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James Stewart:
Engraved on his tombstone

by David A. Andelman

James Stewart could have been a lawyer, indeed for a brief time was in fact a lawyer. But he clearly should not have been a lawyer.

“I could tell you many stories that are unfortunately protected by the attorney-client privilege. But the behavior I saw there was like a postgraduate education in rich people behaving badly,” Stewart told the May luncheon meeting of The Silurians Press Club, describing his early days in a law firm—New York’s patrician Cravath, Swain and Moore (though in fairness he did not cite this firm in his talk). “Almost all of our clients were guilty. I saw that firsthand, and it was a little discouraging over the years to work and devote yourself to advocating on their behalf and then see them actually get off without having to pay any price for the bad behavior.”

Which says a whole lot about how Stewart instead became a journalist and the bane of so very many of his erstwhile colleagues. What he also learned from his earliest experience with the law, was “if you don’t love what you’re doing, it’s very hard to compete successfully with people who do love what you’re doing.”

James Stewart clearly loves taking down a whole lot of people who very much deserve being taken down. From his first real journalism job as executive editor of American Lawyer under the indominable Steve Brill, last month’s Silurian luncheon guest as winner of the Peter Kihss Award, to the Wall Street Journal as page one editor to Smart Money magazine which he founded, and now to The New York Times as a columnist, he has never stopped taking down the high and the sometimes mighty. And much of his more elaborate takedowns have come in the pages of his nine books—from Den of Thieves and Disney Wars to his most recent, Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy that he wrote with co-author Rachel Abrams.

In his latest work, what started as a tale of sexual predation by one executive, Les Moonves, quickly morphed into a far larger and more epic tale of greed, lust and corporate malfeasance. “I was getting information that this was something very different than public perception had recognized,” Stewart observed, describing “a treasure trove of documents, emails, information related to this story” that began tumbling into his hands and those of his co-author. If you had any doubts about diving into this book, let Stewart’s confession offer a modicum of reassurance: “I can promise you, there are some astonishing actual events in there, I have to admit, and I think I have I’m pretty grown-up, and I’ve seen a lot in my life, but there were some things we just could not put in on grounds of taste.”

As for his main characters, Stewart seemed most sympathetic to Shari Redstone. “She was treated horribly. Sumner is a horrible person. Let me just say that flat out, and he treated her horribly, and yet she loved him. I think a theme in the book is the power of that. Sort of familial relationships. The father-daughter relationship, her craving for his love and approval which goes right up to the very last scene of the book, and I think anyone can empathize with her.”

Stewart wrote his latest book, as he did with his entire career-long oeuvre of ten volumes, with the voice of his first editor, the late Alice Mayhew, echoing in his mind. “She said never write a book because you think it’s going to be a best-seller. Write a book that you love writing, a book that you believe in, and then who cares whether it’s a best-seller. You have sitting on your shelf for the rest of your life, a book that you can be proud of. And by the way, who knows after your long gone, it could still be discovered, and people will recognize it for the great book that it is. I’ve taken that to heart and repeat that to my students at every opportunity.”

As for what would he like as his epitaph? For that, he would have to go back to his seminal work on Michael Milken and the decades-long court battle it took for him finally to win vindication for all he had written. “The judge wrote an amazing opinion in which he said, not only had I not been negligent in what I wrote, which would have won the case because gross negligence was the standard, but everything that I wrote was correct,” Stewart smiled thinly. “I’ve often said that I want that opinion engraved on my tombstone.”


Steven Brill, Winner of the Peter Kihss Award, Discussed American Lawyer, Court TV, and NewsGuard, at the April Meeting

by David A. Andelman

When I first started on night rewrite at The New York Times in the spring of 1970, Peter Kihss sat several rows in front of me—a gulf that seemed all but unbridgeable at the time. But not for Peter. For him, even a twenty-something novitiate was someone worth cultivating, mentoring. There was, for instance, the time night metro editor George Barrett sent us both out to the Lower East Side to find some Latino victims of a particularly horrific housing disaster. Peter, with your humble servant in tow, knocked on any number of doors, in each case launching quietly, gently but fluently into the Spanglish dialogue that was the lingua franca of the Hispanic community we were seeking to penetrate. I looked on in awe. The Latino street language that he had taught himself patiently paid off with a brilliant narrative that made page one the next day.

Steven Brill, winner of the 2023 Silurian’s Peter Kihss Award, is the antithesis of a gentle mentor. As Silurian board member David Margolick, instrumental in proposing Brill for the award and a product of the Brill style of journalism, observed in introducing him, “Brill read stories closely, marked them up, and demanded more—not always very nicely. Of all the Kihss winners, I suspect he is the least like Peter Kihss himself….In fact, it’s hard to imagine two journalists more different from one another. Peter Kihss was soft-spoken, avuncular, modest, Steve Brill is none of those things. But there are different styles of mentoring, and one is by example. Brill leaned hard on his people and got great work out of them. Which is why the top news organizations routinely picked them off. Then he’d go out and find some more.”

Under the inimitable questioning of Myron Kandel, Brill began by reminiscing about his start in the news business—especially his profile of two upstart law firms launched by Jews and shunned by the industry’s titans, Skadden Arps and Wachtel Lipton. “That led to my getting the idea to start the American Lawyer magazine,” Brill recalled. “Okay, you’re a lawyer. Your wife’s a lawyer. I’m actually not a lawyer. I always have to remind people that I never took the bar exam because if you go to Yale Law School, you learn absolutely nothing that has anything to do with any bar exam.” Instead, he became a journalist and, as it happens, a serial entrepreneur. “I’ve always thought the central challenge you know of anyone’s life is to do well and do good,” Brill continued. “So that’s the way I measure it.”

Doing good, in fact, defined much of the rest of his career, and doing well came along, too. “My wife and I endowed a journalism program at Yale,” Brill recalled, that “should not be anything like a journalism school—which I think is completely useless.” That contradicts, incidentally, the view of our January luncheon speaker, Columbia Journalism’s new dean Jelani Cobb.

“What it should do is teach people how to be reporters, give them a credential, which you can’t get at an Ivy League school because Ivy League schools pride themselves on not being trade schools, but give them a credential that would help them get the jobs in journalism that they should want.” And it’s worked handsomely, since “the ones that I’ve taught, it would be about 300, I’d say half of them are working journalists. To a large part that’s because once these people are placed, then I just harassed them to help me get new people hired.”

After that, there was the hiring of James Stewart—the May Silurians luncheon speaker. “He presented a resume, and the resume said he had been an intern at the local TV station in Quincy, Illinois, and, better, had been an intern at the local newspaper in Quincy, Illinois. So, that was a slam dunk. This guy’s got journalism experience.” Brill paused. “The resume left out the fact that his family owned the local newspaper and the local television station in Quincy Illinois. Just forgot to mention that. But it worked out.”

Then there was the founding of Court TV—product of “a three second” conversation in Steve Ross’s apartment and “two and a half hours with Jerry Levin.” As some indication of the speed and scope of his activities, he’s completely lost track of Court TV. (It’s now TruTV, a digital broadcast television network owned by Katz Broadcasting and simulcast on Sirius.)

Along the way, there were innumerable books, including his monumental work on Obamacare that grew out of a Time cover at 26,000 words—the longest the magazine has ever published. This has clearly given Brill standing to comment on the judicial dance over the abortion pill. “There isn’t a word of that [Texas federal court] decision that not only makes any sense, but that in any way is legally justifiable for a whole variety of reasons, the first of which is the people who sue don’t even have standing to sue. The second of which is Congress has given to the FDA the authority to make those kinds of scientific decisions—not one judge who was handpicked by the plaintiffs.”

Finally, there is Brill’s creation that has been and continues to be perhaps the most transformative of our profession. “NewsGuard is based on the notion that every once in a while human intelligence is better than the artificial kind,” Brill began. “It is a ridiculously inefficient exercise if you’re a tech person, but it’s a totally normal exercise if you’re a journalist. We read [every] website, we score them on the basis of nine criteria from 0 to 100.” This idea of grading websites is beginning to catch on. “A big part of our business is advertisers; another big part of our business are the platforms. This year, we broke into the black, which is pretty good for a start-up and it’s especially good for a startup that tries to do good as well as do well.” Truly, his mantra.

Brill believes that with AI (Artificial Intelligence) the need will only multiply for a service that can distinguish between the good, the bad, and the ugly. Which is basically what Brill has been doing, it would seem, all his life. And certainly merits him the Peter Kihss Award.


Joyce Purnick’s Lifetime Achievement Award: A Lifetime of Firsts

by David A. Andelman

When it comes to Joyce Purnick, there are a multitude of firsts. As Silurians president Joe Berger pointed out, she was the first female City Hall bureau chief for The New York Times, the first female Metro editor of The Times, and in March, the last half of the first husband-wife team to win the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Silurians Press Club—bestowed at a luncheon ceremony at the National Arts Club.

But as anyone who has ever known Joyce Purnick, ever worked with her, certainly admired her, there is ever so much more to her than any litany of firsts. And Berger pointed all of this out in his introduction before presenting her with an honor that has also been bestowed, among others, on Walter Cronkite, Gay Talese, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton, and husband, Max Frankel before her.

As for Purnick, “fearlessly honest,” “tough, shrewd, and knowledgeable,” were the adjectives that leaped first to Berger’s lips, leading to his conclusion that in her wake she’s left “a trail of shattered glass given all the ceilings she has broken.“ It was a theme that resonated through the lavish encomiums lathered on her by one of her biggest admirers and oldest friends, another former Times City Hall bureau chief and columnist, Clyde Haberman.

Haberman described her in even more vivid terms. “She frankly had the best bullshit detector ever known in journalism,” he began. “And then there is her recipe for lemon meringue pie.” But he was particularly taken with a story from her youth, growing up in Queens where “there was this teenage kid about her same age who was completely reckless in how he drove through the neighborhood just terrorizing everybody, hot-rodding through in his sports car, heedless at everybody in his way. Joyce’s mother Charlotte, who sadly I never had a chance to meet, said to Joyce, ‘stay away from that snot-nosed kid.’ It’;s as good a warning as you’re ever going to hear about Donald Trump. And we’;re all still trying to stay away from that snot-nosed kid.”

Before turning the podium over to Joyce, Clyde thanked her “on behalf of all the city hall reporters who are in this room. I think every one of us learned basically almost everything we know from you personally. You showed us how to understand the city, how to understand power in this town in a way that most of us only understood a fraction of. She had no patience for shortcuts. When you look up synonyms in the thesaurus for integrity, the first option reads Joyce Purnik.”

And with that, Joyce took the podium in her own defense, or at least elaboration. She began, of course, with journalism. “The arc of my career reflects profound changes in our profession, not all of them for the good. Some, but not all, newspapers have changed, local coverage has changed. The definition of truth has changed in some quarters and journalists’ careers have changed. I have little doubt that if I came along today, I would be working in another profession. Unfortunately, journalism wouldn’t have me and maybe hard as this is for me to believe, I wouldn’t have journalism.” Yet back in high school, all she ever really wanted to be was a reporter.

“I was bad at math,” she smiled. “I was truly innumerate and allergic to science. So my wise mother, worried about my future, encouraged me to study music and art and to write. Writing stuck, and journalism was the right fit.” Watching President Kennedy’s televised news conferences, “I saw a few women sprinkled in among the men reporters, and I was hooked. That was it.”

At the Post, it was Dorothy Schiff who gave her a first break. “I typed up a week’s worth of TV listings. I wrote squibs about sitcoms and about old movies, not poetry, but it kept things interesting. I worked into the early morning hours in the composing room with printers, many of them who could not hear, and they labored over hot type. I learned to read upside down and backwards. I helped fashion writer Eugenia Shepherd select the photos that accompanied her stories.”

She got her first byline less than two years later. “I was a full-fledged reporter.” She paused reflectively. “Women at the Post were not limited to the ‘women’s pages,’ as they used to be called. We covered everything and that included my abiding interest in local government and politics. Writing about my city and state was what I had long wanted to do.” And she did that, at least until Rupert Murdoch arrived, buying the Post in 1976.

“One very sad thing that has not changed over the decades is Murdoch. He pursued profits and power—never truth or justice. I stayed a year hoping against hope he would not be as bad as his reputation suggested it would be. He turned the Post into the equivalent of a publicity sheet for Ed Koch. To preserve my reputation, I quit and joined the unemployed. I had been at the Post eight years.”

But it happened to be a fortuitous moment for Joyce, and a transformative one for the newspaper industry. At The Times, a number of women journos had just filed a class action sex discrimination suit and won—the paper settling with them. One of the deals was “to hire some women fast, and since covering New York was a fundamental priority of The Times in those days, I was qualified. I was hired one year almost to the day after the lawsuit was settled,” Joyce recalled.

Ed Koch was mayor. “Covering Koch was a kick because as those of you who also covered him will well remember, he was great copy. He could not stop making news. Front-page bylines, news analyses, week-in-review pieces. They never stopped, because he never did.” Coverage of Koch quickly morphed into bureau chief at City Hall, then a column, and then there was Max.

“I found the love of my life at The Times,” she smiled and looked over at him. “As most of you know, Max Frankel was a widower and the executive editor of The Times. I did not work directly for Max, but he was the top guy in the news department, and I was a member of the news staff. We knew. I knew. Our relationship was bound to be complicated, but we were willing to pursue it.”

Finally, Joyce turned to journalism today, what’s right and what’s not. “A lot that’s going on today is far from positive,” she began. “I will not dwell on it, but I wouldn’t feel right speaking to a room full of journalists without at least touching on the problems—the disappearance of local newspapers throughout the country and the cheapening and politicization of many of those that still exist. We all know that newspapers have always been political. But as I see it, the divisions today, the peddling of distortions and outright lies, thank you Rupert, is just plain ugly and destructive.”

What she would especially like to see is more coverage of Mayor Eric Adams. “As a reader, I don’t think I’ve read enough about Adams. I don’t know why that is. I don’t know why the coverage of him is episodic, but I think there’s a lot more to know about him. And for some reason, we don’t know a lot about Adams, about the way he lives his life, about what he believes. The Times and other papers have shown the conflicts of interest quite well. But I'd like to know more about the man and his values and his history.”

But Joyce did have at least one positive message and a hope for the future of the career she has so wholeheartedly embraced. “The profession still attracts promising young talent,” she concluded. “I read and see and watch them and hear them every day. There are not enough of them in enough places, but I’m counting on them to turn things around someday. Happily, I lived through the Golden Age.”

The date: Wednesday, March 15, 2023
The time: Noon
The place: National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South


At February’s Meeting, Sandra Peddie,
Mafia Chronicler Extraordinaire, Divulged How She Got the Story of ‘Sonny: The Last of the Old Time Mafia Bosses, John “Sonny” Franzese’

By David A. Andelman

Newsday calls their ace investigative reporter Sandra Peddie. Her publisher used S.J. Peddie on the cover of her landmark book, Sonny: The Last of the Old Time Mafia Bosses, John “Sonny” Franzese, because as she tells the story on herself, the book’s editor thought “readers generally don’t buy a book about the mob written by a woman.” Indeed, having edited any number of mob books, this was the first he’d shepherded by a woman. “The core audience for this book turns out to be mob buffs and mobsters,” Peddie observed.

However you spell it, and whatever you call her, Sandra’s work on Sonny Franzese is a page-turner. And why shouldn’t it be? Franzese, the centenarian made-man of the New York Mafia, took down 40 to 50 people in the course of his career—but who’s countin’. Along the way, he transformed the entertainment and music industries while he was building an admittedly toxic empire in his own right.

All of this and so much more unspooled as Sandra Peddie held a Silurian lunch crowd enthralled at the National Arts Club in February.

Clearly Sonny, the underboss of the Colombo crime family, defined the epigram, “only the good die young.” He was 103 when he finally gave up the ghost in a Long Island nursing home, only shortly after he’d won his release from prison. Oh, and parenthetically, after at least once trying to hit on Sandra. A decade before, when he was 93, his youngest son testified against him and helped send him back to jail.

Sandra interviewed him “multiple times as well as 130 of his friends, family members, and enemies. He, I would argue, was bigger than Gotti, certainly smarter than Gotti, and deeply admired by Gotti.” In addition, Sandra continued, beyond being “smart and tough, he never ratted anyone out.”

Above all, Sandra believes, Sonny was an important subject to write about because “he embodied the rise of the American Mafia in the 50s and the 60s. You probably have heard the story about Meyer Lansky—the mob’s accountant, who was recuperating from a heart attack. He was in a hotel room, and he was watching the news and a story came on about U.S. Steel and he turned to his wife, and he said, ‘We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.’ That’s not apocryphal. The FBI had bugged his hotel room and they were in the next room listening. Meyer Lansky was right. In the 60s and 70s, the mob was everywhere. They had insinuated themselves into all sorts of legitimate businesses, even phone companies.” Sonny’s mentors were also a who’s who of the American Mafia—like Albert Anastasia, head of Murder Incorporated.

Sonny was destined from birth to be a very big constellation in the firmament of American organized crime. “Al Capone carved his initials into the countertop of the social club run by Sonny’s father Carmine who was, like Sonny, a ruthless killer,” Sandra told the Silurians. “Frank Costello was a silent partner in the Copacabana which was a favorite hangout of Sonny’s. His father was a mobster. Sonny murdered his first person when he was 14 and that’s how he got made.”

Of course, when Sandra first met Sonny, he was already getting on in years, so his attitude about being interviewed could be softened. “He talked to me half a dozen times,” she said. “He even invited me to his last birthday when he was 103. He was very proud of the fact that he had outlived everybody, but I think there are two reasons he spoke to me. Number one, when I first met him, he was 101. And he knew he wasn’t long for this world, so that kind of changes the calculation. But the other thing is he knew I was going to do something regardless.”

She pointed out that many Silurians in her audience probably operated similarly. “When I do an investigative piece, I do my research, I go to the target and I say, look, I want your perspective, but if you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine. I don’t really care. I’m going to do a story with or without you, and more often than not, people do want to give me their perspective.” By then, too, she’d accumulated some material that positively delighted Sonny. “When I showed him his rap sheet, it was literally like looking at a high school yearbook. He loved it, but he also saw the depth of my research.”

The fact was that “Sonny was a celebrity in his own right,” Sandra observed. “He also was a great businessman. He was very entrepreneurial, so obviously they were in everything. You know, liquor distributors, nightclubs, unions, entertainment and pornography.”  He was even a producer of “Deep Throat” starring Linda Lovelace, the largest grossing porn film of all time. “He had a big influence on popular culture.”

For Sandra, none of this was an easy ride, though. “I’ve been threatened twice since word got out that I was doing a book,” she confessed. “And fortunately for me, my TV agent is a really tough guy, and he’s very good at backing up bad guys.” Not to mention how utterly persuasive and fearless it’s quite clear Sandra Peddie can be.


Jelani Cobb, Columbia’s New Journalism Dean, Talked of Pursuing Dreams and Being Able to Afford To

By David A. Andelman


The average journalist’s salary in New York hovers right around the $50,000 mark, though few entry-level spots are available for much more than $45,000. So how does Jelani Cobb justify what he admits is the cost of a year at Columbia University’s prestigious Graduate School of Journalism that he estimates at $120,000 and where he’s been named the new dean?

“It becomes unfeasible for a lot of people to stay in journalism if they walk out with 40 or 50 thousand dollars in debt,” Dean Cobb admitted to the January luncheon of The Silurians Press Club under questioning by Allan Dodds Frank, a former Silurian president. But Dean Cobb is doing his best to find ways to fix this tuition crisis. “One of my top objectives is to raise enough money to offset the cost of our tuition,” he explained.

Without question that is a key priority for many professional schools. New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine has begun awarding every student enrolled in their MD program full-tuition scholarships “so that any student can pursue the dream of becoming a physician without the burden of overwhelming student debt,” the school says. Indeed, one of Dean Cobb’s dreams, he explained, would be to “create a program where for every student that goes into local news or nonprofit news and stays there for five years, over the course of those five years we will pay off your loans.”

But absent that, for the moment, Dean Cobb is looking at a whole range of value-added skills and competencies that Columbia can bring to journalism and that the school can offer its graduates. “We have an embarrassment of riches,” he observed, “the reputation we have, and having the history and the tradition that we have, we have applicants from all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of skill sets. So, I see a pool of student perspectives, students who are really clear about the social function that journalism serves.”

Then it becomes a question of how to arm them with the skills and the perception of their new calling that will result in a product that fulfills the needs of a rapidly changing society. “How do you teach these kids to  detect and ignore or challenge misinformation or disinformation—if there is, in fact, a difference between those two things,” Dean Cobb observed. “We want to see everyone more acutely informed about things like digital forensics. If someone is sending you a video and it purports to show Russian soldiers committing war crimes in Ukraine, how do you know that that video is what it says it is? How do you know that it is from January of 2023 and not from some unrelated conflict that happened two years ago?” Dean Cobb elaborated that students are being trained in “the forensics of where is the sun in this video? Where are the shadows? What time of day does it purport to be? Let’s get an atlas of the globe and see where the sun would be shining at that time of day, on that date. Are there serial numbers here? What kind of vehicle is that? When was that vehicle released? Is that vehicle a later model than it says it is?”

All of these skills, Dean Cobb observed are “a growth area.” And he points out, “Outlets are hiring in those areas.”

Dean Cobb was a product of New York schools, particularly his home borough of Queens, so he is acutely aware of one sad contemporary reality. “Less than 10% of the high schools in New York City have a school newspaper and those newspapers are disproportionately clustered at institutions that are in well-off communities,” he said. But in fact, this is not a new phenomenon. In the late 1990s, two of us who were senior editors at Bloomberg offered to help create a student newspaper at an inner city high school in Manhattan. It was a uniquely challenging task as there was no budget, no teacher with the most remote attachment to the craft. Persistence, though, paid off with a product everyone was proud to showcase.

But there is another skill, too, that Dean Cobb is most anxious to encourage and that springs from his own unique background with a Ph.D. in American history and deep roots as a New Yorker writer. “There are a lot of crucial histories that have been written by journalists and some pretty significant journalism that’s been written by historians,” he noted, pointing out that William Shirer who chronicled the history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich and Barbara Tuchman were both journalists at their core. It’s the common theme of doing the kind of forensic work to find out information that has been obscured or that is not visible to the public, digging into archives which reporters may need to do and historians do frequently, interviewing people, creating a cohesive narrative, and engaging the public, which I think are core skill sets that they have in common. Those historians’ sensibilities were useful to me.”

In the end, though, it all comes down to money—at least for the moment.  “If I do anything as a dean that’s worthwhile,” Dean Cobb concluded, “it will be in diminishing the degree to which finances determine somebody’s ability to pursue their dreams.”

The date: Wednesday, January 18, 2023
The time: Noon
The place: National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South


David Gelles Dissected The Man Who Broke Capitalism–Jack Welch–at December’s Meeting

By David A. Andelman

When I left CNBC in Washington in 1994, Jack Welch was very much in charge of its owner, General Electric, whose stock was riding high at $50 a share (nearly $100 in today’s dollars). The company had been most generous to me, a very small cog in its corporate wheels, but I was moving to Bloomberg where ownership of individual companies’ shares was frowned upon. At the same time, there was something that told me the Jack Welch years were just too good to be true. So, I sold out. Much to my chagrin, I watched the shares rocket to $450 a share just a few years later, then begin a long, slow descent to where they find themselves today.

I never had a very good sense of just how far off the rails General Electric had gone and at what cost until I listened to The New York Times reporter David Gelles regale a Silurians luncheon on December 21 with tales culled from his remarkable book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy .

“When I started looking around, I found so many other CEOs who had been influenced by Welch or actually studied directly with him. But I [also] started to see his fingerprints all over our economy,” Gelles began in his conversation with longtime CNN business anchor and Silurian president-emeritus Mike Kandel. “It was this system that became an insidious way for companies to do business.”

The leadup to this profile of a superstar gone wrong is the Corner Office column Gelles has written for The Times for years. “In the course of those conversations, one name kept coming up, and it wasn’t Steve Jobs. It was Jack Welch. That bugged me for a while. Why was it that a CEO who had been retired for 20 years was still looming large in the minds of today’s CEOs? That was just sort of a puzzle for me.” But one that he has now brilliantly unpacked.

Welch’s system “involved extraordinary deal making,” Gelles continued, “more than 1,000 mergers and acquisitions in his 20 years at GE. That’s to the tune of one per week and all of that was in the service of not only making GE more profitable, but just bigger. Bigger was better. And in the process of that, it got so far away from its industrial roots.” The principal problem was that the real financial engine that propelled GE stock for so long had little to nothing to do with its deep roots in manufacturing. “The vast majority of the profits [of GE] were coming from GE Capital. It was coming from things like high interest credit cards and commercial real estate portfolios,” Gelles told Silurians. “And so, when the financial crisis hit, guess who is left holding the bag with one of the biggest subprime portfolios? It was GE, and that’s why they needed a bailout from Warren Buffett and the federal government.”

Gelles reminded his listeners that GE “traces its roots to Thomas Edison. GE was responsible for so many of the sort of major technological marvels that we all know and take for granted.” But it began to get away, far away, from these roots, especially under Welch. “Moreover, with the aura that Welch projected as an innovator and especially developer of executive talent, it had that reputation of turning out the best of the best corporate leaders. If you hired an executive who had worked for GE you were getting an absolutely top-notch CEO.” In all too many cases that was simply not the case.

Still, as Gelles suggested, it is not impossible that the media should share some of the blame. “The business press in particular, and I regard myself as a central part of the problem,” Gelles conceded. “Since Welch, with everyone from Elizabeth Holmes to Mark Zuckerberg, we are in the habit of celebrating our business leaders as cultural heroes—as sort of exemplary people. And that’s actually that sort of the idea that I start the book with. I ask this question: why do we lionize billionaires? What is it about America that makes the richest among us our heroes? And I don’t have the perfect answer, but [in this book, I’m] trying to sort of scratch at that question as I tried to understand why Welch was able to be so successful for so long.”

Gelles especially cited the example of another mega American corporation —Boeing and its crisis with the 737Max. “This relentless pressure is to sell as much as what we have,” Gelles continued. “There’s very little regard given to research and development. Relate that to what happened to Boeing with the 737Max. The 737 was introduced in the 1960s when the Beatles were still playing. And it’s still the plane. People are flying it. [But] Boeing has just simply not done the work and spent the money to figure out what a truly modern midsize passenger jet for the 21st century should be like. They just haven’t done the work. They haven’t put the money there. They need to do that, but they keep kicking the can down the road

All that said, Gelles does concede that Welch “was insanely smart. This guy knew more about just about everything than anyone he was talking to, [yet he was] at times cruel.” Then Gelles pointed out, “he engaged in behavior that today would be on the front page of The New York Times because it could easily be regarded as sexist or homophobic or deeply inappropriate in a modern office culture, but he got away with it because it was a different time. And he was Jack Welch.”

Finally, Gelles concluded that The Man Who Broke Capitalism is really “a conversation about a system [that] it goes well beyond Welch at this point. In theory, the CEO works for the board and in theory, the board works for the investors, but too often the boards are effectively captured by their CEOs, and they become these clubby little affairs where everyone’s just, you know, trying to not rock the boat.”

“In his heyday, GE was responsible for something like 1% of [America’s] GDP,” Gelles said. “Jack Welch was a CEO who mingled with presidents, who was essentially a statesman and the impact he had on all these other CEOs, the impact he had on business school curriculums, on the boards of directors, not only at GE but it all these other companies is just unparalleled, and I think will remain unmatched for a really long time. So, I say he is why I wrote the book.”

Perhaps not really to celebrate but to debunk.

The date: Wednesday, December 21, 2022
The time: Noon.
The place: The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South.


Maggie Haberman: Silurians’ Taylor Swift, Trump’s Nemesis

By David A. Andelman


“For this crowd, you are our Taylor Swift, our number one rock star,” Silurians president Joe Berger proclaimed at the November 16 lunch featuring Maggie Haberman, chronicler of Donald Trump and all his peccadillos.

From the get-go at this memorable luncheon, with the largest in-person turnout since the onset of covid, Maggie was clear: “I try to stick to what I know.” And for 58 riveting minutes under the probing questions of former Silurians president Allan Dodds Frank, she unveiled some of her deepest secrets about a Donald Trump she has come to know more deeply than perhaps any other journalist today.

“He refers to us all as the enemy of the people,” Maggie observed. “One of my fondest memories of covering that White House was sitting in the Oval Office with my colleague Peter Baker and our publisher A.G. Sulzberger sitting across the Resolute desk from Trump, saying directly to Trump, ‘Your language about enemy of the people is enabling despots around the globe to engage in free press crackdowns.’ And Trump just kept responding saying, ‘I think I’m entitled to a good story from my paper.’ [That’s] how he views The Times, which is what his thing with me is about. He is uniquely obsessed with the paper, and I’m just the person who covers him more often than others.”

Which helps explain why Trump was so deeply unhappy about at least some of her reporting especially in her remarkable book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. “He’s been extremely angry at various aspects of the book including beginning with reporting from February 2022 that he had been flushing documents down the toilet in the White House,” which helps to explain, Maggie, says, why “I haven’t talked to Donald Trump since I interviewed him in September 2021.

And this despite the fact that she’s had access to his succession of cell phone numbers: “He has a different cell phone number now than he used to, because it changed in the White House. And there’s been lots written about his issues with cell phone use that his staff had to spend a lot of time tamping down. It’s just that it always seemed like it was a joke because so much of it ends up seeming, like it’s a running laugh track with him, but it’s not funny. Someone gave me his cell phone number, I’m not going to say who, and then someone gave me his new cell phone number.”

And then there are Donald Trump’s friends—if you could ever say he’s actually had any. As Maggie put it when the topic of Rudy Giuliani came up—a subject very close to many Silurians who’ve covered one or the other or both in the course of their careers. “They have a very transactional relationship, they were not friends,” she began. “This whole line that they were pals going back to New York, and Giuliani was a prosecutor and Trump was in a habit of trying to cultivate prosecutors for obvious reasons.” Then there was the money. “In 1988, Giuliani’s office got a tip about potential money laundering at Trump Tower. They looked into it, dropped it fairly quickly. There’s been claims that there might have been other reasons, which is that Giuliani wanted to have Trump as a fundraiser when Giuliani was about to be mayor. And this basically set the tone, I think, for this relationship.”

Inevitably, of course, there is the question of what the world, even journalists, all too often simply miss about Trump in their dealings with or writing about him. “He has only a handful of moves,” Maggie said thoughtfully. “Everything is flat and the same and devoid of context—describing Meade Esposito as ruling with an iron fist, the same language that he uses to describe Xi Jinping. Everything is the same, and the context doesn’t matter. Donald Trump is the same in every single context. A letter from a notorious dictator written to a sitting president is the same as trading with Page Six to get them not to write a story about his making Marla Maples return two gold Lexuses—and instead giving them the fact that he was divorcing her, which is also in the book if you want to read about it. That’s the part that really gets missed about him.”

But perhaps the single most important observation, that she tossed off almost as an aside, was a simple answer to what could be a most complex question: on what is Donald Trump most perceptive? “What he’s very perceptive about,” Maggie answered quickly, “is the darkness in human behavior.”

The next question allowed her to elaborate. “Do you think Donald Trump understood the just-below-the-surface racism of many Americans?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Better than other people?”

“I think he was more willing to capitalize on it than other people.” It won’t end. “He has normalized so much behavior that had been relegated to the fringes of our politics,” she continued. “Over the course of decades, after the Civil Rights era, and after the 1970s and 80s, he is just sort of frozen in time in 1980s New York City. I write in the book that the only two politicians I ever heard publicly use the phrase ‘The Blacks’ were Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo. He has a certain mindset. He is openly race-baiting Mitch McConnell’s wife, who was born in Taiwan. He described Governor Glenn Youngkin’s name as sounding Chinese on his social media website the other day. This is not going to a good place and to that end, just to close that thought, his chief policy advisor, Stephen Miller, has been just making increasingly overtly racist, appeals on Twitter. We got one of his mailers at our house in Brooklyn which was pretty striking, and it was all about anti-white and anti-Asian bias, and there will be more of that.”

But that’s only a part of his appeal to the nation, Maggie believes: “One of the things that was very hard for people around the country, when you would try having a discussion with them about ‘he’s not actually as rich as he says he is,’ well, he’s richer than 99% of the country. Because they can see Trump Tower, because they watch The Apprentice, and they thought it was real. Now he has been president, that’s pretty real. They all want a piece of Trump…that’s generally how he sells himself.”

Then there’s a base reality of the anger out there in America. “Why Trump won the presidency? I think that voters in red states who voted for Donald Trump wanted a quote unquote fighter and they wanted somebody who was voicing a level of anger, that a lot of them had in their lives, and Donald Trump came into political being during an enormous era of mistrust in this country, and he fueled it, he capitalized on it.”

So, what’s more important—fame or money? “He is a child of privilege who always had money and who always believed there was going to be a [safety] net there. What he didn’t have was fame. His father couldn’t give him fame. His father could give him connections, his father could give him loans, his father could co-sign agreements with banks and with landholders, but fame was something totally different.”

As for what’s next? Well, we might even have Maggie around to let us know, though she insists “at the moment I’m planning on doing what the paper asks me to do, which is be part of its politics coverage and that will include Donald Trump. But I will not cover him hour to hour the way that I did for the previous years.”

And indeed, there may be quite a lot to cover for a very long time. “The story of this book is about people writing Donald Trump’s obit, over and over and over, and he just finds a way to come back, and the things that matter to us in this room, you know, many of us anyway, do not necessarily matter to the people who cast the votes. He is still really strong. We will know more in the coming days, we will know how his fundraising going. Are donors fleeing, does he have any major donors left? Can he really get a campaign off the ground? Will he get indicted? We don’t know. But absent that, I would not write him off.”

Either way, we now have an absolutely indispensable guidebook to the land of Trump: Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America from our own Maggie Haberman.


MTA Chair Janno Lieber Discussed the Future of Subways and Commuter Lines on October 19

By David A. Andelman

Mass transit “for us, is like air and water,” said John (“Janno”) Lieber. By “us” he meant, of course, we New Yorkers, including journalists who grew up with the city’s subways and buses as the lifeblood that took us to stories and back to our newsrooms, then home again at night. “I grew up in New York in the 1970s, when much of New York seemed not to be working,” Lieber began. He paused, flashed a winning gap-toothed grin, then added, “We’ve got a long way to go but know how far we have come already.”

In the hour he spent with us Silurians for lunch at the National Arts Club on October 19, Lieber affirmed “we need more transit not less.” But above all, though he just took office this past January, “We set our road back in the 2017 summer from hell, when the system stopped functioning.” And then he began detailing just what Janno Lieber’s MTA has managed to accomplish: a new entrance to Penn Station that really looks like a subway entrance—“twice as wide, 10 feet higher.” Then there are the 15 newly handicapped accessible stations in a year and a half, “the East Side access project we’ll get done this year—a genuine regional rail system that you can ride from Long Island to Dutchess County.” In terms of security, the system has gone from 3-4,000 cameras to 10,000 cameras. “Today,” Lieber asserted, “if you do crime in the subway system, you will get caught.”

The MTA is also making real progress, he said, on the Omni system that will replace today’s Metro card in as revolutionary a fashion as the paper Metro card replaced the old token of my youth. (I found one in an old coat pocket just the other day—imagine!) But, he conceded, “we’re fighting with banks over the Omni system and how much banks will charge.”

As it happens, back in 1979 to 1980, another epiphanal moment for the MTA, newly back from two fraught stints in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, I was the transportation reporter for The New York Times. Richard Ravitch, later New York’s lieutenant governor, had just been installed in the job Lieber now occupies. The language of the two men, the challenges they had to confront, the resources that were all too absent, could have been nearly interchangeable. Both inherited a system that, as Lieber told us, was a product of the Robert Moses era “when they undervalued mass transit.” But in the respective ages of Ravitch and Lieber there were similar problems of lack of resources and other spiraling troubles. With one vast, yawning difference: Richard Ravitch never found his city plunged into a pandemic.

Now, even as New York begins to emerge from COVID, ridership is still barely 60 percent to 65 percent of a comparable week in the pre-COVID era. Wall Street is still functioning at barely a 50 percent run-rate. Most of the riders who do patronize the city’s subways “are essential workers. They’re coming from outer borough neighborhoods, communities of color, disadvantaged communities.” In Manhattan, “we’re waiting for white collar office workers to come back.” Weekends are still a bright spot at 90 percent of the pre-COVID passenger load. Much of that is tourism, of which Lieber admits the city could still use much more.

And at its foundation, a top problem for Lieber, as it was for Ravitch back in my days, remains money. “We’re $1.8 billion per year in revenue down from pre-COVID,” he said. “What I tell Albany is that cutting services is not the way to play. That’s not good for any of us.” Continuing that theme, Lieber observed, “We need a funding plan that assures mass transit will be able to be provided at the right level. We should not have total reliance on the fare box. So we’re funding the system on the backs of the riders, and we need to deal with that.”

Much of this was language I heard repeatedly from Ravitch, who was driven by this back in 1979 to 1980. I still recall vividly the call I had from him late one evening in the fall of 1980 when I had put in my notice and was leaving The Times for CBS News. He pleaded with me to let him come to my very small apartment. It was late, my two-year-old son was asleep, my wife furious that I would entertain such a visit. But Ravitch could be persuasive, even when I impressed on him that I was moving to Paris for CBS and would never again be reporting on him. For two hours, he sat in my living room, pouring out his heart—eventually I came to believe, as much if not more for his benefit than for mine—explaining that everything he did, all he asked, was for the people of the MTA region.

I was almost persuaded. As I was, after listening to Janno Lieber more than 40 years later.


Silurians 2022 Dennis Duggan Prize

NEWMARK JOURNALISM STUDENT
CANDACE PEDRAZA
WINS 2022 DENNIS DUGGAN PRIZE

by Jack Deacy

Candace Pedraza

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.


First Silurians Luncheon of the Season, Sept. 21

by Joe Berger, President

Ken Auletta, masterful journalist, will talk about his new book on Harvey Weinstein and the Hollywood and media culture that enabled him, at the season’s first Silurians lunch, Sept. 21.

Ken Auletta, it can be said without exaggeration, is the nation’s media maven. This son of Coney Island has written 13 books, including five best sellers, that together with his Annals of Communications columns for The New Yorker magazine have charted the revolutions in the newspaper, television, film, Internet and advertising industries and what the upheaval reveals about our country and ourselves. He has profiled Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Sheryl Sandberg, and John Malone as well as Facebook, Google. AOL Time Warner, and the New York Times. Columbia Journalism Review concluded, “no other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta.”

His latest book, published in July, is Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein And The Culture of Silence. It is the story of an unsavory but devilishly complex figure who behaved like a monster while also giving birth to acclaimed movies like Pulp Fiction, The Crying Game, The King’s Speech, Shakespeare in Love and The Artist. Hollywood Ending uncovers what made Weinstein a talented ogre and how a culture that prioritized fame and box office success enabled and shielded his numerous sexual assaults and outright rapes. Those Silurians who were here when Ronan Farrow spoke about Weinstein will be surprised how fresh and riveting is Auletta’s book. He provides the personal, psychological and economic context for Weinstein’s crimes. And he vividly opens a window on the intrigue, rationalization and valor that took place within the media world as Weinstein, armed with a battery of prominent lawyers and a firm of former Mossad agents, tried to squelch the assault story and courageous reporters and editors kept burrowing. It is a measure of the respect with which Auletta is held that among the subjects who sat for interviews with him were the Weinstein brothers. No wonder Auletta has won numerous journalism honors, including a lifetime achievement award from the Silurians.

The date: Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022
The time: Noon.
The place: The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South.


 

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We’ve had a great run of speakers at recent events.  If you were unable to attend, you can now see what you missed.  If you did attend, here are encore presentations for you to enjoy.  Please SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel.

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Our New Address

Please be aware that as of May 25, 2022, the Silurians Press Club has a new address:

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P.O. Box 2045
Grand Central Station
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Silurian Calendar

Dates for the 2023 season. All events, except those noted to be otherwise, fall on the third Wednesday of the month at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South. Further details will be announced as they become known.

Dinner:
June 21:  Dinner honoring the Silurians 2023 EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM AWARD winners.

Join The Silurians Press Club!

Veteran journalists. Attend luncheons talks with great speakers.  For further info click here.

Click to view the November 2022 issue of Silurian News
Click here to view previous issues.

New Members

Dan Cryer
Angela Dodson
Kyle Good
Steven Greenhouse
Sylvia Helm
Kenneth Jones
Judy Kuriansky,
Susan Lacy
Joanne Mattera
Sheryl McCarthy
Melvin McCray
Jacklyn Monk
Sandra Peddie
Garry Pierre-Pierre
Terry Pristin
Dean Warren Schomburg
Beverly Solochek
Mark Stamey
Sandra Stevenson
Robert E. Sullivan
Jeffrey Tannenbaum

Obits

Grace O’Connor
Jim Lynn
Martin J. Steadman
Joseph J. Vecchione
Lawrence Malkin
Pat Fenton
Herbert Hadad
Judith Hole
Judith Bender
Rosalind Massow
Charles Strum
Jane H. Furse
Carl Spielvogel
Mike Santangelo
William Condie
Jack Schwartz
Stephen Stoneburn
Ray Brady

Member News

David Andelman has started a (free) Substack column Andelman Unleashed, so just click to subscribe. Also… On Dec 1 David was awarded France’s highest honor – the rank of chevalier (knight) of the Legion d’Honneur, for “a lifelong commitment to promoting better understanding between the people of France and the US”. (Learn more on page 8 of the Jan 2020 Silurian News.)


More news about Bill Diehl: Bill has a new book out, titled “50 Years of Celebrity Chatter: (Or The Time I Interviewed a Porn Star Naked,” in which he recounts his experiences interviewing various show-biz types during his years at ABC Radio Network and before that at WNEW. Besides the porn star Marilyn Chambers, of “Behind the Green Door” fame (she was naked, he wasn’t), he provides insights and anecdotes about a wide range of actors, including Tom Hanks, Bernadette Peters, Robin Williams, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Tony Curtiss and Mel Brooks. And there are photographs, in both the paperback and Kindle versions of the book, available on Amazon. David Andelman calls it “truly a great, fun ‘read.’ I commend it to all.”


Bill Diehl, a veteran radio broadcaster who spent much of his career with ABC covering entertainment industry personalities, is himself the subject of a new podcast about his career of almost five decades. He was interviewed by Jordan Rich, a popular Boston podcaster. Here is the link to the podcast: https://player.blubrry.com/id/76975387/.
Diehl, a long-time member of the Silurians’ Board of Governors, is the author of the 2017 memoir “Stay Tuned: My Life Behind the Mic.” It is available on Amazon. He is currently working on his second book, “Who Said That?” A follow-up to “Stay Tuned,” it is expected to be ready for publication in the fall.


Like many of us, Stephen B. Shepard has had some second thoughts. Unlike many of us, he’s written them down and put them in a new book, a memoir called — aptly — “Second Thoughts.” It’s available on Amazon either as a paperback or a Kindle version. Shepard started rethinking his life when he turned 80 a couple of years ago, and felt that “retrospection” might yield new understanding about such subjects as the family of his boyhood; the profound changes in journalism since he was a youngster; the Jewishness he once rejected; a greater appreciation that can come with re-reading “fiction that matters”; and a closer look at the meaning of male friendship. Shepard, former editor of BusinessWeek magazine, is the founding dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, now known as the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Small parts of “Second Thoughts” have appeared in his two earlier books, “Deadlines and Disruptions” and “A Literary Journey to Jewish Identity.”


Just in time for the start of a new year, former Silurians president David A. Andelman has published his latest book, “A Red Line in the Sand,” now available on Amazon. A seasoned commentator who contributes frequently to CNN Opinion on global affairs and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News, Andelman combines history and global politics to help his readers better understand the exploding number of military, political, and diplomatic crises around the globe. Using original documentary research, previously classified material, interviews with key players, and reportage from more than 80 countries across five decades to help understand the growth, the successes and frequent failures that have shaped our world today. A former president of the Overseas Press Club and, most recently, the Silurians Press Club, Andelman has a long and renowned record that spans print and broadcast media as fluidly as it does national borders. Over the course of his career, he has traveled through and reported from more than 85 countries. A graduate of Harvard University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he is a Visiting Scholar at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and director of The Red Lines Project, a member of the Board of Contributors of USA Today, and a “Voices” columnist for CNN Opinion.
He is also the author of “The Peacemakers” and “A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today” and the co-author of “The Fourth World War.”

Around the Web

For a list of websites and blogs of special interests to journalists
click here.

Silurians Member Blogs

  • Andelman Unleashed
  • Arlene's Scratch Paper: a blog of her writing, photography and random musings by Arlene Schulman
  • Novelist Online Onpaper by Kenneth Crowe
  • PollyTalk From New York by Polly Guerin
  • The Media Beat – a multimedia commentary by David Tereshchuk

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