History > 2006 > USA > Journalism, media (IV-VI)

Op-Ed Contributors

What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran

December 22, 2006
The New York Times
By FLYNT LEVERETT and HILLARY MANN

Washington

HERE is the redacted version of a draft Op-Ed article we wrote for The Times, as blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House.

Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no classified material. These passages go into aspects of American-Iranian relations during the Bush administration’s first term that have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy to Afghanistan, James Dobbins.

These aspects have been extensively reported in the news media, and one of us, Mr. Leverett, has written about them in The Times and other publications with the explicit permission of the review board. We provided the following citations to the board to demonstrate that all of the material the White House objected to is already in the public domain. Unfortunately, to make sense of much of our Op-Ed article, readers will have to read the citations for themselves. (See links at left.)

The decisions of the C.I.A. and the White House took us by surprise. Since leaving government service three and a half years ago, Mr. Leverett has put more than 20 articles through the C.I.A.’s prepublication review process and the Publication Review Board has never changed a word or asked the White House for permission to clear these articles.

What’s more, we have spent a collective 20 years serving our country as career civil servants in national security, for both Republican and Democratic administrations. We know firsthand the importance of protecting sensitive information. But we also know the importance of shared knowledge. In the entrance to the C.I.A.’s headquarters the words of the Gospel of John are inscribed, “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”

National security must be above politics. In a democracy, transparency in government has to be honored and protected. To classify information for reasons other than the safety and security of the United States and its interests is a violation of these principles. It is for this reason that we will continue to press for the release of the article without the material deleted.

Flynt Leverett is a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Hillary Mann, a former Foreign Service officer, participated in the United States discussions with Iran from 2001 to 2003.

    What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran, NYT, 22.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/22/opinion/22precede.html

Op-Ed Contributors

Redacted Version of Original Op-Ed

December 22, 2006
The New York Times
By FLYNT LEVERETT and HILLARY MANN

The Iraq Study Group has added its voice to a burgeoning chorus of commentators, politicians, and former officials calling for a limited, tactical dialogue with Iran regarding Iraq. The Bush administration has indicated a conditional willingness to pursue a similarly compartmented dialogue with Tehran over Iran’s nuclear activities.

Unfortunately, advocates of limited engagement — either for short-term gains on specific issues or to “test” Iran regarding broader rapprochement — do not seem to understand the 20-year history of United States-Iranian cooperation on discrete issues or appreciate the impact of that history on Iran’s strategic outlook. In the current regional context, issue-specific engagement with Iran is bound to fail. The only diplomatic approach that might succeed is a comprehensive one aimed at a “grand bargain” between the United States and the Islamic Republic.

Since the 1980s, cooperation with Iran on specific issues has been tried by successive administrations, but United States policymakers have consistently allowed domestic politics or other foreign policy interests to torpedo such cooperation and any chance for a broader opening. The Reagan administration’s engagement with Iran to secure the release of American hostages in Lebanon came to grief in the Iran-contra scandal. The first Bush administration resumed contacts with Tehran to secure release of the last American hostages in Lebanon, but postponed pursuit of broader rapprochement until after the 1992 presidential election.

In 1994, the Clinton administration acquiesced to the shipment of Iranian arms to Bosnian Muslims, but the leak of this activity in 1996 and criticism from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Robert Dole shut down possibilities for further United States-Iranian cooperation for several years.

These episodes reinforced already considerable suspicion among Iranian leaders about United States intentions toward the Islamic Republic. But, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, senior Iranian diplomats told us that Tehran believed it had a historic opportunity to improve relations with Washington. Iranian leaders offered to help the United States in responding to the attacks without making that help contingent on changes in America’s Iran policy — a condition stipulated in the late 1990s when Tehran rejected the Clinton administration’s offer of dialogue — calculating that cooperation would ultimately prompt fundamental shifts in United States policy.

The argument that Iran helped America in Afghanistan because it was in Tehran’s interest to get rid of the Taliban is misplaced. Iran could have let America remove the Taliban without getting its own hands dirty, as it remained neutral during the 1991 gulf war. Tehran cooperated with United States efforts in Afghanistan primarily because it wanted a better relationship with Washington.

But Tehran was profoundly disappointed with the United States response. After the 9/11 attacks, xxx xxx xx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xx set the stage for a November 2001 meeting between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the foreign ministers of Afghanistan’s six neighbors and Russia. xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxx xxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx Iran went along, working with the United States to eliminate the Taliban and establish a post-Taliban political order in Afghanistan.

In December 2001, xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx x Tehran to keep Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the brutal pro-Al Qaeda warlord, from returning to Afghanistan to lead jihadist resistance there. xxxxx xxxxxxx so long as the Bush administration did not criticize it for harboring terrorists. But, in his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush did just that in labeling Iran part of the “axis of evil.” Unsurprisingly, Mr. Hekmatyar managed to leave Iran in short order after the speech. xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxx the Islamic Republic could not be seen to be harboring terrorists.

xxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxx xxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxxx This demonstrated to Afghan warlords that they could not play America and Iran off one another and prompted Tehran to deport hundreds of suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives who had fled Afghanistan.

Those who argue that Iran did not cause Iraq’s problems and therefore can be of only limited help in dealing with Iraq’s current instability must also acknowledge that Iran did not “cause” Afghanistan’s deterioration into a terrorist-harboring failed state. But, when America and Iran worked together, Afghanistan was much more stable than it is today, Al Qaeda was on the run, the Islamic Republic’s Hezbollah protégé was comparatively restrained, and Tehran was not spinning centrifuges. Still, the Bush administration conveyed no interest in building on these positive trends.

xxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx x xxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxxx xxx xxxxxx xx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxx xxxxxxxx x xx x x xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xx xxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxx xx

From an Iranian perspective, this record shows that Washington will take what it can get from talking to Iran on specific issues but is not prepared for real rapprochement. Yet American proponents of limited engagement anticipate that Tehran will play this fruitless game once more — even after numerous statements by senior administration figures targeting the Islamic Republic for prospective “regime change” and by President Bush himself that attacking Iran’s nuclear and national security infrastructure is “on the table.”

Our experience dealing with xxxx xxxx Iranian diplomats over Afghanistan and in more recent private conversations in Europe and elsewhere convince us that Iran will not go down such a dead-end road again. Iran will not help the United States in Iraq because it wants to avoid chaos there; Tehran is well positioned to defend its interests in Iraq unilaterally as America flounders. Similarly, Iran will not accept strategically meaningful limits on its nuclear capabilities for a package of economic and technological goodies.

Iran will only cooperate with the United States, whether in Iraq or on the nuclear issue, as part of a broader rapprochement addressing its core security concerns. This requires extension of a United States security guarantee — effectively, an American commitment not to use force to change the borders or form of government of the Islamic Republic — bolstered by the prospect of lifting United States unilateral sanctions and normalizing bilateral relations. This is something no United States administration has ever offered, and that the Bush administration has explicitly refused to consider.

Indeed, no administration would be able to provide a security guarantee unless United States concerns about Iran’s nuclear activities, regional role and support for terrorist organizations were definitively addressed. That is why, at this juncture, resolving any of the significant bilateral differences between the United States and Iran inevitably requires resolving all of them. Implementing the reciprocal commitments entailed in a “grand bargain” would almost certainly play out over time and in phases, but all of the commitments would be agreed up front as a package, so that both sides would know what they were getting.

Unfortunately, the window for pursuing a comprehensive settlement with Iran will not be open indefinitely. The Iranian leadership is more radicalized today, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, than it was three years ago, and could become more radicalized in the future, depending on who ultimately succeeds Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as supreme leader. If President Bush does not move decisively toward strategic engagement with Tehran during his remaining two years in office, his successor will not have the same opportunities that he will have so blithely squandered.

    Redacted Version of Original Op-Ed, NYT, 22.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/22/opinion/22leverett.html

Times Seeks to Bar Review of Phone Data

November 25, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

The New York Times asked the Supreme Court yesterday to bar a federal prosecutor from reviewing the phone records of two of its reporters. The records, lawyers for The Times said, would allow the government to learn the identities of many of the reporters’ confidential sources.

The case arose from a Chicago grand jury’s investigation into who told the two reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, about actions the government was planning to take in 2001 against two Islamic charities. The United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, sought the reporters’ records directly from their phone companies, and The Times filed suit to stop him.

In August, a divided three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled in favor of Mr. Fitzgerald, saying the reporters were not entitled to shield their sources. The needs of law enforcement, the majority said, outweighed any protections the reporters might have in the First Amendment or other areas of law.

Ms. Miller left the paper last year after spending 85 days in jail in connection with a separate leak investigation, also supervised by Mr. Fitzgerald.

The paper’s filing yesterday was a limited one, seeking an order from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg staying the appeals court decision until the Supreme Court has an opportunity to decide whether to hear the case. The deadline for seeking review of the appeals court’s decision is in January, but The Times said it would move faster.

In a letter filed in response to yesterday’s application, the Justice Department said it “desires to review the records in question as expeditiously as possible” but agreed not to do so until Wednesday. Yesterday afternoon, the court ordered the government to submit a formal response to the stay application by today at 4 p.m.

The press has been on a losing streak of late in the federal courts, with several decisions refusing to recognize protection for confidential sources. The Supreme Court has not weighed in on the question since 1972.

Floyd Abrams, a lawyer for The Times, said the case now before the court could give it an opportunity to clarify the law.

“If the government is permitted to proceed to scrutinize the telephone records of The New York Times and its journalists,” Mr. Abrams said, “it will be in a position to identify literally scores of confidential sources, thus imperiling both the ability of the press to gather the news and of the public to learn it.”

    Times Seeks to Bar Review of Phone Data, NYT, 25.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/us/25paper.html

Gerald M. Boyd, Who Broke Barriers as an Editor at The Times, Dies at 56

November 24, 2006
The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER

Gerald M. Boyd, who began work as a teenage grocery bagger in St. Louis and rose to become managing editor of The New York Times, then was forced to resign in a newsroom revolt after a young reporter was exposed as a fabricator, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 56 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his wife, Robin Stone. Mr. Boyd had kept his illness from most friends and colleagues.

Mr. Boyd’s career, which took him from the end of the civil rights era to the beginning of the Internet era, was built on competitiveness and a determination to get the story right. As he rose in prominence, he became a beacon of possibility for aspiring black journalists.

Giving a lecture in honor of one of his early editors in St. Louis a few years ago, he told the hometown audience, “Throughout my life I have enjoyed both the blessing and the burden of being the first black this and the first black that, and like many minorities and women who succeed, I’ve often felt alone.”

He was, in fact, the first black journalist to serve in many of the jobs he held at The Times, including metropolitan editor and managing editor. At 28, he was also the youngest journalist chosen for a prestigious Nieman fellowship at Harvard.

“He really did have a drive,” said Tom Morgan, a classmate at the University of Missouri and later a colleague at The New York Times. “Most people spend their college years trying to figure out what to do. Gerald always knew. There was no doubt.”

After covering the first Bush administration for The Times, Mr. Boyd was elevated to the editing ranks by Max Frankel, The Times’s executive editor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was given a variety of editing responsibilities before being named metropolitan editor.

Mr. Boyd went on to lead coverage that won the newspaper three Pulitzers: for articles about the first World Trade Center bombing, for a series on children of poverty, and for a series on the complexities of race relations in the United States. He also shared the leadership of The Times during the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, coverage that earned six Pulitzer prizes.

During his steady advance up management ranks in the 1990s, he put some colleagues off with his occasional irascibility and brusqueness. But he won the respect of many others for his determination to beat the competition, both by publishing scoops and by providing comprehensive coverage.

“Gerald was always very demanding,” Mr. Morgan said. “He just had very definite ideas about how he thought things should be, and how they related to him. He always wanted to control things.”

The reversal of Mr. Boyd’s fortunes came in June 2003, when he and Howell Raines, the paper’s executive editor, resigned after revelations of fabrications and plagiarism by a young reporter, Jayson Blair, ignited a firestorm of newsroom criticism against their management.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement: “Gerald was a newsman. He knew how to mobilize a reporting team and surround a story so that nothing important was missed. He knew how to motivate and inspire.

“And, tough and demanding as he could be, he had a huge heart. He left the paper under sad circumstances, but despite all of that he left behind a great reservoir of respect and affection.”

George Curry, a colleague of Mr. Boyd’s at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the 1970s, said, “When Gerald came out of college he always talked about being the editor of The New York Times. That was his single most important goal. To get the position and have it blow up was extremely disappointing. It was what he always wanted to do.”

Gerald Michael Boyd was born in St. Louis in 1950; his mother, who had sickle cell anemia, died when he was a small child. His father, a delivery truck driver and an alcoholic, moved to New York and played little role in his childhood.

Mr. Boyd and his older brother, Gary, were raised by their paternal grandmother, who was also raising their two cousins. Their younger sister, Ruth, was raised by their maternal grandmother in California.

In his unpublished memoir, he wrote, “I learned to survive by learning to rely on no one other than myself. Over time, I would travel further and rise further than I could ever have imagined as a child growing up poor in St. Louis. I would become as familiar with the powerful as I had always been with the powerless.”

Throughout high school, Mr. Boyd worked up to 40 hours a week after school and on weekends at Cooper’s, a grocery in his west St. Louis neighborhood.

In his 2000 speech in St. Louis, Mr. Boyd said he understood why people described him as having overcome poverty, but added, “I was rich in the ways that matter. You see, I had a grandmother who devoted her life to keeping me fed and clothed, even when it meant getting up before dawn to take care of me and three other boys. A strong-willed woman who led by example.”

He also had a newspaper-reading aunt who instilled the journalism bug, he said, and the support of his brother and cousins.

Mr. Boyd, whose work schedule prevented him from playing sports at Soldan High School, found time to write for the school newspaper and was encouraged by a teacher to apply for a scholarship for aspiring black journalists sponsored by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“In his senior year he did apply, and to his surprise he won a full ride to the University of Missouri at Columbia, with a guaranteed job to follow at The Post-Dispatch,” Mr. Boyd’s brother, Gary Boyd, said.

Not long after he arrived at the university, he met Mr. Morgan.

“There weren’t very many black people on campus, period,” Mr. Morgan said. The two were friends, then colleagues on Blackout, a newspaper for black students that Mr. Boyd founded.

“He always had a drive to run a newspaper,” Mr. Morgan said. “That was his love.”

Mr. Boyd joined The Post-Dispatch after graduation, in 1973. His first story, he said during the 2000 speech, was about “owls mysteriously attacking city residents,” and it appeared on the front page, at least in the first edition. He was soon assigned to cover City Hall.

Mr. Curry, his colleague at The Post-Dispatch, added: “Gerald’s always been very aggressive — breathing, eating and sleeping journalism. He was like that coming out of school.”

He continued: “I don’t think it would cross Gerald’s mind that he would not beat someone competing against him. That’s part of his DNA.”

Together, Mr. Curry and Mr. Boyd founded the Greater St. Louis Association of Black Journalists in 1977, and one day, sitting in the Original, a soul food restaurant near City Hall, the two men sketched out a program to train black high school students in the basics of the business. Alumni of the program have gone on to organizations like The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Curry said.

Mr. Boyd joined The Post-Dispatch’s Washington bureau in 1978 and covered the 1980 presidential campaign and then Ronald Reagan’s White House.

In 1983, he joined The Times’s Washington bureau and its team of political reporters. Mr. Boyd covered Vice President George H. W. Bush during the 1984 campaign and continued to cover the White House during the Iran-contra scandal.

He then covered the 1988 presidential campaign, focusing on Vice President Bush’s pursuit of the presidency. After the election, Mr. Boyd wrote about the new administration, its appointees and its plans and programs.

The Times’s executive editor at the time, Mr. Frankel, discussed moving Mr. Boyd into an editing position. Mr. Frankel told Mr. Boyd that he would be put on a fast track — and that, like Jackie Robinson, he would face pressure and skepticism about his talents.

“I said if he could withstand the raised eyebrows and whatever pressures might attach to my putting him on the fast track, I would love to give him that opportunity,” Mr. Frankel said.

The decision to promote Mr. Boyd, who first worked as a special assistant to the managing editor as he toured the desks, set him on a path to the top ranks of the newsroom at The Times.

Mr. Boyd’s marriages to Sheila Rule, a hometown neighbor and later a colleague at The Times, and to Jacqueline Adams, a newscaster, ended in divorce. He met Robin Stone, a journalist, during a recruiting trip after he joined The Times’s management. They were married in 1996 and had a son, Zachary.

Besides Ms. Stone and their son, he is survived by his brother, Gary, of Gurnee, Ill., and sister, Ruth, of Oakland, Calif.

Mr. Boyd was selected by Mr. Raines to be managing editor in 2001. The following year, the National Association of Black Journalists honored him as its journalist of the year.

In his new post, he continued to be demanding, as he and Mr. Raines were faced almost immediately with the immense task of covering the news events of a generation: the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan.

But the revelation of Jayson Blair’s string of deceptions cut the foundation out from under Mr. Boyd and Mr. Raines. Newsroom complaints about the pair’s management style reached a peak, forcing their resignations.

In the years since his resignation, Mr. Boyd worked as a consultant in journalism and kept an office at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Two of his particular interests — the quality of journalism and race as the most fraught issue in America — were twinned in the summation of his speech in St. Louis in 2000.

“To be different in this society, even a little different, means additional pressures and responsibilities and hardships that really don’t change, no matter how high up you climb,” he said. “And no matter how much progress we’ve made where race and gender are concerned, we’re not close to being where we should be.”

He then concluded: “Many of you know I’ve spent my life trying to be a good journalist. But what matters more to me is whether I’ve been a good man and a decent man.”

    Gerald M. Boyd, Who Broke Barriers as an Editor at The Times, Dies at 56, NYT, 24.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/nyregion/24boyd.html?hp&ex=1164430800&en=453f2b80b75203d5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

'60 Minutes' correspondent Ed Bradley dies at 65

Updated 11/9/2006 10:33 PM ET
USA Today
By Peter Johnson

Ed Bradley, the jazz-loving 60 Minutes correspondent whose race and earring set him apart from his more traditional, white colleagues on the top-rated newsmagazine, died Thursday of leukemia at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, according to CBS News. He was 65.

A man who once described himself as a newsman who could "play all the positions, hit for average and for power," Bradley was perhaps the best-known African-American broadcast journalist in America.

The 2006-07 season marked Bradley's 26th year on 60 Minutes, where his large body of work has been recognized by every major broadcast journalism award, including 19 News Emmys. And he was recently honored with the Lifetime Achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

"He was one of the most natural broadcasters in the business, with the kind of ability that only Walter Cronkite shares. He was that rare," said Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes. "As a reporter, he could do anything and everything. He was like a rock."

"Besides being a great journalist, Ed was a remarkable human being, a wonderful colleague, and a loyal friend," said 60 correspondent Steve Kroft, whose office is next to Bradley's. "I always felt Ed's greatest achievement was the way he led his life. He enjoyed it immensely, as did the people who were lucky enough to have shared it with him. It is a devastating loss."

A fitness buff, Bradley told a reporter in 1992 that he exercised on a Stairmaster and bike and did 1,000 abdominal exercises a day. But in May 2003, Bradley underwent heart bypass surgery, and complications dogged him in later years.

There is no doubt that Bradley was one of America's pioneering black journalists, says Howard University communications professor James Rada.

When Bradley was reporting in the 1960s, there weren't many African-American TV correspondents. "Those who were there were often segregated to covering 'race' stories," said Rada. "But Bradley's ability as an investigative journalist qualified him to cover any newsworthy topic — and he did just that."

Rada said Bradley's "knack for drawing us in while still maintaining enough distance, meant that when he did cover a story where race was at issue, you never got the feeling that it was a 'black' story or that he was 'race-ing' the perspective. I think that objectivity lent a great deal of credibility to a topic that — even today — the media still seem to have problems covering."

Bradley had a knack for putting subjects at ease while asking the tough questions. This was visible whether it was hard news or something on the lighter side, such as covering musicians or entertainers. "Even if you saw him laughing with the subject, he would still ask enough difficult questions that you could tell he hadn't signed on to the subject's fan club," Rada said.

Bradley "brought much more to the table than his status as a pioneering African-American broadcast journalist," said Paul Levinson, a Fordham University communications professor. "He had a unique way of eliciting the truth from difficult and complex interview subjects."

An example, Levinson said, was when Bradley interviewed Bob Dylan for 60 Minutes in 2004. "For nearly half a century, journalists have been trying to elicit something clear, or least comprehensible, from Dylan. Bradley somehow managed to get Dylan talking on point, including explaining when he stopped writing songs with the lyrical intensity of his 1960s' works. Bradley was a true muse for conversation."

Bradley, a Philadelphia native, started out as a teacher after graduation with a B.S. in education from Cheyney (Pa.) State College. He taught in the Philadelphia area and was once an interim principal — while also volunteering and working part time at Philly radio station WDAS. There, he spun records by jazz artists such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Billie Holiday, according to an interview with writer R.J. DeLuke posted at allaboutjazz.com.

Bradley was in Philadelphia when riots broke out during the civil rights era, and began calling in stories about them to the radio station. "I knew I wasn't suited to be a classroom teacher," according to a video interview Bradley gave the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

He arrived early for an interview with Martin Luther King Jr., whom he found in a Philadelphia hotel room in socks and a T-shirt, eating potato salad and collard greens. Before King said a word, Bradley recalled, "I remember being stunned watching this man."

By 1967, he was one of three blacks at WCBS radio in New York; the others were a technician and a janitor. Bradley told Maynard that he was assigned mainly black-related stories until he complained to the assignment editor, "I want to be treated at this station the same way you treat anyone else. If you can't see your way clear to do that, I'll take it up with the news director."

From that point on, his assignments changed.

Bradley joined CBS as a stringer in its Paris bureau in September 1971. A year later, he was transferred to Saigon. He was named a correspondent in April 1973 and shortly thereafter was wounded while on assignment in Cambodia. In March 1975, he volunteered to return to Indochina and covered the fall of Vietnam.

In June 1974 he was assigned to CBS' Washington bureau, where his star rose quickly. He became a White House correspondent, covered Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign and began a long-running stint as floor correspondent for the Democratic and Republican National Conventions starting in 1976 and running through the 1992 campaigns (except for 1984, when he covered the Democrats only).

He became anchor of CBS Sunday Night News in November 1976 and joined 60 Minutes during the 1981-82 season. During the '90s, when networks produced numerous newsmagazines, he anchored another CBS series, Street Stories. His 1992 prison interview with Mike Tyson drew high ratings.

He told The Christian Science Monitor in 1986 he wrestled with the "intrusiveness" of the media, especially when private people are thrust into the spotlight through tragedy. "You've got four networks, two or three wire services, a half-dozen magazines, plus a hundred local television and radio stations so they can say, 'Our reporter talked to the father of ...' "

Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism said Bradley was "a more important figure in broadcast journalism history than most people probably realize in this day and age, when every local newscast seems to feature a person of color. Bradley was not only on camera working in the pantheon of network TV in the 1970s but he was doing so when few journalists of color were on the networks at all."

Bradley, he said, "also brought a youthful spirit, a hipness, and a kind of caring humanity to his TV reporting that was not in fashion at the time. Morley Safer was funny and wry. Mike Wallace was tough. Harry Reasoner, curious and wise. But Bradley would dash into the surf to help the young Vietnamese victimized by pirates. He wore an earring. He could do rock music. He could also be tough. He walked that line, a line many in TV today are wobbling along for ratings. It seemed very natural for him, very genuine."

Rosenstiel said that "as a young person who aspired to be a journalist, he was a hero to me for these qualities, and it had nothing to do with his color. He was just one hell of a journalist, and seemingly a very human and decent guy. He connected those qualities with journalism to me as a young person on the other end of the TV screen. He was the kind of person who made you want to be that when you grew up. I imagine if you asked you would find a lot of people who feel that way."

Twice divorced, Bradley married artist Patricia Blanchet in 2004.

    '60 Minutes' correspondent Ed Bradley dies at 65, NYT, 10.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-11-09-ed-bradley-obit_x.htm

Los Angeles Paper Ousts Top Editor

November 8, 2006
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Dean Baquet, the editor of The Los Angeles Times, who defied orders from his corporate bosses to cut jobs, was forced out of his own job yesterday, shocking the newsroom just as it was gearing up to cover election returns.

He is to leave his post Friday and be succeeded by James O’Shea, the managing editor of The Chicago Tribune, who will start Monday.

Mr. Baquet’s departure follows that of the paper’s publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson, who openly objected to cuts ordered by the Tribune Company in September and was fired last month.

David Hiller, who succeeded Mr. Johnson as publisher, said in a statement yesterday that he had had discussions with Mr. Baquet about staffing levels. While the company maintained its position that further cuts might be necessary, Mr. Baquet still considered them excessive.

“After considerable discussion during the past several weeks,” Mr. Hiller said, “Dean and I concluded that we have significant differences on the future direction of The Times.”

Colleagues of Mr. Baquet said the firing had less to do with a dispute over job cuts than his vocal resistance to them, made plain in a speech last month in New Orleans, in which he encouraged editors at other newspapers to “push back” against owners who wanted to cut newsroom staffs. In fact, when Mr. Hiller addressed the newsroom yesterday, he said he expected no job cuts, at least for the rest of the year, and he told editors it was still possible that any further cuts could be reached through attrition, according to people at the paper.

Mr. Hiller said in an interview later that public debate was not a “fatal problem.” But he added of Mr. Baquet’s speech in New Orleans: “I did not think it was helpful to Dean and me in working through things. My issue was what it said about whether we saw eye to eye on how we lead this great newspaper forward.”

Of future job cuts, he said he did not know what next year would bring, and he did not have a specific staffing level in mind, but that “over time” he expected that the staff would be reduced. In the last five years, the newsroom’s size has fallen to 940 from about 1,200.

The Los Angeles Times has steadily lost circulation in the last decade or so, falling to 776,000 daily as of Sept. 30 from a peak of 1.2 million in 1990.

The two-month showdown in Los Angeles has been a stark example of the conflict between many newsrooms and boardrooms across the country as papers face an economic slump and continued demands by Wall Street for improved financial results.

The stock prices of most public newspaper companies have fallen in the last two years, yet many of the publications remain profitable. The Los Angeles Times reported that its operating profit margin was 20 percent, higher than that of the average Fortune 500 company.

Mr. Hiller said in his statement that changes were “threatening the financial position of the whole industry,” and that the cuts were not about maintaining high profit margins. “Look no further than recent reports on other large metro papers in Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas and San Francisco,” he said.

Many colleagues of Mr. Baquet said they had considered his departure a matter of time. The news was supposed to have been announced tomorrow, but word began leaking out yesterday, and at midafternoon, Mr. Baquet confirmed it to his staff. “Believe me, I didn’t want it to come out this way,” he wrote in a memo. He could not be reached for comment last night.

Many on the staff of The Los Angeles Times said the news caught them off guard and threw the paper into turmoil, coming on election night, one of the busiest and most complicated times for news organizations. Mr. Baquet’s departure, on top of the potential sale of the paper, creates even further uncertainty for the staff.

“People are crushed,” said Alice Short, a deputy metropolitan editor. “People really believed in Dean and that as long as he was in that front office, we were going to be O.K.”

Vernon Loeb, an investigations editor, said the employees were stricken. “It was like a parent had just died,” he said. “We’ve kidded ourselves into thinking that Dean is such an artful dodger, he could play this string out forever.”

It was not immediately clear whether other editors who were close to Mr. Baquet would leave in solidarity with him. But the two managing editors said they would stay. One, Douglas Frantz, said in a memo to the staff, “While I’m angry and heartbroken, I’m not quitting.” The other, Leo C. Wolinsky, said, “Losing Dean is the most difficult change I’ve had to weather.” But he added, “I intend to stay and fight to keep this paper great.”

Mr. Baquet’s prospects for future employment, at least in the newspaper business, seemed uncertain. For Mr. Baquet, editor of the country’s fourth-largest paper, there are only a few other newspaper jobs that would be considered promotions or even lateral moves. His options might be further limited by a reluctance on the part of publishers to hire someone who had defied his paper’s owners.

Moreover, Mr. Baquet had begun going on the road with his message of newsroom resistance. In his speech in New Orleans, he encouraged editors at other papers to resist cuts, a problematic view as the newspaper industry retrenches and many papers are cutting their staffs.

“We need to be a feistier bunch,” Mr. Baquet said there at the annual meeting of The Associated Press Managing Editors. He said the public service aspect of newspapers was at stake, even as the industry faced declining revenue. “We understand the business model is changing and we have to do some cutting,” he said, “but don’t understand it too much.”

The news of Mr. Baquet’s ouster prompted a local group, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, to urge subscribers to tell the Tribune Company to stop further cuts at the paper or to risk cancellation of their subscriptions.

Jamie Court, president of the group, which is nonpartisan and nonprofit, also scolded the company for allowing the news to come out on a busy news day, saying, “It is obvious that the owner of Los Angeles’s largest news organization wanted to bury this news in the maelstrom of Election Day, even at the risk of shaking up its staff.”

Mr. O’Shea was named managing editor at The Chicago Tribune in 2001. Before then, he was deputy managing editor for news and worked in a variety of assignments, having joined the paper in 1979 after serving as a reporter, editor and Washington correspondent for The Des Moines Register.

Mr. Baquet’s staff gave him a sustained ovation yesterday as he stood on a desk in the newsroom to announce he was leaving. He said he did not want them to dwell on the last month but to remember the last six years — when the paper broke news stories, forced laws to be changed and won Pulitzer Prizes. His management team stood behind him.

Mr. Hiller climbed on the desk afterward. He said he had hoped this day would never come.

The Tribune Company, under pressure from investors, is considering selling some or all its assets, which include 10 other papers and two dozen television stations.

David Geffen and two other Los Angeles billionaires have expressed interest in acquiring The Times. The hope of some in the newsroom is that Mr. Geffen, or someone, will buy the paper and rehire Mr. Baquet as editor.

    Los Angeles Paper Ousts Top Editor, NYT, 8.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/business/media/08paper.html?hp&ex=1163048400&en=6ad46be18b7d68c2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Daily circulation falls 2.8% at U.S. newspapers, 3.4% on Sunday

Updated 10/30/2006 12:51 PM ET
AP
USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — Daily circulation fell 2.8% at U.S. newspapers in the six-month period ending in September, an industry group reported Monday, latest sign of struggle as newspapers try to hold on to paying readers.

Sunday circulation fell 3.4% in the period, according to the Newspaper Association of America's calculations of data supplied by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The latest decline is in line with a long-term trend of falling circulation as newspapers battle increasing demands on readers' time and rapid changes in reading and advertising habits due to the growth of Internet use.

Gannett Co.'s (GCI) USA TODAY remained the top-selling newspaper in the country with average paid circulation of 2,269,509, but that was down 1.3% from a year ago.

The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones (DJ), kept its No. 2 spot at 2,043,235, down 1.9%. The New York Times was next with 1,086,798, down 3.5%.

The Los Angeles Times, published by Tribune Co. (TRB), suffered the largest drop among major newspapers with a decline of 8% in the period to 775,766, which the newspaper attributed to efforts to trim third-party circulation.

Those copies, which are often distributed to schools, hotels, hospitals and other public places, tend to be less valued by advertisers. The Los Angeles Times said it has been reducing that kind of circulation in favor of individually paid copies.

New York's two tabloids were the only newspapers in the top 20 to win circulation in the period. The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.(NWS), reported a 5.1% gain to 704,011, edging ahead of rival New York Daily News, owned by the real estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman, which had a gain of 1% to 693,382.

    Daily circulation falls 2.8% at U.S. newspapers, 3.4% on Sunday, UT, 30.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2006-10-30-newspaper-circ_x.htm

Secret Iraq Meeting Included Journalists

October 9, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN

It was the kind of shadowy, secret Washington meeting that Bob Woodward is fond of describing in detail. In his new book, “State of Denial,” he writes that on Nov. 29, 2001, a dozen policy makers, Middle East experts and members of influential policy research organizations gathered in Virginia at the request of Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense. Their objective was to produce a report for President Bush and his cabinet outlining a strategy for dealing with Afghanistan and the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11.

What was more unusual, Mr. Woodward reveals, was the presence of journalists at the meeting. Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and a Newsweek columnist, and Robert D. Kaplan, now a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, attended the meeting and, according to Mr. Kaplan, signed confidentiality agreements not to discuss what happened.

While members of policy research groups often dispense advice to administration officials, journalists do not typically attend secret meetings or help compile government reports. Indeed, many Washington journalists complain that the current administration keeps them at an unhealthy distance.

Mr. Zakaria takes issue with Mr. Woodward’s account, saying that while he attended the meeting for several hours, he does not recall being told that a report would be produced.

“I thought it was a brainstorming session,” he said. “I was never told that there was going to be a document summarizing our views and I have never seen such a document.” (Mr. Woodward wrote that the report, which supported the invasion of Iraq, caused Mr. Bush to focus on the “malignancy” of the Middle East situation.)

Mr. Kaplan said much of the meeting was spent drafting and reworking the document, which in the end carried the names of all 12 participants and was “a forceful summary of some of the best pro-war arguments at the time.” Could any of the participants have been unaware there was a document in the making? “No, that’s not possible,” he said.

Mr. Kaplan, who was then a freelancer at The Atlantic Monthly, said he spoke to his editor before attending, and was given approval to attend because “everybody was in a patriotic fervor.”

Mr. Zakaria said he felt participating was appropriate because his views, as a columnist for Newsweek, were public, although he has never divulged his involvement to his readers.

“My column is an analytical column,” he said, adding that he gives advice to policy makers and elected officials: “If a senator calls me up and asks me what should we do in Iraq, I’m happy to talk to him.”

JULIE BOSMAN

    Secret Iraq Meeting Included Journalists, NYT, 9.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/media/09zakaria.html

Olbermann News Commentaries Target Bush

October 8, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:00 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Keith Olbermann's tipping point came on a tarmac in Los Angeles six weeks ago. While waiting for his plane to take off he read an account of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's speech before the American Legion equating Iraq War opponents to pre-World War II appeasers.

The next night, on Aug. 30, Olbermann ended his MSNBC ''Countdown'' show with a blistering retort, questioning both the interpretation of history and Rumsfeld's very understanding of what it means to be an American.

It was the first of now five extraordinarily harsh anti-Bush commentaries that have made Olbermann the latest media point-person in the nation's political divide.

''As a critic of the administration, I will be damned if you can get away with calling me the equivalent of a Nazi appeaser,'' Olbermann told The Associated Press. ''No one has the right to say that about any free-speaking American in this country.''

Since that first commentary, Olbermann's nightly audience has increased 69 percent, according to Nielsen Media Research. This past Monday 834,000 people tuned in, virtually double his season average and more than CNN competitors Paula Zahn and Nancy Grace. Cable kingpin and Olbermann nemesis Bill O'Reilly (two million viewers that night) stands in his way.

Olbermann stood before Ground Zero on Sept. 11 and said Bush's conduct before the Iraq war was an impeachable offense. ''Not once, in now five years, has this president ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space and to this, the current and curdled version of our beloved country,'' he said.

His latest verbal attack, this past Thursday, criticized the president's campaign attacks on Democrats.

''Why have you chosen to go down in history as the president who made things up?'' he asked.

Olbermann has become a hero to Bush opponents, who distribute video files and transcripts of his commentaries. One poster on the Daily Kos who's been trying to spread his own four-year boycott of cable news wondered: ''Is it time to modify the boycott to allow for Keith's show `Countdown' -- and only his show?''

On the right, he's known as Krazy Keith and OlbyLoon, and the Olbermannwatch.com Web site is devoted to picking apart his words.

''Look in the mirror, Keith,'' an Olbermannwatch.com blogger wrote. ''You have become that which you claim to despise -- a demagogue.''

Olbermann has never been a Bush fan. He's gone on crusades before, pounding on alleged voting irregularities in Ohio in 2004 when the story went dry elsewhere. He's also waged war against O'Reilly. None of these match his most recent campaign for ferocity.

Liberal activist Jeff Cohen is thrilled for Olbermann's success, but admits that it's bittersweet.

Cohen was a producer for Phil Donahue's failed talk show. Less than four years ago Donahue's show imploded primarily because MSNBC and its corporate owners were afraid to have a show seen as liberal or anti-Bush at a time those opinions were less popular, he said.

In his new book ''Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media,'' Cohen alleges that NBC News forced Donahue to book more conservatives than liberals and eventually wanted one of the nation's best-known liberal media figures to imitate O'Reilly.

Same time as Olbermann, same channel.

That Olbermann has been permitted to do what he's doing is evidence that ''the political zeitgeist has changed dramatically in four years, and especially (at) MSNBC,'' Cohen said.

While it's true a different political atmosphere has helped Olbermann, NBC News senior vice president Phil Griffin disputed Cohen's interpretation that politics doomed Donahue. While MSNBC could be faulted for giving up on Donahue too fast, the show never caught its rhythm and was extremely expensive, he said.

''People try to ascribe motives to us, that somehow we're trying to keep liberals off the air and it's all about ideology,'' Griffin said. ''If you get ratings, there's no issue.''

Even before this fall, Olbermann's ratings had been on a slow rise as viewers connected with his entertaining way of delivering the news, Griffin said.

Early in his second tenure at MSNBC, Olbermann said he wanted to do a segment on whether some of the more heroic elements of former POW Jessica Lynch's rescue were exaggerated. He was told by NBC News executives that he had to balance it with a commentary by conservative radio host Michael Savage, and he refused. He was prepared to walk, he said, but it never came to that.

Olbermann said he hasn't spoken to NBC Chairman Bob Wright or anyone at corporate owner General Electric Co. about his commentaries. No one's asked him to tone things down; in fact, ''I've had to calm them down a little bit,'' he said.

Such is the almighty power of the Nielsen meter.

''As dangerous as it can sometimes be for news, it is also our great protector,'' Olbermann said. ''Because as long as you make them money, they don't care. This is not Rupert Murdoch. And even Rupert Murdoch puts `Family Guy' on the air and `The Simpsons,' that regularly criticize Fox News. There is some safety in the corporate structure that we probably could never have anticipated.''

What he's doing now is little different from what he did in sports, he said. ''You see the events happening before you and you describe them to the audience.''

As for his hero worship on the left, Olbermann said, ''I'd love to say it's totally irrelevant. I'd say it's 99 percent irrelevant.''

More important to him was when he was approached by a Republican media operative on Sept. 11, who complimented him on the commentaries despite utterly disagreeing with them.

''The purpose of this is to get people to think and supply the marketplace of ideas with something at every fruit stand, something of every variety,'' he said. ''As an industry, only half the fruit stand has been open the last four years.''

------

On the Net:

http://www.bloggermann.com/

http://www.olbermannwatch.com/

http://www.keitholbermann.org/

------

EDITOR'S NOTE -- David Bauder can be reached at dbauder''at''ap.org

    Olbermann News Commentaries Target Bush, NYT, 8.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-TV-Keith-Olbermann.html

Media take center stage in fight for votes

Wed Oct 4, 2006 5:14 PM ET
Reuters
By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Democrats call Fox the FAUX news channel. Republicans used to refer to CNN as Clinton network news.

With U.S. elections a month away, TV viewers have been getting a steady diet of gloves-off politics that experts say serves both politicians and programs.

It works especially well for cable television where anchors of news shows both real and imaginary rankle and rile in a way shunned by major networks more prone to balance opposing views.

A July survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press confirmed more Republicans watch Fox News and more Democrats watch CNN.

Michael Wolff, media columnist at Vanity Fair, said bias was not so much linked to the ideology of the journalists or even the corporate owners as it was driven by a desire to boost ratings.

"I don't think Fox says, 'We're here to promulgate a political agenda.' I think they say, 'We're here to get ratings ... and we do that by speaking to this particular demographic, which happens to be conservative and right wing,'" he said.

The ratings translate into dollars -- not only for the programs but also for Democrats and President George W. Bush's Republicans, the country's two main parties hoping to win control of Congress in the November 7 vote.

Experts say politicians aim in their TV appearances not so much to change views as to get partisans angry enough to vote.

Increasingly politicians have decided the way to win is to raise the passions of the base rather than engage in discourse, said Lee Miringoff, director of Marist Institute for Public Opinion.

"They're not after converts so much as getting their supporters to show up," he said. "You can see by the fact that those candidates show up on these shows, from Bill O'Reilly to Jon Stewart and everything in between."

Wolff said politicians like doing the shows to draw campaign contributions as much as votes, adding: "From a media basis, it's related to having highly targeted audiences ... it keeps the enthusiasm among your most committed supporters who will then support you financially."

TRADITIONAL VALUES

O'Reilly, host of the popular Fox cable show "The O'Reilly Factor", is author of "Culture Warrior," a book that argues America is in the midst of a fierce culture war between those who embrace traditional values and those who want to change America into a 'secular-progressive' country.

"The media is firmly in the S-P (secular-progressive) camp," O'Reilly writes in a message on the Web site.

Charges of media bias came to a head last month when Bill Clinton accused a Fox interviewer of pushing a conservative agenda when asked whether as president he did enough to combat al Qaeda.

"You did Fox's bidding on this show, you did your nice little conservative hit job on me," Clinton told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace.

Michael Dimmock, research director at the Pew, said Stewart's political satire program "The Daily Show" attracts a very liberal audience and O'Reilly draws more conservatives even if most Americans turn to more mainstream outlets for their news.

"The kind of shouting and argumentative segment of the American news media is only a segment of it," Dimmock said, adding that network news and newspapers were much calmer and Internet readers relied heavily on wire service stories generally considered among the least partisan.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said conservative skepticism was fueled by the likes of O'Reilly and like-minded politicians.

"There is some core legitimacy to the complaint of a liberal press," he said, adding that surveys showed there were more liberal and Democrat journalists than conservative and Republican ones.

"Over the last 30 years the United States politically has become a more conservative country and newsrooms have moved in the other direction," Rosenstiel said.

    Media take center stage in fight for votes, R, 4.10.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-10-04T211411Z_01_N29409585_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-POLITICS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3

R.W. Apple, a Times Journalist in Full, Dies at 71

October 4, 2006
The New York Times
By TODD S. PURDUM

R. W. Apple Jr., who in more than 40 years as a correspondent and editor at The New York Times wrote about war and revolution, politics and government, food and drink, and the revenge of living well from more than 100 countries, died early this morning in Washington. He was 71.

The cause was complications of thoracic cancer.

With his Dickensian byline, Churchillian brio and Falstaffian appetites, Mr. Apple, who was known as Johnny, was a singular presence at The Times almost from the moment he joined the metropolitan staff in 1963. He remained a colorful figure as new generations of journalists around him grew more pallid, and his encyclopedic knowledge, grace of expression — and above all his expense account — were the envy of his competitors, imitators and peers.

Mr. Apple enjoyed a career like no other in the modern era of The Times. He was the paper’s bureau chief in Albany, Lagos, Nairobi, Saigon, Moscow, London and Washington. He covered 10 presidential elections and more than 20 national nominating conventions. He led The Times’s coverage of the Vietnam war for two and a half years in the 1960’s and of the Persian Gulf war a generation later and he chronicled the Iranian revolution in between.

As a political correspondent, Mr. Apple, beginning in 1972, paid attention to the Iowa precinct caucuses when they were still largely ignored by the national press. Four years later, he helped turn the caucuses into an important test of a candidate’s strength by being one of the first reporters to spot the potential appeal of a little-known former governor of Georgia named Jimmy Carter. In later years, he turned the same searching, child-like curiosity to writing about food, architecture and travel from around the nation and the globe.

For a generation, The Times turned to Mr. Apple to write front-page “News Analysis” articles, putting great events of the day into longer-term perspective. His best were 1,200-word tapestries of history, erudition and style; the worst were clear and concise, but reflected conventional wisdom that sometimes proved wrong.

To the end of his life, Mr. Apple kept a small black bag packed with essentials, including a personal pepper mill, ready to be whisked away on a moment’s notice for a big story, or for a little one that caught his fancy. Even when his knees began to wear out from years of carrying the surplus pounds that were a by-product of his adventures, Mr. Apple lost none of the “legs” that define the best reporters.

“Newspaper people love impossible dreams,” he once told Lear’s magazine. “I suppose we’re reckless sentimentalists. If we didn’t love impossible dreams, we would not still be working in an industry whose basic technology was developed in the 16th and 17th centuries.”

Mr. Apple was no manager, and he could be cruelly short-tempered with hotel clerks, copy editors and political aides. In his days as Washington Bureau chief, in the mid-1990’s, his editing might involve bursting out of his corner office to declare that one reporter had “misspelled fettucine Alfredo!” or that another had referred to Ann D. Jordan, the consultant, corporate director and wife of the Washington super-lawyer Vernon E. Jordan, as a “socialite.”

But he was a natural role model, and his colleagues and competitors all watched what he asked, and what he wrote, and what and where and when he ate and drank, and they did their best to follow suit, albeit with much less apparent ease, capacity or zest. When, in an Indian restaurant in Uganda, he warned his dining companions, “No prawns at this altitude!,” they listened up.

“I used to say that Johnny grew into the person he was pretending to be when we were young,” Joseph Lelyveld, a contemporary who rose to become The Times’s executive editor, told the writer Calvin Trillin in a 2003 profile of Mr. Apple in The New Yorker. “Now I wonder whether he actually was that person then, and the rest of us didn’t know enough to realize it.”

Drama, and a lot of dash, followed Mr. Apple as night follows day. He was the pool reporter sent to the deck of the U.S.S. Forrestal in 1967 when a fiery accident nearly killed one of the ship’s pilots, Lieut. Commander John S. McCain 3d. From that incident he formed a lifelong friendship with the pilot, who went on to become a United States Senator.

It was Mr. Apple, or so the legend goes, who told Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. It was Mr. Apple whose relentless questioning elicited from Ronald L. Ziegler, Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary, the admission that his previous explanations about the Watergate affair were “inoperative.”

Mr. Apple’s dinner guests — at his Georgetown house, his farm near Gettysburg, Pa., or his English cottage in the Cotswolds — were apt to include not only leading politicians but also prominent figures in architecture, cuisine and the arts. He thought nothing of beginning a sentence by saying, “The first time I made lunch for Julia Child ... .”

Mr. Apple joined The Times as a brash and ambitious recruit from The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. He quickly became one of the highest-paid reporters on the local staff. In his first year at the paper, his byline appeared 73 times on the front page. A citation for an early publisher’s award, an in-house prize, described his impact:

“In the interests of efficiency, The New York Times recently equipped its main office with automatic elevators, a Centrex switchboard, a two-faced Universal Jump clock, a Goss press with magnetic amplifier drive, a jam-proof Jampool conveyor belt and a 185-pound, water-cooled, self-propelled, semi-automatic machine called R. W. Apple Jr.”

Mr. Apple was always the hero of his own life, especially in his younger days. His colleagues swapped so many outraged stories about his bumptious behavior that they eventually began charging each other for the privilege, with the proceeds going to a kitty for their bar tabs. In “The Boys on the Bus,” his 1973 book about the 1972 presidential campaign, Timothy Crouse painted a portrait of Mr. Apple that was at once flattering about his talents and unsparing about his flaws.

“There was a reason why reporters told stories about Apple,” Mr. Crouse wrote. “They recognized many of their own traits in him, grotesquely magnified. The shock of recognition frightened them. Apple was like them, only more blatant. He openly displayed the faults they tried to hide: the insecurity, the ambitiousness, the name-dropping” and “the weakness for powerful men.”

He added: “When they talked about him, they were really saying: ‘I hope it doesn’t show that much in me.’ ”

Raymond Walter Apple Jr. was born Nov. 20, 1934, in Akron, Ohio. His father, also known as Johnny — nicknamed for Johnny Appleseed — ran a chain of grocery stores that had been founded by the family of Mr. Apple’s mother, the former Julia Albrecht. The senior Apple had hoped his only son would take over the business, but an early encounter with The New York Times in the Akron public library gave Mr. Apple other ideas.

In the pages of The Times, Mr. Apple once told Current Biography, he found “wonderful, romantic” bylines like Osgood Carruthers and Drew Middleton, reporters writing from faraway places. “It seeped into my conciousness that these people were actually being paid to do this,” he said.

At Western Reserve Academy, a private prep school in Hudson, Ohio, Mr. Apple was sports editor of the student newspaper and editor in chief of the yearbook. He continued his journalistic training in college, on The Daily Princetonian at Princeton. Twice expelled for neglecting his studies at Princeton, he eventually earned a B.A. in history magna cum laude from Columbia University’s School of General Studies in 1961.

By then, he had already become a working journalist, first at The Wall Street Journal, then at The Newport News Daily Press, where he moonlighted while stationed at Fort Monroe, Va., during a two-year hitch as an Army speechwriter. In 1961, he was hired as a writer on the overnight shift at NBC News in New York. He eventually became a writer and correspondent for NBC’s nightly newcast “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” covering civil rights and other stories and winning an Emmy award in 1963.

But all that was pale prologue to his career at The Times, where he rose rapidly and never looked back. He soon became Albany bureau chief and covered Robert Kennedy’s 1964 Senate campaign in New York. By 1966 he was bureau chief in Saigon as the Vietnam war escalated. He mastered the art of hitching rides to battle zones on military transport and dictating his dispatches over balky field telephones, and he brought a keen truth-detector to the daily military briefings known as the Five O’Clock Follies.

In his 1991 memoir, “Deadline,” James B. Reston, the longtime Times columnist and editor, recalled that Mr. Apple “didn’t invent the war but taught a whole generation how to cover it.” In 1968, he won George Polk and Overseas Press Club awards for his coverage before plunging into the war-fueled turmoil of the 1968 presidential campaign at home.

Mr. Apple would cover other wars and conflicts with distinction and panache, but it was as a political reporter that he cemented his reputation. He was in constant touch with scores of county chairmen, governors and mayors when they still dominated politics and almost unrivaled at counting noses, canvassing convention delegates and predicting election results.

“Nineteen seventy-six was a spectacular performance on his part by any measure, but particularly those of us at The Washington Post felt he was on his game and making it really hard for us in Iowa,” said David S. Broder, the longtime Post columnist and reporter. “And it wasn’t just what Johnny saw in Iowa and the Carter campaign, but that he had enough confidence in his own judgment to write it really hard when nobody else was doing it.”

Many of Mr. Apple’s friends believed he deserved print journalism’s highest prize, the Pulitzer, for his work that year; though nominated for it many times, it was one of the few honors that eluded him. All the same, the journalism magazine MORE pronounced Mr. Apple “America’s most powerful political reporter” in 1976, a distinction he accepted with some trepidation.

“I am frightened by it,” he told the magazine, “or perhaps awed is a better word. And I am very reluctant to throw it around in the newspaper.” He added: “I’m very ambivalent about the power I have and the way it’s used. Yet I would be transparently un-candid if I didn’t say I do enjoy it enormously.”

At the end of the 1976 campaign, Mr. Apple was named London bureau chief, a job he held until 1985. In that post he covered not only British politics but the Falklands war, elections in France and Spain, the Iranian revolution and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. He traveled widely throughout Europe, exploring and writing about his interests in food, wine and architecture and amassing a wine cellar whose contents would animate dinner parties 25 years later.

On his return to Washington, he produced “Apple’s Europe,” an elegant, idiosyncratic, critically praised book of travel and restaurant tips that would become the model for “Apple’s America,” a similar guide to American cities published in 2005.

Mr. Apple’s first marriage, to Edith Smith, a former vice-consul in Saigon, ended in divorce. In 1982, he married the former Betsey Pinckney Brown, and she became his traveling companion, driver and partner at table, often introduced in his first-person food and travel articles as “my wife Betsey.” She survives him, as do two step-children from her first marriage, Catherine Brown Collins of Washington and John Brown of Alexandria, Va., and a sister, Barbara Pittman of Rockford, Ill.

Mr. Apple continued to cover politics through the 2004 election, first as chief Washington correspondent, then as Washington bureau chief, later as chief correspondent of The Times and, beginning in 2002, as associate editor, a title that reflected his unique status at the paper. But more and more often, he wrote about the topics that really compelled him — bourbon and bacon, potatoes and tomatoes, langoustines and mangosteens, barbecue and Bouillabaisse, New Orleans and New Zealand.

For his 70th birthday, he gathered friends at the Paris bistro Chez L’Ami Louis, which he often described as his favorite restaurant, for heaping plates of foie gras, roast chicken, escargots, scallops and pommes Anna, washed down with gallons of burgundy and magnums of Calvados.

Mr. Trillin, who later wrote about the evening for Gourmet, quoted one guest who summed up Mr. Apple’s attitude toward the party, and toward the rich, long life and career that produced it: “It’s my understanding that Apple has simplified what could be a terribly difficult choice by telling them to bring everything.”

    R.W. Apple, a Times Journalist in Full, Dies at 71, NYT, 4.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/nyregion/05applecnd.html?_r=1&oref=slogin