Afraid I’m going to ask Clark Hoyt, public editor of the New York Times, for a correction to a Times story.
But first, I have a question: How often has Columbia University bestowed its coveted Pulitzer Prize for national news reporting on reporters who DECLINED to publish a big story?
At least once. It happened in the case of Hoyt and Robert Boyd, who received the 1973 Pulitzer for their gumshoe work uncovering the psychiatric hospitalizations of then U.S. Sen. Thomas Eagleton, a Democrat from Missouri who briefly was his party’s nominee for vice president in 1972.
Eagleton’s ascent ended abruptly, brought down by Hoyt. Who is Clark Hoyt? After a distinguished career with the Knight and Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers, he now writes columns that judge the wisdom, ethics and intelligence of Times staffers.
It seems only fair that Hoyt himself be hauled into court once in a while.
The revelation that earned Hoyt and Boyd that 1973 Pulitzer? Hoyt confirmed a fact long-suppressed by media in Eagleton’s home town of St. Louis, Missouri — that Eagleton had suffered from depression. He’d been hospitalized three times and twice had received electric shock therapy. Such a scoop might have prompted Eagleton to withdraw from the campaign had it been published by Hoyt and Boyd’s employer, the Knight chain of newspapers. But we’ll never know what might have happened had Hoyt and Boyd actually beaten everybody with that story, because it never hit the streets. At least, not as a scoop for the Knight papers.
I became interested in this footnote in journalistic history while researching the background of Hoyt, whom I’ve taken to task a couple of times in joelontheroad.com for writing Times Op-Ed columns which, I think, harm the reputations of hardworking reporters and editors on the low end of the Times feeding chain. But I have to admit that even though I criticize him, I find his columns fascinating. He’s usually thorough, follows leads well below the surface and takes the bigwigs to task, too. Sometimes I think he fails to understand the complexity of writers’ jobs, but his column is one of my must-read pieces in the Sunday Times, along with Frank Rich, Randy Cohen and Deborah Solomon.
But as I say, it seems only fair that he who judges ought now and then to be judged. Recently, I was gearing up to write a searing column about Hoyt’s column on a recent Times embarrassment when I found myself accidentally wandering a side path.
It seems completely unrelated, my research into questions about events I watched or took part in during the spring of 1965, when I was a $75-a-week clerk-intern in the Washington, D.C. office of then U.S. Rep. and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford. I’ve been trying to learn more about Ford’s press secretary of the time, Jim Mudge. (You can read about Jim in my post, “Jerry’s Memory Hole,” in the category “Jerry & Me.”) Jim had worked for the Detroit Free Press before coming to Washington, and in January 1966, I recently learned, he went back to the Free Press to be chief of the paper’s City-County Bureau. (Many years later, without realizing Jim had been there, I worked in that same office covering Wayne County for the Free Press.)
Anyway, when I retired last November, I was given a copy of “On Guard,” by Frank Angelo. It’s a history of the Free Press. Funny thing: I was given a copy of “On Guard’ when I hired into the paper in 1984. I looked Jim Mudge up in the index and found him mentioned as reporting on the Detroit riots in 1967. My eye strayed to another page and the name Clark Hoyt jumped out at me.
Suddenly, I was reading about a different Clark Hoyt. No, the same person, just 30 years ago. In 1978, then Free Press Executive Editor David Lawrence “named Clark Hoyt assistant to the executive editor with responsibilities in the news area,” according to the book, which continues, “Hoyt joined the Free Press in 1968 as politics writer and served later in the Knight Newspapers Washington bureau. It was while he was in Washington that Hoyt, and bureau chief Bob Boyd, won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the history of mental illness of 1972 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton. That reporting was based on information supplied anonymously by telephone to John S. Knight III, a talented Free Press reporter who later became an editor at the Philadelphia Daiily News and was murdered in late 1975. Boyd, a Free Press reporter before going to the Washington bureau, and Hoyt were awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.”
I wondered if Hoyt and Boyd filched the tip from the other reporter, Knight. Nope. I’m told by an old Free Press hand that this young Knight was of the same Knight family that owned the Free Press, but he was an intern. Interns don’t normally follow up tips on national stories. And I learned that the tip was relayed to Hoyt on his way to St. Louis to look into the background of the relatively unknown first-term senator, Eagleton, after he was nominated for VP at the 1972 Democratic convention.
I find the language of “On Guard” interesting: Hoyt and Boyd won a Pulitzer for “uncovering the history of mental illness” of Eagleton. Doesn’t say they wrote a story.
They didn’t.
Here’s how Eagleton’s obit in the March 5, 2007 New York Times put it: After the convention, “rumors began circulating among politicians and journalists. Mr. Eagleton held a news conference on July 25 in Custer, S.D., where he had just briefed the vacationing Mr. McGovern over breakfast.”
Not exactly how it happened. It wasn’t rumors that forced Eagleton out.
It was Pulitzer Prize-winning news reporting.
Seems Hoyt took the Free Press intern’s tip and used it to guide his reporting in St. Louis. He started reading newspaper clips about Eagleton and found gaps — periods when the politician, normally in the news, suddenly disappeared. He kept digging and found references to hospitalizations — and a physician’s name. When Eagleton’s doctor slammed his door in Hoyt’s face, the reporter knew he was onto to something big.
Why didn’t he write and publish it?
Maybe he wishes he had. But I don’t think so.
Here’s what I suspect happened. He and Boyd had evidence that a potential vice president — a man within reach of the presidency — suffered from periodic bouts of depression severe enough to require hospitalization. Maybe not so problematic for a U.S. senator, but certainly worth concern in a man who could set off a nuclear inferno. At that level, it’s political — no longer just between his doctor and the senator.
The reporters had the story and could have written and published it. They were at that moment where they needed, out of fairness to Eagleton, to let him know what they had and give him a chance to respond.
Think of the temptation: They had a really hot story — as it turned out, a Pulitzer prize-winner. Why not just go with what they had?
Ever see those disclaimers in news stories that say the subject didn’t return a phone call for comment? Hoyt and Boyd might have placed a call to Eagleton shortly before deadline and then run a story breaking the news and saying there was no word from Eagleton by press time. If they’d happened to connect with someone in the campaign, they could have used whatever quotes they got. And if there was no comment, so be it. Who could reproach them? They’d have preserved their scoop.
I learned from a column by Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher what happened.
It seems they recognized the gravity of the story and its potential impact. This was about more than competition among media.
They weren’t taking short-cuts. They learned Eagleton and presidential candidate George McGovern were staying at a log cabin resort in South Dakota. Hoyt and Boyd traveled to Montana, found the resort, located the campaign manager and unloaded their bad news. Eagleton, it turned out, hadn’t leveled with McGovern and the story was a big shock to him. Eagleton called a press conference. The beans were spilled. Everybody had the story.
Eagleton tried to hang in, but withdrew a few days later under pressure from McGovern.
The Times needs to clarify if not outright correct Eagleton’s obituary. It was not “rumors” that pushed the senator to withdraw. It was the force of truth, well and thoroughly reported by Hoyt and Boyd.
Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
