[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 114 (Friday, July 14, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10075-S10076]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
GEORGE SELDES
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, George Seldes, who died Sunday in Vermont
at the age of 104, was literally, a Witness to a Century--the title of
his autobiography.
A true investigative reporter who refused to accept the subtle
pressures imposed upon journalists by publishers, editors, and
advertisers--he was uncompromising in reporting what he saw and heard,
and printed those observations in his own independent publication--In
Fact.
Izzy Stone called Seldes the ``granddaddy'' of investigative
reporters--high
[[Page S10076]]
praise from another great independent journalist of our century.
My visits and frequent correspondence with George rank among the
highlights of my Senate career. He never intruded, but did on occasion
offer some very good advice to this senator--and most times, I was
smart enough to recognize good counsel when I heard it. I had the great
pleasure of joining him at his 100th birthday party in Vermont--an
event that became a public celebration of his life.
Here was a man who interviewed William Jennings Bryan, Theodore
Roosevelt, Eddie Rickenbacker, Generals Pershing, Patton, and
MacArthur; a personal observer of Lenin and Mussolini and a confidant
of Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis.
One of the great lives of our century has passed--but George Seldes
left behind a recorded history to guide our understanding of the
turbulent time.
I attach an editorial that appeared in the July 8, 1995 edition of
The Burlington Free Press, and a column written by Colman McCarthy that
appeared in the July 11 edition of The Washington Post.
They capture the spirit and dogged pursuit of truth that marked
George Seldes' lasting contribution to journalism and the history of
our age. I ask unanimous consent that they be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Burlington Free Press, July 8, 1995]
A Contrary Voice
George Seldes, who died Sunday at 104, was a journalist and
harsh critic of mainstream journalists who might be best
remembered by Vermont newspaper editors and reporters from an
appearance before the Vermont and New Hampshire Press
Associations in the late 1980s.
Except for a slowed step and a bit of a stoop, nothing in
Seldes' appearance betrayed his exceptional age, nor hints of
any mellowing on matters he found important--beginning and
invariably ending with a journalist's responsibility to tell
it straight.
What bothered this long-time resident of Hartland Four
Corners most during his 86 years of covering historic events
was not so much what got into newspapers of his day but what
didn't--especially immediately preceding and following World
War II. Errors of omission.
It was a time when some journalists doubled as government
informers for U.S. intelligence agencies as a gesture of
patriotism; when the Washington Press Corps kept many elected
officials' personal foibles and peccadillos a secret; and
powerful publishers ran newspapers more like personal
fiefdoms in pursuit of selective causes than purveyors of the
larger truth.
Like I.F. Stone, Seldes figured if mainstream newspapers
wouldn't print what he wrote for fear of riling advertisers
or powerful news sources, he would print it in his own
publication. In Fact, it was called, and it took on, among
many powerful interests, the tobacco industry and its ability
to keep damaging health data out of newspapers--a
consequence, Seldes was never shy about charging, or
newspapers' heavy reliance on cigarette advertising.
In some cases, he was acting on tips from mainstream
reporters who knew their own papers would never print what
they'd dug up. They would leak the news to Seldes who would
print it. In other cases, In Fact became a more reliable
source of news for mainstream newspapers than their own
sources--the ultimate flattery for any newspaper person, and
ultimate indictment of those who missed the news.
In his later years, Seldes was always careful to note
improvements in the objectivity of today's newspapers--while
holding firm to the belief that when newspapers forget their
responsibility to truth, they risk retreat into those bad old
days.
Nor was his burr-under-the-saddle style without fault--his
muckraking, make-waves narrowness of vision caused him to
miss some of the bigger picture, too; a heavy dose of Seldes
at this prime could be hard for any average reader with
broader interests to take.
What seemed most striking about his comments at that
appearance in Hanover, N.H. however--just as it does now--is
the diminished capacity of contrary voices like his to be
heard today in the din of the modern information age.
Today, so many loud, contrary voices compete for listeners'
ears, with so many public outlets for spreading their views,
the problem is no longer an absence of facts, in some cases
it's too many facts--and too few people taking the time to
make sense of them.
More big-picture wisdom and few disconnected facts in every
type of media today would go a long way--a need that's grown
wider with George Seldes' passing.
____
[From the Washington Post, July 11, 1995]
George Seldes: Giant of Journalism
(By Colman McCarthy)
As a traveling companion, George Seldes didn't believe in
letting you rest. In the spring of 1982 when he was 91 and in
New York to collect a George Polk Award for a lifetime of
contribution to journalism, I took the Fifth Avenue bus with
him for a 30-block ride between the ceremony and his nephew's
apartment. We would have taken a cab but he preferred the
bus: a better way to get the feel of the city and its people.
Along the jostling way, Seldes threw at me a half-dozen
story ideas, mingled with sidebars of his opinions, plus
advice on how not merely to gather facts but to cull the
useless from the useful, and then a string of mirthful
recollections from his newspapering days going back eight
decades. If we were the boys on the bus, George Seldes was
some boy.
He died on July 2, in his 104th year and only a half-decade
or so after retiring from a reporting career that began in
1909 with the Pittsburgh Leader.
It's well within the bounds of accuracy to say of Seldes--
and this isn't the kind of gassy praise that's the customary
sendoff for the deceased--that for much of the 20th century
he stood as a giant and a pilar of journalism, a reporter's
reporter. He had the subverse notion that investigating the
press--the money-saving schemings of the publishers of his
day, editors cowering before advertisers, reporters
fraternizing with the pashas they write about--should be as
vital a beat as skeptically covering politicians.
At the Polk ceremony, the citation of the awards committee
succinctly summarized the spirit of intellectual independence
Seldes committed himself to: ``By mutual agreement, George
Seldes belonged not to the journalism establishment, nor was
he tethered to any political philosophy. With a gimlet eye
ever fixed upon transgressors, he soared above the
conventions of his time--a lone eagle, unafraid and
indestructible. He is 91 now and still a pretty tough bird.''
Seldes lived in Hartland Four Corners, Vt. Until recently,
he was self-sufficient at home and ever delighted to receive
such pilgrims as Ralph Nader, Morton Mintz and Rick
Goldsmith, a California filmmaker who is completing a
documentary on Seldes's life. The film will include
references to I.F. Stone, who credited Seldes' newsletter
``In Fact''--which had 176,000 subscribers for a time in the
1940's--as the model for his own carefully researched I.F.
Stone's Weekly.''
The titles of some of Seldes's books give a hint of the
fires that burned within him: ``You Can't Print That: The
Truth Behind the News'' (1928). ``Never Tire of Protesting''
(1986), ``Tell the Truth and Run'' (1953), ``Lords of the
Press'' (1935). In the 1980s, he wrote his memoir ``Witness
to a Century'' and edited ``The Great Thoughts,'' the latter
a thick and rich collection of ideas Seldes had gathered
throughout a lifetime of reading and listening.
``Sometimes in isolated phrase or paragraph,'' he said of
his selections from Abelard to Zwingli and from Ability to
Zen, ``will work on the reader's imagination more forcefully
than it might when buried in a possibly difficult text. Each
time a quotation in this book makes a reader think in a new
way, I shall have achieved my aim.''
As a reporter and press critic, Seldes was more than an
iconoclastic outsider, as worthy and rare as that calling is.
His news-gathering and analysis were ethics-based. Omitting
the news is as vile a sin as slanting the news, he believed.
Too many papers avoid stories that might upset the powerful
or the majority, while printing news on safe subjects and
editorializing to bloodless conclusions.
In ``freedom of the Press,'' Seldes recalled how he was
compromised while covering World War I: ``The journals back
home that printed our stories boasted that their
correspondents had been at the fighting front. I now realize
that we were told tonight but buncombe, that we were shown
nothing of the realities of the war, that we were, in short,
merely part of the Allied propaganda machine whose purpose
was to sustain morale at all costs and help drag unwilling
America into the slaughter. . . We all more or less lied
about the war.''
If so, that was to be the last time Seldes shied from
getting the whole story. For the rest of his long life, his
reporting on what were often no-no subjects--workers' rights,
public health and safety, press sellouts, corporate and
government lies--was the essence of truth-telling. Like his
life, the telling had fullness.
____________________