EDITORIAL: Undoing history, or righting a wrong? (05/04/03)

EDITORIAL

Undoing history, or righting a wrong?

Earlier this year, the call went out to Ukrainian Americans to write letters to the Pulitzer Prize Board seeking the revocation of the Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Walter Duranty of The New York Times. That action was meant to attract the attention of the board just before its deliberations about this year's crop of Pulitzer Prizes. We have no way of knowing how many letters were sent, but we do know that Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, sent out form letters responding that "complaints about the prize for Mr. Duranty have been raised on and off through the years. However, to date, the Pulitzer Board has not seen fit to reverse a previous board's decision that now stretches back 70 years." Furthermore, he noted that Duranty's prize in 1932 "was for a specific set of stories in the previous year - namely, 1931" - not the years of the Famine of 1932-1933.

What he neglected to mention, however, was the Duranty's prize was given, as noted on the www.pulitzer.org website, for a series of articles - "especially the working out of the Five-Year Plan." That Five-Year Plan, as we all know, called for the forced collectivization of farms, which led to the Great Famine in Ukraine. Duranty effusively praised Stalin's Five-Year Plan. His subsequent stories denied the Famine at the same time that he told others that millions - perhaps as many as 10 million - had perished. Indeed Duranty's role in Moscow was more that of a propagandist for Stalin than a correspondent.

In 1986, Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, when asked if the newspaper would return Duranty's Pulitzer, replied: "what we report has to stand, for better or worse, as our best contemporary effort. ... That contemporary Pulitzer jurors thought him worthy of a prize for the things he did write from Moscow is a judgment I am neither equipped nor entitled to second-guess at this date. ... it is not a prize The Times can take back."

In 1987, Times Executive Editor Max Frankel - reacting to the revelation in a recently declassified State Department document that "in agreement with The New York Times and the Soviet authorities," the dispatches of Duranty always "reflect(ed) the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own" - said this "doesn't seem to qualify as news. It's really history, and belongs in history books."

In 1990, Karl A. Meyer of The Times, in a feature on its editorial page called "The Editorial Notebook," acknowledged that what Duranty wrote from his post in Moscow constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."

In 2001, in the book "Written into History," which contains Pulitzer reporting of the 20th century from The Times, there is a parenthetical notation after Duranty's name: "Other writers in The Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage." Elsewhere it is noted that Duranty's prize "has come under a cloud"; his reporting "ignored the reality of Stalin's mass murder."

Earlier this year, contacted by The Washington Times about the campaign to revoke Duranty's Pulitzer, Catherine Mathis, vice-president of corporate communications for The New York Times Co., was quoted as saying: "The Pulitzer Board has reviewed the Duranty prize several times over the years, and the board has never seen fit to revoke it. In that situation, the Times has not seen merit in trying to undo history."

But this campaign is not about undoing history. It's about righting a wrong. If the Times does not want to do the right thing - as it has demonstrated over and over again - and voluntarily relinquish Duranty's ill-gotten Pulitzer, then the Pulitzer Prize Board must act to undo this injustice. No other response will do.

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