Duranty stepped down as the Times
Moscow correspondent, just months after his triumphal trip with Litvinov to
the White House. He continued as special correspondent for the Times through
1940 and wrote several books on the Soviet Union, never altering his view of
Stalin as a cruel but necessary figure in Russian history. He died in
Florida in 1957 with both his bank account and his reputation severely
diminished. Given his cynical world view, Duranty might be mystified by the
outrage still surrounding his career.
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Then again, perhaps he anticipated the questions to come about his reporting
from the Soviet Union. In his bestselling 1935 memoir, "I Write As I
Please," he discusses whether the "noble" objectives of the Soviets
justified the harsh means they employed. In deciding, he recounts an
incident that occurred while he was a cub reporter for the Times's Paris
desk in 1917 during World War I. George Creel, the head of the U.S.
military's public information office, had relayed a tale about how American
sailors on their maiden voyage to Europe sank a pack of German submarines.
Duranty believed the story to be war propaganda meant to bolster flagging
morale, but he filed the story anyway. Did the end justify the means, a
troubled Duranty wondered? His answer took the form of a poem written in the
style of E.E. Cummings. In long stanzas he tells of the sailors' heroic tale
and his decision to write about it despite doubting its truth. The final
stanza concludes:
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Well I ask you does a reporter not mean someone who reports
reports exactly what he sees verbatim what he hears
and did I not report it to my full two thousand words
and did it LEAD THE PAPER or not
and if Saint Peter asks unpleasant questions about it
I shall appeal to Saint Athanasius
and if Saint Athanasius lets me down
I'll shout for citizen Creel
and if they can't find him in heaven
then I fear we'll meet in HELL
Colombia Journalism Review, NY, NY, http://www.cjr.org/
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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