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.