Suppressed: Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent

greetings from the national archives flagship building in washington dc which sits on the ancestral lands of the nakacha tank peoples i'm david ferriero archivist of the united states and it's my pleasure to welcome you today's virtual author lecture by robert m smith author of suppressed before we begin i'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our youtube channel on monday may 10th at 5 p.m bob drury and tom clavin will tell us about the true saga of daniel boone and the conquest of the frontier the subject of their new book blood and treasure and on thursday may 13th at noon historian jonathan zimmerman and pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist signa wilkinson will present their new book free speech this brief but bracing book tells the story of free speech in america and makes the case for why we should care about it today for more than 120 years the new york times has proclaimed that it publishes all the news that's fit to print at some point someone is deciding what is fit to print and the results of those decisions are the subject of our featured book suppressed robert m smith spent years as a reporter with the times and in his new book he examines how some stories make it to print how some do not and how the filters work the first amendment to the constitution declares that congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press with that freedom comes responsibility and this book reminds us that news outlets approach that responsibility in different ways robert m smith is a former new york times white house and investigative correspondent who was witness to some of the most important stories in modern history including watergate the pentagon papers the milai massacre he began at the times in his twenties quit went to yale law school and was rehired by the times he became a lawyer in a prestigious firm served in the administration of president jimmy carter and worked as an international commercial mediator in england and in the united states he won an award for news writing from the united press international won several awards while at the new york times and has written a comprehensive legal treatise on mediation and arbitration now let's hear from robert m smith thank you for joining us today my name is eric fox and i am speaking today with robert m smith author of the soon to be released suppressed confessions of a former new york times washington correspondent bob is a graduate of harvard college and he has advanced degrees in foreign affairs from columbia the columbia graduate school of journalism and yale law school he has had a wide-ranging career which includes journalism the law both in the united states and england and serving in the jimmy carter presidency bob received many accolades as a journalist and as a lawyer preparing a case for the world court and serving as a mediator for multinational corporations bob you've written a lot in your career and now you're publishing a book whose central theme is the first amendment and the role of the press what do you think is the most important lesson from your book i think that the most important lesson is that in a time of a bad great totally divided country the normal rule of the press is to be able to show folks on the right uh what those on the left are like and thinking and so on and vice versa and playing a role perhaps in and having them understand one another and knitting the two together that's not possible now because the press is not trusted by a very large part of the population advocacy journalism has to some extent replaced neutral journalism and people don't trust the press which means the press cannot help us stitch the country back together so to speak your book starts with a critical moment in american history the lead up to the watergate investigation what happened when you were an investigative reporter in the washington bureau of the new york times and met with the director of the fbi something quite remarkable happened and it's still stupefying to me the day before i was to leave the bureau and go to yale law school i had lunch with the then acting director of the fbi we had lunch at a french restaurant and uh sat at a table and he told me about watergate and some of its participants and i was incredulous i couldn't take my notebook out because here we were in a crowded washington uh restaurant at lunchtime and so i sat there trying to remember the names he gave me sigretti's name for example and i used the mnemonic uh spaghetti and spaghetti sigretti anyway he he told me uh this story uh to some extent with detail and i after the lunch i knew it was my last day i cornered the excuse me editor news editor of the washington bureau of the times and and asked him to go to his office shut the door there put up a scotch taped a sign that said do not disturb turn on a small tape recorder gave him one of the reporters pads and pen and asked him to take notes which he did and i told him about what had just happened and gave him what the fbi had about watergate and then at the end of my briefing or debriefing we left the room and i went to my desk to finish packing up and he went into the newsroom now the newsroom had i don't remember exactly but 30 say 35 really good reporters and i went off to new haven and read the paper and saw nothing nothing uh and i didn't understand what was happening and then a few months later the times began getting very badly beaten by woodward and bernstein and i i was just amazed and subsequently i asked the editor years later what had happened and he said he had no explanation i said that essentially that's not credible and he said well we're going off my wife and i on an alaskan cruise and i said that cruz wasn't for a week i mean for goodness sake and journalism a week is a vast amount of time uh you had plenty of time so what really happened he said i don't know do you want me to take truth serum and i said if it would help yes how do you address claims that the media has always been biased well it depends i suppose on what you mean by bias but there are degrees of bias just as at law school we've learned there are degrees of evidence or evidentiary solidity some things are more solid than others this table here next to me is quite solid uh the jurors could see it the judge could see it uh rainbow is uh somewhat more ethereal and some may see it and some not i suppose but any event um there are degrees of objectivity no one i think would no one in the newspaper business or craft would argue that reporters and editors are without their own personal political views or partisan bias and that's true but that doesn't mean that they inject it into their stories so at some institutions premier among them probably the new york times which has said and still says and house ads and runs in the paper that it is telling the truth well you know again of course putting aside the relativity of the truth of different versions of the truth that is absolutely not what happened with regard to the times and the trump administration or or the times on other topics now and i i think any fair-minded reader knows this and certainly president trump felt correctly he wasn't getting a fair shake and the times correctly said it wasn't getting a fair shake from him they were both right in a sense but the time stepped into the ring and began punching it out or slugging it out with the president that wasn't the role of the press and it had one really quite apart from principles one really awful effect if you're in there slugging it out with person you're writing about the president then people are not going to find you credible after all you're in the ring and that uh has had the effect i i mentioned earlier and that is so far to answer your question from any view of journalistic neutrality that i don't think one needs to say a lot more about it what other evidence can you point to in terms of bias and how do you compare times to other news organizations well you know when i showed up on the doorstep of the new york times i was uh very young i was in my mid late 20s and uh naive i suppose but i saw other examples they're in the book uh they're laid out you know the times coverage of uh president then president trump um is compared in the book in detail with coverage by the associated press excuse me the the associated press has hundreds probably thousands of uh client media outlets around the world some left some right some in the middle so it doesn't want to lose clients it does play the news down the center um and give i think a quite objective view and that is uh not uh what is uh occurring uh [Music] generally um in my stay at the times one of my first assignments when i was i don't know 27 or something like that um i was sent back to harvard uh college where i myself got to college uh which is probably where they sent me and i mean because i knew the place and uh they there were riots by the students at harvard all right there were these big riots and i was there to cover the riots and i wanted very badly everybody in the media went very badly to have uh an interview with the president of harvard nathan and uh uh president wasn't seeing anybody no one uh in the media well one day i happen to be in harvard yard and uh the where the administration is and and freshman dormitories and so on and um i saw president pusey walking across the yard and i went over to him and i was holding my notebook i identified myself as a times reporter and i asked him questions and he gave me answers to my surprise i hurriedly wrote a story and filed it and was very proud of myself that here i was young reporter i'd gotten this interview which no one else had been able to get around uh well i don't know late afternoon four o'clock five o'clock whatever i got a call from god that is to say scotty reston a journalistic icon of great uh magnitude and importance who was i think then running the paper and he said hello bob so i've been looking at the interview of president and don't you think uh we ought to uh uh pass on this one i don't think we were a bit hard with him i i said i have no idea what you're talking about scotty uh no i don't think i i we were hard on him i i told him i was a times reporter i had my notebook out i asked him absolutely normal questions she gave answers which were not earth-shaking answers but um uh he did give substantive answers and they were it was the first interview that um that he had given to anybody and and reston said well don't you think he's under a lot of pressure on a lot of stress and i said yes he is she said well why don't we just uh let this one pass and so my story one of my first and supposed in the sense uh at the times was spiked that is to say it never got to see the light of day for this reason and there were many or several other episodes like this where stories were killed or not covered whatever which are also uh laid out in the book for example i covered the milai massacre and the pentagon reporter who sat next to me in the washington times would not cover the men the massacre at all until finally uh near the very end of the story uh the pentagon decided to have a news conference and then for the first time he wrote about that that is the army's view of uh the massacre or i covered a story about problem banks this list of problem banks and the government thought these banks were problem banks i think it was the comptroller of the currency and uh i did a story well the financial business financial reporters at the paper wouldn't touch the story or finally just to give you just one of the series of examples another one i had leaked to me as i recall a letter from a lockheed a lawyer from lockheed who was writing on hotel stationary from geneva switzerland or somewhere in switzerland uh talking about the bribes he was paying to co-warden recipients and talking about how he had to pay more to compete with the italians in the french or whatever it was and it was a short uh piece because it is what he what he had written spoke for itself with references to code words code books uh antelope and things like that code words and uh he at the at the end it was rather funny because he said i i asked uh the bribe intermediary essentially why he trusted me and and the fellow said because you're a lawyer so i thought it was a sort of an important piece at a time when overseas uh bribery was being featured uh and investigated in uh congress in the senate and i filed it and the business and financial pages didn't run it i got so upset that they weren't running it that i took the piece and submitted it to the sunday week in review where i was a frequent contributor at the time and the week in review ran and then the following monday an editor from the in the washington bureau came over to me and said bob the editor of this fan business financial has called and asked why you gave this piece the sunday weekend review and not to uh the business section and i opened a drawer on my desk and show him they showed him the duplicates the carbons of the story that i had sent to business financial so i hope that gives you a sense of what i'm talking about and what i lived through your book is not afraid of exploring topics where neutrality is often hard to find you've mentioned the trump presidency uh and your viewpoint on the media's treatment what shapes your own uh mindset in politics well i'm not going to go into frankly my own politics although i don't think they're any secret i mean i i my view from [Music] my perspective is irrelevant as it should be uh in the case of uh reporters covering the white house or anywhere else but it's no secret that i served um a special assistant to the attorney general under president carter so one can imagine what my politics at least were um but i do think that's not relevant and the whole point i'm trying to make is about not to be relevant i lived in france for a while and in france uh in the small town i lived in i had to read three newspapers just to find out what was happening because of this uh partisan or ideological partiality i read the monda for the uh conservative right-wing view i read i'm sorry for the left or liberal view for the right wing or a conservative point of view and then once a week i would read a publication called canal olshanae which is a terrific investigative reporter with all kinds of sources in the french government well we've kind of reached that stage here now you have to watch i i gather uh msnbc and talks and so on to get some sense of where the truth might lie what were the harder stories for you to cover the ones that involved investigating those in power that had something to hide or the ones dealing with the lives of otherwise ordinary citizens clearly eric ordinary citizens i you know the the stories that really made me personally um extraordinarily sad we're covering the shooting of the students at kent state or covering integration with with school buses bringing i don't know five or six or seven year olds into south boston where the south boston uh uh mothers the irish american mothers there were screaming at these children and it's just a terrible sight to see or to take whatever example the harlem photographer in his 80s sitting on the stoop of the house the brownstone in harlem sorry from which he was being evicted and all of his negatives photos class sides going back 50 years were being loaded by sheriff's new york pacific chairs on trucks to be taken heaven knows where i mean these things are really obviously very troublesome put yourself in the shoes the reporter covering them they're much harder on you i think than being at the white house and covering nixon saying something about foreign policy you were a commended journalist in one of the most prestigious news organizations in the world and working in its washington bureau no less why did you leave journalism for law school and why did you return to the times after law school that's a complicated question i'm not sure i'm i'm the best person to answer it but eric um excuse me um i think i may have in all fairness peaked too soon i think it was combination factors you know i here i was in the washington new york times which at the time was the uh uh in some ways the pinnacle of washington journalism i suppose and i was quite young when i was covering uh the white house and uh and the state department pentagon and so on so i think if i hadn't uh been able to do that until i was in my late 30s or early 40s or mid 40s i might not have left secondly i had always some feeling that i wanted to be an entrepreneur and thirdly a chance you know i applied to only one law school to be honest to yale and i took all the tests and gave them my transcripts and all the usual drill and i thought that they probably wouldn't take me and if they didn't i would say the paper but they did take me and i went to yale and i found that school particularly the first year a remarkable intellectual experience i'm not even i'm not an intellectual but the experience of the way in which the things could be analyzed was uh amazing and made me certainly want uh to finish law school and ultimately uh to be a warrior and then for the last uh i don't know 29 years or so to be a mediator a commercial mediator have your post-journalism careers helped shape your viewpoint on journalism or your career in journalism and is there a thread between your varied careers well again eric i i'm not sure i think so i think you know [Music] moose the founder of time magazine um said that john was in prepares you for everything which i think is true it does has extremely ground level uh practical education involved in it uh so i i think that's true in terms of law it certainly changed the way in which i at least analyzed uh life and events and mediation i just found was in my mind remains a better way of solving uh conflicts than slugging out a courtroom with a jury or a judge uh and i think the thread among them is that some of the skill sets are uh involved in all of them i mean in journalism uh you have to be believed your sources have to find you credible honest and willing to keep their confidences even if it means you go to jail and that's a high standard of trust to gain [Music] in uh law if you're a trial lawyer as i was you have to convince the jurors that even though you're an advocate they should listen to you and believe you certainly as to those things that seem credible and i always told jurors i was an advocate which is true and finally in mediation you have to absolutely have the trust of the parties and the lawyers to but mainly i suppose the parties in the dispute i mean i've been a mediator in the united states and in england where i'm also a barrister um and so i've had different cultural experiences of mediated cases in the german language for example and in french the bottom line is that there is there are some skills that are similar in all three areas and i've been fortunate in being able to bring i hope some of those skills from one uh craft to another you once prepared a case before the world court can you share some of that experience now i'll show you the government in action democracy in action and how these things really look from behind the curtain this is in the book this big it's one of my favorite uh in a sense uh episodes because um it was my idea this is this was during the period when the iranians were holding hostage americans you would call perhaps and uh [Music] we were going the united states it is that is when i was uh special attorney general uh to the world court in the hague to ask uh the world court to say tell the iranians to give us the hostages let the hostages go so i thought this was something for the attorney general not for the state department legal office and the state the attorney general is supposed to represent the united states and all courts everywhere but in any event the the matter had already reached the point where the state department had prepared the brief and so on but the white house agreed with me and we were tood off uh the very next day to uh holland and to get into the world court and the attorney general would would present uh to the world court the um case well we got on the plane and i looked at the brief and all all modesty aside all kidding aside the brief was a good legal brief but this was not meant really for legal consumption only or mainly this was an exercise in public international and in a way it was like journalism in a way it was like trial law you know and the brief was very dull or at least i i found it so uh you know filled with legal references and legal languages and i i didn't think the way this should be a approach this matter should be approached so i rewrote the i stayed up all night on the plane surviving with the kind help of the klm stewardesses uh on dutch cocoa right and rewrote the brief and i knew that we needed some sort of sound bite or some something that would capture media attention international media attention and i came up with as the lead the the beginning of the brief let my people go uh which is in both the islamic and and christian and jewish religions um so uh that's the way that the brief started in the attorney general started in the court so i arrived or we all arrived in holland and i had to get the brief retype since was rewritten and i went to a secretary in the embassy around noon and said can you please type this right away because the attorney general is going to be giving the brief in a couple of hours in the world court and she looked at me and said well you know it's lunchtime i didn't i was so tired and so staggered i i went to whoever the highest person i could find in the embassy and said can you please help me get this type and we did and went to the world court uh where by that time i had a splitting headache from not having slept and so on and so on and a very kind bailiff gave me some white powder and and like a tea and a in hot water for the headache um and it did its uh work but there was it was some pain involved and being under a massive amount of lights as as this argument unfolded but the notion that we almost failed for in my mind at least a variety of reasons including a secretary who simply wanted to go to lunch was somewhat revelatory and and funny you were negotiating with the new york times as part of the union and something shocking happened what was it well the times had offered me a few jobs when i went back to work for it after law school and one was running a subsidiary publication and so on one was being the times labor negotiator i turned it down i went back to washington washington as a correspondent but i did take on the pro bono activity of being a uh the the newspaper guild the union representative in the washington bureau of the times which led to a number of uh results but in in terms of the the the times in the union but or or the reporters but the event that i think um i remember most in a way was where it was this we were negotiating with the times and with the fellow who took the job i had turned down across the table from me and asking for different things for the for the reporters and editors forgive me and the uh the times i kept saying all night and into the morning into you know 3am they didn't have any money they didn't have any money and they couldn't give us they couldn't pay us any more money and finally um i uh said look i understand that your position is you don't have any money and you can't give us any more money but here's an item that doesn't cost you anything that you should give us and we need and the item was this when a reporter wrote a story and the times changed the story some editor editors changed the story then the reporter should have the right to have his or her byline taking off the piece and in fact there's an international treaty about this to which the us's party anyway the times to my amazement said no we won't give you that and i was so taken aback that because it was a non-monetary item it was the absolute right thing to do by any standard certainly it seemed to me by the times the standard and i had you know as i mentioned just recently finished law school and i uh feigned anger i suppose and said look if you cannot give us this non-economic item i'm going to recommend to our team that we strike and i walked out and um about 20 minutes later the times negotiator came and they came back in the room brought us back into the room and said they would give us that item but the very notion that the paper would change a story and keep the reporter's byline on it when it didn't say what he or she had said was troublesome and i was very glad we won that one eric where do you find hope for a better future with the u.s media oh i i'm not sure that's for me to say um there are so many different theories as to what will happen with the media in a digital age with multiple channels many of them completely unreliable some of them partially unreliable with journalists bread to revere advocacy journalism as opposed to neutral journalism i don't know where we're going i'm hoping that the times as uh an industry leader if not the industry leader will find its way back to its traditional path and save it stay there and find that as both the most helpful the fairest and the in the end probably the most profitable way for it to roll forward the very fact that the new york times had to take felt obliged to take house ads ads and paid for itself of course and ran on its own behalf in the times um saying how attached it was to the truth i think tells you something uh why would it feel compelled to say that well thank you bob that was an interesting and insightful discussion and there is so much more that is in the book i'm very glad your experiences and perspectives and wisdoms are documented for all of us thank you eric you

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Length: 35min 46sec (2146 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021