An In-Person Reunion After Two Years of Zoom and a Glorious Tribute to Photojournalist Chester Higgins Jr., Winner of the Silurians Lifetime Achievement Award

By Aileen Jacobson

Chester Higgins Jr.

For the first time in two years Silurians got to see each other in person, and for the first time ever we honored a photojournalist with our Lifetime Achievement Award during the gala on March 24 at the National Arts Club.

Chester Higgins Jr. spent 39 of his 75 years as a staff photographer for the New York Times and also has published several books of photography, most recently Sacred Nile, a splendid volume. At the gala, he received numerous accolades, many pointing out that he transformed the way that people look at and think about Black people—and every other person.

“Chester has always been a man on a spiritual mission, striving to find the humanity, the dignity and the grace in everyone,” said Joseph Berger, who worked with him at the Times for many years and is now first vice-president of the Silurians.

“He changed the newspaper,” said Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, the first Black person in that job. Unlike some other journalists who think of themselves that way, Baquet said, Higgins “actually is an artist.” Baquet cited a joyous photo Higgins took of Amiri Baraka jitterbugging with Maya Angelou at an event honoring Langston Hughes at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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Extra! Extra! Special March 30 Zoom Program on Ukraine Featuring Mikhail Zygar, Russian Writer and James Brooke, American Ukraine Expert

By Michael Serrill

I am pleased to announce that the Silurians Press Club has scheduled a special Zoom program on Wednesday, March 30 to discuss the most important global event in decades—the war between Russia and Ukraine. To lead the discussion, we have invited two men who have intimate knowledge of both combatants and the events that led to the current conflict.

Mikhail Zygar                                                 James Brooke

Mikhail Zygar is a Russian writer and filmmaker and the author of an open letter and petition opposing the invasion.  “We do not believe that an independent Ukraine poses a threat to Russia or any other state,” the letter says. “We do not believe Vladimir Putin’s claims that the Ukrainian people are under the rule of ‘Nazis’ and need to be ‘liberated.’ We demand an end to this war.” The letter had attracted 1 million signatures when Zygar was warned that he was about to be arrested and should take the next flight out of Russia. He will speak to us from Berlin.

James Brooke spent 24 years reporting from a variety of locations for The New York Times. He was Moscow bureau chief for the Voice of America and then Bloomberg News before starting an English-language business newspaper in Ukraine. He returned to the U.S. last year and will speak to us from his home in the Berkshires.

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

By David Margolick

Edward Sorel

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.
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A Life Well and Truly Lived: With Anecdotes and Loving Words, Steven V. Roberts Paid Tribute to His Wife and Distinguished Fellow Journalist Cokie Roberts at the January Meeting

By David A. Andelman

Steve Roberts

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.”

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

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.”

Peter Bergen

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.”

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

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!

Michael Wolff

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.

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The Tale of Merriman “Smitty” Smith, Known as “the Greatest Wire Reporter Ever,” as Told by Bill Sanderson at the October 20 Meeting

by Aileen Jacobson

Bill Sanderson

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.

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

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 (and available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv2gVaBsSds) 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.

Silurian Contingency Fund: Help
Is Available for Journalists in Need

For more than 60 years, the Silurian Contingency Fund has been providing grants to New York metropolitan area journalists facing financial hardship. All present and former New York City journalists who can demonstrate need are eligible for grants from the fund. Members of the Silurians Press Club will be given priority.

All transactions — including the identities of the recipients — are strictly confidential and known only to the directors of the fund, which operates independently from the Silurians Press Club. The fund, whose formal name is the George E. Sokolsky Silurian Contingency Fund after its first chairman, is administered by a four-person Board of Directors, all members of the Silurians. Steven Marcus is president. The other directors are Mark Liff, Kevin Noblet and Michael Serrill, who as president of the Silurians Press Club serves in an ex-officio capacity. The board members evaluate applications for grants and determine eligibility and the amount of the grants.

Grants have historically ranged up to $1,000. To apply, contact Steven Marcus at steven.b.marcus@gmail.com.

If you want to contribute to the fund, also contact Steve. The fund is certified by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501 (c) (3) charity, so contributions are tax deductible. Contributions should be made payable to the George E. Sokolsky Silurian Contingency Fund and sent to Steve at 160 West 96th St., Apt. 15M, New York, NY 10025.

Marty Baron Covers Hollywood, the Washington Post, Trump, Bezos and Other Topics During his May 19 Silurians Talk

by David Margolick

Marty Baron

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.
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