Alex writes:
After graduation I went to Navy O.C.S. and was aboard the U.S.S. Kearsarge and then the U.S.S. Coral Sea during deployments to the Gulf of Tonkin. I got out with the intention of going to Columbia Journalism School, but – unreliable sod that I am – I instead took all my Navy savings and the birthday gifts of a lifetime and headed off with a friend. I was gone for two years, wandering around Eastern Europe, living in Paris, and finally crossing Africa from Tangier to Cape Town, which included hitching across the Sahara, climbing Kilimanjaro illegally on an abandoned trail, and bouts of malaria and dysentery. It was the great adventure of my life.
When I got back, utterly broke, I went to work in the family newspaper business, first at The Daily Post-Athenian and then at The Greeneville Sun. I am in the fourth generation of the family newspaper enterprise, where my father, two brothers and brother-in-law still work.
In 1978 I became editor of The Greeneville Sun in my hometown of Greeneville, Tennessee, and in 1980 I was chosen for a Nieman Fellowship, which allows mid-career journalists to spend an academic year studying at Harvard. In my first week there I met Susan Tifft, who was a grad student at the Kennedy School of Government, and at the end of the year I proposed. She agreed to marry me, but for some reason preferred her job as a writer at Time to moving to Greeneville. It was an impasse, as I had intended to spend my life making The Greeneville Sun into The New York Times of small newspapers. The impasse was broken by my decision to try my hand at The New York Times itself and I went there in 1983. I became the press reporter, and, in 1987, I won the Pulitzer for my coverage of the collapse of the Bingham family newspaper dynasty in Louisville.
When my articles about the Binghams originally appeared in The Times, the story was so rich that it got a lot of attention, including an offer to write a book. Susan and I had gotten married only six months earlier and the thought of effectively going into a cave alone to do a book was not very appealing. I went to The Times’s managing editor, Arthur Gelb, seeking advice and he said, “Why don't you write the book together?” So we did, and then vowed never to do it again. The book was The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty, and it was picked by Business Week as one of the ten best books of the year. A year or so later, ignoring our vow, we embarked on the much more ambitious project of a book about the Ochs and Sulzberger family, which has owned and run The New York Times for more than a century. I left The Times and Susan left Time to do this book, which took seven years. The ultimate product was The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times, and we are very proud of it. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, among other honors. Susan and I have renewed our vow never to do another book together, and this time we shall keep that vow.
Because the Ochs/Sulzberger book took so much time, I became involved in various ancillary things. I was host of On The Media, a live two-hour program on public radio. And I was executive editor and host of Media Matters, a PBS series on news in the format of 60 Minutes. During the late stages of the Ochs/Sulzberger book, we were approached by Duke University to share the Eugene Patterson Professorship at Duke, which we did for several years. In 2000 I went to Harvard as director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, which is a sort of media think tank. As a member of the Harvard faculty, I teach, but I also run the Center, which is focused on the intersection of the press and politics – a big topic. We live in Cambridge, and Susan still holds the Patterson Chair at Duke, to which she commutes during the school year. We learned last August that Susan has cancer, but happily she has achieved remission. May it remain so.
