 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture by Robert M. Smith, author of Suppressed. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Monday, May 10th, at 5 p.m., Bob Drury and Tom Claven will tell us about the true saga of Daniel Boone and the conquest of the frontier, the subject of their new book, Blood and Treasure. And on Thursday, May 13th, at noon, historian Jonathan Zimmerman and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Signa Wilkinson will present their new book, Free Speech. This brief but bracing book tells the story of free speech in America and makes the case for why we should care about it today. For more than 120 years, The New York Times has proclaimed that it publishes all the news that's fit to print. At some point, someone is deciding what is fit to print, and the results of those decisions are the subject of our featured book, Suppressed. Robert M. Smith spent years as a reporter with The Times, and in his new book he examines how some stories make it to print, how some do not, and how the filters work. The First Amendment to the Constitution declares that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. With that freedom comes responsibility, and this book reminds us that news outlets approach that responsibility in different ways. Robert M. Smith is a former New York Times White House and investigative correspondent who has witnessed some of the most important stories in modern history, including Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the MyLy Massacre. He began at The Times in his 20s, quit, went to Yale Law School, and was rehired by The Times. He became a lawyer in a prestigious firm served in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, and worked as an international commercial mediator in England and in the United States. He won an award for news writing from the United Press International, won several awards while at The New York Times, and has written a comprehensive legal treatise on mediation and arbitration. Now, let's hear from Robert M. Smith. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Eric Fox, and I am speaking today with Robert M. Smith, author of the soon-to-be-released Suppressed Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent. Bob is a graduate of Harvard College, and he has advanced degrees in Foreign Affairs from Columbia, the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Yale Law School. He has had a wide-ranging career, which includes journalism, the law, both in the United States and England, and serving in the Jimmy Carter presidency. Bob received many accolades as a journalist and as a lawyer, preparing a case for the world court, and serving as a mediator for multinational corporations. Bob, you've written a lot in your career, and now you're publishing a book whose central theme is the First Amendment and the role of the press. What do you think is the most important lesson from your book? I think that the most important lesson is that in a time of a badly, totally divided country, the normal role of the press is to be able to show folks on the right what those on the left are like and thinking and so on and vice versa and playing a role perhaps and having them understand one another and knitting the two together. That's not possible now because the press is not trusted by a very large part of the population. Advocacy journalism has to some extent replaced neutral journalism and people don't trust the press, which means the press cannot help stitch the country back together, and the press cannot speak. Your book starts with a critical moment in American history, the lead up to the Watergate investigation. What happened when you were an investigative reporter in the Washington Bureau of the New York Times and met with the director of the FBI? Something quite remarkable happened, and it's still stupefying to me. The day before I was to leave the Bureau and go to Yale Law School, I had lunch with the then acting director of the FBI. We had lunch at a French restaurant and sat at the table, and he told me about Watergate and some of its participants, and I was incredulous. I couldn't take my notebook out because here we were in a crowded Washington restaurant at lunchtime, and so I sat there trying to remember the names. He gave me a Segretti's name, for example, and I used the mnemonic spaghetti, the spaghetti Segretti. Anyway, he told me this story to some extent with detail, and after lunch, I knew it was my last day, I cornered the editor, the news editor of the Washington Bureau of the Times, and asked him to go to his office, shut the door there, put up a Scotch tape sign that said, do not disturb, turn on a small tape recorder, gave him one of the reporter's pads and pen, and asked him to take notes, which he did, and I told him about what had just happened and gave him what the FBI had about Watergate, and then at the end of my briefing or debriefing, we left the room and I went to my desk to finish packing up, and he went into the newsroom. Now the newsroom had, I don't remember exactly, but 30, say 35, really good reporters, and I went off to New Haven and read the paper and saw nothing, nothing, and I didn't understand what was happening, and then a few months later, the Times began getting very badly beaten by Woodward and Bernstein, and I was just amazed, and subsequently I asked the editor years later what had happened, and he said he had no explanation, and I said that essentially that's not credible, and he said, well, we were going off, my wife and I, on an Alaskan cruise, and I said that cruise wasn't for a week. I mean, for goodness' sake, in journalism, a week is a vast amount of time. You had plenty of time, so what really happened? He said, I don't know. Do you want me to take a truth serum? And I said, if it would help, yes. How do you address claims that the media has always been biased? Well, it depends, I suppose, on what you mean by biased, but there are degrees of bias just as at law school. We've learned there are degrees of evidence or evidentiary solidity. Some things are more solid than others. This table here next to me is quite solid. The jurors could see it, the judge could see it. Rainbow is somewhat more ethereal and some may see it and some not, I suppose, but in any event, there are degrees of objectivity. No one, I think, would, no one in the newspaper business or craft would argue that reporters and editors are without their own personal political views or partisan bias, and that's true. But that doesn't mean that they inject it into their stories. So at some institutions, premier among them probably the New York Times, which has said and still says and how says and runs in the paper that it is telling the truth. Well, again, of course, putting aside the relativity of the truth of different versions of the truth, that is absolutely not what happened with regard to the Times and the Trump administration or the Times on other topics now, and I think any fair-minded reader knows this. And certainly President Trump felt correctly he wasn't getting a fair shake and the Times correctly said it wasn't getting a fair shake from him. They were both right in a sense, but the Times stepped into the ring and then punching it out or slugging it out with the president. That wasn't the role of the press. And it had one really, quite a part from principles, one really awful effect. If you're in there slugging it out with the person you're writing about, the president, then people are not going to find you credible. After all, you're in the ring. And that has had the effect I mentioned earlier and that is so far to answer your question from any view of journalistic neutrality that I don't think one needs to say a lot more about it. What other evidence can you point to in terms of bias and how do you compare the Times to other news organizations? Well, you know, when I showed up on the doorstep of the New York Times, I was very young. I was in my mid-late 20s. And naive, I suppose. But I saw other examples that they're in the book. They're laid out. You know, the Times coverage of President, then President Trump is compared in the book in detail with coverage by the Associated Press. Excuse me. The Associated Press is hundreds, probably thousands of client media outlets around the world. Some left, some right, some in the middle. So it doesn't want to lose clients. It does play the news down the center and give, I think, a quite objective view. And that is not what is occurring generally. In my stay at the Times, one of my first assignments when I was, I don't know, 27 or something like that, I was sent back to Harvard College where I myself got to college, which is probably where they sent me. And I mean, because I knew the place. And there were riots by the students at Harvard. All right, there were these big riots. And I was there to cover the riots. And I wanted very badly everybody in the media want very badly to have an interview with the president of Harvard, Nathan Pusey. And President Pusey wasn't seeing anybody, no one in the media. Well, one day I happened to be in Harvard Yard and where the administration is and freshman laboratories and so on. And I saw President Pusey walking across the yard. So I went over to him and I was holding my notebook. I identified myself as a Times reporter and I asked him questions and he gave me answers to my surprise. I hurriedly wrote a story and filed it and was very proud of myself that here I was, young reporter, I'd gotten this interview, which no one else had been able to get. Around, well, I don't know, late afternoon, four o'clock, five o'clock, whatever. I got a call from God, that is to say, Scotty Reston, a journalistic icon of great magnitude and importance, who was, I think, then running the paper. And he said, hello, Bob. So I've been looking at the interview of President Pusey and don't you think we ought to pass on this one? I don't think we were a bit hard with him. I said, I have no idea what you're talking about, Scotty. No, I don't think we were hard on him. I told him I was a Times reporter. I had my notebook out. I asked him absolutely normal questions. He gave me answers, which were not Earthshaking answers. But he did give substantive answers and it was the first interview that he had given to anybody. And Reston said, well, don't you think he's under a lot of pressure and under a lot of stress? And I said, yes, he is. He said, well, why don't we just let this one pass? And so my story, one of my first, I suppose in the sense at the Times was spiked. That is to say it never got to see the light of day for this reason. And there were many or several other episodes like this where stories were killed or not covered or whatever, which are also laid out in the book. For example, I covered the Mealy massacre and the Pentagon reporter who sat next to me in the Washington of the Times would not cover the massacre at all until finally near the very end of the story, the Pentagon decided to have a news conference and then for the first time he wrote about that, that is the Army's view of the massacre. Or I covered a story about problem banks. This list of problem banks, the government thought these banks were problem banks. I think it's the control of the currency. And I did a story. Well, the financial business financial reporters at the paper wouldn't touch the story. Or finally, just to give you just one of the series of examples, another one, I had agreed to me, as I recall, a letter from a lawyer from Lockheed who was writing on Hotel Stationary from Geneva, Switzerland, or somewhere in Switzerland, talking about the bribes he was paying to co-ordered recipients and talking about how he had to pay more to compete with the Italians in the French or whatever it was. And it was a short piece because it is what he had written, he spoke for itself with references to code words, code books, antelope, and things like that, code words. And at the end it was rather funny because he said, I asked the bribe intermediary, essentially, why he trusted me and the fellow said, because you're a lawyer. So I thought it was sort of an important piece at a time when overseas bribery was being featured and investigated in Congress and the Senate. And I filed it and the business and financial pages didn't run it. I got so upset that it weren't running it that I took the piece and submitted it to the Sunday Weekend Review where I was a frequent contributor at the time and the Weekend Review ran it. And then the following Monday, an editor in the Washington Bureau came over to me and said, Bob, the editor of this business financial has called and asked why you gave this piece to Sunday Weekend Review and not to the business section. And I opened the drawer of my desk and showed him the duplicates, the carbons of the story that I had sent to business financial. So I hope that gives you a sense of what I'm talking about and what I lived through. Your book is not afraid of exploring topics where neutrality is often hard to find. You've mentioned the Trump presidency and your viewpoint on the media's treatment. What shapes your own mindset in politics? Well, I'm not going to go into, frankly, my own politics, although I don't think they're any secret. I mean, my view from my perspective is irrelevant as it should be in the case of reporters covering the White House or anywhere else. But it's no secret that I served as special assistant to the Attorney General under President Carter. So one can imagine what my politics at least were. But I do think that's not relevant. And the whole point I'm trying to make is about not to be relevant. I lived in France for a while. And in France, in a small town I lived in, I had to read three newspapers just to find out what was happening because of this partisan or ideological partiality. I read Le Monde for the conservative right-wing view. I'm sorry, for the left or liberal view. Le Figaro for the right-wing or conservative point of view. And then once a week, I would read a publication called Canal au Chine, which is a terrific investigative reporter with all kinds of sources in the French government. But we've kind of reached that stage here now. You have to watch, I gather, MSNBC and Fox and so on to get some sense of where the truth might lie. What were the harder stories for you to cover? The ones that involved investigating those in power that had something to hide or the ones dealing with the lives of otherwise ordinary citizens? Clearly, Eric, ordinary citizens. You know, the stories that really made me personally extraordinarily sad were covering the shooting of the students at Kent State or covering integration with school buses bringing, I don't know, five or six or seven-year-olds into South Boston where the South Boston mothers, the Irish and American mothers there were screaming at these children. It's just a terrible sight to see. Or to take one, for example, Harlan, a photographer in his 80s sitting on the stoop of the house in the brownstone in Harlem. Sorry, from which he was being evicted and all of his negatives, photos, glass sides, going back 50 years were being loaded by sheriffs, New York city sheriffs on trucks to be taken heaven knows where. I mean, these things are really, obviously, very troublesome. Put yourself in shoes that report covering them. They're much harder on you, I think, than being at the White House and covering Nixon and saying something about foreign policy. You were a commended journalist in one of the most prestigious news organizations in the world and working in its Washington bureau, no less. Why did you leave journalism for law school and why did you return to the times after law school? That's a complicated question. I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer it, but Eric, excuse me, I think I may have an all fairness Pete too soon. I think it was a combination of factors. You know, here I was in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, which at the time was the, in some ways, the pinnacle of Washington journalism, I suppose. And I was quite young when I was covering the White House and State Department and Pentagon and so on. So I think if I hadn't been able to do that until I was in my late 30s or early 40s or mid 40s, I might not have left. Secondly, I had always some feeling that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and thirdly chance, you know, I applied to only one law school, to be honest, to Yale. And I took all the tests and gave my transcripts and all the usual drill. And I thought that they probably wouldn't take me. And if they didn't, I would say at the paper, but they did take me and I went to Yale and I found that school, particularly the first year, a remarkable intellectual experience. I'm not an intellectual, but the experience of the way in which the things could be analyzed was amazing and made me certainly want to finish law school and ultimately to be a warrior and then for the last, I don't know, 29 years or so to be a mediator, a commercial mediator. Have your post-journalism careers helped shape your viewpoint on journalism or your career in journalism? And is there a thread between your varied careers? Well, again, Eric, I'm not sure. I think so. I think, you know, Loose, the founder of Time Magazine said that journalism prepares you for everything, which I think is true. It does. It has extremely ground-level, practical education involved in it. So I think that's true. In terms of law, it certainly changed the way in which I at least analyzed life and events. And mediation I just found was, in my mind, remains a better way of solving conflicts than slugging out and recording with a jury or a judge. And I think the thread among them is that some of the skill sets are involved in all of them. I mean, in journalism, you have to be believed. Your sources have to find you credible, honest and willing to keep their confidence even if it means you go to jail. And that's a high standard of trust to gain. In law, if you're a trial lawyer as I was, you have to convince the jurors that even though you're an advocate, they should listen to you and believe you. Certainly as to those things that seem credible. And I always told jurors I was an advocate, which is true. And finally, in mediation, you have to absolutely have the trust of the parties and the lawyers too. But mainly, I suppose, the parties in the dispute. I mean, I've been a mediator in the United States and in England, where I'm also a barrister. And so I've had different cultural experiences. I've mediated cases in the German language, for example, and in French. The bottom line is that there are some skills that are similar in all three areas. And I've been fortunate in being able to bring, I hope, some of those skills from one craft to another. You once prepared a case before the world court. Can you share some of that experience? No, I'll show you the government in action, bureaucracy in action, how these things really look from behind the curtain. This is in the book. It's one of my favorite, in a sense, episodes, because it was my idea. This was during the period when the Iranians were holding hostage Americans, you would call, perhaps. And we were going, the United States, that is when I was special assistant attorney general, to the world court in the Hague, to ask the world court to say, tell the Iranians to give us the hostages, let the hostages go. So I thought this was something for the attorney general, not for the State Department, legal office. And the attorney general is supposed to represent the United States in all courts everywhere. But in any event, the matter had already reached the point where the State Department had prepared the brief and so on. But the White House agreed with me, and we were to toot off the very next day to Holland and to get into the world court, and the attorney general would present to the world court the case. Well, we got on the plane, and I looked at the brief, and all modesty aside, all kidding aside, the brief was a good legal brief, but this was not meant really for legal consumption only or mainly. This was an exercise in public international diplomacy. And in a way it was like journalism, in a way it was like trial law, you know, and the brief was very dull, or at least I found it so, you know, filled with legal references and legal languages. And I didn't think the way this should be approached. This matter should be approached. So I rewrote the brief, I stayed up all night on the plane surviving with the kind help of the KLM Stortices on Dutch Coco, right? And I rewrote the brief, and I knew that we needed some sort of soundbiter, some something that would capture media attention, international media attention. And I came up with, as the lead, the beginning of the brief, let my people go, which is in both the Islamic and Christian and Jewish religions. So that's the way that the brief started and the attorney general started in the court. So I arrived, or we all arrived, in Holland, and I had to get the brief retyped since it was rewritten. And I went to a secretary in the embassy around noon and said, can you please type this right away, because the attorney general is going to be giving the brief in a couple of hours in the world court. And she looked at me and said, well, you know, it's lunchtime. I was so tired and so staggered. I went to whoever, the highest person I could find in the embassy and said, can you please help me get this type? And we did and went to the world court, where by that time I had a splitting headache from not having slept and so on and so on. And a very kind bailiff gave me some white powder and like a tea and hot water for the headache. And it did its work, but it was some pain involved in being under a massive amount of lights as this argument unfolded. But the notion that we almost fail for, in my mind, at least a variety of reasons, including a secretary who simply wanted to go to lunch, was somewhat revelatory and funny. You were negotiating with the New York Times as part of the union and something shocking happened. What was it? Well, the Times had offered me a few jobs when I went back to work for it after law school. And one was running a subsidiary publication. So one was being the Times labor negotiator. I turned it down. I went back to Washington as a correspondent. But I did take on the pro bono activity of being a, the newspaper guild, the union representative in the Washington Bureau of the Times, which led to a number of results, but in terms of the Times and the union, or the reporters. But the event that I think I remember most in a way was this. We were negotiating with the Times and with the fellow who took the job I had turned down across the table from me and asking for different things for the reporters and editors. Forgive me. And the Times that I kept saying all night into the morning, into 3 a.m., they didn't have any money, they didn't have any money and they couldn't give us, they couldn't pay us any more money. And finally, I said, look, I understand that your position is you don't have any money and you can't give us any more money. But here's an item that doesn't cost you anything that you should give us and we need. And the item was this. When a reporter wrote a story and the Times changed the story, some editor or editors changed the story, then the reporter should have the right to have his or her byline taken off the piece. And in fact, there's an international treaty about this to which the US is party. Anyway, the Times to my amazement said, no, we won't give you that. And I was so taken aback that because it was a non-monetary item, it was the absolute right thing to do by any standard. Certainly it seemed to me by the Times's standard. And I had, you know, as I mentioned, just recently finished law school. And I feigned anger, I suppose, and said, look, if you cannot give us this non-economic item, I'm going to recommend to our team that we strike. And I walked out. And about 20 minutes later, the Times negotiator came and they came back in the room, brought us back into the room and said they would give us that item. But the very notion that the paper would change your story and keep the reporter's byline on it when it didn't say what he or she had said was troublesome. And I was very glad we won that one, Eric. Where do you find hope for a better future with the US media? I'm not sure that's for me to say. There are so many different theories as to what will happen with the media in a digital age with multiple channels, many of them completely unreliable, some of them partially unreliable, with journalists braiding to revere advocacy journalism as opposed to neutral journalism. I don't know where we're going. I'm hoping that the Times as an industry leader, if not the industry leader, will find its way back to its traditional path and say that stay there. And find that as both the most helpful, the fairest, and in the end probably the most profitable way for it to roll forward. The very fact that the New York Times had to take, felt obliged to take, House ads paid for itself, of course, and ran on its own behalf at times saying how attached it was to the truth I think tells you something. Why would it feel impaled to say that? Well, thank you, Bob. That was an interesting and insightful discussion. And there is so much more that is in the book. I'm very glad your experiences and perspectives and wisdoms are documented for all of us. Thank you very much.