(2 of 3)
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).