Truth and Consequences: Anatomy of a Biography Susan Tifft, Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism November 2, 1999 "Ms. Tifft:" Talk a little bit about, I didn't know quite how to phrase this, [inaudible] in search of the truth but basically the idea is, I'd like to talk a little bit about how, when you're writing a book like this, know what you know. How do you know what's truthful and what the difference is between writing a biography and this and journalism. It's kind of a strange time for biography in the United States. I don't know whether of you have been reading about the controversy over the Ronald Reagan biography by Edmund Morris, but by way of background, that biography was just called Dutch, has a fictional character in it who actually is Morris and it actually has fictional footnotes and although I must say I have not read it, I only read lots of articles about it. Supposedly it is a book that illuminates character, it illuminates personality but many historians are finding it very disappointing in terms of illuminating any of the events of Reagan's Presidency. I'd like to pass this around by the way. This is a cartoon from the New Yorker magazine which I think will sort of, speaks to this whole idea of the state of biography in the States at this point. Edmund Morris who was basically commissioned to do the book on Ronald Reagan was given not only a three million dollar advance but was also given incredible access to both Ronald Reagan and to the people around him. He for instance, he had sessions every month with Reagan, he was able to travel with him and so on. One of the disappointments that has been expressed in the articles that have been published about the book since it came out is that he was given all the facts and then sometimes has come up with little that was illuminating but also the disappointment too is in the controversy is that was not faithful to the truth, that he basically created this fictional character. At the same time that this book has come out, there has also been another book that's caused some controversy, another biography, and this is a biography of George W. Bush who is, as you know, running for President on the Republican side. And there was a book that came out just a couple of weeks ago by St. Martin's Press, which has been pulled from the shelves. And the reason that it was pulled from the shelves was basically two reasons. One was because the author was found to be a felon which the publisher didn't know at the very beginning and secondly there was a section at the very end of the book about alleging that George W. Bush had used cocaine and then actually been arrested for it and that his father, the President, had intervened to get that changed. These were accusations that were not attributed to anyone and were not proven but were out there nonetheless, and this book has been taken off the shelves and in fact shredded. The third book I want to mention is a little bit different biography but it has also caused some controversy and that's a book by Bob Woodward called Shadow. Five Presidents have been elected since Watergate. And the reason this book has caused some controversy is because Bob Woodward was the, along with Carl Bernstein, was one of the two investigative reporters who covered Watergate and the controversy here is that so much of the book is attributed to anonymous sources and the very end of the book where you normally find end notes telling you where things come from, many, many, many of the attributions here are interviewed with a knowledge source. And so the controversy is, well, why can't Woodward tell us who he spoke to and how are we to be able to question this information. I say all of this stuff by way of dumping on other books, or criticizing other books, but just by way of saying that the whole question of trying to figure out what is truthful and how you let the reader know what you know. It's a problem that he have confronted on our book as well. So I want to talk a little bit about that because we have some similarities with these other authors that I just described. Like Edmund Morris, we had access to the members of the Och family, members of the Sulzberger family, access to them as individuals and also access to the New York Times archives which no one has ever had before. Unlike Edmund Morris who were not commissioned by the family to do this book, we approached the family through Punch Sulzberger who was then the chairman of the New York Times company, now chairman of Meredith, and got the access to the people and to the documents. And the family had no control over this book. This is an independent book but in fact that was also the case in Edmund Morris' case. The Reagans never read Dutch before it came out. One of the other similarities between our book and the books I've just mentioned too is that like Shadow, if you've ever read any of Bob Woodward's books, one of the things that most beguiling about them is that he really brings you into the stories, he makes situations come alive. There's a real narrative flow to his books. He brings you into the White House for instance and into those cabinet meetings, and it really paints a picture of what it's like to be in the White House. And one of the things we try to do in this book, and I'll leave it to others to judge whether we do it successfully, is that we really try to have that kind of narrative description so that we, if we are successful we'll [inaudible] do with it and bring you inside this family and bring you inside the New York Times. The difference is that we, in both these cases, is that unlike Dutch we don't, we didn't make anything up. We certainly were not fictional characters in the book. And unlike Bob Woodward, we tried to find as we could to let readers know how we know what we know and so that's just setting the stage for this discussion. I'd like to step away for just a second here and talk a little bit about the difference between journalism and a book. I don't know how many of you have written books, I suspect a number of you have, so a lot of this is probably not news to you. You know in journalism the first rule is that you don't invent anything and we tried very hard to make sure that that was the case in this book as well. If we said something happened on a sunny day or a rainy day, and it was something that happened in the past, we checked the weather reports for that day to make sure that we were saying something that was accurate. But there are differences between journalism and a book. Probably the most important one is that this represents a point of view. You know if you read a straight news story, say in the New York Times, you have a situation where for the most part, all the parties are allowed to have their say. There is the event itself or whatever it is that may have occurred and then all the parties who have a role to play in that event get to have some kind of say in the story. That's not necessarily the case here and that is in part because of the idea of having a narrative flow. You want to be able to, you have to tell a story. And in order to tell a story you cannot interrupt it by having all points of view represented. What you have to end up doing is synthesizing everything that you know, from interviews, from archival research and from other sources and to try to put together a story. What you're doing is telling a story. A very different kind of writing, a very different kind of reporting. I want to say something also sort of parenthetically which is, I don't know what it's like in your or in any of the other countries that are represented here but it may surprise you to know that actually there is more fact checking on a newspaper than there is on a book. The whole process of publishing in the States is one in which basically the author is trusted to provide an accurate manuscript. Now this book has two excerpts that were published in the New Yorker magazine, maybe some of you saw them. One was in April of this past year and one was in July. The New Yorker magazine has a very rigorous fact checking department. They have people who do nothing but check the facts in your article. So we went through a very rigorous fact checking procedure for that, however, when it came time to publishing the book itself essentially our publisher relied on our word to say that everything was accurate. Now there is a process for all the publishing called lawyering where lawyers for the publisher look through the book to see if there is anything that's potentially [inaudible, sounds like actionable] or libelous and so forth. Any invasion of privacy that might provoke a lawsuit. And that's very standard procedure but this whole idea of fact checking which we in journalism assume to be a regular part of the procedure whether we're at Time magazine where I was where we actually had people who were researchers, who helped us check facts, or whether we're just relying on ourselves and our editors to help make sure that everything was accurate. Book publishing is very, very different. I want to say a word too about this whole question of how do you know what you know. The question of how reliable sources are. Now this is something that we confront in journalism, we confront in a somewhat different way with a book like this. One of the things that has come home to Alex and me over and over again is that as we interviewed hundreds of people, as we did for this book, one of the things that struck us was that memory is the least reliable aspect of any source. And strangely enough, if you're interviewing a person who really was the principal actor in a situation, that person's memory is often the least reliable for all sorts of, when you think about it, quite logical reasons. They're not necessarily very objective about themselves. Now I'm not talking just about the things that can be factually checked like whether or not they had a meeting on a certain day or what they may or may not have worn or something like that. I'm talking about just memories of events. One of the things that we tried to do was to do a kind of round robin about various events and memories. I'll just give you a very, very small example because this book expounds more than a hundred years. So of course, we're not relying specifically on memories because many of the people who could remember things that far back were dead. So we do have access to some interviews that were done of people who did remember back that far. Adolph Ochs bought the New York Times in 1896. And we were very lucky in a number of ways in some of the sources that we found. We went to Chattanooga which is where Adolph Ochs had his first big success at the Chattanooga Times, he was from the South. And we ran across in a story in there, a man named James Livengood who had written a book about Chattanooga in the 1940's and he was considered sort of the most imminent Chattanoogan historian. We went to talk to him and he is now living in a nursing home, he's in his 90's I guess, and he very generously shared with us all of his note cards from the book that he wrote about Chattanooga. Well in those note cards were interviews with people now long dead who remembered Adolph Ochs back in those days and also remembered his acquisition of the New York Times. Several people had actually been with him on the day that he acquired the New York Times. Well one of the people who was with him on the day that he acquired the New York Times in August of 1896 recounted to Mr. Livengood that after the transfer of property had taken place that Adolph and all of his friends had prepared to a restaurant he called Savaronie's [sp]. And he described what they had there. He described what they ate, he described what they drank, he described the mood of that lunch and so we took that information in and we tried to found out whether there was in fact a restaurant in New York City at that time called Savaronie's. But there wasn't anything, in any of the sources we could find that had that restaurant. But we did have the location of the restaurant and so through our own research at the New York Historical Society we were able to find out that actually this person's memory was not so good. He had the name kind of right, but not exactly right. The name of the restaurant was Café Savarin [sp] and it was right across the street from where the sale had taken place. But the most interesting aspect of the research, it was in the Equitable building. The Equitable was the largest, one of the largest, insurance companies at the time. And as we came to find out the Equitable Life Insurance Society in the New York Times were very much intertwined financially from before the sale all the way through until about 1910 or 1912 so it became a very, very interesting aspect of the story as a matter of fact this one small fact and checking it. I only say this to say that here was a person that had a very distinct memory of what he ate, what he drank, what the day was like and so on. He had one small detail wrong. But that's why you can't rely on people's memories, in part. One of the most reliable sources though, as you might expect, is contemporaneous records. Contemporaneous letters, contemporaneous diaries and we were really very lucky to have access to those. We had unfettered access to the New York Times archives in New York City. Now, the New York Times archives makes it sound like it's a public archive or a building like the New York Public Library. It's not like that. It's a private archive, it's in one room about the size of this room on East 42nd Street and what it really consists of are papers that were saved by everyone from Adolph Ochs and actually some letters even before that, because the New York Times actually was founded in 1851, all the way through to the present day. When Alex and I made our first trip to the New York Times archives in fall of 1992 we very quickly realized that the only way to take advantage of this vast resource, really this motherlode of wonderful stuff, was to actually go through it page by page. We weren't going to be selective about it. We were going to be completely thorough. Now that process took us about a year and a half, page by page, through the New York Times archives. But it turned out to be the poor material that we needed to construct this book. Some of the things we found there were the most reliable sources. I mean they were letters written by Adolph Ochs as he was negotiating for the New York Times. And there were diary entries by his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger who became publisher of the New York Times in 1935. Arthur Hays Sulzberger parenthetically I think kind of knew that people like us were going to come after him at some point or come after the story because he was very self-conscious about writing these kinds of diary entries, explaining why he had the views that he did about everything from Eisenhower to Zionism. He even wanted to explain how he felt about life after death and things like that. He really was a very self-reflective man and left a lot of material that was interesting was useful. There were also other documents that helped in a situation like this that you might not think of. For instance, the family as you might expect lived in a number of different places over the century, and in a number of cases there were floor plans and listings of possessions after people died. You actually could reconstruct how a house looked by looking at this information, you could write about for instance Hillandale which was sort of the country estate of Adolph Ochs in White Plains, New York and you could actually put the reader right there by describing what was in the library, what books were on the shelves by looking at this list of his things, with the [inaudible] that occurred after he died. And that's something that really, hopefully, makes the story come very much alive and puts the reader there but it is very accurate because you've got a source for it. As I was saying the least reliable source is memory. And when you think about that, it makes a lot of sense. We all have certain stories that we tell about our past. If I were to ask any of you around the table to tell me about your childhood or tell me about your professional career you have a spiel, you have something that you've told over and over again almost like the oral tradition of the Bible. At a certain point it turns into kind of hardened myth. That doesn't mean that it's not true, it just means that it's only partially true or it's only a sliver of what's accurate. Interviews that we did and we did hundred of interviews as I've said and for the principal characters in the book, the family members themselves are who living, we did repeated interviews. They are very, very helpful for perspective. They're very, very helpful for talking, for exploring how someone felt about a situation or the perspective that someone had. They're not necessarily so good when you're trying to find out facts about an individual or about an incident. The best way to do that is really to do, well you know like that film, [inaudible], you know the idea of going around and around and around. And if you get all the perspectives at a certain point you at least have some, you have enough information to make informed judgments about what really happened and how people reacted to it. We did one thing which we had the luxury of doing that you don't necessarily have when you're running a straight journalistic story which is we had to make some very almost, I guess you would say, macabre decisions about who we were going to interview first. When we started this project in 1992, it took seven years, we looked at the array of individuals that we knew we wanted to interview. Of course we wanted to interview members of the family but there were also a number of executives at the New York Times, people who had worked at the New York Times previously who were important to the story and we made a very calculated decision to go after the oldest and the sickest first, even if they weren't the most important people to the story. Logical, because you're just worried that they are going to die before you get to them. And in fact several of them did. Harrison Salisbury [sp] we were lucky enough to get to before he died. Scotty Ruston [sp] who was a celebrated New York Times correspondent and [inaudible, sounds like Morris Magerchy] we had several interviews with him but only the first one was helpful because after that he became, he just didn't remember enough. He was just too old and he did die in the course of the project. One of the things that has come up in the discussion, in the controversy about the Reagan biography and I think sometimes Edmund Morris almost uses this as a defense for what he did. That's some talk about how opaque Reagan as a character is and how unself- reflective he is and how difficult that is for a biographer. We have something of an opaque subject too and I don't mean the family itself, I mean Punch Sulzberger who was the chairman of the New York Times company, now chairman emeritus, and really he was in many ways if not the typical figure certainly one of the typical figures in the story. He also was the one who gave us access to the family, gave us access to the archives. He's a very affable man, very courtly man and a very smart man and a very strong man in many ways. But he is not particularly self-reflective and his memory is not particularly good and that doesn't mean that he has any kind of disease or something, it's just that he doesn't really take note of details in the way that a biographer might like. He also is what I would guess you would call a pre-Freudian. He one time said to us, why should I try to remember everything that I've tried so hard to forget? He really doesn't want to [inaudible, sounds like plumb] the motivation of himself or others very much. So that makes it a very difficult kind of interview in a way. But we interviewed him I would say at least sixteen times in the course of this book and often for hours at a stretch. He was useful for discussing certain events that happened at the time such as [inaudible] Pentagon Papers. But what you would get with him on something like that is not a detailed blow by blow account of what happened, you know with the Pentagon Papers you can go elsewhere with that kind of information. But what you would get for the most part is his recollection of his feelings about how threatened the Times was, how threatened he felt and so on. But he was a guy who for instance when we asked him a simple question like, how did you meet your first wife, he's been married two times, he couldn't remember. And I don't think that's because, I don't think he was trying to be evasive, I think he honestly had pushed things into the background and so that was a very difficult thing for us. And I suppose in some ways you could say it's like getting a Morris's problem but luckily we had so many people who observed him at close range over a period of time that I think we were able to give him his due as a full personality. Alex and I wrote one book before this. It was also about a newspaper family, it was about the Binghams in Louisville, Kentucky who had a big family feud and ended up selling their paper to the Gonet [sp] chain in 1986. We had an editor on that book, named Jim Silverman who taught us something very important. He said, what you should do is always watch their behavior, so in the case of Punch Sulzberger we had seven years to watch the behavior and that was also very helpful in ascertaining what he was like and ascertaining how he made decisions and so on. And I must say we came to admire the way he made decisions and how he conducted himself at the Times very, very much. I just want to say one last word and then we can have a conservation I hope about this question of how you let readers know what you know. I've already said this is not objective truth, this is our point of view on this story but what we did try to do in the back of the book is to let people know where we got things. If there is any kind of dispute about or we had some caveats about how we felt about things we tried to put those in the back of the book as well. There's a reporter from the New York Times named Doug France who has written about this question of letting people know, in news stories, where your sources are coming from and he says it this way. He says it's important for the reporter to be transparent, that's the word he uses, transparent, meaning that even if you're quoting someone anonymously there should be some sense that the reader can pick up about where that source is coming from so that they can make some judgments about whether the source is biased or just or whatever. We did have some anonymous sources in this book but we did try to identify them in such a way that the reader could ascertain at least where the source was coming from, even if it was just identified, for instance, a close friend of Punch Sulzberger or an executive who worked at the paper or something like that. So we tried very much to do that but we tried to use anonymous sources sparingly. I think I'll stop there and just take any questions or observations from your own work which I'd be very interested in about how you ascertain what's truthful and how you figure out how to get at the truth. "Question:" [inaudible] people who [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well I think there are a couple of answers to that. One is that, when you're doing a project like this that takes years and years to do there is this period that you get in to with sources, that you're going back and back and back, where I almost think they almost don't believe that it's ever going to be written. I mean Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. said to us at one point, well, when we finish the book and we told him the date that it was coming out he said, I thought it was never going to be done. It's like he didn't believe that it was going to be done and that's of course not true, he did believe that it was going to be done but I think there is a period of time where you have that kind of relationship with a source that is almost, probably think you're a psychiatrist but you know so much about the family, you know so much about the situation that there is that kind of confessional quality to some of the interviews. The other aspect of it is I think that this is a family where smooth relations are valued. And I think what has happened over time is that they don't necessarily talk to each other about the problems they have with each other or even the problems in their own families but they did talk to us. And so we became almost like a central point for these kinds of things. And of course then it all comes out like this but as you point out it's an extremely private family and it is quite remarkable that they were as open and [inaudible] as they were. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well I think one of the things that made it possible is that they knew with whom we were conducting these interviews, that we weren't it for their newspaper, we weren't doing it for a magazine article, we were doing it [inaudible]. But I really can't explain why they necessarily opened up about those kinds of things, it's just that you all know from your own work that if you've done enough legwork, you go into an interview pretty much knowing as much as your source, which you should know as much as your source and in many cases, in that particular case, it's something we already knew from other sources about what happened. And so it was just a matter of [inaudible]. So that's how that works. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" That's a good question. I must say it never ceased being interesting to me but it's not an easy thing to do and particularly not an easy thing to do when you're working together with another person, especially when you're working together with your spouse. That's a whole other conversation. But it certainly never occurred to us to drop it. No, never. This was such a unique opportunity to have this kind of access to this kind of story and we thought it was a very important story to tell. So I can't honestly say that we ever thought about dropping it. But that doesn't mean that there weren't points of frustration or weariness along the way. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Oh that doesn't bother me at all. But I'll tell you, we had a very different reaction. Alex doesn't like to read bad reviews he just won't read them at all. It doesn't bother me in the least. I mean, I find it fascinating to see how people react to it. There's a kind of, I don't know, I feel that once this is produced it has a life of its own. And I feel very good about what we did so I read that, I felt like we did answer that question, I feel like the whole book answered the question that he raises in [inaudible] but that's his point of view and I respect it, so it really honestly doesn't bother me. [tape break] "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" We didn't know it was going to be seven years. We though it was going to be maybe four or five. "Question:" [inaudible] consider giving up the book [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well, you know the thing is, people talk about writing a book and writing [inaudible] the last stage. So much foundation laying goes on before that that by the time you get to the writing stage you feel like you're almost home, strangely enough. I mean in this case you know as I said we spent a year and a half just in the New York Times archives and then there are about fifty other archives that we looked at as well with all the interviewing we were doing. But when you try to put your arms around all that information and make it manageable so that you can write from all of that plus all the interviews that you've done, the organizational part of it takes a long time. And I've talked writing classes and things like that about how you go about doing something like this and the thing I always emphasize is that you can't write before you are ready to write and you can't be ready to write until you do all this organizational work. You have to really think the whole story through from beginning to end. You have a very detailed outline. But a lot of the organizational work is somewhat tedious and maybe that gets to your question, it just that there are these points where you feel like what you're doing is not particularly interesting even though you know that it's important. One of the things we did to prepare to write this book is that we built our own data base of information. By the time we were ready to write everything was in the computer and so we didn't have any paper whatsoever even though we have 60,000 documents and an enormous number of secondary sources and all the interviews that we did. All that was in the computer. I don't mean verbatim, but we had gone through everything, we extracted what we thought could be useful to us in writing the book, we organized it in such a way that we could use it and then when it came time to write, we just flipped the screen and wrote on one side and had the notes on the other. Edmund Morris, getting back to him, I didn't see this on 60 Minutes, but apparently he talked a little bit about his methods of working and he apparently works with a fountain pen. He doesn't use a computer and he uses note cards. I guess he showed the note cards on 60 Minutes he [inaudible] through the note cards and my hats off to him but I don't think I could that. The computer makes it very easy actually once you put everything into it but putting everything into it means that you're basically keypunch operator for, in this case, about a year putting everything into it. There is one other aspect though about that process which is, and it gets actually to what I was talking about today, about truth, which is that one of the things that happens when you spend all that time without material and you actually are putting it into a computer. You're sitting there and you're going through every single piece of paper that you collected, you're going through every single book that has anything to do with your subject, going through every single interview you've done and you're going through it and reading it again and putting into this organizational way. The thing that happens over time, every day, every day, is that you end of owning that information. I mean you really own it. You have it to expend. And that hopefully translates into a more authoritative tone in the book because you know what you know, and you really know it and you can convey that to the reader. "Question:" [inaudible] report [inaudible] reporting process [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well we hooked up a system that works for us. I think a lot of people do it in different ways. Some people do have, sort of split it up so that one person does the interviewing, the other person does the writing. That's not really the way we operate. We both did the interviews, not every interview, but we both did the interviews of the principle characters because we both knew that we were going to write and in order to write you have to see those principle characters up front. You have to see them in their home environment, in their office environment. You have to see what they look like, how they carry themselves, the tone of voice and all that. So we did all principle interviews together, we did the other interviews, we split them up. We did all the archival research together. And I think that speaks to an element of trust because you have to be able to trust your partner to know what's important when you come across [inaudible] and he has to know that he can trust you. When it comes down to writing we created several different outlines and we had to hammer this out together. Talking it out, not typing it out. One was a thematic outline which is basically the idea that this book is larger than just a collection of events it truly has themes, we wanted to figure out what those were. The second was the actual outline from which you write and that went through from beginning to end, dividing up the chapters, figuring out what the arc of the chapters was going to be and then finding each other chapters to do. So, we would assign each other different chapters and then we would edit each others, that's how we would do it. And achieves one voice in the end. But one of the things we discovered on our book which was somewhat a painful experience was that we both have different strengths and weaknesses. I would say that Alex's strength really is as an interviewer. He's an unbelievable interviewer. And you can go into an interview with him, swear you're not going to tell him anything and by the end of it you're rushing out to Xerox your tax records you know, and give him the information. And honestly my strengths are the organization and the writing. So the way we divided it up this time was, although we both did both, I would say I did more of the writing and he did more of the interviewing but that's just a percentage. Everybody works differently you know. Some of you were in our topic last night and we met an investigative reporter from the Raleigh News and Observer named Pat Stiff [sp] and he writes a lot with a partner and he says that his strength is reporting so he, and he doesn't feel like he is a very good writer so the way they divide it up is that he does a lot of the leg work and very little of the writing and his partner does a lot of the writing, but that's not quite the way we work it out. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well you know by the end of the, I would say I did more, I certainly did more of the first draft of it but then that's only the first draft. Then Alex swayed them with his comments and then we had an editor of course at Little Brown, our publisher, who also helped streamline it. We took 400 pages out of this book. As big as it is and we took 400 pages out, so there's a lot left on the cutting room floor. It was kind of overweight, it's overweight at this weight probably but it was really obese in its first draft and so at that point it becomes a team effort. I mean I'm happy to take credit for the fact that I wrote the first draft and so in a sense it's more my voice but really in the end it's such a blended thing that I really don't feel that it's fair not to give these others their due. Have any of you written books? "Question:" What is like now [inaudible] how many books would you like to sell [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Oh, of course we want to see it as a bestseller you know. Well there's the first printing of 80,000 books and I honestly don't know what the sales figures have been. I know it's been on the New York Times extended bestseller list which is not the one you see in the New York Times Sunday book review which is only 1-15. The last I checked it was number 29 on the extended bestseller list. But you know one of the things I think is interesting to find out is as we have been traveling around the country promoting the book through the publisher has arranged for appearances and promotional kinds of events to help sell the book and one of the things that's interesting is that they have scheduled nothing west of the Mississippi. Their thought being I suppose that people in that part of the country are not as interested in the New York Times I guess or as one person that the publishers said to me, well you know people on the West Coast they only read books about celebrity. So, I don't know how far the book will travel, we of course hope it will sell very well. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Oh, you mean in the future? Well, yes, well there has been some interest in something like that but I really don't know. But it seems to me it would be a natural kind of thing. Well what I'm hoping is that people see this not just as a newspaper book but which is fine if they do, but that it's really very much a family story and I'm sure Alex mentioned this to you but because there are so many German speakers here, this is a German family originally, from the barrier. And it would be wonderful to have some overseas rights sold too. But it's a mystery to me how a book becomes a bestseller. When you look at the American, at the New York Times bestseller list, it's hard to figure out sometime how certain books get there and certain books don't. So it's just a mystical thing. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well, I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question. I guess it would be that either people are not that interested in the New York Times, they're not interested in journalism, they see it as a daunting read, you know it's based, it's serious. I mean there probably could be a whole list of reasons. And you look on the bestseller list you see everything from the Dahli Lama [sp] to low carbohydrate diet so I don't know how to answer that question. But I'm curious, have any of you written books of this kind or any kind? No? "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well there are certainly other newspaper families but I think we kind of don't want to get into this sort of [inaudible] industry of writing about newspaper families and also they seem to be disappearing, the Daniels family having relinquished the Raleigh News and Observer. No, I think, I have an interest in writing more books. I think Alex is probably more interested in pursing public broadcasting or some other things but probably the obvious family to do would be the Chandler family, the family that owns Times Mirror in Los Angeles. As I understand it there's a person whose been working eleven or twelve years on it, a book about that family. And so that's already in progress. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well we do talk to them about that. The actual coverage of the Holocaust that was mentioned in that review and a significant part of the book came from other research [inaudible] within the articles. And one particular book that was very helpful to us, a book by [inaudible] called Beyond Belief, which is a book about press coverage of the Holocaust, American [inaudible] to the Holocaust. But we did speak to them about that. We spoke to Punch Sulzberger and his three sisters who lived through that period of time. It was their father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger who was publisher of the New York Times during World War II and they were very young at the time, relatively young at the time and they don't remember the subject ever coming up around the dinner table nor did they have any knowledge of that their parents had ever done anything to help any of their relatives get out of Europe during that period of time. One of the things we pursued, and I'm very glad we did, was that even though they told us that they didn't have any knowledge of their parents ever doing anything to help relatives or others get out of Europe, we just didn't take them at face value and we starting tracking it down [inaudible] and we were able to actually locate about, or name anyway, about 25 to 30 individuals that their parents had in fact helped, had signed affidavits for and had assisted in getting settled here in the United States. But this was news to them. They had no idea. And as far as asking them to justify it, we didn't ask that kind of question. We just asked them what they knew at the time, how they felt about it now and I think the one thing that speaks for itself is that the New York Times actually admitted they had made a mistake in this area. During the 1996 Centennial celebration of the family's ownership there was an exhibition at the New York Public Library which had a number of news articles from the New York Times and there was an exhibition about the New York Times and right next to some of the articles about the Holocaust there was a little card that said something like, they have been accusations that the New York Times buried news of the Holocaust or downplayed news of the Holocaust, these articles proved that that was true. And that was the first time that they had ever officially admitted that they had actually downplayed news of the Holocaust. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well it was a complicated, well ultimately after Arthur Hays Sulzberger, he was the publisher of the New York Times but it was a complicated period of time and we try to explain that. "Question:" "Ms. Tifft:" Well that was Arthur [inaudible] and Susan Dreyfuss together. Susan Dreyfuss was a member of the family [inaudible]. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well I have some ideas and I'm not settled on anything yet. I think what I'd like to do is take a vacation. "Moderator:" A well deserved one after today. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" No, I didn't start teaching until about a year and a half, two years ago but I was doing some other kinds of writing. Alex was doing some work on TV and he also had a radio show at the time as well, just one day a week. But for the most part it was full time, yes. In discussing this with my students one of them raised her hand and said, this clearly was the most important question to her and maybe it's the question on your mind too, which was, how did you manage to stay alive "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Right, right. But you know we got an advance for the book which was a very good advance and it certainly made it possible for us to conduct the research that we needed to do and also to live, but we also supplemented that by doing this other kind of work. But I think if I figured it out, if I had kept records and I figured it out, I would say we were probably paid about 5 cents an hour, over that period of time, it's a long time to do it and also it's an expensive kind of thing to do. We, for instance, went to Germany to see the grave of Adolph Ochs' ancestors which are still there in a Jewish cemetery in Bovaria. The Nazi's didn't get to that cemetery and so it's still standing and we also spent a period of time, one of the characters in the book is a man named Cy Sulzberger whose byline is C. L. Sulzberger, and he was the chief foreign correspondent for the New York Times for many years and also wrote a column. He was a member of the family and he died in 1993. We got access to his papers but his papers were in Paris. So we were able to get permission through his son to actually go through his papers in his apartment before they were shipped off to Harvard, which is where they are now. But all that kind of traveling and so on, it's [inaudible] something that you pay yourself, the publisher doesn't pay you to do that. And so you have to be rather careful about how you spend your money. And also we traveled all over this country. Many of the [inaudible] interviews are not in New York, there were some in California, there were some in the South.. One particular character we have a tough time tracking down was a man named Emory Bradford. And Emory Bradford was basically the top non-family executive of the New York Times in the early 60's when Punch Sulzberger became publisher. And one of the first things Punch Sulzberger did when he became publisher was to fire Emory Bradford for a whole host of very good reasons. This ended up essentially sending Emory into a sort of a spiral. He was a very towering and somewhat terrifying figure. I always like to think of him as a combination of Cotton Mather and Al Hague. He was very tall, [inaudible, sounds like seely] kind of guy, went to Yale, was a member of Skull and Bones, which is a sort of secret society that George Bush is also a member of. And very much a kind of a wasp aristocrat. Well, I'll spare you all the details but basically he ended up getting divorced from his wife, having several marriages, becoming an alcoholic, tried to commit suicide, ended up driving across the country in a microbus, sort of like [inaudible] and the magic bus and ended up being a massage therapist. He went to [inaudible] Institute and completely changed his life. I mean this is a story you couldn't make up, you know. But the problem was, this was a guy who didn't want to be found. I mean when we tried to figure out where he was when we wanted to interview him we had no idea where he was. But finally we were able to track him down to one of the few people he had kept up with who was Harrison Salisbury, he is a very eminent correspondent for the New York Times and he gave us an address and luckily it turned out to be correct. Emory Bradford at that time was living on an island off the coast of South Carolina and he agreed to let us come down there and interview him. So, we went down there for three days, three very memorable days and spent them with Emory Bradford. But by the time we found him was in the 80's and I painted this picture of him with his wasp aristocrat, a three piece suit and Yale Skull and Bones. When he greeted us at the door he was in drawstring jeans, a flannel shirt and he offered us trail mix, which is kind of a combination of nuts and raisins and [inaudible] stuff. His profession at the time was nude massage therapy. And he had a meditation room with candles and everything. He also during the course of this wanted us to get into his hot tub with him nude, which we refused to do because we do have professional ethics but that was one of more colorful characters we met along the way. And there's a very long bottom of the page footnote explaining all the different things that happened to Emory after he left the New York Times. It was just too good to put in the back, we had to put it in the pages. But he's one of the people that we tried to find very early on because he was older. He had heard that he was ill and he did in fact die in 1998. The thing that's great about a situation like this, a project like this is that you do meet these amazing people who have been, and Emory is sort of an interesting case because it's just so strange and so wacky in a way but also when you're interviewing people who have been there at the great event of journalistic history in the United States over the last century it's just a great privilege to be able to have that kind of experience. So when you were asking over here whether there was a moment of weariness or point in which you get bored, I mean I certainly never felt that. I always felt this was a terrific privilege to be able to conduct this kind of research and this kind of project. "Question:" [inaudible] your response to [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Finding which [inaudible] "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well you know I mean as I was saying before I don't really, the reviews that either criticize or whatever I don't really, it doesn't bother me. I often disagree with what they have say obviously but as I said I think it's kind of interesting to see how the responses have been varied and the family is not really, has not really made any kind of official comment. Their policy really is, they'll say no comment although we've heard various things. We haven't heard anything directly [inaudible]. One of the things I think that is particularly, well let me back up for a second. I was talking with a friend of ours in New York who writes this kind of book but he always, he very carefully says to write about people who are dead and I must say I can understand that. Because it's a different dynamic. "Question:" [inaudible] "Ms. Tifft:" Well our relationship with the family was always a professional one, certainly never a social one. And so in a way it stopped after we stopped interviewing but Alex worked at the New York Times, we certainly have cordial relations. There was a book party that was given for us in New York when this was published and we invited members of the family to come to that if they wanted to. And Punch Sulzberger came to it and two of his sisters came, several other members of the family came, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. came to it. I don't think that they meant that they endorsed it necessarily but I think that that just meant that they felt that it was at least fair and that they were certainly willing to be there at that event. But as far as having any kind of continuing relationship, it's really just a case of whether we bump into them or not, I mean it's certainly [inaudible] continuing relationship [inaudible]. "Moderator:" Well thank you so much. 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