Interviewees

Shaun Illingworth: This begins the second interview session with John Wicklein on March 18, 2016 with Shaun Illingworth and ...

Yaqarah Letellier: Yaqarah Letellier.

SI: Thank you very much for having us back.

John Wicklein: Fine. Good to have you.

SI: Last time, we left off talking about your experiences at WRVR. That job ended in 1974. How did you become involved with Boston University after that?

JW: Somebody suggested it. Boston University was looking for a new dean of their journalism school--actually, the School of Public Communication. One of my friends suggested I apply for the deanship. That's what I did. I went through the search committee and was appointed dean in 1974.

SI: Can you describe the school that you came into? What were your priorities?

JW: Yes, I can. The school was a large school, fifteen hundred students when I got there, which was, I think, the second-largest journalism and public affairs school next to Texas. Of course, it'd have to be Texas. It had three separate departments: a print journalism, a television journalism department, and a public relations department.

I wanted to preserve those and I wanted to install a graduate program in print journalism, which they didn't have before I got there. I was interested in film and had produced some documentaries by then. So, I was able to get funds to set up a small film department with sixteen students. I guess I got that going the second year that I was there. Those were some of the main things I was looking for.

I was also writing and giving lectures on freedom of press issues. That's one of my most--well, I have fervent, I would say, interest [in] freedom of the press and the freedom of expression. So, I was traveling around to universities, and so on, giving lectures and writing for the journalism reviews on that subject and subjects in that area, while I was the dean there.

SI: How much of an adjustment was it to go from being a reporter and station manager for both television and radio to being in academia?

JW: I found it very interesting. I really enjoyed working as the dean there because you could do a lot of things with the school if you could convince the faculty to go along with it. That was one of the things the dean had to do, because the faculty is very protective of its prerogatives, but they went on with the things I wanted to do.

One other thing I wanted to do was start the school--most journalism schools start Journalism 101 in the second year, but since they were coming into this school as a specific undertaking--I'm trying to think of the word. Anyway, I felt that they should start in the freshman year. So, the second year I was there, we did that, too. We enrolled the students in their major, which was journalism--print or television journalism--in the first year.

I enjoyed working with the faculty and working on these things that took some organizing with the faculty to get them on the side I wanted them to be on. We did most of this through committees and faculty meetings. They pretty much accepted the things I was suggesting and they approved them. That went along, I thought, very well, until about three years in.

I had some great difficulties with John Silber, the president of the university, and so did a number of the other deans, because he was suggesting things that, by journalistic lights, were unethical. I couldn't do that. I'll give you an example. There were two independent student newspapers on campus. They irritated Silber by criticizing him on a lot of other things that he did on campus. So, three times, he called me up, but I remember the last time particularly. He said, "You have some investigative journalists on your faculty, don't you?" I said, "Yes, I do." He said, "Well, every week when the papers come out, I want you to assign some investigative journalist to investigate these stories and see to it that they aren't all lies, which I think they are." I said I couldn't do that, that it was unethical.

Then, another time--going back one--he said there was a student in your school who had written an article about him that he thought was terrible, and he said, "I want you to dismiss that man. Kick him out of the school and we'll kick him out of the university." I told him, "No, I wouldn't do that." When he talked to me about having these investigative reporters re-report the stories in the paper, I said that was unethical and I wouldn't do that. He said, "Well, then, there's nothing that can be done." I said, "No, there's nothing that can be done."

So, after that, I was on pretty bad terms with the President. So were these other deans. The dean of liberal arts, the dean of the law school, and the dean of the education school, they all had things that they couldn't abide. So, the four of us, those four deans, got together and decided that we've got to suggest to the board of trustees that they dismiss Silber. We'd recruited eleven other deans and three vice presidents, and then, went to the executive committee of the board and laid out what the problems were with Silber, each of us and some of the eleven other deans, too, and the vice presidents. Then, the whole board was to meet six weeks later. It was a huge board, forty-six people, I think.

So, the university--it was a private university--and it was run by the executive committee, and mostly by Silber. So, we thought we had a nine-to-three majority on the executive committee, but Silber started working on them. He doled out contracts to a number of these executives--well, they were executives. Most of them were businessmen in town. By the end of that time, he had persuaded all of them that they would do much better if they let him keep the job. We lost then on a vote of twenty-three to nine. That's how many of the forty-six came out. So, we couldn't get him dismissed.

The Boston Globe had been following this. They got in touch with me and I helped them put together a series of--well, it came to be a five-part series on mismanagement at Boston University, which the investigative reporting team, the Spotlight Team that you've heard about in this movie Spotlight--of course, they're a different crew way back then. We worked together on that and I gave them a lot of leads.

They thought they could get Silber on a charge that he had mismanaged the funds in the school by comingling the funds that were made by specific grants to different agencies, say government agencies, and he put them all together into the operating budget, which made his operating budget look very secure. He bragged about how he brought the university's budget out of debt and made it a money-making function, but he hadn't; we knew that. The vice president who knew that specifically, he had told us that, refused to talk to the investigative team. So, it was not possible to bring him up on any charges other than mismanagement, which I think they did an excellent job.

However, since Silber had the board with him--I think for twenty more years he had his board with him. Finally, the board changed over and they finally fired him. That's the story of Silber and my time there. Some of the deans felt they had to leave. I thought maybe I could out-wait him. Of course, I couldn't. I had tenure as a professor of print journalism and broadcasting. Also, my faculty, the student body and the alumni all came together and sent messages to the board that they didn't want me dismissed. So, I wasn't. I stayed for another year, but you could see that I was never going to get any new things that I wanted there. Silber was not going to do that. So, I decided that I would leave and do something else. That's my story of Boston University.

SI: When you were working with The Boston Globe's investigative team, were you under cover? Could they use their name in the articles?

JW: I worked with them mostly in giving them leads. We spent about a couple of months when all the deans were working on this and we had done a lot of research on the university and Silber. I could put you in touch with some of the vice presidents and some of the other deans. So, that's how I worked with them. I didn't write anything. I gave them some head's up on things that they could be looking for.

SI: When did you decide to leave Boston University?

JW: 1980. Yes.

SI: You also did work down in Brazil.

JW: I was a visiting professor in Methodist University outside of Sao Paulo, Brazil. I spent a semester there. I'm trying to think if that was right after I left Boston. Well, I had the dates in there.

SI: Yes. "Visiting professor of communications, Methodist University, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1979."

JW: Yes. Let me see how it happened.

SI: You were a professor of journalism and broadcasting at Boston University from 1974 to 1980. You were the dean from 1974 to 1978.

JW: Yes. The last two years--since I had tenure, I just kept the possibility open that I'd go back as a journalism professor. Finally, after two years, I just decided I just couldn't go back there because Silber was still in charge and I didn't want to do that.

SI: What stands out about your time in Sao Paulo?

JW: Well, the military dictatorship was still in effect. They were making moves toward democracy, but the military still controlled the country. I decided to do an article--I suggested an article to The Atlantic Monthly on the suppression of freedom of speech and the press in Brazil. During the two months I was there, I went around to different places; I went to Rio and I went to Brasilia. I did some research and came up with an article about that for The Atlantic, which they published. Then, the ambassador to the U.S. came back with a long letter to The Atlantic saying that I was all wrong, that there was perfect freedom of expression and freedom of the press in Brazil, which was absurd.

Anyway, they published it. The ambassador said, "Look at our constitution. It says we have freedom of the press and freedom of speech." Of course, they did; it said it right there in the constitution, but they didn't bother with the constitution. They suppressed so much it was incredible and they killed people who didn't abide by that. So, I learned a lot about it doing the research for that article.

SI: I would guess, given your position in the university, you were fairly protected from the government. Was there any intimidation?

JW: Well, I wasn't sure. I was there to do talks, the way I put it was, about what the Americans thought about these things, freedom of the press, and so on. My main occupation there was to do a two-hour seminar once a week, a graduate seminar. The dean of the liberal arts college, which I was part of, asked me to come in and talk to him before I started that. He just said, "Well, before each semester starts, the captain of the military police comes in here and sits down and has a cigar with me, and says, 'We're going to attend some of your classes and we'll make ourselves known in those classes, but there will be other classes that we will have people in there, officers in there, and we won't make ourselves known to who's there.'" He said, "You'll know your secret policeman if they wear polyester suits and dark glasses."

It was a cliché, but anyway. When I started it, I had about twenty people in the class, only two of whom spoke English, but I had a translator. But there, sure enough, was a man in polyester with dark glasses. The dean told me, "He'll be the only one that will ask you questions," because it wasn't the tradition of students in Sao Paulo to question the professors. Sure enough, he asked me a lot of leading questions, which I said, "Well, here's what we do in the United States." I made no intention of telling him what he or they should be doing, but they could infer it. So, that was a very interesting time.

SI: Was there any attempt to influence or intimidate you outside of the classroom?

JW: No. The head of the communications department, graduate communications school, had been fired from the Sao Paulo University because of his politics. He was just lucky not to get killed, because a number of priests and professors were killed because of their politics, because of speaking up. But I knew about it and I talked a little about it with him, but of course he was reluctant to say much about it because he thought the country was slowly moving towards democracy. He thought it was hopeful, but what had happened was terrible.

So, no, I didn't feel that. But I'll tell you something that's interesting. Because I did some interviews in Rio and in Brasilia, a lot of interviews, and interviewed the Archbishop of Sao Paulo, who had been very strong against the administration or the military dictatorship, but they didn't dare kill him, apparently. But for my article, I interviewed the editor of his paper. Most papers had resident censors sitting right in the newsroom. He had a resident censor. He told me a story that one of his articles had started off, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." He said to the censors, "Who said that? We can't have that." He said, "Jesus said that." He said, "I don't care. Get it out of there." So, he had to take that out. So, I led the article with that because I thought that was very interesting.

Well, the thing was that I didn't know if my notes would be confiscated when we left and took two planes, one to get to Rio, and then, [one to get] back to the States. So, Myra, my wife, and I packed all my notebooks. I had fourteen notebooks. We packed them around our clothes, inside our clothes, but luckily, nobody frisked us and tried to bother about that.

SI: So, after you came back and you decided to leave Boston University, you went to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

JW: Yes. I was in charge of news and public affairs funding for the corporation. I had about twenty-one million dollars a year for news and public affairs. That was in 1980. So, I haven't figured out what that would be in today's figures. Anyway, one of the things that I did, that's still going on, was that I realized that the commercial networks--ABC, NBC and CBS--were never going to do controversial documentaries or news and public affairs documentaries, hard-hitting investigative reporting. So, I wrote a prospectus for a series that I hoped some of the stations would pick up. It became Frontline, which still exists.

What happened [was], I able to get four of the stations to put funds together and I had a million dollars for that. I was able to put a million dollars into that each year. The others picked up the rest of the money and started Frontline. For the first year, I was on the editorial board of Frontline, but that was the most interesting thing I did while I was at the Corporation. But I gave partial funding usually, because the idea of the corporation was if you wanted something to be done that you provided some of the funds. Then, the producers had to go find the rest. So, there was a commitment both ways. I funded about eighteen documentaries while I was there outside of that. Yes, that's what I was doing mostly, news and public affairs, but most of it was documentaries.

SI: Where would the money come from?

JW: The Corporation had got funding each year from the federal government. They had a fund, the organization I was in was called the program fund. There were funds for all kinds of art programs, drama, and things like that. Another man was in charge of that, and I was in charge of the news and public affairs side of it.

SI: How did President Ronald Reagan's political revolution affect your ability to get funds and do things?

JW: They were always trying to either cut it out or reduce it. I was there four years and the funds started going down. They were trying all the time--the Republicans that he put on the board, the conservatives he put on the board, wanted to de-fund themselves, as a matter of fact. The board was leaning more and more away from news and public affairs. They didn't really want any controversial news and public affairs.

They didn't say it directly to me, but I heard through the grapevine that that was the situation. They took a vote that public affairs should be historical programming. That actually came about. That's what led to Ken Burns. He's had good funding for that forever because it's not essentially controversial. It's a very hard thing to attach a program fund or program funding to the government. I was worried about that. You were always going to have a fight about that.

SI: Tell us a little bit more about the early years of Frontline.

JW: Well, there were four stations: New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. After the first year, WGBH in Boston took it over completely and they've had it ever since. They've done a very good job, I think. They've gotten into some interesting controversies. They're the one thing that I don't know what has happened about the Corporation and whether they tried to affect them. I haven't known about that. Frontline is so well-liked by all the Public Television stations that I don't think they could sabotage that. If there were another--well, there were conservative regimes, but I haven't heard them trying to force that off the air. As I've said, they've been doing it now with the same executive producer for thirty years.

SI: You put out this idea, but were you involved in putting together the team?

JW: Yes. Well, what was necessary. I suggested to a man who was doing something at WGBH called The World on television. I liked the documentaries he was doing locally--or maybe they were done nationally. We were on a trip to a PBS meeting in New Orleans, and I suggested to him, on the plane as a matter of fact--or, I told him that I'm going to put out this request for proposals and that WGBH might be interested and that I thought of him as the executive producer and that he might be interested.

So, he took it up with the head of WGBH, and then, they put in a proposal. It looked very good. They thought of the name Frontline. So, they devised a program that did essentially what I had proposed in the request for proposals. It would have to get into issues of interest to the country in public affairs. That's what they've done.

SI: Would you work with any other private foundations, like Ford or MacArthur?

JW: No, I didn't. That was earlier on with the--I think I told you about it last time, the magazine program. Sorry, I haven't got the words. Well, it was called PBL. No, the public laboratory--well, I gave you that the last time.

SI: The Public Broadcast Laboratory?

JW: Yes. Sorry. That was instituted by the Ford Foundation. Fred Friendly did that. But no, there was nothing. This was strictly this program fund, which hasn't survived. PBS hadn't been doing much. I think the original idea of PBS [was] they wouldn't do much of this programming. Now, PBS does the programming and they have their own program fund, but (CPB?) doesn't have it anymore.

SI: Did you have a question?

YL: Yes.

SI: Go ahead.

YL: What was your favorite documentary from Frontline?

JW: I don't have a favorite documentary. I just think they're doing a lot of things that are of current interest to the public. But my favorite documentary that I did was Free at Last with The Public Broadcast Laboratory.

Because I was a reporter at The Times, and then, later on, in television, I had gotten to know Martin Luther King pretty well, in an official way. So, when I heard that King was going to stage a Poor People's Campaign in the summer of 1967, I called him up and asked him if he would allow a team from The Public Broadcast Laboratory, a film crew and a reporting team, to go with the march. So, we did.

We started it on his birthday, January 15th of '68 and did a lovely scene with him in the basement of the church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, in which everybody gave him funny presents and made funny speeches with him. He got all embarrassed. It was the most human thing I'd seen of King in that time. I'll tell you another thing that was very human for me. I was standing on a cement stoop just outside of their community building and he [Martin Luther King Jr.] came out on it; we were leaning on the railing. They had a playground right down below, and he said, "Aren't kids great?" He asked, "Do you have any kids?" I talked about that and he talked about--I think he had one by then. I said, "They are." He said, "Yes, it's just wonderful." It was a nice interlude and showed him in such a human way. I didn't use that in the documentary of course, but I did use the story about--well, we filmed his birthday situation.

Of course, you couldn't keep a film crew there all the time. So, the film crew just came to different points of his campaign which was to come into Washington, I think, in June of that year. They were going to set up a camp on the Mall in Washington. But we found a man named Joe Louw, a South African who was a very good still photographer. I sent him along to take stills. I like the idea of using stills and film in a documentary. So, he was with King and the people who were running it, Andy Young and those people, most of the time.

He was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when King was shot. He was the one who took the very famous pictures of Andy Young and some of the others pointing up--you may have seen them--pointing up to where the shot had come from. He sold those pictures to Life Magazine for forty-thousand dollars, and then, gave the proceeds to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Then, he called me that night, the night that King had been shot. He said, "John, King is dead." I was just taken. It shook me up tremendously.

That was a Thursday night. We had not planned to finish the documentary. I had seen some rough cuts of it up until then, but we hadn't planned to do it until June when the March came into Washington--yes, into Washington. But we felt we had to get it on air, or a documentary about it on air right away, by Sunday night, which was our night to put on this magazine program. So, that's what we did. It is incomplete, but I think for what it was up to that time, it was a very good documentary. That won the Venice Biennale prize for the best documentary of 1968; that was the favorite documentary. Of course, we called it Free at Last because of his wonderful speech when he said, "I'm free at last."

SI: Wow. Can we stick with this for a minute, before we move on to the rest of your career?

JW: Yes.

SI: You had really seen Dr. King before he became this icon when you were covering him for the New York Times.

JW: Yes. Well, he was becoming well-known by that time. I did the first interview with him--I'm trying to think when--maybe '57 or something like that. When he came to New York, he was giving a speech. I knew he was at the Hotel Pennsylvania and called him up there. He hadn't known me, but I said I was with The Times and could I come and interview him? He said, "Yeah," and I went down to see him.

He opened the door on the hook and looked me. I guess I passed. So, I got in and did an interview then. Then, I did a number of interviews with him. I did an interview on air with him when I was the news director at Channel Thirteen. I called him on the phone on a lot of different things that came up along the way. So, I got to know him, as I said, in a business way. He knew who I was in a business way, too.

SI: Do you have any impressions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that are different than the image we have of him now?

JW: Well, a couple of things I think of. I covered a speech by him at the Riverside Church, and then, went to the vestry, the robing room back there. His wife was there, and she was pregnant with his first child, I remember. That was just an image; it was sort of interesting to me because he was such a public figure by then that you hardly thought of him with [Coretta] or with his family. That didn't become part of my story for that day, but it was just interesting to me.

Then, when the Vietnam War came on, he received a lot of criticism for talking out against the war. So, I called him up and I said, "People are saying that this is taking away from your efforts in the civil rights field in this country. Why would you want to"--I don't know exactly how I put it--"divide your interest between the war?" which he was dead set against. He said, "Well, that certainly is part of the civil rights story because look at who's fighting that war. Mostly black people." That was true. Then, we talked some more about that and I wrote a story for The Times on that, too.

SI: We want to come back to that later, but we'll continue on with your career. After 1984, when you left the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you went to Ohio State.

JW: Yes.

SI: How did that come about?

JW: Well, I enjoyed that very much, too, because that was a program that they brought in a journalist who had been engaged in national affairs, I gathered. They wanted to have the Kiplinger Chair in Public Affairs Reporting, and have him or her work with a group of ten Kiplinger fellows. So, I was the Director of the Kiplinger Midcareer Program for Journalists at Ohio State. That looked very interesting to me. I went through the search committee process and was hired to do that. That was for a five-year term. It was a rotating term. They wanted a professional journalist to have it every five years, a different one.

I was sixty then. I thought that was a fine idea. That would take me to sixty-five and maybe I'd do something freelance by then. I set that up. I set up two newspapers that we put out, one in the first part of the year and one in the second part of the year, which we called the "Kiplinger Program Report." We had a newsroom there, phones and electric typewriters, which they were then. But the reporters had about ten years of experience.

They could suggest stories to me, long-form stories, because they hadn't had too much of that chance in their own papers to spend a lot of time on a story, which they did. The first part of the year, they did Ohio State stories, things about Ohio State, and put a paper together then. I sent the paper to all the papers in Ohio that had a hundred-thousand circulation or more. They could pick up our stories so long as they credited the Kiplinger Program at the end and gave the writer a byline. We had a lot of pickup with that.

Then, the second year, we did national stories. I had enough money to send them anywhere they wanted to go in the country, or they could all go together to Washington, because Austin Kiplinger set up a newsroom for us in the basement of the Kiplinger building in Washington and set up phones for us, and so on. They could do a lot of pre-reporting in Washington, and then, follow up with in-person interviews of politicians or whomever in Washington. That went well. They all liked that.

Also, by then, I was in the Investigative Reporters and Editors Association, which is still operating; about three thousand people in it now. Because I was interested in investigative reporting, I thought that this group of ten fellows should listen to all the investigative reporters who came to that and held seminars, and so on. Each year that I was there, the five years I was there, I took the group to wherever the IRE was meeting. I was on some panels, too, there. So, that was very interesting work. I enjoyed it very much.

While I was there, I was worried about the corporate and government influence on the content of public broadcasting. So, I got a grant from the Gannett Foundation to hold a meeting on this. Out of that meeting, which I called a lot of people from public broadcasting and journalists, we got together and we set up something called the Working Group for Public Broadcasting. So, for the next year, I worked with a number of these people that we had picked as chairman of different aspects of that. We put out a report after that suggesting that public broadcasting should be supported by a national trust fund that would be set up by the government, but hopefully, not directly controlled. The content would not be controlled. We had some other ways that we tried to get some insulation for that.

The chairman and I went to Washington and did some lobbying to Congressmen to do that--Ron Wyden and a couple of others. They said they were all for it, but, finally, they said, "Well, we can't get out in front of this." There was too much back-flak from the idea of taking that out of the corporate--the corporations liked having some control of content. So, it was an interesting tour to do, but it didn't work out.

SI: Was that reminiscent of what Fred Friendly was trying to do in the 1960s?

JW: No. Well, he felt that same way and he wanted to start a public broadcasting news network. I'm sure that if he was--well, he was funding it from the Ford Foundation and he couldn't run it directly. He couldn't provide the funds, and then, take the funds. The Ford Foundation told him that that wasn't going to be. So, he appointed his executive producer at CBS News as the director of The Public Broadcast Laboratory. So, I'm sure that if we had brought that off, that we were all of a mind that we weren't going to take any pressure from anybody to do that, to produce anything.

SI: You said you've been speaking and writing on these issues of free expression and freedom of speech. Is it mostly tied to the issue of corporate and government control?

JW: No. In many aspects, privacy was one of my concerns. I wrote a book in 1979 and '80 about what I called the "blessings and dangers of interactive communication," which later became the Internet. I did a lot of research on that and saw it coming. So, that was a major concern, privacy, which is practically gone in this country.

I went throughout Western Europe and talked to people in Sweden, England, Germany, Denmark and France, all of which had privacy commissions. The Swedish one was the strongest, that there are very strong laws against invasion of privacy in Sweden. They have some police powers to bring charges against people who are found doing that. Of course, I tried to find out if anything like that was going on in our Congress, and absolutely not. Bills had been introduced but never took hold to do that, and it still hasn't after all these years. In Europe, in Western Europe, they're still doing it. It's a very strong idea there.

SI: Is this your book Electronic Nightmare?

JW: Yes.

SI: You were decades ahead of a lot of people in this concern. What tipped you off to this issue?

JW: I guess I got started--I had done some research and done an article for The Atlantic on a two-way system that was set up in Columbus, Ohio, before then. It raised a lot of concerns about control because I was hoping, and so were other people who were working on this at the time, that there would be a public interest satellite, for instance, that everybody could get into it freely and it wouldn't be controlled by corporations. Well, that never happened.

So, now, you have these major Internet corporations able to say, "No, I won't take your"--or they have been saying that--"I won't take your content because I have this other content I want to put on now." That's why everybody has been fighting for open access to the Internet. The FCC [Federal Communications Commission] has been doing some things in that regard recently.

SI: Net neutrality?

JW: Yes, yes. Net neutrality.

SI: Before we started recording, we talked about your work with the American Civil Liberties Union on media outreach efforts. It seems like they also do a lot of work in terms of safeguarding privacy in the electronic age. Was there every any crossover with the ACLU or other groups regarding this electronic privacy issue? Did you work with any?

JW: At the ACLU, it was pretty much directly, very specifically, to the institution of the ACLU and what should be their approach to such things as the Fairness Doctrine, because there are many flaws in the Fairness Doctrine. It sounds wonderful to most people--Fairness Doctrine, what could be better than that? But I'll tell you one thing that's a problem with it, and it came from my being a manager in television news. The managements, the upper managements of these places, are very worried about the Fairness Doctrine. They don't really understand it. They think that if you have some information on one side, you've got to balance it with information on the other side. That's a false equivalence in journalism, as far as I'm concerned--well, everybody's concerned with.

So, there's pressure from the managements to stay away from controversial stories. I've had that from a general manager saying, "Well, won't we get a Fairness Doctrine problem with that?" I have to explain to him, "No, we won't. That that's not what that means, but that's what it was taken to mean." So, good people were on both sides of that issue, but, of course, the Fairness Doctrine was dropped then, finally. I was never a strong supporter because I knew this inside thing that was happening. You just had to have fairness by other means.

SI: At the end of the five years at Ohio State, what did you decide you wanted to do next?

JW: I loved coaching these fellows. I worked with them on other stories and we would take the stories and give them to the entire group, each a story. They would read them and we'd discuss them and we'd have each of them do another review. I enjoyed it very much. It was an editing function. So, I thought I would like to try to be an editing coach. Will you excuse me for just one minute?

[TAPE PAUSED]

SI: Ready?

JW: Yes. What I did was that. I drafted a prospectus of visits to newspapers in which I would coach, at different times probably, reporting and writing and editing. So, I sent it out to a number of newspapers around the country. Over the years, the response was good, very good. I coached at thirteen newspapers around the country. I would usually go in for up to five days or six days and work with whatever the editors wanted, maybe the business department or the sports department sometimes, and the copy editors--working with copy editors--and general assignment reporters. For the last seven years, before I moved here, from 1977 to [1984], I was the regular writing and reporting coach at the Washington Post. I'd moved to just outside of Washington after I left Ohio State.

What I would do with these reporters, I would have them send me stories that either they had written or edited, at my home, well in advance so that I would read them. I asked for ten stories apiece and reviewed them. Then, I'd go to the newspaper and have forty-five-minute sessions with each of these reporters who had sent me stories. Most of the time, the editors asked which reporters to be coached. An interesting thing happened. Whenever I went, the very best reporters, or what the editors thought were the best reporters, would ask to have some coaching, too, because they wanted to become better reporters or better editors. That was an interesting thing. Well, I always had enough slots to do that as well.

Then, I would hold seminars and talks that I would give to the whole city desk team, or something like that. That's exactly what I did at The Washington Post; I'd collect stories. Then, every two weeks, I'd go into the paper and set up interviews with the reporters that I was working with. Then, when I came here, I didn't feel like doing all that travel anymore. So, I set up a coaching website suggesting the same thing to reporters at different papers and put ads in The Editor & Publisher and The Columbia Journalism Review, and so on. So, for a while, I had a job to do that. They would send me stories here, and then, I would review them and send them back marked up. They sent them by email, and I'd mark them up and write a review of what I thought they were doing. Then, we'd have an hour conversation on the phone to do that.

Well, that lasted for about five years, but, then, so many reporters were being fired. Sometimes, papers would pay for it, for me to do that. But one of the first things they cut at papers was the training, which is like shooting your foot, but that's what they had to do, cut out the training or lose a reporter. So, that's what happened. That rather died out. I enjoyed doing that, too, but it didn't last.

SI: I was going to ask about the last part of your career and seeing major changes in print journalism.

JW: Well, that was the saddest part, I think. It started to happen when I was going to these papers. The papers wanted to do just as good a job and cover local affairs and things like that, but the editors were told by their managers, "Well, you've got to cut your budget in half." If you do that, there's no other way but by dropping reporters and editors.

SI: Let's ask a few other things from your career and outside interests. You were a Fulbright Scholar in Australia for a year.

JW: Yes. I went there to research freedom of the press primarily, because there's so many more restrictions on the press freedom in Australia than there are here. That's true of all the Commonwealth countries, England, and so on. They have no First Amendment, so, they can't rely on that. Australia, when I was there in 1990, the newspapers kept a lawyer in their newsroom to vet anything that looked slightly controversial. The politicians were suing the newspapers all the time because they don't have what is called here the public figure defense, that, in this country, you can't sue a politician on his work. You can sue him for other personal things, but you can't do that. But, in Australia, you could do that.

I was in a communication school at Charles Sturt University, which was just on the edge of the Outback in a little town called Bathurst, about a hundred and twenty miles west of Sydney. I was in doing mainly seminars there in all these issues. The professors, who had been journalists, all said that, in Australia, there were some politicians who had gotten into politics mainly to feather their own nest by suing newspapers. In fact, the Prime Minister, who was the one just before I was there, said that he had "The Melbourne Sun memorial swimming pool" in his yard. He'd gotten so much money that he was able to build a swimming pool on the returns, and he was very proud of it, too.

I interviewed an investigative reporter in The Sydney Herald, which was one of the few papers that did investigative reporting, and he said, "I think there may be eight investigative reporters in the whole of Australia, because it's such a dangerous thing." I told him about the investigative reporters and editors--there's thousands of them--in this country. Although, I guess a lot of them are being fired now because it costs money to send people out for days or weeks to investigate a story. So, I then wrote some articles about that in The Melbourne Sun and in The Australian Journalism Review and The American Journalism Review and The Columbia Journalism Review. There's different aspects of that that grew out of that six months in Australia.

SI: You also did some work in Poland with the Rutgers Media Resources Center.

JW: Yes, yes. That was a good thing. I think Rutgers set that up because it was just after the turnover. After the Communists got out of Poland, there were no reporters and editors who set up to do honest, straight-ahead reporting; they were all set up to do propaganda. So, they had to train a whole new group of reporters and editors, and that's what Rutgers helped to do by setting up that institute. I didn't mention it--I've forgotten the exact name of it. So, I went for two years to work in papers in ...

SI: Warsaw?

JW: Warsaw and Krakow. Also, they asked me to--Jagiellonian University there in Krakow was setting up a journalism school where they used to have people trained in propaganda. They now needed professors who were going to support straight-ahead journalism. They had an undergraduate program, but they asked if I would come and talk to them about a graduate program in print journalism. So, I did that for part of the time under the same Rutgers auspices.

SI: In a former Communist country, did they face some of these issues that you talk about with Australia, where they don't have something like the Bill of Rights to protect them?

JW: I think it was more direct repression. No suggestion that the press was free in those countries.

SI: Was that the case even after Communism?

JW: Well, I think there were some editors and reporters who stayed on, I guess, on these papers. In fact, I was giving a talk in Warsaw about this and saying that you couldn't put your own--if you were going to do an honest bit of journalism, you couldn't put your own opinion in the stories because they'd all been opinion stories before that.

One of the journalists, an old man who was in this, he said, "Well, that's what we've been fighting for. We couldn't put our own opinion in it during the time of the Communists." I said, "Well, you can't do it now, either. You can put it in editorials and that's perfectly fine, but the idea of a free press is that you keep it as free as you can without loading it with your own opinion."

SI: You've done a lot of public affairs documentary work in various aspects of your career. What are some other projects that you worked on that come to mind?

JW: Well, I did several localized documentaries at Channel Thirteen. For ABC News, I did a series of four documentaries called Brand New You, when they were putting together the State University of New York. I went to four different branches of it and did half-hour documentaries. Then, we re-edited it into an hour-and-a-half documentary that was put out quite some time ago. That was an interesting thing I enjoyed doing.

I did a documentary with Joan Ganz Cooney, who worked with me at Channel Thirteen. We did a documentary on all the problems of Rikers Island, which I see now, in the papers, they're still having major problems at Rikers Island. They're trying to shut it down, but it isn't happening. Most of the time, I was the executive producer of documentaries.

With the eighteen documentaries I told you I did with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I would go around the country and look at all their rough cuts. Although they never said--except for the Martin Luther King one, they never listened to me as executive producer. For some reason, when I started out, they said they didn't want that to be my title, but I could suggest what ways stories should go and did. But the production was always up to the producer, finally.

SI: Were you with The Public Broadcast Laboratory when Robert Kennedy was assassinated?

JW: Was it that--?

SI: That was three or four months after Dr. King was killed. [Editor's note: Senator Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968, shortly after winning the California Democratic Presidential primary.]

JW: I guess so, but I didn't do anything about that.

SI: I was wondering if there was any reaction.

JW: No.

SI: At that time, obviously, Vietnam was becoming a major issue. Do you have any recollections of work you were doing related to the antiwar movement or the news coming back about Vietnam?

JW: Well, we also did short pieces, as well as documentaries in this Laboratory. So, we had some reporters that went around the country. We did things of that sort. I don't remember about the core of the time of Vietnam because that wasn't a major concern, other than the problems that it had for the people in this country opposing the war.

SI: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was in 1964, but the buildup does not really happen until the late 1960s. Then, going into the early '70s when we withdraw. [Editor's Note: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a naval battle between the United States and North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2, 1964. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, 1964, authorizing the President to take retaliatory action against North Vietnam.]

JW: Yes. Well, I didn't get involved with that.

SI: Are there any other aspects of your career that you want to talk about? We have your vitae here, but what do you think about the most when you think about your career?

JW: Well, one thing that kept me very busy was, I was a visiting professor, for instance, at Jackson State in Alabama. There, I was talking mostly about the concerns in my book. I lectured on all these subjects, including all those ones I described about privacy, and so on, and freedom of the press and freedom of speech, too.

I gave lectures and seminars at twenty-one universities around the country. Those were interesting or dull depending on the place I went to. I enjoyed that. I liked particularly talking with the professors and their concerns at that time. I also wrote articles, as I said, for journalism reviews on the subject, and I liked that. I liked taking a story and working for about three months on a freelance and really digging into a story, and writing it then for these different journalism reviews.

YL: Did you write any other books besides Electronic Nightmare?

JW: Yes. I was co-author of a book on public access television, way long ago, when people were starting to think about it and setting up public access channels in a lot of towns. That really never took off very well, but they're still doing it. That was a how-to book about how to set up that kind of television.

SI: I would like to go back to when you were writing for The New York Times and your five-part series on the Civil Rights Movement in the churches in the South. I think you said in the first interview that you were assigned to cover that, or did you develop that kind of story?

JW: I suggested a series about that.

SI: How did you come up with a strategy for investigating this issue?

JW: I did a lot of research before I went out reporting on it to try to find out who was supporting integration of churches and who was fighting against it. For instance, one whole section of that was on the situation in New Orleans where Archbishop [Joseph] Rummel was the first that I know of to integrate schools, before Brown v. Board of Education. [Editor's Note: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas was a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that ordered schools to be desegregated.] He integrated the diocesan schools. He ran into a lot of trouble, not only from rednecks but his own priests.

I remember going across the river to a small town on the east side of the Mississippi and going to a church service there with a priest. As I walked in, I noticed that blacks were in the back and to the right side, and whites were across the front and slightly back here. I'd known that he didn't want to integrate his congregation. Of course, I interviewed him after that, after I sat through the service. He said, "Well, this is our tradition. I don't care what Rummel thinks; we're not going to integrate our congregation." I said, "Well, won't you get into trouble with the Archbishop?" He said, "Yeah, I will be, but we're not going to do it." I never did find out what happened to that church ultimately, but that was the kind of thing that you can imagine they felt that.

Of course, the Southern Baptist Convention was rabidly against any kind of integration of the churches. I got to know a lot of people who were fighting that battle, one way or the other. The churches that were most effective--well, the denomination that was most effective was the United Church of Christ, which was the old Congregational Church. They sent Andy Young to join the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to run a voting drive very early on. He had been a pastorate at a Connecticut church at the time in the United Church of Christ. They gave a hundred thousand dollars at that time to support the voting drive, I remember.

A lot of the Episcopalian churches in the South were moving in that direction or trying to. I'm just trying to think. There was a Southern Presbyterian minister in Georgia who sort of became famous on preaching about integration. His synod was fighting him and, finally, I went down there from Atlanta and sat in a church in which a member of the synod came and announced that he was being dismissed from his pulpit because he did this. That was a rather exciting story because it just split the congregation in half. There was a lot of interest in that. That's what happened.

A man named [Fred] Shuttlesworth in Birmingham--I mentioned this in one of the articles--he was a black minister and an activist in Birmingham. His house had been firebombed four times. He said that it was funny because every time the house was firebombed--I guess they just threw against the front of his house, but anyway, it wasn't burned down--he said, "I'd go out on the porch and there I see a Birmingham police car driving way." So, I used that in a Times story. Bull Connor then told The New York Times bureau chief in Atlanta that if ever I came to Birmingham again that I'd be arrested on sight. So, that was pretty good to do.

[Editor's Note: Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor, a politician in Birmingham, Alabama, ordered Birmingham police officers and firemen to use dogs and high-pressure water hoses against demonstrators rallying against racial segregation in the city in 1963. During that same year, Ku Klux Klan members planted dynamite in the Birmingham Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which had been a gathering place for civil rights activities. The resulting explosion killed four young girls and injured twenty-two others.]

Then, I interviewed a Methodist judge, the district judge in that area. I guess he was the head of the Methodist laymen's group in the area, the whole area. I interviewed him and wrote a story in that series about it. He became furious about it. So, he got hold of the AP [Associated Press] and told the AP that the people down there didn't want outside agitators to come into Birmingham and that John Wicklein had no business coming into Birmingham and disrupting their way of life. So, AP wrote the story and The Times ran it with that in it.

When I was reporting, you don't try to slant anything--of course, just stating the facts about integration or segregation in your stories--Northern readers, most of them, were saying, "Well, that's terrible, isn't it?" I've always wanted to give the devil his due and report and quote people exactly on what they're doing.

That happened in an interesting way. I went and covered a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. It's a huge meeting, about twenty-five messengers, as they say, because nobody is allowed to represent anybody else. Their messengers at the convention represent themselves. Anyway, the man who's elected president I interviewed and told a story about what he felt about integration, which was he didn't think it should happen. He said, "Over time it will happen, but not now; now is not the time."

So, I wrote the story in the news for The Times. So, the next morning, he called me and he said, "Well, John, you were absolutely right; I am a gradualist. That was just right." [laughter] He was happy to see that he was not going to be penned with any integrationist stuff in my newspaper.

YL: This is just a general question, but it is about the Civil Rights Movement. Have you ever been close to being arrested for your work as a reporter?

JW: No, I haven't. I have worried about being a Northern reporter in the South, and I've covered some segregationist rallies while I was doing this. I would take off these glasses and take off my jacket and tie, and I wouldn't take notes because I didn't know what would happen in the group.

I felt myself mostly under attack for my union [coverage] in Elizabeth, New Jersey, when I first started my career, because of something I wrote that the union didn't like. A bunch of goons surrounded me and asked me where I got the story. [laughter] But no, I've never been sued. In fact, I am proud of the fact that nobody has ever asked for a retraction or a correction on a story I've written.

SI: I also want to ask you a little more about the Kennedy campaign and your coverage of the Catholic issue. It seems like with your coverage of the churches and civil rights, you knew what churches to go to. How would you tackle something a bit more diffuse, like how the country was reacting to a Catholic candidate?

JW: Well, I spent a year. That was my assignment for one year; 1959 and 1960, I covered that issue, along with other stories all around the country. So, I met some of the crazies and some of the hardcore anti-Catholics that were so dead-against Kennedy. I might as well put this into the--this has never been published, but I covered the primary campaign between Hubert Humphrey and Jack Kennedy in West Virginia. I went to some of his rallies and I found that there were a lot of Republicans in the audiences. He told them exactly the same thing he told anybody else. He was very straightforward about what he was doing.

SI: John F. Kennedy?

JW: Jack Kennedy, yes. Then, I interviewed Bobby Kennedy about it there, too. I went up to hollers in West Virginia and talked to the people who said they would not have any Catholic as a President. So, then, I came back into Washington on that trip and I went into Kennedy's office in Washington and interviewed him about the whole situation, about this anti-Catholic thing. I had written a number of stories by then about how the South was going to go against Kennedy and so was the Midwest for the issue of Catholicism.

Bobby Kennedy said to me--when I got up to leave, he said, "Take off your reporter's hat, John, and tell me, what would you do? How do you fight this anti-Catholicism?" I said, "Well, when I was in West Virginia, I saw how the people reacted to Kennedy even though they were Republicans. They may not have voted for him, but they seemed to be very receptive of his talks." I had also met many Southern Baptist leaders over the years.

So, I said, "What I would do is get a group of the Southern Baptist leaders and get them in a group and have Kennedy talk to them specifically about his feeling about the separation of church and state." I was talking about Texas because, as a friend of mine said, "There are more Baptists in Texas than people." So, I said, "I would go down to Houston and gather that group together and talk to them about it, and then, take the Q&A from them."

So, three weeks later, that's what he did. Kennedy said that he believed in the separation of church and state and he was a candidate serving--I forget the exact words--and that he was a Catholic and he would be Catholic and the Catholic Pope would have no influence on his running of the country. This has not been published. I'm writing a memoir; that's where I'm saying this comes from. He did very well with that. I don't know if he turned many of the Baptist elders for him, but I think it helped around the country to have him say that.

Then, The Times had me go--The Times divided the country into [four] sections: New England, the Midwest, the West, and the South--in September of 1960. What they wanted to do was have a reporter in each of those areas do a survey of how that area was going to go and why, as best you could find out. I went to the Midwest and went to a number of towns in the Midwest, and sometimes to churches and sometimes to leaders. Then, I went into newspapers and talked to the political editors of the newspapers, too, to try to sound it out.

Of course, it seemed to me the Midwest was not going to go for Kennedy because of that reason, because of the Catholicism. Then, I went through the South and did the same thing ... and felt that the South was even more convinced that, because of his Catholicism, they couldn't vote for him. If anything was going to defeat him, I thought that was. And it came very close, I think.

SI: Did you cover the meeting between Kennedy and the Southern Baptist leaders as part of your report?

JW: No, that was the reporter who covered Texas. I've forgotten. I have the clip. I didn't cover it.

SI: What was the relationship like between the press and a campaign in those days?

JW: Well, that was the one and only time in my whole career I went off on something like that. I just felt so strongly about it that I couldn't say--well, I have no idea. Let it happen. Of course, all Northern reporters--most reporters outside the Deep South thought that segregation was a bad thing, but you try to keep that out. As I say, if you quoted these people exactly, the people in the North were going to understand anyway what we felt about things like that, but you didn't do interpretive stories to say that these are no-good bastards.

SI: Aside from the civil rights issues and the Kennedy campaign, what are some of the other major stories that you remember from that period and your writing about religion at the time?

JW: Well, since I was traveling all over the country, checking out the religion issue, the national editor, if I was in a town where--I can remember being in Pittsburgh when Nixon was speaking. They asked me to cover that speech, although it had nothing to do with religion because he wanted to keep religion out of it from his concerns, as much as possible.

I tried four times to have an interview with Nixon about this. Each time, the word was sent back to me that religion has no place in the political campaign, although his staff and many others were using a whisper campaign against Kennedy. They used it fairly well, but Nixon said that he's above all that, he wouldn't do that.

SI: Was there any coverage given to the growth of the Islamic Brotherhood movement at that time?

JW: No. No, I don't think so. It was never a major issue. I know that Malcolm X was shot, and that, of course, was a story, but I don't think I was at The Times at that time.

SI: That was probably when you were at WABC.

JW: Locally, yes.

SI: Are there any other stories that you covered in the 1960s and 1970s, before you went into academia, that stand out in your memory?

JW: Not off the top of my head. I should think of some, though. Well, I started out with the old Newark Evening News, like I told you. One of the assignments I had in Elizabeth, New Jersey, was to cover a long Singer strike, Singer Manufacturing Company. There was a huge plant there and they walked out. There was a Communist union. Not that anybody could prove it, but everybody thought it was a Communist union running this strike.

I covered that for a number of weeks. One of the things I did there was, they had a march around an L-shaped building. The union had people marching this way and up, and then, turning around and coming back this way. The head of the union came up to me; I was standing at the corner here. He said, "Yeah, we got seven thousand people out on this." I said, "No, you don't. You've got 3,420." [laughter] I had stayed there until they came around again. That's the figure I used, the three thousand.

Anyway, there was a funny incident, or unusual incident. The union had worked itself up to the point where it sensed that the people in the union didn't want to go on too much farther. They got permission to negotiate with the management of Singer Manufacturing Company and get the best deal that they could, and then, come back to the union. The shop stewards had a meeting. Well, their meeting was in a small, abandoned church they had set up their headquarters. So, the night of the meeting, I walked up to the front door and started to go in, and somebody pulled me aside and said, "This meeting is closed. It's closed to the press. It's closed to everybody."

So, I got outside and I walked around the back, and went in the back door that happened to be open. The back door--it was a very small church--it led right into the vestry. There was a door between the vestry and the place where this meeting was being held. I saw right above me there was a hole in the ceiling, an access hole to get up into the attic. It was a one-story church and an attic above it. So, I piled up some boxes and climbed through the hole and climbed to be right over the dais.

They were presenting the case to the union and working hard to get them to say yes, because the union officers really wanted to end it now. They got a vote approving their contract. The next afternoon, they were supposed to go to meet the Singer Manufacturing Company officers and sign the papers that the strike was over. Well, the next morning, I walked into that church, which they were using as an office generally. They'd seen me coming and, immediately, a bunch of guys that looked like thugs came very close around me.

The head of the union said, "Where did you get that story? Who leaked that story to you? Which one of these people leaked that story to you?" I said, "Well, I can't reveal my sources." [laughter] I don't even think I told them that nobody in there had got that story. That was fun for me anyway. I never told them how I got the story.

YL: You talked before about unpublished stories and unfinished products. Are there any other unfinished products or incomplete stories that you think back to, that would have been interesting if you finished?

JW: Well, I'm writing a memoir. I should have started it twenty years ago, but I've been working on it for about two years. I've made a rundown of things, periods and incidents that happened to me. I'm always interested in a funny incident, and there were a lot of funny incidents in that time. So, I'm trying to write those. Nothing that would be earth-shattering, but would be interesting for a memoir. I'm doing the memoir not for publication, but for my children, grandchildren and I just had a great-grandchild for the first time.

YL: Congratulations.

SI: Congratulations.

JW: They'll be seeing that. I'm working on it, but I don't have anything specific. I have some very interesting Navy stories, but that isn't part of the--

SI: We talked about your time in the Navy extensively last time. Do you think your experience in the Navy affected your later life, your career or your attitude during your career?

JW: Well, I don't know about my attitude. Maybe it did. I was first an assistant communications officer on a destroyer. Then, I became communications officer after the war ended. There were sixty men in my division and I was twenty-one years old. That was something that you were thrown into, the fact that you were sent in there as the officer over all these men.

You had to develop a philosophy of how do you handle that, so that you don't get a mutiny. I learned early on that you have to work with the chiefs. The chiefs have been there ten or twenty years. They knew the Navy and I didn't, because I'd come in after four months in midshipmen's school. As it turned out, I got along very well with the people in my division and never tried to be rough on them; I didn't feel that way.

I think that served me well when I got administrative positions later in my career, that you should be--it's cliché--firm but fair, but that's what I wanted to do. That's what I think I have done. I think maybe I picked that up from the work I did on the ship.

SI: There is one story from your years at The New York Times that I wanted to ask you about. I was working on another project on immigration from Cuba after Castro's takeover, Operation Peter Pan. In doing the research, I found many articles from The Times and saw that you had written them.

JW: Yes, I hope that's true.

SI: These articles were about churches in the United States hosting families who were coming from Cuba, hosting children that were coming over alone. Does anything stand out about that issue in your coverage?

JW: I think that I wrote stories about that from the point of view of the churches who accepted them, but I was never down there seeing them come in. I didn't do firsthand reporting on that.

SI: Was it something you were just assigned to do?

JW: Yes, probably. I just don't remember exactly about that.

SI: Is there anything else about your career or your life in general that you want to add to the record?

JW: No. What I will do is look through the memoir and look at the outline that I've made of incidents coming up. If there's anything like that, could I talk it into the phone?

SI: Yes, or you can write it into the transcript.

JW: All right. Sure. Yes, you told me that I was going to see the transcript.

SI: Probably in a couple of months.

JW: Yes. I'm sure my memory isn't correct on all the dates. I think I'll want to change a lot of dates probably.

SI: That's okay. What we do in the transcript is, if you say the wrong name or date, we'll put in a note correcting it. You can also edit that as well.

JW: I'm sure I forgot some names, which I will dig out.

SI: Everyone does. Do you have any other questions? No? Thank you very much. We appreciate all your time over these two sessions. It has been very fascinating.

JW: Thanks for doing it. I like the idea. Do other universities have anything like this?

SI: Yes. A lot of them have oral history programs on a variety of topics. Columbia has, like ours, a wide range of topics. A lot of the other universities, they'll focus in on one particular thing. Same thing with University of California, Berkeley. They have the Regional Oral History Office that gets into a lot of different issues. It is a growing discipline, but we've been around for twenty years. We've done a lot in a lot of different areas.

JW: Yes.

SI: Well, thank you very much. I'll conclude this session.

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Reviewed by John Wicklein 7/15/2018