Oral History Interview with Robert Schulman, July 18, 2007

ROBERT SCHULMAN: [ ] O. LEONARD PRESS: Thank you. Tap in anytime.

SARAH MILLIGAN: Go ahead.

PRESS: Okay. Pick up where you left off and what you forgot first.

MILLIGAN: Who are you?

PRESS: Who am I?

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: I’m Len Press and I’m interviewing Bob Schulman for oral history, and the date is 7-18-07.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: And we’re at the, in the conference room of the Kentucky Historical Society. This is the Thomas D. Clark Center— SCHULMAN: Very good.

PRESS: For History. And what else?

SCHULMAN: Thomas, Thomas Diogenes Clark.

PRESS: Hm. Yeah. Dio-, Diogenes.

MILLIGAN: Really?

PRESS: I, I got, the first time I wrote him— SCHULMAN: You didn’t know that?

PRESS: I, I wrote him Thomas Di-, Thomas Dionysius. [laughter] And he was, he, gentle soul that he was, he didn’t even point it out. I discovered on my own finally, and apologized. Anyway, I, you had, you’d, you remember some things from last time. 1:00SCHULMAN: Yes. We had, we had discussed on the occasion when the, the head of the Schick razor company came up with a huge amount of money to finance the meeting of a Christian anti-cru-, Christian anti-Communist crusade at the Hollywood Bowl, not to be confused with ot-, with other bowls. [laughter] PRESS: Right.

MILLIGAN: That’s what I’m here for.

SCHULMAN: Actually the proposed message suggested that maybe it should be renamed the toilet bowl. It was a rabid, it was a rabid, 2:00red-baiting anti—and you remember they came to a, a first-rated station in each of the major West Coast cities to carry ninety minutes of this program for pay. And what, under the direction of Dorothy Stimson Bullitt, the president and developer of the KING Broadcasting Company in the Northwest, at, well, she called upon us, and at my suggestion, she did, was to have something, which I’d forgotten we called “Encounter” to follow the Hollywood anti-Communist crusade, and to bring in, which we did—and I remember two of the three people. I remember Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, Richard Rovere, the politics writer for the New York Magazine. And who was the third?

PRESS: And who was the third? 3:00SCHULMAN: I’m embarrassed because, as you say Len, although you’re not as qualified as I, to us holst—oldsters, he was a biggie, namely Gilbert Seldes, prolific writer of books on journalism ethics and the first head of the Annenberg Journalism Center at the University of Pennsylvania. And in riffling through to find his name, I discovered that—I’d forgotten this—Newsweek did a piece about it: about the whole thing that Schick razor promoted and identified what we had done by way of a response in Seattle as unmatched in its responsible journalism. In Newsweek. Wasn’t that nice? I’d forgot. [laughs] PRESS: I, this is a digression, but let me ask: where are your papers?

SCHULMAN: Part, the, all of the— PRESS: Are they?

SCHULMAN: Or many of the manuscripts of the four years when I was doing “One Man’s Opinion” at KING TV 4:00and radio, I sent to the archives at the U of L.

PRESS: Okay.

SCHULMAN: But all of, almost all of the other papers, I have around the house. [laughs] PRESS: And do you have any plans? Has anybody spoken for them?

SCHULMAN: No. And I’m really, I’m going to welcome them.

PRESS: [ ] I want that on record because— SCHULMAN: Make a suggestion.

PRESS: I think something— SCHULMAN: Huh?

PRESS:I think something should be arranged. Definitely should be arranged.

SCHULMAN: Well, I would welcome a good suggestion. But, you know, when it comes to my papers on my mother’s sister, my aunt, the subject of a recently published book, Romany Marie—this is kind of funny. Mitch McConnell’s ex-wife, first wife, the mother of his daughters, who remained in Louisville at, as an archivist until she went to Smith College, where she has been for the last, 5:00I don’t know, twelve or fourteen years, the director of women’s history at Smith College. And she some years ago expressed an interest in the Romany Marie material. But I don’t know that that’s the place. Of course, it’s closer to Greenwich Village than Louisville.

PRESS: Only geographically.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. [laughter] At any rate, and I, you know, just in this—here’s a thing. When I left Seattle in June of 1968, an Argus ac-, accolade, this was a weekly arts publication. It was embarrassing. “To Robert Schulman who has served this area well as a long-time member of the Seattle Municipal Arts Commission 6:00and the state Arts Commission; also director of Governor Dan Evans challenging “Design for Washington” conference. As he leaves the Northwest for Kentucky to join the Sunday department of the respected Louisville Courier-Journal and Times.” Oh.

PRESS: Oh, well that was generous of them to call it “the respected.” SCHULMAN: Wasn’t it though? You know. I found a letter from Norman Isaacs in which he is telling me, April 6, 1984, of his plans to write, which he did, a book called the, what did he finally call it? But it was an extremely, extremely effective book about the state of ethics or lack of ethics in American journalism. Upon 7:00his retirement as head of the National, short-lived National News Council and associate of Fred Friendly at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which led I think, in part, some years later when a former managing editor of the Louisville Times, who went then to the K-, be editor of the Kansas City Star, and from there to the Baltimore Sun, which was then bought by Capital Cities. [laughs] So Cap Cities had an annual meeting, if you please at the Biltmore in Phoenix, and Mike Davies arranged for me to join Fred Friendly in putting on a program about ethics for the management, executives of Capital City. And that was great fun and 8:00very, very unforgettable. And each of us got what was brand new at the time, and we accepted, a Walkman. Yes.

MILLIGAN: That was your payment for ethics?

SCHULMAN: Yes. Yes. Exactly.

PRESS: This was just for the staff or the admin-, the executives?

SCHULMAN: The executives. Yes. It was a top— PRESS: It wasn’t broadcast or anything?

SCHULMAN: No. No, no. Anyway. I just brought this letter for your interest.

PRESS: Before you go on, are you going to talk at all about the news council, any way?

SCHULMAN: I’d be delighted. Yes. And that’s where I got to meet and really visit frequently with that lovely sharp woman from Texas who just died. But— PRESS: Lady Bird?

SCHULMAN: No, no, no. We talked about Lady Bird last time. No, no. The journalist.

MILLIGAN: The columnist.

PRESS: Oh, oh. I want to say Marie— MILLIGAN: Molly Ivins.

PRESS: Marie I-, Isaacs.

MILLIGAN: Molly Ivins, right SCHULMAN: Kevin.

PRESS: I-, I— MILLIGAN: Ivins.

SCHULMAN: Ivins.

PRESS: Ivins.

MILLIGAN: Molly Ivins.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Molly Ivins.

PRESS: Molly Ivins. Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Molly Ivins. A remarkable woman PRESS: Oh, yeah. 9:00SCHULMAN: Well, maybe this is, this, the national news council came, in part, while I was doing “One Man’s Opinion,” and then when I was shifted in 1974, and I don’t know that we went into this or not. I was enjoying that marvelous platform—and let me digress. Last time you asked me what of the “One Man’s Opinions,” which I did every weekday for four years, which of them had been in my judgment most effective or useful and I, I was blank. I mean there 10:00has been so much done since then, Len. You know, just like to ask you which of, which KET exploit most stays in your mind. Yeah.

PRESS: It’s one I wouldn’t tell about about anyway. [laughter] SCHULMAN: But I did, I, you know, the, the, my answer having pondered it since when we last met. First of all, that, that exploit that we went up into the, into this dreadful scalping of the mountain and were greeted by the miners with shotguns and so on, which was voted that year’s nation’s best editorial. But it was not an editorial. It was my “One Man’s Opinion” commentary. On another occasion, this has come to mind, 11:00there was a big move in, in Louisville to buy great acreage of land in Shelby County and move what was then Standiford Field, not yet the Louisville International Airport to Shelby County and create a Louisville, new Louisville regional airport, much like the decision in Northern Kentucky by Delta and other airlines to make the Cincinnati Airport regional in locating it in Florence, Kentucky. And it seemed to me that this was environmentally an appalling idea because green—you all in Lexington know about this so well—green land was being engulfed and developed in great swathes for industrial—and farmers were being bought out and the leading individual in favor of this was a delightful and very effective member of the Louisville establishment, James “Buddy,” as he was known, 12:00Thompson, the president of Glenmore distilleries. Buddy was not only the chairman, and for many years remained the chairman of the airport reg-, the airport authority, but he was one of Kentucky’s first private balloonists. He used to fly all over. He had his own uniform, a slinky, and a good looking guy anyway. And really rather conservative, politically. He ran, he wanted to be state auditor, but he didn’t make it, which in a sense was too bad because he might well have become governor, who knows. He was the key figure in pushing this whole airport project. And he regarded what “One Man’s Opinion” had to say as really trying to put the nail in the coffin. And he was very taken out of sorts with me. 13:00And apparently I had some influence, but we remained friends afterward and, of course, the regional airport never happened. Also, during my “One Man’s Opinion” time was when John Y. and his lovely wife were running for governor and the occasion that campaign year was an odd annual meeting of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Kentucky Chapter in Louisville. They used to have a big annual dinner to raise money. And the speaker, believe it or not, with whom I have visited again, was Muhammad Ali, called upon to talk about truth and beauty. He tried. But that’s not why 14:00I mentioned this. We were seated, Louise and I, near an exit door. And the can-, the candidate for governor, John Y. Brown, had made an appearance on the stage, and then he and Phyllis George were leaving and they came by our table and stopped to say hello. And Phyllis George said to Louise Schulman, Louise Tachau Schulman, “How do I get a good review out of your husband?” [laughs] Well, that indicated, you know, some value to “One Man’s Opinion.” And Louise said, “Well, you’ll have to ask him.” And she said, “Well,” Phyllis said, 15:00“Maybe I’ll lay a little Texas on him.” Somehow I never forgot that.

PRESS: And you never found out what that meant either.

SCHULMAN: No. Nor have I—I’ve seen her since. I’ve never had the audacity to push it.

PRESS: To ask her what that meant. [laughs] SCHULMAN: Especially since she’s no longer Mrs. John Y. Brown.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: But she, of course—anyway, that, that did occur to me as another manifestation of the— PRESS: Of the program.

SCHULMAN: The “One Man’s Opinion.” Somebody—and again this came in—somebody called what I was doing “Jolly useful flatulence.” [laughs] PRESS: Well, so long as it was jolly.

SCHULMAN: But what I’d done, I had for a year until WHAS budgetary problems forced her dismissal, I had a fine research assistant named Ginny Duffey. 16:00She was very good. And I called her husband, a lawyer, yesterday, to see, even, even if after thirty years what commentary she would remember that had been especially useful or effective. She’s visiting her mother in Kansas, [laughs] but she will be back this weekend, and he promised to relay that question to her. During the actual John Y. Brown administration, I used to get attention. People would come to the office to talk about potential—and the man who was, I remember as having been most regular in coming to see “One Man’s Opinion” was a chap named Bruce Lunsford. [laughter] Sarah, Bruce Lunsford more recently, long after the John Y. Brown administration in Frankfort developed a health services company called Vencor 17:00and it was, as Len knows, it was so successful and made so much money that he hired I.M. Pei, one of the world’s great architects, and they were going to build an I.M. Pei structure on, along Louisville’s Main Street. And then things turned against Vencor and it went bankrupt. Out of, out of that shambles came two companies, not involved with Lunsford, but who, that are doing quite well. And that’s not relevant to our—but it was Lunsford who sought out “One Man’s Opinion.” And I will say this, during the Louie Nunn administration, which he explained to me later was why he had given so much attention to me in his public papers, his published papers, and that is that in the shadow of the always faithfully 18:00liberal Courier-Journal and Louisville Times editorial policy, depending upon what the issues were, witness my respect for the, his assistants, that I mentioned that I named the Kiddie Corps. And as a result they came to me with all kinds of information, sometimes hurtful to the Nunn administration. So, it, it, for as long as it lasted, I, it, I think it, and maybe as we, I think as I explore it maybe some more will come to mind. I, I hope this gives at least the scintilla of feeling about what went on.

PRESS: Before you skip to the next professional phase, tell me about the news, national, talk about the National News Council for a minute, because I think it’s, it’s an important— SCHULMAN: Ooh. 19:00PRESS: Concept in journalism, professional journalism.

SCHULMAN: Immensely. Immensely.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Yes. I was, I was moved just a week or so ago—we’re talking here July 9, 2007. Here, Len.

PRESS: I always carry a spare.

SCHULMAN: I wondered what, I wondered what he was looking for.

PRESS: Yeah, well, yeah. You begin to wonder.

SCHULMAN: I thought it was a note about the National News Council. There, there are 20:00many documents in print journalism by a variety of organizations that have certain standards or co-, codes of ethics. The oldest and the most durable and the most consistent of them was the one that was developed in the early ’20s, of the Twentieth Century, by what was then called Sigma Delta Chi, now known as the Society of Professional Journalists. And the reason I mentioned where we are on July 2007 is that there was a little story of some consequence in the Kentucky papers, the Herald-Leader and the Courier-Journal, about how by a slender vote of the governors of the Kentucky Bar Association, they refused 21:00to make mandatory that clause in the, in lawyers ethics that stipulates that lawyers, when they see a colleague acting improperly, in gross violation, shall report it to the appropriate authority. Kentucky is the, one of only four states that lacks such a mandatory clause. Well, what this meant for me was the recollection that until the mid-’70s, the Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics had such a clause requiring journalists to report when they saw a manifestation of a colleague acting improperly, without balance, without fairness and all of the other obvious sins. And 22:00the, the fight to save that under duress was led by a man whom I greatly respected and with whom I worked, Casey Buckroe of the Chicago Tribune. He and we lost. So that today, ever since the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists is a toothless document. And I, I was moved, you know, maybe to write a letter to point out to the lawyers that, that the point was made that they already in social status voted as standing below every other profession and every other enterprise, except for journalists and people in Congress and sanitation workers.

PRESS: And I think, and I think, and I think medical, and I think medical doctors.

SCHULMAN: N-, n-, well maybe with, with Sicko. [laughs] PRESS: No, I think that’s true.

SCHULMAN: Which does remind me, and I shouldn’t dwell on it now, but, Sicko, the piece of marvelous and effective but really journalistically dubious—it is journalistically dubious— MILLIGAN: The Michael Moore movie?

SCHULMAN: Yeah. The Michael Moore movie. 23:00PRESS: It, it, it doesn’t pose as a journalistic endeavor.

SCHULMAN: Oh. Well, I would disagree. Oh, no. I mean, no.

PRESS: It uses facts and is a documentary. But, go ahead.

SCHULMAN: Well.

PRESS: We could talk about this— SCHULMAN: At any rate, at any rate, a highlight in it, if you’ve seen it— PRESS: Um-hm.

SCHULMAN: Is when a woman doctor named Linda Peeno, P-E-E-N-O, is found testifying before a Congressional committee, saying that as a evaluator of claims for Humana, the Kentucky company, she on one occasion ravaged her medical degree and her medical commitments by denying a claim to a woman for surgery, and the surgery really, except economically, was justified, and the woman died. 24:00And she goes on. It’s one of the really telling serious points in the—well, it so happens that I knew, knew and know Linda Peeno very, very well. And, I would have to search out Linda and talk to my friends at the top management of Humana to get a really reputable shake of how authentic and fair this piece is. But it was right up Sicko alley. The reason I met her, and I’m getting off of the National News Council—so remind me about the University of Louisville and one of the programs that I was able to establish there called “Great Stories.” 25:00“Great Stories and Professional People.” I’ll give you a hint now—what it was, and it lasted for, oh, perhaps ten years, was to use significant short stories and plays read in advance by people of shared professional responsibilities, not as literary exercises, but in terms of what reading that story and those characters and that plot provoked in them about their work-a-day uses of responsibility and relationship and authority and power and so on. And we did these seminars repeatedly for teachers, for physicians, for lawyers, for paralegals, for government administrators. 26:00And it was a program that, that drew this woman doctor because she was so fascinated and worked for a while with me in the administration of these programs as they related to the medical profession. Anyway.

PRESS: Anyway. Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Now the National News Council— PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: I started at lengthily, damn it. [laughs] PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: To get us into it by trying to give you a sense, give us a sense of what ethics, quote-unquote, and standards are in American journalism. Only belatedly, Len, as you know, did it spread and not always in consequential ways, to broadcasting to the point where one or more of the networks established an ombudsman and had 27:00some so-called standards of which they were stimulated to do by challenges from print journalism, primarily. This, this lack of, of coexisting, especially in Louisville and in Kentucky, where succeeding his father, Barry Bingham, Jr. as publisher of the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times and the operator of, of television and radio, network television and radio, he, Barry Bingham, Jr.—and by then I had left being a, a, “One Man’s Opinion” and had begun in 1974 my eight years, or seven and a half years as 28:00one of the country’s first press critic columnists. I may have mentioned the circumstances that I, about how this happened.

PRESS: How you became that, you mean?

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: I don’t remember that.

SCHULMAN: Well, in, in the judgment of Barry Bingham, Sr. and Jr., and the president of that company, Cyrus Mackinnon, what I was doing or able to do as “One Man’s Opinion” which included frequently evaluations of journalistic enterprise, in, most particularly including the Courier-Journal and Times and local and state, Kentucky television. It seemed to me that from time to time I found occasion to say deservedly good things about KET, which I’d like to get into as a special category. [laughs] PRESS: You did. You did.

SCHULMAN: Because that played a very significant role for me. 29:00And, you know, all of it, creatively started and engineered and, and nourished and nurtured by O. Leonard Press. At any rate. With Barry Bingham, Jr. really going grossly radical in ethical requirements, it was his dictates that, that led the then sports editor of the Louisville newspapers, Earl Cox, as a member of the Associated Press Sports 30:00Writers Association to, for the first time, rid around the country, rid sportswriters of the habit of being paid by team operators working as, as scorekeepers and so on. It really cleaned up— PRESS: And sub-rosa publicists.

SCHULMAN: And, and pre-, not so sub-rosa in many, in many cases and Barry went with, you know, I met with him in my role every morning and reported only to him. And had, you know, freedom to bite the hand that feeds me.

PRESS: This was Junior?

SCHULMAN: Barry, Jr., yes. He went so far as to dictate that big sports events like the Buick-Nascar race or the Marlboro tennis champion or the 31:00whatever, that, the Louisville newspapers and television and radio in his, in his ownership must not mention those sponsorships. [laughs] So you can’t call it the Buick Special, you got to call it the—well, the—also, when it came to book reviews, that books sent to be reviewed must be paid for.

PRESS: Paid for. I knew you were going to say that. You know, he— SCHULMAN: And this played hell with the publishers. It screwed up their bookkeeping. They raised [laughs] tremendous— PRESS: Well you probably, you probably experienced this, that he also would not permit any of his reporters to appear on Comment, which paid a very modest stipend— SCHULMAN: I know, because I appeared rather frequently.

PRESS: Yeah. I, yeah—unless he paid that, their 32:00way to Lexington.

SCHULMAN: That is correct. That is correct.

PRESS: And did not accept the stipend.

SCHULMAN: But this was, this was very special in— PRESS: I mean, he was— SCHULMAN: So much so, Len, that the Wall Street Journal did a front page story citing him as the Mr. Clean of America.

PRESS: I was just going to say, he was squeaky. He was the definition of squeaky-clean.

SCHULMAN: Worse than squeaky. I mean, it was— [laughs] PRESS: It was a little over the edge actually.

SCHULMAN: Yes. Very much so.

PRESS: But it was interesting, you know.

SCHULMAN: So much so. Well, Norman Isaacs— PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Was a, really a prototype of American ethical journalism. And he had tried up, up the hill as the head of the major journalism organizations, the Associated Press managing editors, the American Newspaper Editors Associa-, American Society of Newspaper Editors, the APNE, managing editors, and the ANPA, the publishers association, to spread what he had, and he preceded Barry, Jr.’s interest in this, Barry, Jr.’s taking over. But oddly enough, and it was not the question of ethics, it was a differences of 33:00opinion on other scores with Barry Bingham, Jr. that sent Norman Isaacs, executive editor away from Louisville to Columbia to join Fred Friendly, and there he established the National News Council. Bear in mind that the Courier-Journal and Times under Barry Bingham, Sr. had established the country’s very first newspaper ombudsman. That has been lost to view. A man named John Herchenroeder, a long-time city editor.

PRESS: This is before the New York Times?

SCHULMAN: Pardon me?

PRESS: Before the New York Times?

SCHULMAN: Oh, good heavens. Oh, the New York Times had no ombudsman. That was the point of this story.

PRESS: they did, eventually.

SCHULMAN: Not until, not until— PRESS: Modern times?

SCHULMAN: Nineteen-ninety— PRESS: Oh, really?

SCHULMAN: What am I talking about? Not until 2002. 34:00PRESS: Oh really? Okay. Okay.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: Okay.

SCHULMAN: I’ll get to that.

PRESS: Okay.

SCHULMAN: And why that’s the case. No, the, the, John Herchenroeder, who knew that community of Louisville like the back of his proverbial hand, and Norman Isaacs was the factor there. And his role was to be a Mr. Fix-it, either on the telephone or by written, to listen to complaints by readers, to bird dog the complaints with the appropriate editors and/or reporters and then tell the complainer whether it was warranted or not and what was being done about it. First in the country. The Washington Post followed the Courier-Journal and then other newspapers. As, as the author 35:00of that, of this column, I had, as “One Man’s Opinion,” been fortunately called each year to a conference in Washington, DC on journalism that involved, and it was critics or others, run by a man, ex-Washington Post reporter named Julius Duscha. And we met, at all places, at the Watergate. And it was there in 19-, probably 1975 or so, attending one of those meetings, but in my role as, now as a press critic in Louisville. The deal was that I would work in tandem with that first ombudsman because 36:00as a long-time city editor, he very rarely wrote columns and in the view then of Barry Bingham, Jr., it was essential that the reader should know more about the process of decision, not just that a complaint had been found, okay to do something about it, but that whole nexus of how things work. And that was why they called me from the broadcast thing to establish that role. And I worked in tandem with the ombudsman. His complaints, his mail and so on, he shared with me. And I wrote two columns a week and one a month for the Courier-Journal reflecting those complaints and those problems and what, and also I, of course, did not just, I was not limited to that. I think I told you about 37:00how I was allowed, before I started, to go around the country to find what little else was going on, and did I not mention going to the Washington Post and Katherine Graham? Well, it, that was one of the first stops because the Post had followed the Courier-Journal and I had an appointment with Kay Graham, as I did with the then-ombudsman of the Post. He was the third by then. And she was most gracious as I came into her office. She stood up and said, “Ah, the ombudsman from Louisville.” And I said, “Well, I’m a little bothered, I’m a little sorry, Ms. Graham. I must correct you. I, I’m not the ombudsman. I’m the press critic.” Her eyes widened, and she said, “There are two of you?” [laughter] 38:00Which, now, Norman Isaacs, in New York, felt the need to establish a National News Council, because in the previous, all the previous years, the idea of a press council organized by journalists and ci-, effective citi-, blue ribbon citizens to receive independently, to receive complaints about the work of newspapers or stations and examine them, evaluate them, and if their only power in such a state press council was publicity: we found this complaint warranted, and here’s why. Or we did not find it and X newspaper or Y station is not culpable. There was only, at that time, 39:00one, one state news council, in Minnesota. It remains to this day very effective and highly regarded by the publishers and, and editors of the St. Paul-Minneapolis and other newspapers in that area. Well, also, therefore, I was in, in Washington at one of these meetings with other ombudsman then from the Sacramento Bee, from the Kansas City Star. There were perhaps by then about twenty such newspaper ombudsmen. Only newspaper. And it, we together, at one of these Washington meetings, where among the speakers was Ben Bradley, established, and its my recollection, that I, frankly, came up with the name: the Organization 40:00of News Ombudsmen. Why did we select that? Because the acronym, the abbreviation is “O no.” Organization of News Ombudsman. And in varying degrees, the ods-, ombudsmen were free to really criticize. I had total freedom. A few others like the man under McClatchy in Sacramento had this kind of freedom. A couple of others. But many of the other ombudsman, quote-unquote, had to report to sub-editors rather than to only the top dog.

PRESS: Wasn’t there a difference between the ombudsman and you in that they— SCHULMAN: Yes. Technically I— PRESS: You critiqued all, any, [ ] papers.

SCHULMAN: I dealt with all journalism.

PRESS: And they only dealt with their own papers.

SCHULMAN: That is correct. 41:00That is correct PRESS: Okay.

SCHULMAN: And thank you for making that clear.

MILLIGAN: Where does that term come from?

SCHULMAN: That’s a Swedish term. It, it, it was traditionally an historic, it, in Sweden, it has been used to designate an individual in the government, but independent of the government, to accept citizen complaints and explore them, investigate them, and report. That’s the meaning. It’s an unhandy word, you know.

MILLIGAN: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: We started to call them ombuddies, you know. [laughs] Well, there’s Norman Isaacs in New York. Only, at that point, there’s a, yet now, in the successive years, succeeding years, an, another news council has been established in Seattle in the Northwest, and it’s doing quite well. But two, you know—and in Kentucky it was resoundingly voted down by the 42:00Kentucky Press Association. Now Al Smith, the legendary Al Smith, he, as president of the Kentucky Press Association one year— PRESS: Seventy-four.

SCHULMAN: Was in favor of it. But he got no where.

PRESS: You opposed it, did you not?

SCHULMAN: Opposed the news council?

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Oh, no.

PRESS: Really? Okay.

SCHULMAN: Oh, good heavens, no.

PRESS: Okay.

SCHULMAN: No, no. The only, the only thing that I—I think I know what you were thinking about, much more recently, like six or seven years ago, David Hawpe, the editorial editor of the Courier-Journal, myopically proposed the creation of a Kentucky Press Council that would be financed initially by the state legislature. Ah. 43:00You know, this, this is like stamping an A on a woman’s bosom before she goes to church.

PRESS: Well.

SCHULMAN: Well, or another letter.

PRESS: No, no. I mean, I don’t, I don’t— SCHULMAN: Anyway.

PRESS: Go ahead.

SCHULMAN: And how this got—I, I did a column about it then and called in Norman Isaacs from New York, who was appalled because the whole essence of a news council is independence from government, from press and its, its makeup is so balanced with judges and others, so on. What blew it out of the water here, and what makes you think that I opposed it—that’s what I opposed, the creating a state press council that would have the stamp of official connection, government connection. 44:00There was a, a meeting, a benefit meeting that we, the Society of Professional Journalists helped arranged, to bring Mike Wallace in. This was after the “Sixty Minutes” tobacco furor, and as you will remember, Ken, Mike Wallace suffered from a depression as a result, and a lively woman, do-gooder in Louisville, came to the Society of Professional Journalists and said, “Gee, if we could get him to come talk—” because she was working for a local mental health organization— PRESS: Oh.

SCHULMAN: “That would be a benefit. And you could do something journalistically.” Well, he came. That dinner raised a quarter of a million dollars for mental health, and then the Saturday morning, there was a seminar to discuss state 45:00and local press councils. And the idea of a press council was, if, if the Kentucky Press Association was against it, even more venomously against it was the editor and publisher of the Lexington Herald-Leader, one Creed Black. 46:00PRESS: Oh, yes.

SCHULMAN: And, long gone from the Herald-Leader—and so we, here was this meeting. Mike Wallace and David Hawpe on hand from, from Lexington was Tim Kelly, the publisher of the Herald-Leader. And at an appropriate point, Kelly laced Hawpe with this idea of a, and Mike Wallace turned to Hawpe and said, “David, did you really do that? How stupid!” Well, at any rate, let’s get back then—it was in the context of all of this that Norman Isaacs in New York to such a, to such a dedicated degree 47:00that he left the Columbia, Fred Friendly and the Columbia School of Journalism and took on the role as executive director of the National News Council. He, and then hired a marvelous guy who had been editor of Look Magazine, Bill Arthur— PRESS: Bill Arthur, sure.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: From Lexing…, from Kentucky.

SCHULMAN: Exactly so. There was that connection.

PRESS: Um-hm.

SCHULMAN: And they assembled a membership, like Molly Ivins, like the former Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, like others in that—and, and the whole thing was, was sacrosanct. That is, invite complaints, examine and investigate the complaints, and then 48:00publicize the results. Above all others, the New York Times— PRESS: Refused.

SCHULMAN: Refused not only to participate, but when the, when a finding was issued, the New York Times would not publish it. This was the edict maintained by the then-executive editor of the New York Times, A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal. Had been a wonderfully proficient foreign correspondent, but a son-of-a—but a, but an autocrat at the breakfast table. And so, with the New York Times doing that, and some others, Norman was very, very free in laying at the doorstep of the New York Times what happened after four or five years, that it’s the death of this agency. 49:00That’s sad.

PRESS: Interesting story there.

SCHULMAN: Now, there’s a, then you, since your impression was that the New York Times had an early ombudsman—New York Times was so death on ombudsman.

PRESS: I, I, I remember that. But, but, as, for the News Council, I remember that they were— SCHULMAN: Killed the News Council.

PRESS: Yeah, they did.

SCHULMAN: Well, in 19-, I was still doing the, the column, “In All Fairness,” so this must have been in about 1980, a year or two before it ended. By the way, that Norman Isaacs letter, which I had— PRESS:That’s not it, is it?

SCHULMAN: No—yes, it is. It says 1984. “Some thirteen thousand miles later, your letter of 3/15 has finally reached 50:00its target. Your role as media critic expired. Why? The News Council has rolled over and given up, and Lyle Baker opted to leave the veil honorable to the end.” Lyle Baker being the marvelously respected head of advertising at the C-, Bingham newspapers. So that’s a—anyway, in, in, about 1980, as I say, I went up on one of my trips to New York and managed an interview with Abe Rosenthal, the purpose of, and he, he, his secretary had said I had fifteen minutes. Why, why was the New York Times so obdurately and consistently and vehemently opposed to establishing an ombudsman? 51:00As the conversation developed, whatever intrigued Abe Rosenthal, he decided that we needed more time together, and he took me behind the little Japanese screen that marked his inner sanctum, and there he gave me in a very passionate way, his idea—I, I hope I justice to it—that the New York Times was the best in the world in covering everything from Abyssinia to zoology and everything in between. Now, maybe we—and this was true at the time—maybe the Times wasn’t doing quite so good a job of covering the press, but to establish a monitor looking over the shoulders of New York Times editors would require an edu-, individual so 52:00immersed in New York Times ethos, so cognizant of the historic and complex nature of the New York Times and its decisions and so on that this was impossible to recognize, especially when you considered that such an individual, given such power, might then be called to really chop away. So, that was fascinating. I went home and did a column for the Louisville Times about this interview with the executive editor of the New York Times. A month or so later, as was my wont, I attended the annual meetings of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in this case in Phoenix or Chicago, somewhere. 53:00And I was talking to somebody else and here came Abe Rosenthal, and the somebody else said, “Abe, oh, you know Schulman from Louisville?” “Oh yes,” he said. “The son of a bitch from Louisville.” PRESS: He remembered you.

SCHULMAN: He did. [laughter] Now. Then came 19-, 20-, 2005, 2004, 2005, when the New York Times was hit with the young man— PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Faking his stories.

PRESS:Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Jason— PRESS: Jason, yeah.

SCHULMAN: Dreadful, and it occasioned a whole humongous resurrection of thinking and rethinking at the New York Times. Out of that, 2005, 2004, 2005, came the New York Times’ creation 54:00of what they call the public editor. And they are now on their third public editor. He—it’s been hes so far—write a column in the Sunday New York Times, in the Op-Ed, in the Review of the Week section, long piece, obviously free to do what they want, and they’re consulting constantly with Keller and the other editors before writing. And it’s okay. Interestingly, what bothers me—and I wrote to the first of them, I should repeat it—this is just a question of sad human psychology. When and maybe I would not like to think that this was the case in all 55:00of the years that I was hacking away at the mistakes made in coverage by the Bingham papers or the Bingham stations or Time Magazine or someone, but in the case of the New York Times, every time the New York Times is found by the public editor as having been remiss in some area, whether it, Iraq or, or consumer news, or so on, many readers say, “A-ha! We always knew.” Instead of giving the New York Times credit for allowing such candor to be expressed, they use it as a hammer.

PRESS: Well, they, the Times— SCHULMAN: So, that’s human, isn’t it?

PRESS: No. Well, the Times kind of earned it by— SCHULMAN: Well.

PRESS: By its arrogance before.

SCHULMAN: That’s, that’s true. That’s true, and that’s a well taken point.

PRESS: Anyway, thank you for— SCHULMAN: Well— PRESS: Reviewing that, because— 56:00SCHULMAN: It was a sad, sad case because it— PRESS: It was an important attempt. Is there no news council at all now? National?

SCHULMAN: No. No. None at all.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: And just two state.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Well, not state. Minnesota Press Council is state, but the—well, no. No, no, I take that back. It’s the Washington State Press Coucil.

MILLIGAN: When did the national council really stop being a council?

SCHULMAN: Well, this letter was 19— PRESS: Eighty-four, I think you said.

SCHULMAN: Eighty-four. Yes. And it was probably ’83. Something like that. Well.

PRESS: So, you’ve, you’ve given up the “One Man’s Opinion” on WHAS. 57:00SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: And then?

SCHULMAN: Well, the, the, as I’ve mentioned, it was the decision of the head troika at the Courier-Journal and Times to call me from the other end of the broadcasting end of the block and establish what was, if not unprecedented, certainly close to it in their judgment. That is, to create a column to evaluate on a free, unfettered basis, to evaluate all the practices of journalism, beginning with the Bingham enterprises. And would I be agreeable to accepting that role? And they hastened to say that in all probability 58:00I would never achieve my ambition to be voted the most popular kid on the block.

PRESS: This was for the paper on a weekly or daily— SCHULMAN: Twice weekly in the Louisville Times, and then about a year or so after it, once a month in the Courier-Journal on the front page of the Editorial, the Op-Ed, the Opinion section. And again, this was, and, and, the title was one that I finally came up with that I thought, it seemed to work, and interestingly, despite whatever credibility I had won as “One Man’s Opinion,” it was a year or two before some elements in the community, including the lawyers and, 59:00and bankers were ready to accept the fact that I was not a flack for my employers. This was gratifyingly resolved in the second year when the Louisville Bar Association voted to give me a “Gavel Award.” PRESS: Um-hm.

SCHULMAN: And said they were satisfied that this was indeed a well-taken service and that I wasn’t pussy-footing for the owners of the papers. It, it was a—well, witness the experience at the Washington Post with Kay Graham. It was a marvelous opportunity. I did not have any assistance. I was free, as I mentioned, 60:00reporting only to the publisher. And as the years went by, there were several editors at the Louisville Times and the Courier-Journal who weren’t at all happy with my assessments of their performance. And this is to Barry Bingham, Jr.’s extraordinary credit—these guys would send memos to him, no copy to me, complaining about some bitchy little thing here or there. And consistently, he shared those memos with me, asking for my reaction, which he then discussed. And you know, I, one—there were many things all over the state of Kentucky. I was, I was allowed to subscribe to not only the major, larger city 61:00newspapers. You know, Owensboro, Bowling Green, Lexington, Hazard, so on, Pikeville, but a dozen of the small weeklies. And one that sticks with my mind was a young man running the Martin Countian in Inez, Kentucky, which nestles up against the Virginia border in Martin County. Poor as, poorer than churchmice. But Homer Markham— PRESS: Oh, yes.

SCHULMAN: You remember Homer? Was running a bold paper that was calling the turn on, you know, in counties like this is, can, also, as Len 62:00knows so well, everybody’s related to everybody else. So the mayor’s cousin is the jailer and the mayor’s uncle is the coroner, if there is one. And there’s, somebody is the judge and what-not. And it’s a nice network. And Homer Markham and his little Martin Countian was taking against this in the most influential n-, attorney in little Inez was bridling at this and brought suit for a million dollars against this little paper, this little weekly paper and this editor. Previously in all the years, the, the only really consequential illustration like that had been the well-known— PRESS: New York SCHULMAN: Mar-, Whitesburg, the Mountain Eagle. And I had done many columns 63:00early on with Tom and Pat Gish. Well, I decided that something ought to be done about this. And so, with the, my wife whose career, when she was paid—she’s been a volunteer for forty years—but when she was working for pay, she worked for the state poverty program and for the mental health program, travelling all over the state. And she warned me that if we were going to Inez, I’d better take a light bulb. I laughed, you know. Sure as Hell, when we got to Inez and checked into the Inez hotel, our room hanging from the ceiling had one twenty watt bulb. And so she was going to spend most of the day in that room. By God, a hundred watt or two fifty 64:00or whatever. Anyway, Homer was delighted to see me and I visited extensively with the whole, John Kirk, the lawyer and the jailer and the sheriff and so on. And it was as plain as could be that Homer’s accusations were valid and I came home, and you know, this, on that occasion did a piece in the Sunday Courier-Journal, and it, it solved— PRESS: Solved the case?

SCHULMAN: That’s right. That’s right.

PRESS: You were a, you were practicing sort of in the same mode as, but quite differently, it seems to me than Larry Lasoeur, was it, at the Washington Post. Larry— SCHULMAN: No, Larry Laurent?

PRESS: Laurent. Larry 65:00Laurent— SCHULMAN: Oh.

PRESS: And John whatever-his-name-was in the New York Times.

SCHULMAN: Well, no. Jack Gould.

PRESS: Jack Gould.

SCHULMAN: They were, they were TV— PRESS: Critics.

SCHULMAN: They were TV critics.

PRESS: They were program critics.

SCHULMAN: That’s exactly so. I was a, a press critic.

PRESS: And, and—a press critic. Right. And, and they didn’t deal with the press, as such?

SCHULMAN: No. No, no. Except— PRESS: Neither did the predecessor media columnist of the Courier-Journal, as it were, Bill Ladd’s Almanac, which was also a, a, really a program.

SCHULMAN: That is correct. That is correct. There was no— PRESS: So this was, this was quite different than any of those.

SCHULMAN: Oh, yes. I, I remember early on— PRESS: Was there any comparable media critics?

SCHULMAN: Now? Yes. There’s a, at the Los Angeles Times. Actually in the, in the long run, he received much more attention than I. 66:00David Shaw. He’s sort of regarded now as an icon. A bigger paper, more immediate. You know, it’s like I mentioned, when I was in Seattle and in the case of Kentucky—and I suspect that anybody long involved with KET has suffered this—that is, you can do things that have in, in, clear national, nationally, national-level freshness and, and originality, but if they were being done in New York or LA, they would get instant and big attention. KET can do it for years and for the most part, suffer and, 67:00unheralded—no, depending upon the breaks.

PRESS: Yeah. Yes and—yeah, yes and no.

SCHULMAN: Well, that’s a, that’s a statement like answer, diplomatic answer.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Y— [laughs] PRESS: Well, it gets us, it gets us beyond this.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: Okay, so— SCHULMAN: But I remember one of the first things that captured my attention that went beyond evaluating what the Courier-Journal and Times or the New York Times were doing. A, a reporter for WAVE TV in Louisville happened to see, and then it was called to my attention, he had reframed, he had posed a situation in order to make his story. He brought the people together and set him up. [laughs] 68:00It was a crime story of some kind. And so I called him up and we discussed it and there was no question about it: he hadn’t done it—he had indeed done it. And we had a photo because a photographer for the Courier-Journal had documented it. Well, it was enchanting then. A month or so later, the WAVE television man called me to say that he had an instance of a Courier-Journal photographer having posed a photo. Sure as Hell. And so, you know, this man, we remained friends long after he went to NBC and had a very distinguished career in the West and in Colorado: Roger O’Neill.

PRESS: Oh, yes.

SCHULMAN: But he learned a lesson. 69:00PRESS: Yes.

SCHULMAN: At, at his expense.

PRESS: I didn’t know that he was from here. He— SCHULMAN: Oh, oh, yes. Oh, he was.

PRESS: You know how I met him?

SCHULMAN: No.

PRESS: Thanks to you all, at that, at that award thing, he was a speaker.

SCHULMAN: Oh, really?

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Oh. Oh, for heaven’s sake.

PRESS: You know, they, for him.

SCHULMAN: Oh, that’s right.

PRESS: Anyway, he, I have to comment on that last thing we passed by, about national versus local. Those who have more, m—from those who have more, more is expected.

SCHULMAN: That, that’s true.

PRESS: So, so— SCHULMAN: That’s true.

PRESS: And sometimes, it takes, it takes less to get that kind of attention if you’re from the midland, sometimes.

SCHULMAN: Sometimes, yes. But, you know— PRESS: If it’s particularly good.

SCHULMAN: In personal terms— PRESS: I know. Oh, yes.

SCHULMAN: That was driven to me with, in what I mentioned the last time I was together. 70:00That is, our recognizedly effective documentary on, on migrant labor. As I said, six months before Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, but— PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: It’s been lost to view, whereas the other one is an icon, you know.

PRESS: Yeah. Well, the name there, the name.

SCHULMAN: Well, that’s right. Edward R. Murrow, you know. Well, in this role, I got involved with the First Amendment Congress national meetings, you know, with James J. Kilpatrick and, and a fellow named Dan Rather who later had some notoriety and, you know, all of this material contributing to columns. 71:00It, it brought me then into, into close touch with, among other things, the state legislature. That was how I got to know the remarkable and cherished George Street Boone. When he was in the Kentucky state legislature, one of the young Turks and I would come up on an individual basis and nose around and develop from a column standpoint how, how were the legislators being treated by those who are assigned to cover them, sometimes with gross unfairness. And for the most part, George and Joe Graves and I’ve forgotten some of the others, 72:00the young Turks in the, in the—and Vic Hellard, whom I got to know. Now, my interest in the state legislature came from much earlier when I had been in Washington state and then came here and was writing still for the Sunday Magazine and I was interested in the activities of the National Organization for the Improved Legislatures. Very effective at that time, and, but little attended to in the press. You know, this is one of those things that—and so I decided to do a cover story on the General Assembly and zero in on one of the legislators. And I watched and one man who really impressed me out of the whole bunch, and he was not the only one, obviously, 73:00was a man named Romano Mazzoli. As a result, as a result according to Rom Mazzoli, because we became friends through all the years since then—as a result, this empowered him to run for Congress and get elected and he’s been— PRESS: And elected and elected and elected.

SCHULMAN: And elected and elected and elected. That’s right. Also developing at that time in Louisville were at that point, three young men from a local law firm, Wyatt, Tarrant and Combs, namely David Jones, Wendell Cherry and Dave Grissom. And those three guys together left the firm to start a chain of nursing homes called ExtendiCare. 74:00And they were already then making good money, but they looked around and decided that ExtendiCare was not nearly as promising as going into the medical insurance business. So, they started a company called Humana. And through those years, when I was doing, evaluating the press, there were occasions when Humana really deserved to be scorched. But such was the, the emotional—you know, the reporters of the Courier-Journal particularly, prided themselves on being fair, but many of them had built in biases or perceptions that did not sufficiently 75:00engineer their reporting. In particularl, there was a man who was a medical reporter. And consistently, he would gross out Humana. And I was free to go and seek out David Jones and, and Wendell Cherry. And, of course, they were eager—my God, somebody was coming to hear their side. Fantastic! So it was easy meat, really. As a result, you know, I never got a, the Humana stock, [laughs] but— PRESS: Too bad.

SCHULMAN: When I was then working as a volunteer for, for public radio in Louisville and we needed a, five thousand dollars to round out a hundred thousand dollar effort and 76:00I went with the then director, who remained for many years until recently, Jerry Westin, to Wendell Cherry, the vice-president of Humana, and he said, he got more and more impatient, he said, “Ah, damn it. I’ll give you the five thousand.” You know, it was that kind of nice thing. So, there were interesting— PRESS: And you accepted it despite the fact that you were in the media yourself and the beneficiary and— SCHULMAN: Well and because it was for public radio.

PRESS: Well, well, well. Public radio. That makes it okay, huh?

SCHULMAN: Well, I don’t know. [laughter] I mean, it was a civic effort, you know. I was a trustee of the, by the— PRESS: It’s okay. I’m not— SCHULMAN: No, no, no.

PRESS: I’m not an ombudsman.

SCHULMAN: No, this is well-taken 77:00and needs to be examined. But only briefly. [laughter] We, no, I accepted. It’s not like the president at the University of Louisville, who while he was president took the job as, as president of the Chamber of Commerce, for heaven’s sake. And I really laced him on that.

PRESS: Not this president?

SCHULMAN: Don Swain.

PRESS: Don Swain.

SCHULMAN: Don Swain, yeah. And today they were, they’re good friends, you know. But that does, well, I don’t know that it’s time to move on— PRESS: It is.

SCHULMAN: Is it?

PRESS: Um-hm. It is.

SCHULMAN: Well, what ended Norman Isaacs, you know, in effect said, how come you’re not—economic pressures beginning in the late-’70s and the first year or two of the ’80s 78:00were beginning to change the whole landscape for the Courier-Journal. As, Len, as you knew, and Sarah, the tradition was, there were, Kentuckians knew only three things, the governor, UK and the Courier-Journal. The, that was the, later KET, I would like to think. But at that time, it was a true state-wide newspaper. It circulated everywhere. Well, then increased paper costs tremendously increased transportation costs, some beginnings of declining circulation and so on. It was in, like ’79 that in, in 79:00collaboration with the then managing editor, a universally unpopular guy named Paul Janich— PRESS: Oh. Um-hm.

SCHULMAN: Barry, Jr. and his business sides felt it necessary to begin to cut back on state-wide delivery. That was the first of what became a pattern. So, Sarah, now as Ken, as Len knows, you can’t buy the Courier-Journal, let alone get it in Lexington. You can’t even get it in Richmond or Hazard or, indeed, in Western Kentucky. And I, and, you know, the, the usual plus pizzazz was put on it in the announcement. Well, I felt, I felt it my duty to call a spade a spade 80:00and did a column. And it was that kind of column that produced, not from, not ever from Barry Jr., but from these managing editors, bitching. And they started to really bitch to the point where each of them then started their own columns. [laughs] Leonard Pardue in the Times and Janich in the Courier-Journal, writing about what was good and what they were doing and so on. [laughs] Anyway, I reached the age in 1981 when it became reasonable to end that experiment. And, you know, they called Louise. What did I want? There was a dinner and they gave me an electric portable typewriter. [laughter] 81:00Well, fortuitously, this was wonderful. I had been with the column “In all Fairness” supporting efforts by the National News Council who had, Bill Arthur had hired a man named Ned Schnurman, who was an old newspaper guy, city editor from Newark and so on, and immensely—I mean, he threw out ideas like a popcorn machine. And he was starting that, that year, that winter of 1981, starting what became the first PBS television program on the press, called “Inside Story.” As anchorman, the man who had been Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance’s Press Secretary, namely Hodding 82:00Carter, the product of a long-time c-, Mississippi publishing, newspaper publishing family. His father had been threatened with death many times for taking cudgel up against segregation. So, Hodding was really a first-rate guy and Ned called: did I want to come up and be the managing editor? Well, what a nice turn of events. Now, I knew that Louise Tachau Schulman, native Louisvillian would never, never agree to go forever, but we went up for that first six months, the debut, and it was a remarkable experience. The, the first sponsor for the, for those first two or three years was General Electric, 83:00to the tune of two million dollars. We had an opening reception at some fancy beanery—it wasn’t Twenty-One—and man named Jack Welch came with a broad and he was drunk, but very convivial. And Lehrer and Richard McNeill—Bob, Robert McNeill— PRESS: Robert.

SCHULMAN: Came. And we had the guy from the King and I’s ex-wife on the staff. We had a really first-rate staff. And we did, you know, it was marvelous. And again, it kind of, all of a sudden, in that role and in New York, I was being invited to parti-, to take part not only in New York, but in Washington, DC TV 84:00panels. All of a sudden, something that had never happened to me in Louisville. KET was always a pleasure, but this was my, you know, Chris Wallace and what not. Diane what’s-her-name— PRESS: Sawyer?

SCHULMAN: Rehm. Rehm.

PRESS: Oh, Rehm.

SCHULMAN: Yeah.

PRESS: Yeah. Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Right. Anyway, and we, you know, we, we had an interesting—this is just a digression, but Bill Small who had left Louisville as news director at WHAS to go to CBS in Washington and became for years the CBS manager of its Washington bureau, with a developing hand in all kinds of the star anchor people. He had expected 85:00to be named president of CBS news to succeed a man whom I frequently was a source for me in my columns, S-, S-. Oh dear.

PRESS: I can see him, but I can’t think of his name.

SCHULMAN: Yes, so can I. And I, and I had him at a National Society of Professional Journalists convention in San Francisco appearing in opposition to a man named Reid Irvine.

PRESS: Oh, yes.

SCHULMAN: The persistent gad-fly, right wing gad-fly from Accuracy in Media.

PRESS: IAM—AIM.

SCHULMAN: Accuracy in Media. AIM, right. He always treated me with reasonable fairness because 86:00I, I leaned over to give him a, you know, a, a recognition, which was a bad state of affairs because Ed Guthman, whom I mentioned earlier, Bobby Kennedy’s, the former Seattle Times reporter who became Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary. He ended up as, later, as managing editor of the Philadelphia Enquirer. And he called me in Louisville one day and said, “Reid Irvine wants something of me. Shall I, shall I deal with him?” I said, “Well, if you’re fair and so on, sure.” Well, it was bad advice. Reid Irvine really scarified Guthman. I mean, he’s a miserable man, basically. [laughs] Anyway— PRESS: I don’t know that it’s significant, but was, it was “Dick Something,” wasn’t it?

SCHULMAN: Yes, 87:00exactly. Good.

PRESS: But, but I don’t know why we want to know, except that, that— SCHULMAN: Except— PRESS: Bill, Bill wanted it replaced.

SCHULMAN: Well, except that Bill Small wanted to replace and except— PRESS: And did, didn’t he?

SCHULMAN: No, no. Oh, no, no.

PRESS: Oh, he went to NBC?

SCHULMAN: That’s right. He was grossly disappointed.

PRESS: Huh.

SCHULMAN: No, no. That was the, and he then was made president of NBC news.

PRESS: Well, that’s— SCHULMAN: And his wife had remained a good friend of my wife, from their Louisville days. Her name was Gish Small. So much so, and, and Small rarely had any patience for me and what I was doing. So much so that the highlight was that when we set up to do “Inside Story” and we were monitoring all the network news channels and the fair, fair 88:00use rule we were using, tape from their, from their network newscasts where it was appropriate to something we were doing—Hodding and I get paired letters from the president at NBC news, in effect saying, “If you sons-of-bitches don’t quit using our network stuff, we’ll sue you to hell.” Bill Small.

PRESS: Oh. Not really?

SCHULMAN: Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We had to get a lawyer for the program, for “Inside Story” to go to Washington and then the, and get able to use NBC tapes.

PRESS: After all the nice things I said about him publicly.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. [laughs] And yet, 89:00every time before and since, when we go to New York— PRESS: I know.

SCHULMAN: He takes us to dinner. One great day when he was, before this happened, when he was NBC president, we went up to his great office with eighteen TVs on, you know, and, and the, little people hovering around watching the news and so on. And then we go to dinner in his, in his limousine. [laughs] Well, that’s a— MILLIGAN: And you remained friends because your wives are still friends? Is that part of it?

SCHULMAN: E-, e-, e-, yes. Yes. And you know, professional disputes apart, one human being to another, he’s a nice Jew. 90:00[laughs] Well, we came back at the end of the first season. The program continued very well for the next two years. We came back to Louisville and I resumed monitoring the news on WHAS TV. There was a new program called Louisville Tonight. Big budget. Very well sold out. But so expensive that being sold out on the advertising side— PRESS: Couldn’t pay for it.

SCHULMAN: Couldn’t make it. Some interesting personalities. A good reporter named Tom van Howe and a very attractive and brighter than you might have expected, Angie Humphrey. And it was a magazine. And I did what 91:00I had been doing since fifteen years before on “One Man’s Opinion.” And in the papers.

PRESS: Except you went on site, right?

SCHULMAN: That’s right. But then it was piddling out and I got a call from the Dragon Lady, she was known as, who was the, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the U of L. Now, I had not—I had had more contact through my years on WHAS and the newspapers with the UK School of Journalism, Farrar, lovely guy who was the director of telecommunications and so on. He went to Texas. He may still be in Austin; I’ve lost track. And, of course, 92:00I have not mentioned, I was still doing “One Man’s Opinion” and then went over into the, the column when Ken Cherry—no, it wasn’t Ken Cherry. It was the man who was the director of the, of the University of Kentucky Press. Excuse me, the Press— PRESS: University Press of Kentucky.

SCHULMAN: Press—University Press of Kentucky. I mention that because it was a Tom Clark device. That is, the John Sherman Cooper—they called, would I take on for the bicentennial series of 1976 a short biography of John Sherman Cooper? Their interest was in his international, how did his international fame 93:00and recognition relate to his Kentucky beginnings? And that, of course it was an extraordinarily fulfilling thing to spend many, many hours with John Sherman Cooper, with his family—that whole, you know, four or five sisters and one brother—in their big house in Somerset on Main Street, in Washington with all of his staff. People used to say that John Sherman Cooper had an affidavit face. His speaking, it, his speaking style was so deficient that on one occasion—now this is in the book because the guy at the Washington Post, guy that was in the Press Gallery, and he was leaning over so far to try to hear John Sherman Cooper, he almost fell out of the gallery. You know, somebody had to grab him. 94:00But a man of such unquestioned ethics and brightness and dedication to serving citizens. And of course the newspaper coverage had never, as it frequently fails to do, had never caught these beginnings as a county judge succeeding his father in Pulaski County. And his father, he was a Centre College and his father felt that was not enough for him, and he had to go to Yale, you see. Anyway, that was happening while the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences called me and we had lunch. And she was engaged in what had to be in the end 95:00a losing fight with the then-president of her university. I’d gone off the track to say that I’d had more attention and more time with UK than with U of L, although I had been called in as, amongst some other civilians to engage in a study of what the University of Louisville could do to better its charade of journalism because it had a few adjunct people and otherwise a, a group of communicologists. And I and a number of others were a taskforce. The tragedy was that there was only one injunction put on us: we could not recommend as part of our findings, we could not recommend the creation of a School of Journalism. 96:00Why? As you would end, surmise, because the then-Council on Secondary Education was death on duplication. You already had a School of Journalism at UK, at Western, at Eastern, at Morehead, at Murray, and at Northern Kentucky University. So, it was out of order for the university in the largest— PRESS: City in the state.

SCHULMAN: State—yeah. [laughs] PRESS: I would have think, thought that everybody else having it would have been an argument for having it, not for not having it.

SCHULMAN: Well, yes. And it continues— PRESS: Anyway, that’s the Council of—the Council had that kind of teeth at that time?

SCHULMAN: Yes. Yes. At least in Don Swain’s view.

PRESS: Hm.

SCHULMAN: Don Swain, as, as I mentioned remains a good friend of ours. Now, and I’m—well, anyway, 97:00he, in, in the dean’s view was concentrating on and supporting the business school, engineering, and health sciences, and short-changing the humanities.

PRESS: Um-hm.

SCHULMAN: And what could I do to help her rebuild the profile of the humanities at the University of Louisville? So, that’s the basis—with appropriate income—that’s the basis on which I joined. I had to, as part of that, agree to teach a course and a senior seminar. So I made up a course, and it took a hell of a lot of very fulfilling digging. I called it “The Press and the City.” It was a 300 level course and it consisted of 98:00a history of Bourbon journalism in Kentucky.

PRESS: Huh.

SCHULMAN: And how the Courier and the Journal and so on, and Henry Watterson and so on and some of things I discovered that have yet to be published and I, I found it taking me back—and I don’t think that I’d mentioned this, that when I came to Louisville in the first six months of my stay here, old friend, Norman Isaacs was going, Mr. Bingham was going to celebrate and observe the Courier-Journal’s one hundredth anniversary because it was in 1868 that the Louisville Journal, a Northern paper, 99:00a Union paper, under George Prentice and the Courier under Haldeman, which during the Civil War had had to leave Louisville and become this Chattanooga Courier and the Nashville Courier and the whatever Courier. The Courier and the Journal, hyphenated, were formed at the instigation of a former rebel, Henry Watterson, and so Mr. Bingham wanted to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of the Courier-Journal. And who did Norman Isaacs delegate to put together that centennial supplement?

PRESS: Why?

MILLIGAN: You.

SCHULMAN: [laughs] Well, I was scarified, but one of the great things, and I relate it twenty years later to my creating this course: I 100:00gave the principle chore of the main story to a then-columnist named Joe Creason. A, a real legend for many years talking about his hometown of Benton, and it was a folksy column. But Joe had real talent as a writer and a reporter, and he did this cover story, which, with plenty of factual substance demonstrated for me that the vaunted Courier-Journal had in fact not really been great until the ’30s and ’40s when Barry Bingham, Sr. took over. That those were the golden years. That the hundred, the eighty years, the fifty years under Henry Watterson, he was brilliant, 101:00but he was a hypocrite. He went around the country making speeches about the importance of objectivity and disinterest and, and independence while year in and year out, he was a kingmaker for the Democratic Party. And it, it was he who invented the marvelous line when Williams Jennings Bryan was nominated to be the Presidential candidate: “He’s a jackass, but he’s our jackass.” [laughter] Henry, Henry Watterson in the municipal election in Louisville of 1908, 1909, he was death on woman’s suffrage. He called them Nervous Nellies. He was death on people whose, acted like hyphenated Americans. He was certainly 102:00death on blacks because they tended to be Republican and in opposition to his lifelong devotion to the Democratic Party. So in the municipal election in 1908, I have that he delegated—I presume he delegated—a cartoonist to do a, an appalling cartoon showing Louisville City Hall infested with blacks, wh-, whores, and gamblers, and pimps, and so on. And it ran in both papers and, interestingly, the cartoonist later celebrated as a real American, Fontaine Fox, author of the Toonerville Trolley.

PRESS: Oh, my.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. [laughs] Anyway— PRESS: But he drew it?

SCHULMAN: Oh, he drew it, and it, and it ran, you know. 103:00Later, years later—and then of course, when Watterson, when the World War I broke out in Europe, the Courier-Journal, again and again, you know, praises the fact that it won its first Pulitzer Prize in 1917 or ’16. You know what it won it for? Henry Watterson’s editorials headed “To Hell with the Hapsburgs and the Hophenzollerns.” MILLIGAN: [ ] PRESS: So it was, it was an isolationist paper.

SCHULMAN: Exactly. And he, and he inveighed in his editorials during that period against the German-Americans in Louisville.

PRESS: When did he, when did he win the Pulitzer?

SCHULMAN: Nineteen-sixteen.

PRESS: Oh. Before we entered the war.

SCHULMAN: Before we got into the war. He was, you know, gung-ho. But you got to be suspicious of all of these hyphenates. And then when 104:00for, you know, interesting—that’s another story. Barry Bingham, Judge Bingham, Judge Robert Worth Bingham who under strange circumstances inherited eighteen million dollars from his wife, the former wife of the Florida developer, Henry Flagler. She had millions and there were strange circumstances about that will and a change—well, anyway, he inherited this money, and with it— PRESS: And even how she, even how she died.

SCHULMAN: I’m sorry.

PRESS: And even how she died.

SCHULMAN: Oh, very much so, but that’s another subject.

PRESS: Okay.

SCHULMAN: But with that money, he bought out the Haldeman and Henry Watterson. And his, he was an internationalist, and his first big crusade was the establishment of a League of Nations. And Henry Watterson was 105:00deathly opposed. And Judge Bingham, for the next two years, allowed Henry Watterson to do a piece in the Courier-Journal in opposition to Judge Bingham’s support.

PRESS: Editorials.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: Yeah. Yes.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: That’s remarkable, isn’t it?

SCHULMAN: Oh, extraordinary. Extraordinary. Well, anyway, I created this, this new course and taught it for five years and the interesting and I’m afraid very terribly revealing thing is that at no point during those five years did anybody from any part of the university administration come into see what kind of teaching I was doing.

PRESS: I don’t think that ever happened in the university, any university.

SCHULMAN: Well, 106:00I would expect so.

PRESS: Well, you may have, but you weren’t used to universities.

SCHULMAN: No. No.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: No. Really.

PRESS: Hm.

SCHULMAN: And it’s, once you’re in, you’re in.

PRESS: Well, sure. That would have, that would have been— SCHULMAN: But how, you know, the student evaluations, you, you, you know, you tell them a lot of great jokes and, you know, I got marvelous reviews. [laughs] I, now, I think I’m not going to taint it— PRESS: And besides, Bob— SCHULMAN: Huh?

PRESS: I don’t think they had any doubt about your teaching talents.

SCHULMAN: Well.

PRESS: Let’s face it. But, but, but I don’t know about other dis—well, I do know about some other disciplines, but dull professors are not exactly an exotic breed.

SCHULMAN: [laughs] Yeah. No. No.

PRESS: Yeah. Did you at the same time become advisor 107:00or counselor or whatever the term was for the student newspaper?

SCHULMAN: I did indeed. That was a volunteer effort and I did that for about a dozen years.

PRESS: Um-hm.

SCHULMAN: And it, it was really very fulfilling and the little weekly newspaper now has an annual award. [laughs] PRESS: In your name?

SCHULMAN: Yeah, in my name. And two years ago an editor ending his term, Mike Lindenberger who just went to work for the Dallas Times-Herald said about the, the advisor, he said, “This man, you know, m-, moves around the campus with such speed, but the man must be a million years old.” [laughs] That was, that was ten years ago.

PRESS: Yeah. Well, now you’re a million and ten years old. 108:00SCHULMAN: Well, but we did some things— PRESS: Yeah. Let’s take a break, by all means.

SCHULMAN: Oh, yes. [laughs] [INTERRUPTION—TAPE STOPS] SCHULMAN: As you, as you know, going back to the 1915 and ’16, when Judge Robert Worth Bingham, called, so-called because he was a temporary judge, although he was a lawyer and a progressive in a time when Louisville needed it, married the widow of Florida developer, Henry Flagler. Big. Big, big, big. And there were all these strange circumstances involved with her death and, and a purported change of will and so on. At any rate, this did give him the money with which he bought the newspapers. 109:00And, and as I mentioned from Joe Creason account in the centennial brochure which was really so revealing, the golden years of the Courier-Journal and Times did not start until the 1930s. It, there was liberal policy under Judge Bingham between 1918 or ’17 and 1933. But he had really unaccountably cheap circulation methods, all kinds of—his business operators were playing games 110:00and Louisville’s fortunes were settled—sometimes, sometimes positively, but not—by a small group of bankers and businessmen. In the ’30s, that included Barry Bingham, Sr. As a matter of fact, I was very, very fortunate to get to know and, and have access to that remarkable man, Wilson Wyatt, who, Sarah, was in the Adlai Stevenson campaign, was national head of the Adlai Stevenson volunteers. Later, he had, he had, he was head of an agency, 111:00federal agency before he came back to Louisville. A brilliant man who might have been governor if he hadn’t worn spats that were made the object of ridicule in the campaign. But he was a tremendous and eloquent First Amendment person. And one year, through my involvement with the Society for Professional Journalists, of which I’ve been a member since 1947, I guess, we had on James Madison’s birthday a big dinner at the Hyatt, as I recall, where Wilson Wyatt gave a superb lecture on the First Amendment and, damn it, maybe, maybe it—I’ve 112:00not checked—I bet that Wyatt—that the law firm probably has a copy and it would be worth pursuing, because he spent a great deal of time on it. At any rate, relevant to this story about the Binghams and, and the papers and how things were run. On one occasion, Wilson told me that he had a call at home from a Percy Haley. Now, I didn’t know anymore than a lot of other Kentuckians about Percy Haley until I looked into it for the purpose of this course I taught at the U of L. And there’s practically no clips on Percy Haley in the Courier-Journal morgue. When he died, there was a rather oblique editorial, not with any detail, saying that he’d been a man 113:00of great civic service or something. It turns out that Percy Haley was Mr. Bingham, Barry Bingham, Sr.’s, inherited first by Judge Bingham, political operator. He had an office in the Brown Hotel. And Wilson Wyatt said he had all call one morning: “Wilson, could you come by my office on your way in?” “Oh, sure,” sighed Wilson. And this was in the ’30s, I guess. And Wilson went by and Percy said, “Now,” Haley said, “Wilson, Mr. Bingham and I have been talking, and he thinks it might be a good idea for Neville Miller to be tapped to run for mayor of Louisville. And why don’t you call Ms. Lennie,” 114:00who was the Democratic Party boss for many, many years, “And talk to some of the other people and then get back to me.” Wilson said, he said, “Yeah. Indeed, indeed I will, Percy.” And he went to his office and started calling people , until next morning, he got up and he saw the Courier-Journal, headline said, “Neville Miller to run for Mayor.” That’s the way things went in those days. It resulted, much as my experience in Chicago taught me, that often the product of the smoke-filled room or the back-stage politics produced better candidates than the people and the precincts.

PRESS: Sometimes.

SCHULMAN: And that was a, that was a, a real—then Simon proved concept 115:00that came to me when I was travelling around with John Sherman Cooper. Because this was in 1973 or ’4 when we, when I was working on the book and among other things, there was a sociologist and a political historian with whom we shared a platform at the Eastern Kentucky University, Paul Blanchard.

PRESS: Um-hm.

SCHULMAN: And this man was interested in the development of the, of the state primary system and so on, and because it was going to take power away from the bosses. And John Sherman Cooper startled me by agreeing as we went wherever we were going that this might be destructive. That it would result in misshapen decisions made by a small group of people 116:00at the expense of—well, that’s the way things went in, in Louisville. At any rate, in jumping ahead to, what we noted were the, the increased economic pressures, not under Mr. Bingham, but under his son, which was really kind of grossly unfair that Barry Bingham, Jr.—because what I learned when I came here, and maybe this is generally known, that the, the expected successor— PRESS: Oh, yeah.

SCHULMAN: To Norman Isaacs would be Worth Bingham, Barry Bingham’s older brother. Because he was, he was, he was crude-talking, 117:00he was flagrant, but he was a Hell of a newsman, whereas Barry, Jr.’s experience had been in TV documentaries. He’d done one on the Nile.

PRESS: And growing a mustache that could be waxed.

SCHULMAN: And—yeah. [laughs] Yes. Yes.

PRESS: Which was unfortunate, in all the— SCHULMAN: It was indeed, but he stubbornly stayed by— PRESS: Well, I don’t mean that. But I mean his whole, his whole, his whole being was foppish.

SCHULMAN: Um. Um-hm.

PRESS: He had a good mind.

SCHULMAN: Yes, he did. Yes, he did.

PRESS: But he could—it was hard to take him seriously except for the fact that he was a Bingham. [laughter] SCHULMAN: Well, well, he was, he was deucedly honest.

PRESS: Yes.

SCHULMAN: And as you say, he had a good mind. And as I mentioned, I had to deal with him, report to him, discuss with him every weekday during the eight years I was doing that column. 118:00And I found him to be a source of considerable sagacity. You know— PRESS: And I had the privilege of having some close contact with him when he was trying to develop the technology.

SCHULMAN: Well—y-, oh, yes.

PRESS: And the, and the idea of a newspaper by cable and so on, delivered to the home. And I found the same thing. But, but it was— SCHULMAN: Ah, but you had to get behind the mustache.

PRESS: Yeah, you had to—yes, you did. Well, and— SCHULMAN: Yes. [laughs] PRESS: And the jodhpurs, or maybe I only imagined the jodhpurs.

SCHULMAN: Oh, yes. Oh, y-, oh, yes. Ah.

PRESS: But— SCHULMAN: Well, sad, but as, as the— PRESS: And he was ahead of his time in many ways.

SCHULMAN: As he, as he— PRESS: He was ahead of his time in many ways.

SCHULMAN: Well, so much so that, and maybe we had mentioned this way back, but he, he constantly struck many 119:00of us devoted to print as being a turncoat, as being a, a traitor, because, early on, he was predicting the end of the newspaper. He was predicting that the final status would be everybody getting their news looking at a screen. And so that a month ago, when, when the Gannett Company—or two months ago—when the Gannett Company informed all of its newspapers that they must get with concentrating on the Web and making reporters put their stories on the Web, even if it would scoop the paper the next morning, meaning the end of the scoop. The one thing that 120:00did occur was that this was an effort to cut away half of Barry Bingham,Jr’s prediction, that is, you save the newspaper. And, and I say, “Hooray to that,” because the tactile—I hope there is agreement—the tactile feeling of holding up a newspaper, and instead of popping your eyes at a screen or even at a iPod [laughs]— PRESS: Oh, I think you’re showing your generational— SCHULMAN: That may be. On the other hand— PRESS: Lack of perception.

SCHULMAN: Well, are you going to, are you going to contest my notion that it, it does something to the eyes and to the, and to the psyche and, and to the sociability to sit in front of a God-damned screen and thereby get what you used to get reading the newspaper? 121:00PRESS: The sociability of a newspaper?

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: Reading a newspaper?

SCHULMAN: Sure. Sure.

PRESS: Well, I don’t think the sociability of reading a newspaper begins to equal the sociability of— SCHULMAN: You exchange— PRESS: No, no. There was no exchange with a newspaper. It was a blind, you know, one-sided communication. Where as the networks, the internet, it—every kind of interaction.

SCHULMAN: Yeah, but how weird. Well, I, maybe this will be the wrap-up, I think— PRESS: And, and— SCHULMAN: Anyway, let me— PRESS: And, of course, and, of course, the new newspaper really is, is the participatory blog is what it is.

SCHULMAN: Well, yeah. And we can, I’d be delighted to join you in a— PRESS: At another time. Right.

SCHULMAN: Yes, thank you. I, I— PRESS: Me, too.

SCHULMAN: I’m sorry I pushed your, Len. [laughter] PRESS: You pushed my button [laughter] SCHULMAN: At any rate— PRESS: Anyhow— SCHULMAN: Early on, as we all know—this is all too familiar a story—Barry’s sisters, particularly 122:00Sally, began to be disgruntled and unsatisfied with a) the money they were getting as shareholders, and b) the attention they were getting in editorial meetings, and they were fighting to such an extent that finally Daddy decided the Hell with it. And he told me the reason that Gannett got the papers was that when the early words of this, these, the disturbance were standing ab-, spreading abroad in the land, the head of Gannett came to see Mr. Bingham, and so impressed Barry Bingham with what he would, said he would do with the papers, that that was an element 123:00later in favoring Gannett over the Washington Post, for example. Although, I expect money also was a factor. At any rate, the books began to come out. The first of these by, by—anyway, it was a scandal piece concentrating on the, suggesting that Judge Bingham had killed his wife and, and so on. Then Marie Brenner did a book based on a long piece in Vanity Fair and this totally, totally destroyed the equanimity that Barry, Sr. and Mary Bingham felt about how they 124:00were being treated by journalists. And they wanted, they, his w-, she, Mary said to me several times, a reputable journalistic effort. So they were approached by Alex Jones of the New York Times who had won a Pulitzer Prize for the instant way in which, in the New York Times, he encapsulated the whole story of the dissembling of the Bingham operations. He came to them with his wife from Time Magazine, and together they would write this book. The, the sale had been made. The Society for Professional Journalists 125:00wanted, that summer, to arrange for Mr. Bingham to come talk to the chapter that fall. They were, as most of the Binghams were, every summer in Chatham, a lovely place to be in the spring, summer. I called Mr. Bingham in Chatham. “Oh,” he said, “Bob, this is so marvelous.” He had that fantastic, a classical gentleman, you know, Shakespearean scholar, everything, which you ought to remind me about the occasion when staff began to talk early on that Mr. Bingham had sacred cows that he didn’t want roughly handled in the news. Let me get back to that. It’s a funny story. “Oh,” he said, “It’s just so marvelous.” 126:00He said, “Alex Jones and his wife are here, and it’s like being in analysis. It’s like being on the couch. And,” he said, “Mary’s gotten her correspondence from Radcliffe to share with them and it’s just so exciting.” Great. Marvelous. I guess it was the following spring Mrs. Bingham calls me and she said, “Something must be done.” She said, “We have the galley proofs, and they are appalling. It’s not the book that we had in mind.” I said, “Well, what’s wrong?” “Well,” she said, “I, we’ll get together.” Then about a month later, 127:00SPJ gets word that we can have Alex Jones and his wife here to speak to address the chapter. Mrs.—I let Mrs. Bingham know. She said, “That’s appalling. Why would you have them?” I said, “Mary Bingham, this is, you know, the marketplace of ideas.” She said, “Let me tell you what they have done.” She said, “Between the first set of galleys that we saw and the second set, evidently at the result of their, their publisher’s demand, they have done all kinds of things. For example,” she said, “They—Alex Jones went around and it’s in the book, to ask Joan Bingham, Worth’s widow and others what was the sound that was made when Worth was decapitated by the surfboard.” 128:00I said, “Well, look, Mary, you can come to this meeting.” She said, “No, no, no, no. I wouldn’t. I don’t want to. I wouldn’t dream of it. But,” she said, “Can I send Sam Thomas?” Sam Thomas being the historian who had gone through this and other books and, you know, step by step, demonstrated validities and invalidities. So Sam Thomas did come, loaded with bear and somebody had to ask the first question. And I did. What about this report that the book was delayed because among other things, your publisher had instructed you to find out the sound of— PRESS: You don’t believe that do you? 129:00Go ahead.

SCHULMAN: And it, it, they were standing at joint lecterns and his wife was doing like that. [Makes tapping/rustling sound] And Alex Jones said, “Well, in point of fact, we did have to do that.” MILLIGAN: Is that a figurative decapitation or a literal decapitation?

PRESS: No, it was a, he was in a Jeep, at Chatham, I guess— SCHULMAN: Up in—yes.

PRESS: On the Cape, and they had a surfboard— SCHULMAN: Behind them.

PRESS: On the Jeep behind them, and he— SCHULMAN: He got too close.

PRESS: The surfboard got too close— SCHULMAN: Got too close to a tree.

PRESS: And he got decapitated.

MILLIGAN: Literal.

SCHULMAN: That was why— PRESS: But— SCHULMAN: Barry, Jr.—that was why, by the way, Barry, Jr. was called upon and 130:00Norman Isaacs—I don’t see any reason I—Norman Isaacs said to me that Mr. Bingham wept with him, wept, as he said that he had to call upon his other son to take on the newspapers.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: That’s not, that’s not ever been— PRESS: Huh?

SCHULMAN: That’s not ever been made known.

PRESS: Interesting parallel to the Kennedy family, isn’t it. . ..

SCHULMAN: Yeah. Yes, yeah, yes. Yes, yes, yes.

PRESS: Except that they had—well, maybe not, maybe not.

SCHULMAN: [ ] PRESS: Jack was, Jack was no— SCHULMAN: Saint. [laughs] PRESS: No, no, no, I mean, he was, he wasn’t his brother—his older brother.

SCHULMAN: I’m sorry. Say that—Jack was what? Not what?

PRESS: Was not his older brother. He wasn’t Joe.

SCHULMAN: Oh.

PRESS: He wasn’t Joe.

SCHULMAN: Oh. No, no. No. 131:00No, that’s right.

PRESS: Who was his father’s choice.

SCHULMAN: See—oh, I see. Yes, indeed. Well, the oddly poignant, or maybe tragic business—and this was public, of course—when Mr. Bingham made his decision to sell and announced it, Barry, Jr. said publicly, “I’ve been betrayed.” And, of course, you know what Barry, Jr. did afterward. For about a year or two, he spent a lot of money and hired a couple of good people to produce something on newspaper ethics, called “Fine Line.” PRESS: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

SCHULMAN: And it was earnest and dull and in what we know of 132:00ethical commitments of the newspaper business, nowadays, particularly under economic duress, it died after a couple of years. Well, I, I’ve not been dealt with very gently in the book by the, by the Joneses. Because a particular episode when Carol Sutton—lovely woman, bright, talented—was named managing editor of the Courier-Journal, it was the first time, or so-touted here, the first time that a major newspaper of that quality had had a woman managing editor. And then 133:00two years later, under those economic problems and so on, it became necessary for Carol to be moved from that job and offered something else. And I’d been at, you know, on many occasions in Washington and so on, a friend of Carol. I was called upon to do a column, again, of course. Because the readers were not apprised of this in any way. Why? Why? Why, Carol? I talked with Carol. I talked with Barry and others. And I did what I thought was a fair column in which I paid tribute to her talents and her aptitudes and the job that she had done. 134:00Well, in the Jones book, as you will see, one Jim Ausenbaugh who was the state editor and who went back to Western and, to his home in Dawson Springs, is quoted as saying that I had, that I had cruelly treated Carol Sutton in my column and that she had accused, she had said that she had been betrayed. Well, I’ve never done anything about that, you know. [laughs] PRESS: Is it, you weren’t saying— SCHULMAN: And then she died of cancer.

PRESS: Do you, is, is there anything more you want to say about Romany Rose’s, the book?

SCHULMAN: Ah, I do indeed. [laughs] That’s important. 135:00This—but before we—yes, John Sherman Cooper—I mean, I, I—the material that he gave me and that others like his colleague, Senator Thruston Morton gave me—I don’t know that it makes sense to talk about anything that is in the book, but one story in particular is, strikes me as so delicious and so much characteristic of John Sherman Cooper’s life is you will recall, his first tries at the US Senate. He was filling out the expired terms of others. In one case it was Virgil Chapman and another—at any rate, he lost to Alben Barkley and this was during the Eisenhower regime. And 136:00John Foster Dulles—this was told to me by Thruston Morton—John Foster Dulles, Thruston Morton went to John Foster Dulles and said, “John Cooper is unemployed. This is a fantastic talent. We need to use him in some way.” And Dulles said, “That’s very interesting.” He said, “You know, we need an Ambassador to India. Nehru, Nehru is, you know, leaning toward the Soviets. And it’s a Hell of a problem.” “He said, “I think John Cooper would be just the ideal man with his small town—” and so on and so on. “But, is he married?” And Thruston Morton said, “No, no, no, no. He’s not m—” He—for years, was a, he’d married a, briefly, a, at the end of World War II, he’d married a nurse, and then that ended. And he was considered one of the favorite catches 137:00in Washington. Thruston Morton said, “No, but he is keeping company with Lorraine Rowan and, you know, that is, they’re a hot item.” Lorraine Rowan being one of the social leaders of Georgetown. “Why don’t they get married?” And Thruston said, “Well, the problem is that John Sherman Cooper lives, you know, he spends most of his time at the Cosmos Club. He doesn’t—he’s a bachelor. She’s got this gorgeous home on Sixteenth Street in Georgetown. And John Cooper is never going to propose marriage.” Dulles, Secretary of State Dulles says, “I’ve got just the answer. We are completing a new and handsome embassy in New Delhi, designed by Edward 138:00Durell Stone, the famous architect. You tell John Sherman Cooper he should propose to his woman and take her to this gorgeous home.” Thruston Morton went back to John Sherman Cooper. John Sherman Cooper proposed to Lorraine Rowan who had previously been married to an international playboy. And they were married in their home, ex-home in Pasadena, and with her little dog, a lhasa-whatever it is, went to this. And she played a role and he won over Nehru. So [laughs] by the way, we did, my wife and I then, did, after the book was out, and one of my, one of my disappointments was that when KET did a, later did a very nice documentary 139:00on John Sherman Cooper, the author didn’t even—I mean, the maker didn’t even call me to enquire about— PRESS: Was that after the book? I don’t know— SCHULMAN: Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.

PRESS: You talking about Guy Mendes?

SCHULMAN: Yes, indeed. Yeah.

PRESS: I didn’t know that.

SCHULMAN: I did go to the reception and somebody took a marvelous picture of John Sherman Cooper, beaming, you know. I leaned over and he was not doing at all well at that point.

PRESS: He was very frail then.

SCHULMAN: At any rate, it’s a book that, the first dinner that JFK and, and Mrs. Kennedy had up at the White House, after the inauguration, they went to dinner with John Cooper 140:00and Lorraine Cooper. Well, sometime later, after the book and so on, Louise and I were invited to come have dinner with the Senator and Mrs. Cooper. And I can’t tell this nearly as well as Louise. We were greeted at the door by Michael, their butler, who also served, he had served Evangeline Bruce and others, and a model of a, model major general. He said, “Oh, the Coopers are not down yet. Please—” Took us into the living room. “What would you like to drink?” And here we are looking, looking at the Degases and the Matisses, you know—originals. [laughs] And, of course, I didn’t notice, but here comes Lou-, Lorraine Cooper down the stairs, splendidly dressed. But, 141:00Louise noted she didn’t, she lacked a slip. [laughs] So that, with the light, you could see through. I never saw that. Anyway, then we were joined by the Senator and taken down to the lovely dining room in the lower level where Michael served a splendid dinner.

PRESS: This is on N Street in Georgetown?

SCHULMAN: Sixteenth Street.

PRESS: Yes. And N..

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: On the corner. Yeah.

SCHULMAN: And then, you know, the Senator and I repaired to the library for brandy and cigars— [laughs] PRESS: This was— SCHULMAN: While the women went elsewhere. And that was when Louise admiring some fantastic necklace that, you know— 142:00MILLIGAN: [ ] SCHULMAN: Yeah. And she said, “How did you come by that?” you know. And Mrs. Cooper said, “Mother.” Anyway. I did—forgive me for getting off into that, but it, it— [laughs] PRESS: That was, it wouldn’t make it—what that makes me think of, which is totally digressive, is how much more civilized politicians were in those days. When— SCHULMAN: Um-hm.

PRESS: Jack Kennedy, a Democrat, and John Sherman Cooper, Republican, were very close.

SCHULMAN: Yes. Yes.

PRESS: And, and of totally disparate ages.

SCHULMAN: That’s exactly so.

PRESS: I mean, John, John must have been half, twice his age.

SCHULMAN: Oh, that’s right. Exactly so.

PRESS: They were very, very, very good friends.

SCHULMAN: Exactly so. Exactly so. Well, anyway, you know, 143:00Barry Bingham, Sr. once said to me, apropos of my friendship and relationship with John Sherman Cooper, he said, “If John Sherman Cooper had only been married a little further west, he would have been a Democrat.” [laughter] You know—Pulaski County.

PRESS: Romany Rose.

SCHULMAN: Romany Marie.

PRESS: Romany Marie, excuse me.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. Actually, her sister, the good-looking one, was named Rose. Well, what’s in the book will speak for itself, but growing up, my, my mother, as I think I may have mentioned, died when I was seven. I had this remarkably dedicated step-mother. And she and Pop, my dad, would occasionally take me down to this 144:00dimly-lit, rough, wooden autograph-laden tables, so on, to visit at the Romany Marie tavern with Auntie Marie. And as the book tells, Auntie Marie was the, it, probably you could say overdressed. Exotic, exotic materials, great heavy marvelous bracelets and necklaces and so on. Her hair, up with things to hold it together. Much of it, much of this material having been given to her by famous aficionados or artists or so on. And this was bewildering to a little boy. And a lot of characters hanging around, you know. 145:00My rich uncle, her brother, who had great success as a woman’s handbag manufacturer, all his years decried the people that Marie had around her as spongers and, indeed, in later years they proved to be faithless. Quite a few of them came around to tend to her. But he subsidized her through all those years. Between 1914 and the death of the, the fatal ailment of her husband who was himself a fantastic character in the late ’50s that caused her to close her last place— PRESS: Her place as being?

SCHULMAN: Her place as being bistros in Greenwich Village. Eleven different locations. Each time, she put up a location 146:00saying, “The caravan has moved.” because she had so little attention to profit and refused to call them restaurants. They were her centers for people to get off the edge of the ordinary. And her medium—she never danced, she never wrote, she never painted, she never sang, she never wrote poems—her medium was human, human, always human. Well, you know, she developed during those years, because of the kind of woman she was, this incredible galaxy of people from all over the world. Some names are not so well-known in our, in our time. But even then, you know, Zero Mostel, Burl Ives, Clifford Odets, Lionel Stander— 147:00PRESS: Buckminster. . .?

SCHULMAN: John Mealey and some of the other celebrated photographers from Life Magazine. The first curator of the Metropolitan, the Modern Museum of Art, you know—MOMA. All owed their beginning developments to the way she fed as Teddy Ballantine said—who was in the original Provincetown Playhouse, and then he and his family started the paperback book—Teddy Ballantine said— PRESS: Oh, that’s right. Ballantine Books. Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Yes, exactly.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: “She fed our psyches and our bellies at the same time. She charged our batteries.” You know. Well, so, beginning when I was a-, attending NYU in Columbia, everytime I got, 148:00I realized what was going on, I started taping her. And every time from St. Louis or Chicago or, I had a chance, I would go back to New York and sit her down and get these extraordinary recollections and then seek out these people to get their points of view. In one interesting case, Buckminster Fuller, you know, son of a, the Di-, a Di Vinci of the twentieth century, his cousin was the founder of the Seattle Art Museum, Dick Fuller. And both of them, both of them were descended from Margaret Fuller, the celebrated woman suffragette and, and writer and activist in the nineteenth century.

PRESS: This was his cousin or brother, was it?

SCHULMAN: Yes, Richard Fuller— PRESS: Was his what?

SCHULMAN: Was his— PRESS: Buck— SCHULMAN: Buckminster Fuller’s cousin. 149:00PRESS: Cousin.

SCHULMAN: Yes. And he founded that museum in Volunteer Park, the original which has since then been added to by the two museums down on First Street.

PRESS: Right.

SCHULMAN: And, by the way, our friends tell us this latest one is magnificient.

PRESS: It is. I’ve been— SCHULMAN: Oh, you’ve seen it already?

PRESS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Well, we’ve got to go. Anyway—oh, Buck, Bucky as they called him, came to visit his—and Dick Fuller who know about m-, invited me and he, this was a crowd in the, in the living room, he said, “Bucky, this man is Romany Marie’s nephew.” 150:00This guy, little guy, pulls me to the corner. He says, “My God. My creative world was born in the world of Romany Marie.” Huh-oh—wow.

PRESS: Wow.

SCHULMAN: And we got, you know, then a whole, all kinds of stuff that he did. And the book begins with Buckminster Fuller, how in 1927 he was penniless and committing—and considering suicide and was considered a nut and a loony for his ideas. And he was living in a village of loft—I mean he had a wealthy background and the—matter of fact, one, when he told me that the first time he’d been to Marie’s earlier on was when a, somebody from Martha Graham’s dance troupe danced naked on the table. [laughs] Anyway, 151:00he came to Marie in 1929 and said—she was going to open the latest of her places—he said, “Let me design it with aluminum.” This is in the book, which Fuller, and then Marie added her own account of it. “Let me design it with all aluminum. You know, really bring it up to date.” Well, she said, really she had serious questions. He said, “It won’t cost you anything, hardly.” And so she said he had these aluminum tables on things and aluminum horn lights on the walls and so on. She said, “I was very worried because all that light. It was too much light for my people. You know, they liked to be in the shadows. Well,” she said, “what happened—it was a disaster. 152:00First one chair then another chair crashes and the people are complaining about the lights, too much light. And I can’t turn off the lights.” She said, “It was a disaster. Nothing but complaints. And the next morning,” she said, “Bucky came to me. He was dismayed and crestfallen, and said, ‘Marie, I’m going to go away. I’m going to—what I’ve done to you is irreparable.’” She said, “No, no, no, no. Life is experiments.” She said, “Bucky, I tell you what. You can make up to me this way: you be my official talker. You come in and have dinner every night. And you can talk to people. And that will be my reward, my repayment.” Fuller says to me, “It was my salvation. I met all kinds of people. They nourished me. 153:00They refined my ideas. One of them, Marie had gone with another man to Paris and visited with her fellow Romanian, Constantin Brancusi. And he made dinner for them. And it was Brancusi’s habit, when somebody was going to go to New York, like a little Japanese who was his assistant for a while, named Isamu Noguchi, he said, “Isamu, you’re going to New York. First thing, you go to Romany Marie’s.” So, like Matisse, Noguchi did that. And there, she brought him together with another short man named Bucky Fuller.

PRESS: Hm.

SCHULMAN: They established such a lengthy and counter—and mutually productive 154:00friendship that last year at the Noguchi Museum in New York, there was a really marvelous exhibit called “Best of Friends.” It had all the materials, sculptures and things, that both Fuller and Noguchi had, relating, responding to each other’s talents. And the exhibit began with a great expanded photograph of Romany Marie because she had— PRESS: The catalyst.

SCHULMAN: Brought them together. Yes. Yeah.

PRESS: That’s a wonderful story.

SCHULMAN: So. [laughs] PRESS: Have you any questions you’d like to ask?

MILLIGAN: I’m going to have to think for the P.S.

PRESS: Okay. Okay.

SCHULMAN: I’ve not talked, I’ve not given cre-, sufficient credit to what we did 155:00at the U of L with these seminars, these “Great Stories” things.

PRESS: Well, and— SCHULMAN: Because it was, it was wonderfully productive and finally ended up when I was leaving, placed in the hands of people in the law school, and for a couple of years, recent years, the Louisville Bar Association has used that idea, “Great Stories and Legal Life,” to hold these kinds of stimulating seminars.

PRESS: And I’d like to, I’d like to do the, the Judge Press, the, the Law and the Present.

SCHULMAN: Oh, indeed. Yeah.

MILLIGAN: Until when were you at U of L? When did you stop teaching there.

SCHULMAN: Nineteen eighty-four to—where are we, 2007—probably 2003. 156:00And then I had to establish an office at home and get a separate phone. You know, the old, the old cliché—I married you for better or worse, but not for lunch.

PRESS: Not for lunch.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. [laughs] But Louise is a hell of an editor. When it came to the Marie book, it having the book, the manuscript having been edited by people on the, with the publisher and by somebody at the English department at the U of L, I thought, Well, Louise will have a few, you know—she’ll catch a few commas and so on. When we got together, she had about eight pages of stuff and a lot of it was very well taken. Of course, I’ve not gotten into the personal side. And that’s important. 157:00PRESS: What do you mean?

SCHULMAN: Well, my family life and Eleanor, my first wife, the mother of my daughter.

PRESS: Oh, I didn’t know whether you wanted to.

SCHULMAN: Well, I think it’s important. Eleanor, you know, was born in Alton, Illinois, of a very rigorously Baptist family. Small town, small time. Her daddy ran a paint and wallpaper store.

PRESS: You, you told us when you were talking about your World War II experiences, you— SCHULMAN: Oh, yes.

PRESS: You talked about how you met her— SCHULMAN: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Eleanor, very attractive, very bright. I think I mentioned that one of the radio programs I did I had her. On the other hand, she was very out of sorts when the, one of the plays of mine 158:00that was produced at the Little Theatre—my friend the director didn’t cast her in the lead role. Well, you know, love, poetry and so on. But Eleanor was in analysis through most of our years together. And so it was, it had its, its problems. And probably affected—daughter Becky is a marvelous child and she, she started at Mount Holyoke, pushed by her high school teacher, who thought that was the place for her. And she was so miserably unhappy at Holyoke. Maybe because of the distance from Seattle and the skiing people were different in New England 159:00than they were in the Northwest. But I think it was basic lack of self-esteem and questioning and so on. She was close to a nervous breakdown when we took her home, back to Seattle. She went to the University of Washington then, and fell in love. The first time I met the man who was her husband, her husband ever since—it’s been a fine marriage—he came to the door, he was drunk. [laughs] But he was, at the time, the station, the country’s youngest professionally-certified ski instructor as I’ve mentioned. Anyway, and, and Eleanor was so devoted that that bound volume of my Time cover stories, Eleanor developed 160:00for my fifty-fifth birthday or something.

PRESS: How old was Becky when you got divorced?

SCHULMAN: S-, s-, let’s see. Forty-six to 30.

PRESS: Thirty?

SCHULMAN: Yeah.

PRESS: Well, it, I think probably worked out well for Eleanor that she’s in the same area as Becky and— SCHULMAN: She is back and, yes, we went, when Becky’s first son was graduating from the University of Hawaii, and betrothed to the woman from Texas, Palestine, Texas, who is his wife, we all went. Eleanor went from Seattle, and Louise and I, and we got along. And I don’t mind saying I’m still paying alimony. [laughs] And Louise—I mean, L-, Becky, 161:00Rebecca, who was a lawyer and was a very good lawyer, and has had a fine recent career as the Deputy Head of the University of Washington’s Property Management office. And they have condos in Utah and Sun Valley and what not. And it’s, it’s a good life. And Eleanor is there. I have not seen her in many, many years, but I was very fortunate here as Len knows, Louise is a remarkable— PRESS: She is indeed.

SCHULMAN: Woman. And loaded, loaded with Louisvillian— PRESS: Credentials.

SCHULMAN: Credentials, yes.

PRESS: Contacts. Yeah.

SCHULMAN: Yes. Yes. Yes.

PRESS: Well, probably ought to— SCHULMAN: It is, yeah.

PRESS: Let you get on the road before the traffic starts.

SCHULMAN: Yeah. 162:00When we said that I, because I sure felt like driving today.

PRESS: [ ] SCHULMAN: Because I had an eight o’clock meeting this morning.

PRESS: Oh.

SCHULMAN: And then I exercised.

PRESS: Oh.

SCHULMAN: And then I went to have lunch at a law office so I could say farewell to another, another meeting, Louisville Forum— [END OF INTERVIEW]