The Pulitzer Prizes: Giving and Taking Away

By Thomas Griffith

Somehow, Pulitzer Prizes remain the most valuable American awards there are. That is surprising, considering the many reversals and goof-ups. This year half of the ten Pulitzer jury choices in journalism were overturned by the more powerful Advisory Board. So five contestants whom juries sought to honor lost out, and five who got the final awards must live with the knowledge that they were not the jury's first choice. This may not be a scandal, but it's mighty confusing. Can't they get their heads together up at Columbia?

In the past, controversy raged over the conservatism, prudishness or obtuseness of the Advisory Board when it came to judging music, plays or fiction. Lately, in these fields, the newspaper editors who make up the Advisory Board have deferred to the judgments of specialized jurors.

Only in their own journalistic area are they gung-ho at reversing juries.

Their modesty in the arts is commendable, since most can't even carry a tune. They do think they can read, however, and as recently as 1974 rejected the unanimous choice of the fiction jury, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

It has happened that what the Advisory Board didn't reject, Columbia's board of trustees or president sometimes did. President Nicholas Murray Butler was so distressed by what he considered offensive and lascivious in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls that he refused to submit the award recommendation to the trustees. The trustees refused to approve W. A. Swanberg's Citizen Hearst, so Swanberg got a later consolation prize for an inferior biography of Henry R. Luce.

Late and safe is often the Pulitzer way. William Faulkner got his Nobel six years before his Pulitzer.

Controversy has brought some reform. When Columbia trustees balked at honoring newspapers for publishing leaked documents like the Pentagon papers, President William McGill got himself appointed to the Advisory Board and persuaded the trustees to keep hands off awards. So all power now rests in the ill-named Advisory Board. Its twelve journalist members are top honchos on Establishment papers (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal,--plus Howard H. Hays Jr., editor of the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise). Their reversals of jury recommendations last month gave one unexpected prize to the Washington Post (a well-deserved one to Editorial Writer Meg Greenfield), and two to the Times, including the most controversial of all, to Columnist William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter whose persistence, the judges concluded, had helped pin Bert Lance's coonskin to the wall.

"Why have a jury committee at all?" demanded an angry W.E. Chilton III of the Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette.

He called the rejection of his jury's recommendation "typical of the Establishment press." But, as one editor on the Advisory Board told me, "Everybody's mad. They're mad at being overturned. We're mad at their inferior choices. It may sound Eastern and elitist, but they're not alert enough, well informed enough." This is an old complaint: Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post recalls that in 1973 his paper's Watergate reporting was the preliminary jury's third choice.

The Advisory Board, meeting after Watergate had been further confirmed, gave the Post the prize while Bradlee absented himself from the room (as custom now requires of any Board member while his paper is under discussion).

Why have juries? Because the Advisory Board's members think 900 entries are too many to get through by themselves. But Columbia concedes that good judges are getting harder to find. As more and more newspapers are linked by chains, Columbia tries to avoid naming jurors who might have to judge entries from other papers in their chain. Many of this year's 50 unpaid jurors thus came from places like Gainesville, Fla.; Meriden, Conn.; Sheboygan, Wis.; Anniston, Ala. Since half their recommendations were similarly overturned last year, the amount of discontent at Pulitzer elitism is by now geographically well distributed.

As it is, people always seem to be leaving the room whenever the Advisory Board meets. The editors of the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune returned this year to find that jury choices for their papers had been overruled. Nobody has to leave the room oftener than the man from the New York Times, currently James Reston. The Times frequently takes ads to brag that it has won more Pulitzers (45) than anyone else. This year it reported on the front page that it was the first paper to win three awards in the same year; it buried inside the later news that jurors had recommended only one of the three.

With its clout at Columbia, the Times often presses for Pulitzers that will "vindicate" its most controversial coverage--the Pentagon papers, say, or David Halberstam's Viet Nam reporting in 1964. This usually works, but Executive Editor Turner Catledge in 1967 sat with tears in his eyes as he learned that the other committee members had overturned Harrison Salisbury's nomination for a wartime journey to Hanoi. ("I was terribly upset," Catledge wrote, convinced it was a "decision on political rather than journalistic grounds.") Times Publisher Arthur Ochs ("Punch") Sulzberger must also have had vindication in mind this year when he recommended that his editors submit Columnist Safire's name for a Pulitzer. He well remembers that many staff members once deplored Sulzberger's personal choice of the sharp-needled Safire to offset the paper's overwhelmingly liberal set of columnists. Safire has turned out to be one of the most readable, and most read, Washington columnists. He is prickly, sarcastic and dogged, and irritates many. But with information fed nun from the right, as others get theirs from the left, he works hard. The rap on him is his Nixonian innuendo--for example, often printing alleged "facts" in the form of questions. Ben Bradlee voted against the award to Safire; when outvoted, he suggested that the citation confine itself to praising only Safire's campaign against Lance.

This was agreed: the Pulitzer is a nice club.

To avoid the annual backlash of criticism, the club could stand improving. Perhaps in the case of journalism awards, where the Advisory Board determinations are crucial rather than advisory, it could style itself the "awards committee" (the Advisory language comes from the Pulitzer will).

It could tighten the rules so that there would be fewer entries and undertake to read more of them. This would put less emphasis on the confusingly named journalism "juries," making them what they are in fact, preliminary screeners.

That way Pulitzers might be more easily recognized as having been awarded with one clear voice. --Thomas Griffith

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