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from the January 2025 Silurian News

Selwyn Raab, The Don of Mafia Reporters 

Mafia chronicler to Best Selling author to Consulting Producer

By Joseph Berger

  When Selwyn Raab was growing up on the clamorous streets of the Lower East Side in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he learned that in the nearby neighborhood of Little Italy there was a group of men called “the Mafia,” whose scary members would sell you fun stuff like fireworks and pot.

Later in the 1960s as an education reporter writing about corrupt school-construction contracts, he was told by school officials that, if the city cracked down on the Mafia gangsters who were behind the corruption, the city would never get the fish it needed for student cafeterias. Nor would the schools’ garbage get picked up. 


“Everywhere you looked, there was Mob involvement, and nobody was doing anything about it,” Raab said during a phone interview in September.


Those early experiences launched Raab on a legendary journalism track in which he scrutinized the Mafia, its clannish structure, rituals and roguish personalities as a reporter and editor at the World-Telegram & Sun, NBC News, WNET and the New York Times. He became—like Jerry Capeci at the New York Post and Anthony M. DeStefano at Newsday—one of the Mob’s chief chroniclers.


In 2005, Raab turned the wisdom he’d accumulated over 40 years of writing about the Mafia into the New York Times bestseller Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires; reissued in paperback in 2016, Five Families once again hit the bestseller list.


The book has since been adapted into American Godfathers: The Five Families, a three-episode, six-hour documentary series executive-produced and narrated by the actor Michael Imperioli of Sopranos fame; the docuseries premiered on History in August and can be streamed on Amazon Prime Video. Raab, now 90, was a consulting producer; in that role, he not only assured the documentary’s accuracy and breadth, he also corralled a half dozen former underbosses and gangland “soldiers” who had cooperated with law enforcement and agreed to talk on camera. 

Two men are sitting in chairs in a living room.

Silurian Selwyn Raab and actor Michael Imperioli—serving as consulting producer and executive producer, respectively, for American Godfathers.

A book titled five families by selwyn raab

Selwyn Raab's interview with Steve Adubato discusses the current role of the American Mafia. 2:15, recorded February 2020.

Dapper in a pink shirt and red tie, Raab appears in the documentary as one of its talking heads while dramatic and often bloody newspaper photographs and archival film clips roll across the screen.


He and other experts flesh out the history of the Mafia from its origins in Sicily, to the bonanza that Prohibition created for its bootleggers, to the Mafia’s division of labor into five families governed by a “commission” of dons, to its decline with the arrests of its top chieftains through legal innovations like the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (colloquially known as RICO).


Passed in 1970, RICO allows prosecutors to tie together seemingly unrelated crimes with a common objective into a prosecutable pattern of racketeering. Nevertheless, the Mafia is still with us, except that today the criminal organization avoids the limelight by being active in areas like gambling on the Internet versus lingering in the smoke-filled backrooms of old, playing cards.


As the film shows, during its heyday, both the hierarchical structure and its guiding principle of omertà (the strict code of silence about the Mafia’s activities and the refusal to give evidence to authorities) enabled the members of the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese gangs to dominate an underworld of loansharking, gambling, prostitution, labor racketeering, extortion and, eventually, narcotics trafficking. 


“They would do whatever they wanted,” Raab says in the documentary in his gravelly New Yorkese. “They got away with everything.”


Over the course of six hours, viewers of the documentary meet a string of colorful if menacing personalities—Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Carlo Gambino, Joe Colombo, Joey Gallo and John Gotti—and gain insights into some of the most notorious milestones in mob history.


These include the October 1957 murder of Albert Anastasia while he was getting shaved in a Manhattan barbershop; the disrupted meeting of the national Mafia commission in Apalachin, N.Y., in November 1957; the murder of Joey Gallo during a birthday party at Umberto’s Clam House in April 1972, and the October 1963 televised testimony of “made man” and soldato (“soldier”) Joseph Valachi before a Senate committee, which marked the first time that a member of the Mafia publicly acknowledged its existence and revealed its inner workings. 


Considering the public’s insatiable fascination with the world of organized crime and the men and women who inhabit it, American Godfathers: The Five Families is sure to become the newest favorite of aficionados of the three Godfather films and similar Hollywood fare, ensuring that Raab’s reputation as a topflight journalist will endure. 

Raab, the son of a city bus driver and a graduate of City College, actually achieved most of his stature with another discrete specialty—digging up evidence to exonerate people convicted for crimes they did not commit.

In 1963, New York City was shaken by the murder of two young white women—Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert—in their apartment on East 88th Street. This racially-tinged case became known as the “Career Girls Murders.” After months of little progress, the police arrested a black, 19-year-old eighth-grade dropout, George Whitmore Jr., and maintained that they had extracted a lengthy confession.


Ever the investigator, Raab was able to unearth a dozen witnesses to bolster the young man’s alibi: On the day of the murders, Whitmore Jr. had been with friends in Wildwood, N.J.—160 miles away from the scene of the crime—and at the time, among other activities, he was watching television as Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. 


When another man confessed to the murders, Whitmore was freed—he’d been wrongfully incarcerated for 1,216 days—and all charges were dismissed. The case was cited in the Supreme Court’s Miranda ruling, which aims to safeguard criminal suspects against coercive tactics, and also in the partial repeal of capital punishment in New York State.


Raab’s book about the Whitmore case, Justice in the Back Room, published in 1967, was optioned for a television movie. By October 1973, that same crime story—as well as Raab and his investigative acumen —had morphed into a now iconic television-detective series where Raab, who to this day boasts a full head of hair, was transformed into a bald, charismatic gumshoe named Kojak, played for five seasons by Telly Savalas.


The royalties from the TV show, Raab said in an interview, “put my daughter through law school.”


Then, in 1973, friends of the middleweight boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, having read of Raab’s work in the Whitmore exoneration, contacted him to say that the two witnesses who fingered Carter as the shooter during a triple murder at a bar in Paterson, N.J., in 1966 were lying. Raab retraced one witness’s steps and discovered that he was a couple of hundred feet away and below ground, burglarizing a sheet-metal company, and could not possibly have seen the crime.


Raab dogged the prosecution witnesses for nine months until they recanted and agreed to sign statements that they had perjured themselves. By that point, Raab had joined the Times and his stories helped release Carter from prison in 1985 after nine years of incarceration, though legal proceedings in the case dragged on for a few years more.

“Once Selwyn gets in a story, he’s like a nasty dog yapping at your leg,” a WNET co-worker, Milagros Ardin, told Time magazine. “He doesn’t let go until he gets what he wants.”


Before ending the interview, I felt compelled to pose to Raab what I felt was the elephant-in-the-room question: When covering the Mob, did he ever fear for his life?


Raab replied without hesitation, “I got more pressure from lawyers than from the Mafiosos. I don’t think they read the Times.”


Raab then revealed that the Mob appreciated the New York Times’s policy of not using nicknames, because many are pejoratives. For example, there was a member of the Genovese family known as “Butcher Boy”—a nickname the man despised. One time, the touchy mobster more or less complimented Raab when he flat-out told the journalist, “You’re the only reporter I talk to, because you don’t call me Butcher Boy.” 

from the January 2025 Silurian News

A Silurian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Chester Higgins, Jr.

By Roberta Hershenson

One of the hottest art shows in town this winter was “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876—Now,” which closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Feb. 17. Critic Jason Farago, writing in the New York Times, called the show “winningly eclectic” and “beautifully designed,” while referring to Ancient Egypt as “an inspiration but also a lost dream” for the Black diaspora.

  That “lost dream” idea is reflected in the works of imagination by many of the contributing artists. But for the Silurians’ own  Chester Higgins, Jr., who has two photographs in the show, Ancient Egypt is intensely real.


  Retired from his four-decades as a New York Times staff photographer, Chester, a Silurians Board member, has visited Egypt 22 times and is planning more trips. He believes, he said, in a “parallel reality” that he calls “the spirit world,” and where better to find it than in Egypt, with its monuments to the afterlife?


  Chester’s goal is to attain an even deeper insight into the beliefs that animated the ancients, though his knowledge is already impressive. “I am obsessed,” he said in a recent interview for Silurian News.


  The lens master’s fascination with Egypt began with a press junket in 1973 that turned into a longer stay due to the shutdown of airports during the Yom Kippur War. With a month to immerse himself in the sights, Chester’s imagination was “swept away,” he said, by the awe-inspiring scale of the pyramids and by the painted and sculptured figures he encountered in tombs and elsewhere.


  “You come away with a question. Who are the people who did this?” he said. “They’re not like us—their attitude is completely different. They’re so comfortable in their skin. Their eyes are fixed in a direction beyond them.”

  He still wants to know: “What are the figures looking at? What kind of culture breeds this?”

A man is standing in front of two framed pictures on a wall.

Photo by Betsy Kissam

Chester Higgins, Jr., flanked by his two pieces in the Met’s “Flight Into Egypt” exhibit: “My two images help celebrate the African presence in the ancient Egyptian civilization.”

Chester Higgins also received the 2022 Silurians Lifetime Award. Click for story and video

 “You come away with a question. Who are the people who did this?”


  Chester, at 78, exudes a scholarly vibe that almost makes you forget his stature as one of the finest American photographers alive.


  Check out his YouTube interviews and talks on topics ranging from ancient beliefs to photographing the night sky. Research and preparation define his approach to photography; if he has to make five shots of the same subject, he says, he didn’t think enough about the picture beforehand—a practice photographers call “previsualization.” He uses a tripod and the “deepest depth of field” possible to assure that each detail is sharply defined.


  His photographs in “Flight into Egypt” are drawn from his 2021 book, Sacred Nile—his ninth book—which spans five decades of his life. Chester said he aims to capture “the signature of the spirit,” citing, for example, the work that appears in the November 15th Times review: “African-American pilgrims dance in honor of ancient spirits, Lake Nasser, Egypt, 2006.” The photograph shows a line of people in long white clothing, their arms raised and figures slightly blurred as they dance on the shore in the pre-dawn glow.


  By speaking to the pilgrims, Chester learned they were related to the “Windrush generation”—people who emigrated from the Caribbean to England between 1948 and 1973, after the British Nationality Act of 1948. It was a tumultuous time in which many of those people suffered hardships at the government’s hands, though they were legally entitled to settle there. (The U.K. government apologized for their treatment in 2018.)


  Chester said he used the term African-American in the title because “as political outcasts due to their color in the U.K., they still see themselves as from the home of their parents in the Americas.”


  The long relationships that Chester has built with Egyptologists enable him to prearrange his visits at the times and places that meet his needs. One such shoot, made inside a tomb in 1979, resulted in the second of his photos in the Met exhibit, “Tomb of Irukaptah, A Libationer, Saqqara Necropolis, Egypt.”


  The picture shows a group of statues that each represent a specific person. “Each is a witness to the sacred burial of the owner of the tomb,” Chester said.


  He next plans to visit Egyptian collections in Europe, then take another trip to Egypt, and after that, “maybe a retrospective,” he said.


  For now, he is photographing desiccated elephant ear leaves, using flatbed scanners instead of a camera. Before he could be asked about whys and wherefores, Chester explained, “I want to challenge myself to find the signature of the spirit in something that’s dead.”


From the Met Museum—Through Feb. 17

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now

"Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now examines how Black artists and other cultural figures have engaged with ancient Egypt through visual art, sculpture, literature, music, scholarship, religion, politics, and performance. In a multisensory exploration of nearly 150 years of artistic and cultural production—from the 19th century to the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the present day—the exhibition includes nearly 200 works of art in a wide range of media."

A woman wearing glasses and a purple scarf smiles for the camera.

Aileen Jacobson

Aileen Jacobson Elected President, Fran Carpentier First Vice President


By Ben Patrusky


Aileen Jacobson, who covered the arts and personal finance for three decades at Newsday and has freelanced for the New York Times and other publications for the past 16 years, was elected the 74th president of the Silurians Press Club, heading the 2024 – 2025 slate of officers and board of governors.


For the past two years, in her role as Vice President, Jacobson served as editor of the Silurian News. Assuming the editorship is Fran Carpentier, a 30-year veteran of health and lifestyle journalism, the newly elected First Vice President. Rounding out the officer roster are Carol Lawson, who continues as Secretary, and Karen Bedrosian-Richardson, who remains as Treasurer.


Jacobson succeeds Joseph Berger, who during his two-year tenure as president presided over monthly lunches that featured an outstanding array of speakers. They included: Paul Steiger, founding editor of ProPublica, together with editor-in-chief Steve Engelberg; best-selling New Yorker writer Ken Auletta; Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism; longtime Newsday investigative reporter and author Tom Maier; Brooke Kroeger, author of “Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism”; New York Times White house correspondent Maggie Haberman; Joe Kahn, executive editor of the New York Times; and most recently, New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, winner of the 2024 Peter Khiss Award.


A graduate of Harvard and the Columbia School of Journalism, Jacobson began covering the arts and other topics in the early 1970s as a staff writer for the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine. In 1974, Jacobson joined Newsday, where she remained until 2008, reporting on news, arts, books and magazines, reviewing theater, and writing about personal finance. She is the author of “Women in Charge: Dilemmas of Women in Authority” and co-author of “The Consumer Reports Money Book.”

Fran Carpentier spent most of her career as senior editor at Parade, the national Sunday newspaper, which during her tenure was distributed to 35 million homes every week, reaching more than 70 million readers coast to coast. Carpentier conceived, edited and wrote articles for Parade on a wide range of topics, including health, personal finance and food, often working in collaboration with such notable contributors as Gloria Steinem, Gail Sheehy and Bill Moyers. She also served as web producer and editor-at-large for the health, lifestyle and food channels at Parade.com.


Two longstanding governors — Myron Kandel and Allan Dodds Frank – both former presidents, twice in Kandel’s case – are stepping down from the board. To honor them for their invaluable contributions, and to continue to benefit from their keen knowledge and wise counsel, the board deemed fit to elect them board members emeriti. In their emeritus capacity, each is welcome to join in all board deliberations as they wish, sans vote. Emeritus status was also conferred upon another former president, Mort Scheinman, in acknowledgment of his many years of exceptional board service

A woman wearing a black jacket and a red shirt smiles with her arms crossed

Fran Carpentier

Sept. 21, 2022

2022 Dennis Duggan Prize:
Candace Pedraza, Newmark Journalism School

A woman with long curly hair is smiling and wearing a necklace.

by Jack Deacy


Candace Pedraza, who is in her final year as a student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, is the 2022 winner of the Dennis Duggan Prize.

The prize, which includes a $2,000 stipend, has been awarded annually by the Silurians Press Club since 2007 to an outstanding Newmark J-School student. Ms. Pedraza, 25, will be presented with the prize at a Silurians Press Club luncheon at noon on Wednesday, September 21 at the National Arts Club in Manhattan.

The award is named in honor of Dennis Duggan, the well-respected and popular Newsday reporter and columnist who chronicled the trials and tribulations of everyday New Yorkers for more than four decades. Duggan, who also served two terms as president of the Silurians Press Club, died in April 2006 at the age of 78.

Ms. Pedraza, born and raised in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, attended PS 71 and Herbert Lehman High School.

“From a very young age I was always interested in current events, read newspapers voraciously and watched television news shows,” Ms. Pedraza said. “So it’s no wonder that I was drawn to a career in journalism.”

At the State University of New York at Geneseo, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications, Journalism and Media Studies. After a series of non-journalism jobs, Ms. Pedraza finally decided that a career in news was what she wanted and entered the CUNY graduate school.

As part of her studies at Newmark, she has produced stories for the school’s NYCity News Service, which is directed by John Mancini, a former editor of Newsday, who was a friend and colleague of Duggan.

“I know first hand that Candace’s reporting reflects Dennis’s generous spirit and his deep interest in improving conditions for New Yorkers whose stories are often overlooked,” he said.

Ms. Pedraza complemented her studies at Newmark with internships at City & State New York and The City, the nonprofit news outlets. She is also a writer and podcast co-host at The Knicks Wall, which covers the NBA team in depth. At Newmark, she is specializing in audio and data journalism, with a concentration in health and science reporting. Ms. Pedraza resides in Elizabeth, New Jersey, with her fiance and three cats.

June 15, 2022

The New York Times and Newsday
Win Top Honors In The 77th Annual
Excellence In Journalism Awards

Fortune Magazine, ESPN, WABC-TV, Type Investigations, THE CITY, WINS 1010 Radio, The New Yorker, Gothamist/WNYC, The Record/northjersey.com, News 12 Network, City Limits, USA Today Network, Foreign Policy Magazine And CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism Also Win Awards


A powerful 18-month long investigation by Newsday into policing on Long Island that uncovered abusive treatment of detainees by law enforcement and discrimination against black applicants for police jobs and an incisive New York Times series that reported how the pandemic has devastated the New York City economy were both awarded the President’s Choice Medallion, the top prize in the Silurian Press Club’s 77th annual Excellence in Journalism Awards. 

The Times led this year’s winners with six first place Medallions winning the President’s Choice Award and awards for Breaking News Reporting, Investigative Reporting, Arts and Culture Reporting, Editorials, Commentary and Public Service, People Profiles and Feature Photography. Newsday was close behind with five winning Medallions, capturing the President’s Choice Award, and awards for Business and Financial Reporting , Breaking News Photography, Sports Photography and TV Feature News.

But far smaller and younger news outlets performed nimbly in the Silurians contest as well. Type Investigations, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to independent investigative journalism, won two Medallions, one for Feature News Reporting, the other for Science and Health Reporting. THE CITY, another online nonprofit news site, won the Medallion for Minority Affairs Reporting. In the remaining categories, Fortune magazine won for Environmental Reporting, ESPN for Sports Reporting and Commentary,WABC-TV for TV Breaking News and 1010 WINS Radio for Radio Breaking News.

Runners-up in each of the prize categories were honored with Merit awards. The Times won five, Newsday and THE CITY won three each and Streetblogs NYC, a nonprofit news website, won two.  The New Yorker, The Record/northjersey.com, Type Investigations, Gothamist/WNYC, Foreign Policy, CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, the USA Today network, City Limits and the News 12 Network each won a Merit award.


The Medallion and Merit awards will be presented at a dinner Wednesday, June 15 at the National Arts Club in Manhattan. Silurian Press Club president Michael Serrill announced that for the first time since 2019, when the Covid-19 pandemic emerged, the awards ceremony would be held live in-person rather than streamed virtually by Zoom. 


The Silurians Press Club, established in 1924 as The Society of the Silurians, is an organization of more than 300 veteran and retired New York journalists. Early members included William Randolph Hearst, Lincoln Steffens and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. In addition to sponsoring the Excellence In Journalism awards annually since 1945, the Silurians host monthly luncheons featuring prominent speakers and also provide educational grants for local journalism students and relief for journalists in financial trouble. 

May 2022

Exactly Who Gets a Coveted Times Obit?

A man in a suit and blue shirt is looking at the camera.

By David A. Andelman


For 16 years, Bill McDonald has served as a gatekeeper for the powerful, the famous, the quirky or the just plain interesting as they exit the world where they plied their trade or exercised their talents. 


He is the obituary editor of The New York Times. And for our first in-person lunch at the National Arts Club in nearly two years, he regaled our membership with yarns of life and immortality beyond the grave.


Take the fellow who was the (hardly competent) lookout for the Watergate burglars. “We would always write about Watergate people,” McDonald said. “They’re just catnip for our readers.” Even if, as was the case for this one, he’d been dead for two years. There have been a few other notable cases among the long-dead. Like Donald W. Duncan, green beret turned anti-war leader and editor of Ramparts, a leftist magazine of the Vietnam war era, who Jeff Roth, Silurian and custodian of The Times morgue, uncovered. When fellow Silurian, Robert McFadden, the paper’s leading obituary writer, began to research this obit, he discovered that Duncan, too, had been long dead. “We did the obit,” McDonald observed. “It was a great story and no one else had done it. So, we got a lot of good reaction.”


A Silurian board member David Margolick, himself the author of a not inconsiderable number of obits for McDonald, observed that “Bill’s pages are the primest real estate for journalists in the world. There are few assignments that are better than writing for him and telling peoples’ stories. He keeps coming up with Hasidic rabbis who were 103 years old and there seems to be an endless supply of them.” (Joe Berger, who cohosted the questioning with Margolick, seems to have made a specialty of these rabbis.)


McDonald pointed out that there are some 1,900 advance obits in the bank, though occasionally the desk is caught off guard—more often than not by rock stars who “die too young.” Like Michael Jackson, whose premature death mobilized every resource of the paper within hours. “It was one of those cases where The Times showed up and really did what it can do best,” said McDonald.


But then, Margolick touched a nerve when he asked, “How do journalists get in there—not only Times people—and what are you looking for in order to separate those of us who are Worthy from those of us, who aren’t?”


“It’s the toughest call to make because there is an emotional element to this, to colleagues who are grieving in effect for someone they knew and really want that person to be remembered,” McDonald observed. “We try to apply the same standard to those people, to our own colleagues, as we would to anyone else. So, if you did something in journalism, maybe you won a couple of Pulitzer prizes. Maybe you broke some amazing story. Maybe you ran a newspaper. . . You have to have, I won’t say made news, but contributed to the field in such a way that it sits above and beyond what most people do.”


But beyond journalists, McDonald was quite eloquent in describing just what makes it into the narrow space each day for obituaries—who does and who does not make the cut. “You recognize a good story when you see one,” he continued. “If it’s a combination of a good narrative, tale, yarn, certainly fame is a criterion, and we do those automatically. We have raised the bar above people who maybe had worthy lives. We don’t judge their worthiness as human beings, but their newsworthiness.”


There was, for instance, a woman who played music on drinking glasses in the Woody Allen film, “Broadway Danny Rose.” Another who made plaster casts of the genitals of male rock stars. “Both of those women made an impression on our world, so to speak,” McDonald continued, as laughter swept the room. Of course, there’s also the inventor of kitty litter or the designer of pink flamingos, whose passing was chronicled on Page One by “Margalit Fox, one of our great obit writers.” As for the writer of obits, “you have to have a good storytelling style, a good narrative skill—being able to spin the story and decide, what’s the narrative thread,” while at the same time, “bringing to life the era they lived in—the context and sense of history.”


In response to a question from The Times’ former publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. dealing with the globalization of the paper, McDonald observed that he’d like to see obits become even more of a global, even online, product: “I think I’ve always thought The Times could capitalize on this franchise, a little more than it does, but I don’t make those calls unfortunately.”


Still, in the end, there is rarely a slow day in obituaries. “The supply is unending,” McDonald concluded. “As a former deputy used to say, ‘The Lord will provide.’ And that’s true.”


But it was left to Joe Berger, our incoming Silurian president, to add his appreciation to Bill McDonald: “I’m just glad that we have you as obituary editor because you’re a calm, steady cool presence dealing with this massive subject, and a wise one.”

April 2022

Tim Weiner, Intelligence and National Security Expert, on the War in Ukraine and Political Warfare

A man standing next to a book titled the folly and the glory

By Aileen Jacobson


The war in Ukraine represents “the resurrection of political warfare by the United States,” said Tim Weiner, our speaker at the April 20 Zoom meeting, our second program on that ongoing war instigated by Russia.


Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a former intelligence and national security reporter for the New York Times. He is also the author of several books, including a history of the CIA and a history of the FBI. His most recent is The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia and Political Warfare, 1945-2020. He also hosts a podcast.


Political warfare, Weiner explained to the fifty members who attended, is the use of a nation’s powers “short of war,” including diplomacy, economic warfare, intelligence operations and support for resistance actions.


The intelligence gathered by the CIA about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions “to wipe Ukraine off the face of the earth” became overwhelming by January, he said, leading to a decision to make the evidence public. Putin had used the same kind of “blitzkrieg of propaganda” and misinformation (including calling Ukrainians “Nazis”) to justify war in 2014 in the run-up to the war in Crimea.


That time, Weiner said, U.S. officials didn’t understand what was going on, but this time they were prepared and “totally neutralized Putin’s disinformation weapons” by telling the world about them. He called this sharing of intelligence “a remarkable development” with long-lasting impact on the future global struggle “between democracy and autocracy.”


In response to a question posed by Silurians president Michael Serrill, who moderated the discussion, Weiner credited “buzz and taps and moles” as the probable sources of the CIA’s information. He also believes that the U.S. is finding “work arounds” to pierce the “Stalinist crackdown” on a free press in Russia and deliver truthful information.

Artist, Caricaturist and Author Edward Sorel Spoke at the February 16 Zoom meeting: A Report and an Appreciation


A man is leaning on a chair next to a poster that says edward sorel

By David Margolik


Early on in his profusely illustrious career, Edward Sorel neatly captured in a semi-autobiographical cartoon — it contains nine separate self-portraits — a brilliant artist’s eternal dilemma.


In the drawing, which ran in the Nation, he ponders why, away from their canvases, so many of the painters he so admires were schmucks. Rembrandt was a deadbeat and embezzled from his own son. Degas was an anti-Semite. Matisse looked sweet but dumped his wife once he hit it big. Picasso abandoned his friends during the Occupation. And on and on.


“Let’s face it…I’ll never be a great artist,” the cartoonist reluctantly concludes. “I’m just too nice a guy.”


Forty years or so have passed since Sorel drew those panels. And throughout it all his work has appeared, and continues to appear, in an astonishing array of publications — everything from the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Book Review to Screw. And in various public places, including the walls of the Waverly Inn.


Asked during his virtual appearance before the Silurians on February 16 where on that spectrum — from master to mensch — he’d position himself, Sorel replied with the twin trademarks of his work: honesty and astringency.


“Well, I certainly don’t place myself very high in the nice guy category,” he said. “I’ve done selfish things in my life. But for the 20th Century and even for the 21st I’d rate myself very highly as a cartoonist, as a caricaturist. I did become the artist I hoped to become.”


Sorel, 92, joked that he was now famous enough to be modest. But leafing through his new book, Profusely Illustrated: A Memoir, and beholding the extraordinary range of figures he’s honored (some) and skewered (far more) in his artworks over the past seven decades, it’s clear that in his case, modesty is simply inapt.


By any standard he’s one of the most important illustrators of his era, someone who, along with David Levine and a handful of others, helped resurrect and preserve a cherished tradition of naturalistic, exaggerated portraiture dating back to 19th Century France. “He is our Daumier, our Thomas Nast,” E.L. Doctorow once said of him.


But success, he told the group, did not come easily — he first had to unlearn everything he’d been taught in art school — or early for him. “I was in my late ’40s before I did drawings I like,” he said. “It wasn’t until the ’90s that I became the artist that I wanted to become.” And with the slow death of print journalism, he said, there’s no way latter-day Sorels will happen. “The kind of work I do already looks kind of 19th Century,” he lamented. 


Sorel explains in his book that he did it for two principal reasons: first, to spare at least a few of his works from the oblivion that awaits most protest art and magazine work, and second, to document how, in his own mind, twelve consecutive Presidents helped lead to the “racist thug” who occupied the White House until January 20, 2021.


Oddly enough, for someone who thrived on Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he did not go after Donald Trump very often — for a variety of reasons. There was despair, stemming from his lifelong belief that in the end, work like his really doesn’t help. And the belief that Trump was too dangerous to be funny. And a feeling that his style was insufficiently savage — that only a German Expressionist like George Grosz or Otto Dix would be up to the task.


Additionally, Barry Blitt of the New Yorker was already on the case. Blitt’s Trump covers for the magazine were so brilliant, Sorel said, that he stopped doing them himself. “I couldn’t compete with him,” he continued. “I didn’t know how to be funny about Trump. I couldn’t understand…I mean…he was so transparently a fraud.”


And, finally, Sorel said, he was too busy working on what he called “my first grownup book,” Mary Astor’s Purple Diary, his illustrated chronicle of a Hollywood starlet’s sex scandal in the 1930s. “I wasn’t going to sacrifice that book to Trump,” he explained. “It was pure selfishness on my part.”


He described the Astor book as “a biography written by a poor, lovesick old man.” “I saw her when I was ten years old in The Prisoner of Zenda and I just couldn’t believe anybody could be that beautiful,” he said. (But in the musical based on it that’s now in the works, he and Mary Astor live happily ever after.)


Nixon, whom he called “every cartoonist’s joy,” was his all-time favorite target. “The most untalented caricaturist could do Richard Nixon,” he said. “He was too easy. And so despicable.” But Profusely Illustrated is stuffed with stars as well as scoundrels. The drawing he’s proudest of, in fact, is one of Edward G. Robinson. “If I were a pharaoh, I’d ask to have it buried with me,” he wrote in the book.


Sorel, who was born and grew up in the Bronx, started drawing early. “I was a very promising nine-year-old,” he said. But at the High School of Music and Art and Cooper Union, he ran headlong into the prevailing artistic fashions of the day, abstraction and Cubism. It took him years, he said, to recapture his original instincts and learn how to draw. He confessed to stealing from a lot of artists — sometimes, quite literally — until he’d honed his craft.


But never, he said, did he labor under the illusion that great art changes minds. “I always knew that I couldn’t make a difference,” he said. “People like Jules Feiffer and I know that nobody’s going to listen to us. The only comfort the political cartoonist has is that it reassures the people out there who think exactly the way he does that they are not alone.”


By way of illustration, he described doing a cartoon for Horizon of Barry Goldwater, shown sitting backwards on a horse and clad in armor Attila the Hun might have worn. “I thought it was devastating,” he recalled. But after it ran, he learned Goldwater had inquired whether Sorel would sell him the original.


He wouldn’t.

Jan. 2022

A Life Well Lived: Steven V. Roberts Pays Tribute to His Wife, Distinguished Journalist Cokie Roberts

A man and a woman are standing next to each other in front of a bookshelf.

By David A. Andelman


For 53 years, Steve Roberts was Cokie’s biggest fan. He was also her husband and, at times, writing partner and traveling companion. They also became, for each of them, mutual sources of ineffable inspiration.


That’s the message that comes through in the 272 pages of Cokie: A Life Well Lived and that was conveyed across nine time zones by her husband, Steve, to the many friends and colleagues who dialed in on Zoom for January’s luncheon event.


It was a lifelong love affair—from their first meeting at their respective ages of 19 and 18, Steve a budding journalist on The Crimson at Harvard, Cokie at Wellesley. They were only rarely apart for the next five decades, hopscotching through their years together from Washington to California to Greece and back to Washington. Steve outlined the start of Cokie’s career from her earliest iterations as a journalist, stringing for CBS News as tanks rolled through the streets of Athens in a landmark coup d’état (with Steve on Cyprus and unable to return), to Cokie’s first big breaks on NPR, then ABC, dogged in those far-off days by the burden of being a woman in the man’s world of journalism.


“I was her biggest fan,” Steve said, clearly recalling their decades together until her tragic death cut short their lifelong romance in 2019. “I knew from the day I met her what an extraordinary person she was.”



Still, these were the 1960s and while Steve had a golden pathway from the Harvard Crimson to the Washington bureau of The New York Times, this was not the same avenue for a young woman, even one as talented and with as sterling a Washington pedigree as Cokie (whose parents, Hale and Lindy Boggs, were longtime members of Congress). So, for the first years of their marriage, it was Cokie who would follow Steve as his career path took him from Washington to Los Angeles to Athens and back to Washington again.


From the beginning, Cokie “had an atavistic devotion to newspapers,” Steve recalled, “and an enormous talent” for journalism. She first demonstrated her gift in 1974 when Steve had flown off to Cyprus to cover the Turkish invasion for The Times, leaving Cokie behind in Athens where a Greek coup suddenly erupted. 


All alone, Cokie found herself in the midst of the biggest news story of the day and rose to the occasion, filing for CBS Radio, though she’d never written a radio story before in her life. Then, suddenly her parents received a phone call from the CBS Broadcast Center. Did they have a photo of Cokie? They panicked but were quickly reassured she’d not been killed. Rather, her radio piece would be leading the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite that evening and they needed her photo for a slide while the radio piece played.


Cokie followed Steve back to Washington, though she was reluctant to give up the life of a foreign correspondent at that point—quite aware of the deep-seated male domination of the news business. That was when she stumbled upon, many would say effectively created, the “old girl network.” 


When The Times’s Judy Miller suggested Cokie reach out to Nina Totenberg and that led to a job, and eventually a starring role at NPR, as Steve observed, “it was the first time I saw women be able to help each other the way men have always been able to help each other.” NPR in turn led to a guest slot in October 1987—essentially a tryout—at ABC side by side with Sam Donaldson, George Will and David Brinkley, three of the giants of the news business. “It was like the varsity had arrived,” said George Will, “not given to praise of anybody.” Indeed, Steve told the Silurians, Cokie “had a special quality that you don’t teach.”


While she was waiting to go on the set that first day, Cokie was talking with the show’s young producer, Marc Burstein. “There are three things you need to know about me,” Steve quoted Cokie as telling him boldly. “I’m married to the same man for 20 years. I live in the house I grew up in, and I go to church every Sunday. And if you love those three things about me, we’re going to get along fine.” Years later, Steve recalled, Marc told him, “The only thing that hasn’t changed in that whole introduction was the number of years, you were married.”


In the end, that was all we needed to know about Steve and Cokie. But there is lots more in the book he has written as a tribute to his beloved wife of more than half a century—a book at once instructive and inspiring with a life so very well lived.

Dec. 2021

Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, Author of "The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden," Delivered the Low-Down on Afghanistan

By David A. Andelman


Peter Bergen is unequivocal about many issues surrounding the world and especially America’s place in it. Above all, he’s pretty clear about what he thinks of Joe Biden’s Afghanistan policy.He minced no words when he spoke before the Silurians monthly zoom-luncheon on December 15: “It has turned into a total fiasco.”


He elaborated: America should never have left, he said, and certainly not in the fashion that it did. Bergen observed that “President Biden, and his approval ratings, never recovered from the poorly executed withdrawal from Afghanistan.” But the fallout has turned out to be even worse and more far-reaching. It “seemed to undercut any kind of narrative about competence in the administration.”


Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, is vice president of the New America think tank and author, most recently of The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden, published in August.


He said the withdrawal from Afghanistan was not simply poorly executed, it was a very poor policy decision on a number of levels. And he believes it could even lead to the possibility of a return to Afghanistan at some point. “First of all, the Taliban could engage in ethnic cleansing which they certainly have done in the past.” The fear of genocide was the trigger for Barack Obama’s decision to send more American troops into Iraq. “It wasn’t the murder of Jim Foley [the American journalist]. All that was important, that precipitated Obama’s change of mind. [But] it was the threat of genocide against the Yazidis. Jim Foley’s murder amplified that decision but didn’t precipitate the decision.”



As for what is happening now and what is likely to take place going forward in Afghanistan, Bergen observed that he had spent some time in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. His conclusion was that they “really had no plans for governance in a real sense. They believe that if you make society pure, that everything else will follow and everything else would get taken care of. Well, that’s not a program for turning on the electricity, or putting water in the pipes. And it’s certainly a program that is probably going to lead to the humanitarian catastrophe that we see unfolding in Afghanistan. Ninety-seven percent of the population may be below the poverty line and millions of people may starve.”



As for Osama bin Laden, a major focus of Bergen’s writing and research in the region, he believes that Pakistani officials were not actually protecting Bin Laden in the months and years before his final assassination in a compound less than a mile from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. “Many people naturally supposed that somehow he was being protected by the Pakistanis, but there’s no evidence for that in any documents that were released.” He pointed to the research of Nellie Lee, a colleague of his at New America “who’s read all the documents in Arabic as well,” for a new book that will be coming out shortly. “She and I come to the same conclusion, which is of course, it’s hard to prove negatives, but there was no Pakistani officer protecting Bin Laden.”


Bergen is especially concerned by the prevalence of leaders of the Haqqani network, perhaps Afghanistan’s most notorious terrorists, in the top ranks of the Taliban leadership, including one of the top Haqqani leaders who is serving as Minister of the Interior “with the role of head of DHS and head of the FBI combined,” with 14 of the 33 members of the Taliban cabinet sanctioned by the United Nations as terrorists.


Finally, Bergen was asked what he might have done differently had he been in charge before the Taliban finally seized power. “We were at a politically sustainable place with 2,500 troops on the ground,” Bergen said. “It was a relatively small number [but] it was sustainable and it was in the interest of the United States and also in the interests of the Afghans” that they remained. “And now we have a situation where the Taliban on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is now back in control. They’re in a much stronger position than they were before 9/11.”


Still, Bergen remains encouraged by the quantity and quality of reporting that is emerging from Afghanistan, even under Taliban control. “I think we are getting a reasonably good picture of what’s happening.”

Will Trump Run Again? Michael Wolff Gave Silurians His Take—After Detailing How Insane the Ex-Prez Is

A man in a suit and tie is standing in front of three books by michael wolff

by David Margolick


It sounds more like an ad for a legendary electronics store than an appraisal of a former President of the United States. But according to Michael Wolff, Donald Trump is… insane!


And “crazy.” And “off his rocker.” And “occupying a different reality than literally everyone else.” And “incompetent,” spending his time “talking and talking and just spewing forth and saying whatever comes into his mind.” And illiterate (“He doesn’t read”), which is “compounded by the fact that he doesn’t listen, either.”


“I don’t think he has dementia,” Wolff allowed in his very frank and highly entertaining virtual talk before the Silurians on November 17. “I think he is just crazy. I think he has been crazy for a very long time.”


Wolff has followed Trump for years, dating back to his days as a columnist for New York Magazine, when the President-to-be would hock him semimonthly for leaving him out of something he’d just written. And his trilogy of best-selling books on the man could well prove the most enduring chronicle of the bizarre and exhausting and ongoing Trump years.


As Wolff sees it, his work has proceeded on a fundamentally different premise than the one followed by the mainstream press. By instinct and tradition, he believes, most White House reporters approached Trump on the mistaken assumption that he was sane, and that his presidency was within traditional norms. He, by contrast, covered Trump as the nut case he was and is and always will be.


“I don’t think they got close to understanding that this was in every way, shape and form an aberrant presidency,” Wolff said. “Not just a deceitful presidency or corrupt presidency or a wrongheaded presidency or a disorganized presidency, but a presidency that had no relationship to any presidency that has occurred in the past. There was no way for a whole swath of institutional journalists to say the President of the United States is insane. I can say that. They cannot.”


But remarkably, Trump hadn’t taken anything Wolff has written about him personally, at least for very long. After the publication of Wolff’s first Trump book, Fire and Fury, Trump threatened to sue him. But when Wolff worked on the third, Landslide, Trump laid out the red carpet for him in Palm Beach, and for a simple reason. “The guy gets ratings,” Trump told a flunky.


“So I’m in Mar-a-Lago and he’s introducing me to everybody as ‘Michael Wolff, the best writer in America,'” Wolff recalled. Trump acolytes like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who’d been deputized to badmouth Wolff, looked on dumbfounded. “Reality changes on his timetable, and that can be minute-to-minute,” Wolff observed.


But to Wolff, the very chaos in Trump’s brain is his best defense against the swirl of conspiracy charges leveled against him, whether over financial legerdemain, electoral manipulation, or Capitol insurrections. “He has no plans,” said Wolff. “He has no intentions. He has no follow through — none of the things that you need to pin a crime on somebody. How do you convict a crazy man of conspiracy? If, literally in every cognitive aspect, he does not have the ability to conspire?”


“The ideal of Trump leading a conspiracy is, frankly, ludicrous and ill-informed,” he said. And because growing celebrity and power have only “fueled his insanity,” such charges have only become more untenable over time. And speaking of conspiracies, Wolff said no one in Trump’s inner circle, including his own family, believes he won the 2020 presidential election. Even in that crowd, Wolff said, Trump “occupies an absolutely different reality.”


Wolff said he’d first proposed a fly-on-the-wall book on the early days of the Trump Administration to President-elect’s newly-minted consigliere, Steve Bannon. When Trump didn’t exactly turn him down, Wolff started showing up at the White House, installing himself on a strategically-located couch in the West Wing. “I got to be a familiar face and people assumed I must be there for some reason,” he recalled.


Wolff’s talk ventured for a time into Jeffrey Epstein, whom he also got to know well, and to whom he devotes a chapter in his latest book, Too Famous. But that detour quickly doubled back to Trump thanks to a question from Allan Dodds Frank, who wondered how much Epstein knew about the former President.


“An immense amount,” replied Wolff, noting that for fifteen years the two men were “inseparable.” “I think Epstein knew all about Trump’s finances,” he said. “He knew all about Trump’s women, as Trump knew about his women.” Searching Epstein’s house, he went on, the FBI found a dozen or so pictures of Trump, some with the same young girls whose testimony, according to Epstein, helped send him to jail. According to Wolff, Epstein believed it was Trump who ratted him out to the Palm Beach police, after Trump double-crossed him on a real estate deal.


Shortly after Trump’s elected, Wolff said, Bannon told Epstein he’d been the only person he’d been afraid of during the Presidential campaign, and that Epstein replied, “You should have been.” Wolff added that Bannon and Epstein quickly bonded, in part over their shared conviction “that Donald was a crazy person.”


Despite a terrible diet — and a daily regimen of “at least” 12 Diet Cokes — Wolff described Trump as “indomitable” and said he looked “fantastic” the last time he saw him, certainly in shape for another presidential run. Though awful for the country, Trump had been a “gift” to him, he said, one likely to keep on giving. “Put it this way: there’s every reason for him to run,” Wolff concluded. “He can’t really continue to be Donald Trump without running.”

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Oct. 2021

The Tale of Merriman “Smitty” Smith, Known as “the Greatest Wire Reporter Ever,” as Told by Bill Sanderson.


A man standing next to a book called bulletins from dallas

by Aileen Jacobson


At an urgent pace, Bill Sanderson recounted the tale of how reporter Merriman “Smitty” Smith got the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot onto the UPI wire in only 4 minutes, much faster than anyone else


Changes in the “speed of news” was one transformation Sanderson addressed in his study of the fateful day in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated, he told Silurians at the October 20 Zoom meeting. 


“Today we’ve gone down from 4 minutes to 0,” Sanderson said. 


Another big change, he said, is that newspapers are no longer the dominant way people learn about the news. Smart reporters and editors are still necessary, however, added Sanderson, who has been a reporter for the New York Post and is now a writer and editor at the Daily News.


 In 2016, he wrote a book, “Bulletins from Dallas,” about the events surrounding those shots that Lee Harvey Oswald fired into the young President’s limousine.


Smitty, who had been the UPI’s White House correspondent since 1941, sat in the front seat of the pool car in the motorcade that followed JFK’s car. He was sandwiched between the driver and a presidential press agent. That put Smith on top of the car’s radio telephone, a then-new device that was meant to be shared by all four reporters in the car. As it happened, the AP reporter—the AP being Smith’s main rival—sat in the back. He wasn’t the usual White House correspondent (who was on the press bus) but a different reporter who was there to collect “color” for his own piece.


When the passengers heard shots fired, Smitty grabbed the phone, called his office and wouldn’t let go. The AP reporter cursed him, punched him, hit him and pummeled him, but Smith wouldn’t hand it over until the press car, a few cars behind the limo, stopped in front of the Parkland Hospital. Smith jumped out, dumping the phone on his way. When the AP reporter grabbed it, he found the line dead. Some thought Smith had sabotaged it somehow, but UPI always denied it, and the mystery was never solved, Sanderson said in his breathless narrative.


Before President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally, who had been seriously wounded, were even wheeled into the hospital, Smith jumped on the running board of their limo and witnessed the blood surrounding both men. Smith then hopped on the side of the next car in the motorcade and spoke with a secret service agent he knew, who told him the President was dead. Smith ran into the hospital, commandeered a phone in the emergency room and called in updates to his story as it unfurled.


The first AP dispatch, which came in five minutes later than UPI’s, came from a photographer who had been close to the action. The AP story was also garbled and contained several errors, Sanderson said.


Smith was known as a “reporter’s reporter, who went all out to get his story” and is often ranked as “the greatest wire reporter ever.” He won a Pulitzer Prize for the swift and full coverage that he wrote the next day.


Many people remember first hearing the news of the President’s death from Walter Cronkite on TV, Silurian vice-president Joseph Berger pointed out during the Q and A. But Cronkite was relying initially on Smith’s account, Sanderson said—and that came later: It took about half an hour for studio cameras to warm up in those days, and at first Cronkite was only heard but not seen.


Asked about persistent ideas that Oswald was not the lone shooter, Sanderson replied, “Merriman Smith resolutely hated the conspiracy theories.” Smith would say that he was there and “I know what happened.”

September 2021

Theater Maven Michael Riedel Shares Inside Info, Celeb Anecdotes and Broadway Predictions

A man standing next to a book called singular sensation

by Aileen Jacobson


Michael Riedel, who has long written about theater for the New York Post and other publications, spoke to us at our September 22 Zoom meeting just as Broadway was starting to open up again after a long Covid-induced hiatus. The presentation, attended by more than 50 people was snappy, spirited and fun.


Riedel had recently visited the new musical “Six,” a pop-rock romp about the six wives of Henry VIII, and gave it a thumbs-up. It’s the kind of fresh new show that should do well, he predicted. However, older shows like “Phantom of the Opera” and “Chicago,” that were relying on tourists—no longer here in great numbers—may not last long, after the initial excitement of Broadway’s reawakening dies down. In fact, a person in the know had shared with him, he said, that only 14 of the 35 plays and musicals that are to make up the new season may survive.


Off-Broadway, Riedel added, may make a strong come-back because its more reasonably priced and often adventurous offerings are likely to appeal to young people, the ones who are out and about as though there is no pandemic in the downtown area where lives.


Board member and past president Tony Guida, who moderated the event, said he had researched some ticket prices for “Hamilton” and thought they seemed healthy–$399 each for tickets on the coming Friday and $700 for seats around Thanksgiving. Those are bargains, Riedel replied. Before the pandemic, tickets were going for $1,000 each. And ticket agents, who buy many seats and offer them for resale, may have to start dropping prices for this and other shows, or try to return them.


Anecdotes he imparted included Elaine Stritch often running out to the box office “in her panties” before the curtain rose on “A Delicate Balance” to see how well sales were going, much to the chagrin of her co-star George Grizzard. He had written about that in his latest book, “Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway,” published November 2020. It focused on Broadway’s post-9/11 recovery. This one probably won’t be as swift, he said. People wanted to gather together almost immediately after that trauma. These days, of course, close proximity is not what many people are seeking.

May 2021

Marty Baron Covers Hollywood, the Washington Post, Trump, Bezos and More

A man in a suit and tie is smiling for the camera

by David Margolick


Rather than “that crummy actor [Liev] Schreiber,” Michael Serrill asked Marty Baron during his virtual visit with the Silurians on May 19th, didn’t the much-esteemed, recently-retired editor of the Washington Post think he should have played Marty Baron in “Spotlight”?


“No, I don’t, actually,” replied Baron, whose eleven years atop the Boston Globe included the landmark expose of pedophilia by Catholic priests and a cover-up of the abuse by the Boston archdiocese depicted in the Oscar-winning 2015 film. Schreiber “did a great job,” Baron insisted, though Hollywood’s version of Marty Baron, he conceded, was short on charm and had precious little to say. The Marty Baron speaking via Zoom from the Berkshires was considerably more visible, voluble, and witty.


His talk provided an outline of sorts for his memoir-to-be: a boy raised by Israeli immigrants to whom news mattered; who edited his Florida high school and college papers; who got himself an MBA “just in case the journalism thing didn’t work out.” Work out it did, and then some: in his illustrious career the 66-year-old Baron led three major dailies (the Miami Herald was the third), and held major posts at the Los Angeles Times and New York Times before reaching the Post, where he presided from December 2012 until his retirement last February.

At his insistence, there was no speech: he’s giving enough of those these days. Instead, he took questions, the first several of which, predictably, concerned Donald Trump and his four-year campaign to sully the press. To a considerable extent, said Baron, he succeeded.


“In many ways, that might be his single biggest achievement, if you can call it that,” he said. “Look, we were a convenient enemy. He always needed an enemy. Otherwise you’d judge him on his own merits.” But at the same time, Baron noted, Trump had actually been good for both journalism and journalists: people who’d taken the press for granted came to cherish it, while the reporters covering him became ever more “unflinching.”


And Trump had been good to and for the Post: while denouncing its correspondents and denying them credentials, he’d also cooperated with them, spilling to Bob Woodward among others. At work, he theorized, were both exhibitionism and vanity. “I think he assumed he would persuade Bob that he was doing a great job or something like that,” he said. “God knows.”


It’s thanks largely to Trump, he added, that the paper now has three million digital subscribers — a goal which Jeff Bezos, the Amazon mogul who’d bought the Post nine months into Baron’s tenure, championed. With its storied name, headquarters in a world capital, and reputation for “shining a light into dark corners,” as Bezos himself liked to say, he envisions a paper which one day will have ten, or even a hundred, million digital subscribers.


“He’s the first person I’ve ever heard talk about what we’re going to be in 20 years,” Baron said. “When I first heard him say ‘20 years’ I practically fell to the floor. I’ve never heard the term ‘20 years.’ I was used to hearing ‘next quarter,’ ‘next year.’


“He’s a very unconventional thinker,” he continued. “That’s how he came up with Amazon. If he had thought conventionally he would have been Barnes & Noble.”


Baron said he initially spoke to Bezos every other week, mostly via teleconference, mostly about technology and marketing, though the frequency of their chats eventually trailed off to maybe once a month. “He was fairly preoccupied by some other things at one point, you may recall,” Baron noted. He said the paper’s coverage of those “other things” — i.e. Bezos’s costly divorce — was robust, uninhibited, and uncensored. “We had no special access,” he said. “We gave him no special treatment.”


The same thing, he said, has always gone for coverage of Amazon: “He has never quashed a story or suggested a story or anything like that,” Baron said. During many of his visits to Washington, Bezos didn’t even drop into the Post to say hello. The Post is once again profitable, and Bezos is reinvesting those profits. “Obviously, he doesn’t need the dividends,” Baron said.


When he took the reins, 580 people worked in the Post newsroom; soon there’ll be nearly twice that. Hundreds vie for openings there, but with formerly great papers in other cities stripped bare, Baron observed, certain positions — political reporters, foreign correspondents — are hard to fill.


He called the plight of smaller newspapers “the biggest crisis in American journalism,” one to which he plans to devote some of his retirement time. “I don’t think we can lose hope,” he said, noting that, not too long ago, the Post and New York Times faced equally dire predictions. With the right formula or investor, he said, the troubled New York Daily News might also rebound. “There’s certainly room for a good strong New York news organization, which the New York Times isn’t,” he said.


He declined an invitation to comment on the stormy departures of Times editorial page editor James Bennet and reporter Donald McNeil. “Oh, God. I’m not sure I want to get into the New York Times’s controversies, to tell you the truth,” he demurred. “I’ve had plenty of my own to deal with.”


For all the investigations he’s shepherded, Baron said, the “Spotlight” probe was his most personally meaningful, “simply because it had such a direct impact on ordinary people, people who had no power whatsoever, who were unable to grab the attention of law enforcement authorities, politicians, and the press.


“We all know that journalists are supposed to be investigating government and politics,” he said, “but it’s really important that we also investigate other powerful institutions in our society, and the Catholic Church was then the most powerful institution in Boston and in New England and one of the most powerful institutions in the world.”


Friends of Baron’s told him that “Spotlight” failed to capture his wit, though he confessed he hadn’t felt very funny at the time. “I was a newcomer to the Globe and to Boston, I was called an outsider, I was treated like one, and I felt like one,” he recalled.


 It has all the makings of a sequel. This time, Baron could play himself. And give himself some better lines.
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