Copyright © 1998 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Just In: Pulitzers

Goose eggs at the Globe

By Dan Kennedy

There is no joy on Morrissey: Matt Storin has struck out. For the first time since 1994, the Boston Globe has failed to win a Pulitzer Prize. Though the Pulitzers often have as much to do with luck and timing as they do with merit, the three Pulitzers the Globe has won since Storin became editor, in 1993, have lent considerable cachet to his regime. After all, the paper didn't win a single Pulitzer between 1985, when editor Tom Winship retired, and 1995, the second year of Storin's editorship, when Washington bureau chief David Shribman won for beat reporting. Shribman was followed by architecture critic Robert Campbell, for criticism, in 1996, and Metro/Region columnist Eileen McNamara, for commentary, in 1997.

But it could have been worse. Metro/Region columnist Patricia Smith, the Globe's strongest candidate for a Pulitzer this year, could have won -- and then announced she was leaving. Several weeks ago Smith rejected an offer from the Philadelphia Inquirer following a dalliance that had been going on since January. "The Inquirer always had more money, but money was, like, third on my list," Smith says. "The Globe takes a lot more risks than the Inquirer does." Not only does the Globe now get to keep her, but her failure to capture the gold -- she was a finalist in the commentary category -- may spur her to do more reporting and less navel-gazing in the coming year.

Meanwhile, the Spotlight Team's series on corruption in the Boston Police Department, the subject of a protest the police filed with the Pulitzer board, wasn't even named a finalist. The merits of the department's complaints aside, the series probably never had much of a chance: though the Spotlight Team exposed a handful of dirty cops, it never established that corruption is rampant or systemic.

Elsewhere, the Washington Post's unappetizing display of corporate sucking-up to celebrate retired publisher Katharine Graham's win in the biography category (for her bestseller Personal History) may have helped obscure the fact her newspaper won as many Pulitzers as the Globe did this year. But the gushing front-page story, photo, and sidebar may also explain why the Post and the New York Times aren't mentioned in the same breath these days nearly as often as they were in the 1970s, when Graham, then-executive editor Ben Bradlee, and the Watergate team of Woodward and Bernstein put the paper on the map.

Graham's victory isn't the first time an autobiography has been so honored (Lewis B. Puller Jr.'s Vietnam memoir won in 1992, and the New York Times' Russell Baker won in 1983). And it's certainly true that Personal History was greeted with uniformly favorable reviews. But it would have been nice if the Post's starstruck reporters had at least tried to find out how their boss managed to beat out two serious works of scholarship: Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, by James H. Jones, and Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus.

Finally, the early nominee for most controversial choice is the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, who won in the criticism category for her writing on contemporary literature. Kakutani is regarded in literary and cultural circles as a blow-with-the-breeze trendoid. What is not widely known is that her career at the Times began less than auspiciously. As recounted in the late Edwin Diamond's Behind the Times (1994), Kakutani, as a young cultural reporter in the early 1980s, was assigned to do a major piece on charges -- first leveled in the Village Voice -- that novelist Jerzy Kosinski had invented details of his past and had used assistants to write some of his work. "Kakutani worked on the story for six weeks, growing increasingly anxious about her abilities to do the investigative journalism her editors expected of her (at one point she thought Kosinski was following her).... She finally asked to be taken off the story," Diamond wrote. The verdict of Arthur Gelb, a top editor at the time: "She didn't understand the assignment."

Diamond also reports that Kakutani's reporting was hobbled by Gelb's and then-editor Abe Rosenthal's friendships with Kosinski, so her problems were not entirely her own fault. One can certainly sympathize with an unseasoned reporter's worrying about her two most senior editors' breathing down her back. But one also wonders whether her failure had something to do with the fact that in the tangled Kosinski affair, there were no prevailing winds by which she could reliably navigate.