Untold story about AP's 2000 Pulitzer Prize
“They tried time and time again to kill the story, and ... we refused.”
By Kwanwoo Jun
MANHATTAN, New York -- Charles Hanley, 63, is one of only four “special correspondents” still active in The Associated Press. Hanley and two of his colleagues (Sang-Hun Choe and Martha Mendoza) teamed up to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for investigative reporting on a U.S. military massacre of civilians at No Gun Ri, South Korea, in 1950.
Eleven years after receiving the coveted journalism award, the Pulitzer Prize, Hanley talked about bits of an in-house secret behind the prize-winning story: his then-top bosses of The AP were reluctant to publish his story about the American killing of an estimated 400 unarmed Korean refugees during the early days of the 1950-1953 Korean War. Hanley said his bosses (then-President Louis D. Boccardi and then-Executive Editor William Ahearn) had tried to kill the story but failed to do so.
The U.S. military authorities had denied The AP report, but a Pentagon investigation later confirmed the civilian killing and led to then President Bill Clinton’s statement of regret in January 2001.
During the 90-minute interview at The AP building at 450 West on 33rd St. in Manhattan, Hanley’s voice was calm. His eyes often glared when he recounted the details of his former bosses trying to kill the story. The AP published the story in September 1999 after a 14-month review.
Hanley described his team’s work for the Pulitzer Prize-winning piece as “a stunning experience” of facing and overcoming the resistance from the then-leadership of The AP. Robert Port, then special assignment editor who had pushed for the publication of the story in talks with The AP leadership before he quit in 2000, said the top AP bosses feared the story would vilify U.S. servicemen. “You make these soldiers look like criminals,” Boccardi told Port at a meeting, according to Port’s contribution to “Into the Buzzsaw” published in 2002. Boccardi and Ahearn, who retired from The AP in 2003 and 2000 respectively, were not immediately available for comments.
“They tried time and time again to kill the story, and time and time again, we refused,” Hanley said. “We kept trying to find new ways to write it to overcome whatever their problems were, and the problems were never articulated. It was simply some kind of innate fear of big-explosive stories.”
“We didn’t publish it 14 months,” Hanley said, adding his team had to go through “a very extremely bitter period” of having the story reviewed before its publication.
Hanley said he, as main writer of the story, had to modify the lead paragraph in what he described a “very soft” tone in a deal with The AP leadership in order to get the story published. The revised story starts with the following paragraph: “It was a story no one wanted to hear: Early in the Korean War, villagers said, American soldiers machine-gunned hundreds of helpless civilians under a railroad bridge in the South Korean countryside.” Hanley said its previous versions were more straightforward in describing the U.S. killing of civilians. “It didn’t damage the essence of the story,” he said. “It was either publish or not publish it, a pretty black and white thing.”
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on July 6, 1947, Hanley graduated from St. Bonaventure University with a B.A. in journalism. He joined The AP in 1968 in Albany, N.Y., where he became a political correspondent and bureau news editor. He moved to The AP Foreign Desk in 1976 and served as assistant and then deputy managing editor in 1987-92, after which he was named as special correspondent, a title awarded to a handful of journalists at The AP. He and his wife, Pamela Hanlon, reside in New York.
In the meantime, Hanley had the countenance of an affable uncle whom I met in my neighborhood. Wearing a white shirt and a blue tie, he had a tidy mustache. He had thinning hair, with thick hair only on the sides and back.
When I arrived at his office on the 14th floor, he escorted me to a conference room. We passed by his “special correspondent” desk which was not special. It was just one of many other desks in the office. His desk commanded a nice and unhindered view, facing west by the window towards New Jersey across the Hudson River.
Q: Would you describe your job title, special correspondent?
A: The title was initiated in the 1950’s by The AP for people who are considered to be senior and high-quality journalists. At the moment, there are four of us, still active. Three of them are domestic (special correspondents Linda Deutsch, David Espo and Helen O’Neil) and I’m the only international special correspondent. In most cases, we are feature writers who work on major projects. I’ve done a lot of reporting in recent years on climate change and on nuclear arms control. These are two particular areas of interest. Of course, in the past decade, I did a lot of reporting from the Iraq war and from the Afghanistan war. I look for big subjects: the subjects that cross the many boundaries and many national and international borders.
Q: Would you tell me how you started work in journalism?
A: I attended a small university, St. Bonaventure University, and obtained a degree in journalism before joining The AP in 1968. The head of the journalism department was friendly with The AP’s bureau chief in Albany, N.Y. That bureau chief was on the university’s journalism advisory board. So they had a relationship. And so my journalism department head recommended me to them, to The AP. Even today but even more back then, The AP was considered part of the top tier of American journalism. To work for The AP was considered quite a plum as we called to get that kind of job. So I ended up there actually starting off on a temporary basis.
Q: How do you find story ideas?
A: You just pick it up here and there. I can remember years ago (“As Russian Crime Grows, So Do the U.S.-Russian Police Links,” Feb. 20, 1994) I was planning to write about organized crime in Russia and their international presence outside Russia. I got hold of a specialty periodical on international criminal developments. This was a small university think tank that was interested in international crimes. Just perusing that, I saw a very brief mention of the fact that a leading Russian mafia figure had moved to the United States. I knew this hadn’t been reported anywhere. It turned out that the scholar who wrote this spotted it in a Russian publication, a publication of the Russian interior ministry. In other words, the police agency in Russia had written about this in their own in-house journal. He happened to be a scholar looking at everything. He ran across this but he made hardly anything of it. But I recognized that this was a very good story. And I got very lucky because, on that same trip, working on international crimes, I stopped by Interpol, the international police agency in France. This was really quite a coup because I was writing a feature on their computer system that they were modernizing. And it was a feature about Interpol. They demonstrated their computer and data that were in their computer. I asked them to check on this name, which they did not even recognize. What they turned up, I couldn’t take notes because it would have been suspicious for me to take notes. They just wanted me to see how the computer worked and nothing more. I had to memorize as things were scrolling up. There was a series of messages exchanged between the FBI in American and Russian law enforcement people, the Russian Interior Ministry, about this guy, his travel, etc., about what he is likely to do in America and sort of things. So I was trying to memorize as much as I could while I was watching it. This proved to be the heart of the story. I was able to report that Russians said they thought he was going to assassinate a particular crime figure in America. He traveled here and he traveled there. I had all of that information with attribution. As you know, every story is different, but one has to develop a sense of what’s new. You have to familiarize yourself enough with an area so that you know that this has not been reported.
Things often fall into your lap. Sometimes you are assigned to things by an editor. But mostly, it’s simply immersing yourself in certain areas so that you recognize stories when they pop up.
Q: You’ve earned many awards for journalism. What are you most proud of? Why?
A: Obviously, the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The No Gun Ri thing, which was just a stunning experience for any journalist.
Q: A stunning experience in terms of what?
A: The most important part of the experience was, journalistically, the resistance – we then encountered – from the leadership of The AP. (then-President Louis D. Boccardi and then-Executive Editor William Ahearn) They tried time and time again to kill the story, and time and time again, we refused.
We kept trying to find new ways to write it to overcome whatever their problems were, and the problems were never articulated. It was simply some kind of innate fear of big-explosive stories. That is really what it came down to. In the end, the way we succeeded was to get words out in the news business and elsewhere about the story that was being suppressed.
So they finally had to relent and let us publish it. But it was a very extremely bitter period that lasted a year. We didn’t publish it 14 months. We would have published it 14 months earlier.
Q: I remember watching a multimedia package for the story, too.
A: We were forbidden to talk to (The AP) television. However, I did talk to television, not directly but through a liaison in London to give them an early heads-up. I did the same thing with (The AP) multimedia. At the last minute, the managing editor sent a deputy to multimedia and told them that “We looked at your package. We want you to eliminate everything except the text story and the still photographs that go with the story.” The head of multimedia went to the managing editor and said, “No, we are going to put out this whole package. And they did and they won the multimedia award of the year from Columbia University. In effect, they won a Pulitzer with their multimedia while we were winning a Pulitzer award for reporting.
You see they were still so afraid of the story that they thought maybe it could fly below the radar, nobody would notice and we just slip the story out. That’s why we ended up with a terrible lead. The lead: there was a story no one wanted to hear.
Q: Kind of weak, isn’t it?
A: Very weak. Yeah. Very soft. We relented on that because we wanted to get the story out. In fact, there was one major newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, which took our story and rewrote it the way I had written it originally.
I was the guy who wrote the story. And I was the guy who stood up most to the bosses. I dealt with them (then-President Louis D. Boccardi and then-Executive Editor William Ahearn) directly. I argued with them I got thrown out of the executive editor who threw me out of his office at one point because they were so embarrassed by themselves and by what they were doing. They didn’t want to talk about it. They didn’t want to hear about it. As I was leaving, I said, “You can’t cover up the My Lai massacre.” But I knew we would win because we were in the right. I was a former deputy managing editor and special correspondent. And I knew they wouldn’t dare try to fire me or do anything drastic.
Q: Was there any moment you would like to give it up?
A: No. No. Of course, we did compromise on the lead paragraph. But it didn’t damage the heart of the story. It didn’t damage the essence of the story. You know there was no compromise. It was either publish or not publish it, a pretty black and white thing.
I knew we would win. We had to win. It was an extremely difficult time. I had one friend at The AP whom I could confide in and who would figuratively pat me on the back and tell me I was right. But other people who should have been helping us, middle manager types, just disappeared. Once they realized that two top bosses (then-President Louis D. Boccardi and then-Executive Editor William Ahearn) wanted to kill the story, they would not argue on our behalf.
Q: Would you give some advice to young, aspiring journalists?
A: I’m hardly in a good position to advise anybody about how to go about becoming a journalist in today’s environment. I can only say that it’s a wonderful occupation. The standard advice today, of course, is learn all the media. In another word, learn to do video and take photos as well, still photos, etc. And be ready to do anything. I guess the conventional wisdom is that storytelling is evolving into a multimedia thing. And I suppose that may be true.
But still the very skill is to be able to write in an interesting and engaging way. Of course, find great stories. And really great ones come along pretty rarely. But when you get one, it’s very, very exciting.
Q: What is the bad side of journalism?
A: The hours are long and unpredictable, the work is hard, the pay is poor, and sometimes it's dangerous. But I suppose many of life's best occupations have the same “bad side.”
Q: How has journalism changed since you came into journalism?
A: Journalism has changed tremendously since I entered the field professionally in 1968. After all, I started on typewriters. And although we computerized steadily in
the 1970s at our home offices, I was still relying on the typewriter into the early 1980s in my international travels, before finally switching over to early versions of laptop computers. The digital age led to greater volume and speed in news reporting, greater access to remote areas via satellite communications, and eventually to on-line combinations of text, photos, video and audio that could not be imagined when I began my career. Essentially, of course, the mission is the same, to try to establish and report the facts of important events. But for me one of the greatest changes has been the ability to “show”' rather than simply “tell” the reader those facts, through on-line posting of documents, video interviews, links to authoritative online sources and the like. When used properly, this can give today's journalism much more credibility than in the past.
Q: Have American newsrooms changed over the years? How? For better or worse?
A: I'll address simply the matter of personnel -- the journalists in the newsroom. In that regard, there are vastly more women in American journalism today than when I started more than 40 years ago. There are also more minority-group members, although that is not so noticeable. This, of course, is all for the better.
Q: What do you think of the state of American journalism today?
A: Most of my career, I have regretted what I've seen as the trivialization of American journalism, the growing focus on “celebrities,” unimportant “scandals,” sensational crimes and such. I think that grows worse every year. Today it's joined by another kind of trivialization, the treatment online, in blogs and other forms, of barely concealed opinion -- from whatever source -- as “journalism.” Related to that is the idea that “citizen journalism,” reporting by ordinary, untrained people online, is somehow legitimate journalism. There is still excellent print journalism in America, particularly in investigative reporting by The New York Times, the Washington Post and, at times, The AP. But unfortunately U.S. newspapers are declining, in number and in circulation, and I don't believe such non-newspaper initiatives as the investigative unit Pro Publica can make up for those losses.
Q: What do you think is the future of American journalism?
A: Despite the pessimism in that last answer, I believe that the U.S. is a country so diverse, educated, involved and interested that there will always be a demand for a basic level of good, relevant journalism. It's hard to see that emerging from the current online collection of outlets, but I suppose it may be found online someday as the best newspapers evolve into mainly Internet presences.
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