The Pulitzer Flap

A Pulitzer Prize is U.S. journalism's most coveted honor, and the trustees of Columbia University are ever conscious of the prestige they are awarding along with the prizes. Lately they have shown some skittishness about lauding reportorial feats that depended heavily on illegal disclosure. Two years ago, they chided the 14-man Pulitzer advisory board, which forwards final selections for trustee approval: "Had the selections been those of the trustees alone, certain of the recipients would not have been chosen." Among the winners that year: the New York Times for publication of the Pentagon papers and Jack Anderson for printing secret memorandums on Administration discussions of the India-Pakistan War.

There was similar disquiet among the trustees over the awarding of the 58th annual Pulitzer Prizes announced last week. The advisory board had recommended a prize in national reporting to the Providence Journal-Bulletin's Jack White, 31, who broke details of President Nixon's minuscule income tax payments in 1970 and 1971. Although his scoop was the first in a series of revelations about questionable presidential tax deductions, White's access to confidential returns was a stark violation of Internal Revenue Service regulations; White has refused to say how or where he secured the Nixon returns.

Xerox Journalism. The trustees eventually went along with the award, but not without some soul-searching. Columbia President William J. McGill revealed that "a very substantial number of trustees feel very strongly about the problem of approving a prize which seems to convey that the university is approving illegal acts." Some trustees also balked at rewarding White for a story that may have fallen in his lap. Said McGill: "The feeling is not that the reporter is at fault here but that the award is significant only because of the misdemeanor, and that seems to us to be Xerox journalism." White's colleagues defended him from that innuendo. They pointed out that though he spent last summer covering the closing of Navy bases in New England, among other places, he visited San Diego and Washington, D.C., where he cultivated a number of Government sources. "There were those of us who knew the tax story was there," says Journal-Bulletin Reporter Peter Lennon. "We knew he was working on it for a long period."

The award to White and the other Pulitzers made 1973 a Year of the Muckrakers. Another prize for national reporting went to Washington Star-News Reporter James R. Polk, 36, whose series on the financing of Nixon's 1972 campaign broke the story of Financier Robert Vesco's secret $200,000 contribution. A massive series by Long Island's Newsday, tracing heroin from Turkish poppy fields to New York streets, won a gold medal for meritorious public service. New York Daily News Reporter William Sherman, 27, was awarded a Pulitzer in special local reporting for a 14-part series on doctors' abuses of the Medicaid program.

Strange Decision. Some participants in this year's Pulitzer decisions suggested that the cumbersome mechanism for selecting winners could also stand some investigatory reporting. In each category, individual juries make recommendations to the advisory board, which consists largely of publishers and editors. They are free to veto the recommendations or insert other choices; the university's trustees can then override the advisory board's selections but cannot make substitutions. This Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance arrangement can yield some strange decisions. The jurors in this year's fiction category -Amherst Professor Benjamin DeMott and Critics Elizabeth Hardwick and Alfred Kazin -recommended Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (recent co-winner of the National Book Award). Said their report: "No work of fiction published in 1973 begins to compare in scale, originality and sustained intellectual interest with Mr. Pynchon's book."

Some newsmen on the board disagreed. "It was confusing and confused, written in incomprehensible language," said one. As a result, the board recommended that no fiction prize be given, a decision that DeMott learned about when he read his morning paper on the day after the awards were announced. "I must admit I did not fill up with a sense of purposeful work as a juror," DeMott says. "Why did we read those books?" Leaving in their wake angry jurors, confused advisers and troubled trustees, the Pulitzers again managed to annoy almost everyone -except the winners.

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