>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. [ Silence ] >> John Cole: Well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Library of Congress. I'm John Cole. I'm the director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, which is the reading promotion arm of the Library. And we were created by Daniel Boorstin when he was librarian of congress in 1997. And he created the Center as a public/private partnership with private support from publishers in those days who were generous. But the job of the Center for the Book is to promote books, reading, literacy and libraries, both around the country and as it just turned out, we have -- do it internationally as well. We also have state Centers for the Book that are in each state, plus the Virgin Islands, and District of Columbia. And we are very active here in Washington. The Center for the Book is one of the major parts of the library that work on the National Book Festival, which I hope you know about. It was created in 2001 with the help of First Lady Laura Bush, and the Library of Congress now host it each year -- this year September 21st and 22nd, and it will be on the National Mall. And we will have more than 100 writers who not only will make presentations, but also become involved with book signing and celebrating books. Here at the Library of Congress these noontime talks, which we have dubbed "books and beyond talks," are by writers and authors who have made good use of the Library of Congress's resources. Our talks are all filmed for our website, so I would like to ask you to turn off all things electronic and be prepared during the question and answer period if you are asking question, and I know you will get answers, but your question asking constitutes our right if we so choose to have you part of our webcast. And we thank you in advance. The Center for the Book will also be involved in other major activities during this coming year. One of them I was speaking about earlier is the first Library of Congress Literacy Awards, which are going to be awarded this year. And as you go out, I have put some news releases out about our schedule of other books on the schedule and also the Literacy Awards. The Literacy Awards are the applications are available online. They go to groups that are fighting illiteracy and it's a method of sort of raising consciousness again about the literacy problem in our country, which does not go away, and encouraging other groups to become involved in both the fight against illiteracy and the fight against what we call "alliteracy," people who can read but don't. All of this is done in the name of actually the culture of the book, as Dr. James Billington, the librarian of Congress now talks about in groups, a lot of the activities. But to today's talk, today Stephen Hess is here, as you know, and I always love to show a finished book as a product of research, not only at the Library of Congress in this instance, but many institutions. And in fact it's -- and Steve will talk about this, it really is a special kind of an ongoing project for him, one of many, many projects that he will be not only talking about the results, but also I think telling us about some of the other books and projects in which he is involved. For those of you who don't know Mr. Hess, he is a senior fellow emeritus in government studies at the Brookings Institution, and formerly a distinguished research professor of media and public affairs at G. W., at George Washington University. He was a young speech writer in the Eisenhower White House, and returned to the White House to work with Presidents Nixon and Carter. And he has also advised the presidential transition teams of Presidents Reagan and Clinton. His numerous books include "Through Their Eyes: Foreign Correspondents in the United States," published by Brookings in 2005, "Organizing the Presidency," another Brookings book, and what has to be my favorite because it's based on Library of Congress collections and it is through this book that I first met Mr. Hess. He was with Milton Kaplan, who used to be the curator for political cartoons here in the Library of Congress. He put together "The Ungentlemanly Art: A History of American Political Cartoons." So he obviously is the man who not only knows about politics, but comes at politics from many different angles, which we are going to learn about today. It's my pleasure to present Stephen Hess. Steve. [ Applause ] >> Stephen Hess: Thank you. Thank you. John, it's always pleasure to be with you and I've always appreciated the Center for the Book, and its kindness to me. My connection to the Library is -- on this particular time is actually twofold. About 2 months ago 2 very sturdy fellows came to my office and started to pack up all of my manuscripts, the hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of transcribed interviews with journalists that I've conducted in the last 40 years, all of the notes that I took on them, to deliver to the manuscript division of the Library of Congress. And on the side of each box -- I didn't know this, they slapped a big sticker. It said, "The Stephen Hess Collection." And you can't imagine the thrill of that to me, the pride of that, to know that there was something here in the Library of Congress for future researchers, called "The Stephen Hess Collection." They are a connection to the Library of Congress. If you had the book already, you would see the dedication. The dedication says, "For my family," there are 16 of them, they're in 4 vertical lines. And if you -- they're my wife, my sons and daughter, their spouses, their children, they're my family. And if you looked in line 3 moving left to right and you went one down, you would see "Betsy, Betsy Cody," of the Congressional Research Service. It's right here. And she'll sign all of the dedications after the program if you would like. It says -- under that it says a quote from Amos Oz, which I think many of you would appreciate and agree with, "I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world." Now, this book, "Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters," 1978, 2012, is actually the 7th book in a series that I call "news work." And this happened -- I got to Brookings in 1972. Obviously, as John said, I had bee on the White House staff of several presidents so I was expected to be their presidency person. And in 1976 I wrote a book called "Organizing the Presidency," and realized at that moment I had said everything I had to say about the presidency, wanted to say, and rather than repeat myself I thought I would look for something, another area, and decided it would be journalism in Washington. Now, remember, 2 things. I was not a journalist, and I was not a communication scholar. So what do you do then? Well, you have to find the literature. We all know that. And this will absolutely amaze you given that what's happened in 40 years, what you know about the literature, there wasn't any. There wasn't any. The last serious piece on Washington journalism was a PhD dissertation from the University of Chicago in 1935. It was written by Leo Rosten, who when he realized that he could sell only 500 copies, changed his interest and then started to write Marx Brothers movies, and also a remarkable book called, "The Joys of Yiddish." So what happened was I really had to start my own methodology as I went along. But in that first book I interviewed 450 Washington journalists who were covering the national government for American papers. And was so fascinated that I just couldn't get off the topic. And then went onto another book, which I called "The Government Press Connection," in which I went inside 5 press offices spending a year at each one: the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Transportation, primarily looking for how press officers do their business in a rather conventional way, but kept stumbling over crises. When I was at the Department of Transportation, for example, dealing with the secretary and looking out the window, suddenly a plane, Air Florida 90 crashed into the 14th Street Bridge in the middle of a snowstorm, and there I was at the center of this. And I could follow a crisis right through where people were always in the wrong place, but how they adjusted to this. Same thing at the Pentagon, when I was there, there were American planes shot down, 2 Libyan planes. And again, I saw a different set of crisis management going on there in which I learned from their assistants that in the initial reporting of a crisis like that, it never gets more than half right. But I also had an opportunity to follow leaks in government, which was quite fascinating. I made a topology of them, the Goodwill Leak, the Eagle Leak, and the Animus Leak and so forth and so on. And learned that Scotty Rested [phonetic] used to say that the government is the only vessel that leaks from the top. We went on from press officers until the Senate, and wrote a booked called "The Ultimate Insiders: US Senators in the National Media." The Senate -- or the Congress is really a very unfriendly place to scholars. And rather than stand around waiting for some secretary to give me an opportunity to interview their boss, I simply hung out every day figuring out where they were likely to be. Senators do a lot of walking between their offices, the Capitol, cloak rooms and so forth, and so on, very often alone. And I would simply go up to a senator, introduce myself, and say, "Senator, journalists are going to put an adjective in front of your name. If you had your druthers [phonetic], what adjective would you like to have there?" This sort of -- this was a question that hadn't been asked before, and it interested them. And they would stop and think about it, and talk, and sometimes have very long conversations. They forgot all else that they had to do after that. And I actually interviewed half of the United States Senate just that way in the corridors. By the way, the adjectives that they most wanted to have in front of their name was "hardworking," [laughter] as in "Hardworking John Melcher," or something like that. So from those 2 books, I went to a book called "Lie from Capitol Hill," more about the House than the Senate, and very much about television as local television and the internet was starting to weave into Washington, and tried to figure out how often these congressmen appear -- Congress people appear in their districts in meaningful ways. They were spending an awful lot of money to be seen and heard, but it turned out that they were hardly seen at all, which surprised me. And I wondered why. The reason why I think more than any is somehow from this quote of the book it says, "It is August 1st, 1984, and I am sitting next to Senator Alan Dixon in a screening room in the basement of the Capitol. We are watching a recent broadcast from a cable station in Peoria. The question put to him requires a delicate answer. Dixon listens to his response, he smiles, then issues a laugh that comes from deep inside him, 'I got out of that pretty good,' he says. Watching a man so thoroughly enjoy watching himself is an exquisite experience." And I call that chapter "I Am On TV Therefore I Am." We went on from that because fortunately we got some grants and some money to go around the world, my wife and I, and wrote a book called "International News and Foreign Correspondents." When we got to Rome, for example, I met a young man who is now my colleague, his office is right next to mine, E. J. Dion [assumed spelling], who was then with the New York Times, and he was trying to explain to me what it felt like to report from the Middle East. And it was a point where they went to Beirut all the time. And he says, "You become hooked on your own adrenaline." And I particularly was interested in some of these correspondents who were really high-risk people. In Beijing there Nick Kristof, Nicholas Kristof, who had filled out his expense account after [inaudible] Tiananmen Square, which was, "One Bike Run Over By Tank." When I got to Istanbul, I met up with John Palfrit [assumed spelling] of the Washington Post, who was in Kyrgyzstan coming in for a little recreation that weekend. And one question I would always ask to them was really, "What are your survival techniques?" And John said to me, "Never wash your car." "Never wash your car" seemed like a strange answer. But he said, "If someone plants a bomb under it, you will see the fingerprints." At any rate, from that, seeing how the US covered the rest of the world, it was a natural to see how the rest of the world covered us, including the people who give out the Golden Globes, the Hollywood Press correspondents as well. So now after nearly 4 decades, we had come to the final book. The final book, presumably should explain where we're going from here. I had spent a lot of time getting there. What next? And I suddenly realized -- it didn't take much to realize this, that I hadn't the faintest idea where the media -- when I started it was called "the press," by the time I finished it was called "the media," where the media was going. So what I did was instead of going forward, I decided to go back. By this time I was also, as I said, a professor at George Washington University, so I had captive students who were very happy to join with me, I had interns at the Brookings Institution, where I was emeritus. And what we did was we went back to that first book where I interviewed 450 reporters in 1978, and tried to find them again and see what had happened to them over the years. And in doing we would create the first study of career patterns in journalism. And we found one way or another 90% of them; a hundred were dead. We re-interviewed 283. We found them all over the world. They didn't just stay in Washington, found them in London, in Paris, in Italy, in New Zealand, in Australia. And these are the interviews that -- on others that I'll be giving to the Library of Congress. Now, what we did -- what I had to do with this material because it wasn't like the class of '78. It wasn't like your class in college where everybody came at the same time, would leave at the same time. These were people, the only thing that held them together was that one moment in time that they were in Washington covering national government. So instead I wrote a book that is basically 9 discreet essays at a conclusion. And the essays would be how I wanted to cut the material, whether it might be generically or by organizations and so forth. So if -- I'll go through some of those so you get a sense of what I'm talking about. The first one is what Tom Brokaw would call "the greatest generation." These were the folks who fought in World War II and came back with the GI Bill, if they didn't know if they were already reporters. And their pattern was very simple. They worked someplace where they learned that organization, and then they were sent to Washington where they spent the rest of their lives and where they retired at 65; they didn't have to, but they did. That was the way that it went at that time. So I'll give you an example. Page -- [ background sounds ] typical case -- well not quite typical; this is of a man named "Darwin Olofson" of the Omaha World Herald. And he was transferred to Washington in 1950, he said as a form of punishment. And he tells the story that he was covering the first big snowstorm in Omaha, and he was sent out to get images of the children playing in the snow and white flakes falling and so forth. Instead what he found were that Suds [phonetic] were standing around in the -- freezing on the school playground. So he was an industrious reporter, what he did was immediately started a snowball fight. And the kids loved that. And then he says, "But before I got back to the newsroom the school principal had called our executive editor and accused me of threatening the health and welfare of an entire new generation. Shortly thereafter the executive editor called me in and said he thought I would do better in an unstable environment. He was sending me to Washington." So that was -- that's how it was at that point. Now, the next thing I might likely will tell you about is chapter on women. And this was a little different in this way. There were only 20% of this group of women. It would have been impossible to just take that 20% and make an interesting chapter on it. So we kept interviewing, interviewing, and interviewing over town, and we found a rather interesting pattern. But this basically is how it first started. And the one I'll quote is Judy Woodruff, who had graduated from Duke University in 1968. "My spring break I went to Atlanta. I interviewed all 3 affiliate news directors; 2 of them barely gave me the time of day. The third, the ABC affiliate's news director -- this was a station that was doing one newscast on the weekend, and he said, 'I could use a gofer, newsroom secretary. You can answer the phone, pick up some of the mail.' And I worked for them for a year and a half. The last 6 months they hired me to do the 11:00 Sunday night weather. It was like Cinderella. During the week I would come in and be the secretary in the newsroom, and then on Sunday night I would come in at 6 and for 5 hours I would pour over the weather wires, and that's how I learned how to do the weather reports." She went onto bigger and better things. And then right after that I talk about Nina Totenberg [assumed spelling], who was also looking for a job at the time in Boston, and every time she would come in they would say to her, "We have our woman." "This was my favorite," she said, "We have our woman." That was all the time, "We have our woman." So I watched this through a progression that ends that goes through this strong sense of discrimination, and family, and then balance. And end the chapter with somebody who's a wonderful reporter, although not as famous probably to you, as Judy Woodruff or Nina Totenberg, and her name is "June Cronehaus" [assumed spelling]. And this is what she told us. "I was the only woman in the Dallas Bureau of the Wall Street Journal in 1976, and it was a very macho place. You know, there was pinups around the office and it was not particularly -- it was not a very friendly atmosphere. Five years later by fluke I was sent to Rhodesia to cover the end of the Independence War, and I liked Africa so much that I was given the Africa Beat. So I did that for a couple years, and then I was asked to develop a beat on Third World issues, then in 1980 I came back to be the bureau chief in Boston, and in '85 I went to Hong Kong to be the bureau chief, caught the revolution in the Philippines, returned to Washington to be the deputy bureau chief in 1987." And then there was a unique twist. She married an Australian -- an American diplomat, and left journalism for 7 years. And she says to us, "You know, you get married when you fall in love. You really are. You're not going to decide, 'Oh, I'm going to wait 15 years to get married,' you know. You're going to do it when your heart tells you, you do it. So it just happens that I didn't get married until I was 40. And I had my children at 41 and 42. It was not because I planned it that way. That's just the way it happened." In 1997 June returned to the Washington Bureau of the Wall Street Journal, and working 4 days a week and we interviewed her again in 2006. Her kids were now 16 and 17, and she said that, "We've got college night tonight so I'll go home about 6:30, which is a little early for me. You know, you just have to set your priorities. This is a fairly friendly -- family friendly place. Everybody's got kids around the same age, and no one around here will raise an eyebrow if you have to take off time to do a college tour or something like go to kid's baseball game. Everyone recognizes that when your story's hot, you work hard at it, and you don't watch the clock. And when your story cools off, you can take some time if you need it. You just do it. That's what being a woman is all about." Okay; another chapter was the boomers. We started with the World War II generation, we saw the pattern there, one employee moving along to retirement. When we get to the boomers we start seeing real changes. People start moving from one job to another job. People start moving from one type of medium to another. And it really becomes quite interesting. Here is one woman who moved from one job to another. Her name is "Karen Elliott House." And when we caught up with her first, she was at the Dallas Morning News. She had -- she was from Texas, had gone to the University of Texas, and she moved to Washington in 1994. And she says, "One of the stories I did that I think it made the journal want to hire me was during Watergate. There was a young man named "Bud Crow" who worked at the White House who was one of those low-level people that got in trouble and got sentenced to prison. The day he was leaving court, I called up the White House and asked to speak to him. Of course if you're from the Dallas Morning News no one wants to talk to you. But my picture happened to have been on the front page of the New York Times standing behind him so I said to him, 'I'm that woman who's picture is in the paper standing behind you and I wanted to talk to you about how you tell your children you're going to prison.' He said, 'Well, I don't know that I want to talk about that,' and he put me off. And that evening I was driving down 17th Street past the White House at night with my boyfriend, and I saw him walking and I screamed 'Stop the car.' And I got out of the car, and just went up to him and said, 'I'm that woman who called you today and I want to talk to you.' He said, 'Well, I'm taking my last walk around the White House.' So I just started walking with him. We walked down 17th Street, down past the ellipse, around the ellipse, back up again, with me sort of quizzing him the whole time, and I mean, 'Last walk around the White House, that's a great phrase from the beginning. Then he talked about how he used to run and there and then got into how his children had seen him on TV and what he was going to tell them. You know, if I do say so myself, it was a great human interest feature. The Dallas Morning News ran it. I think the Dallas Bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal saw it. At any rate, I went to the Wall Street Journal at that time." By the way, Karen Elliott House ended her career as publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Another type of change -- hers being job to job, in the same type of -- this one is a change of media. And this person who made the change is named "Lisa Myers" [assumed spelling]. And Lisa Myers has described what happened to her. You'll notice it's sort of like a circle. I bring in these stories as much as possible the book -- in the words as much as I can of the people telling -- talking to me. "I never at any particular point decided that I was going to be on television. I was invited to do a couple panels on 'Meet The Press' and 'Face The Nation,' which I found very nerve wracking. In fact, I could hardly breathe. I think that the thing that really made the difference to me is there was a news conference. It would have been September 1980. I was covering the Carter White House for the Washington Star. I hadn't been covering the White House long. President Carter may have thought I was a sweet young thing. It was the very end of the news conference so it's usually when they look for softballs and puffballs. President Carter called on me and I asked him about some allegation he'd made about Governor Reagan having injected racism into the presidential campaign. The President basically blew me off and said, "Look, I never made such an allegation," or something like that. I stood there and re-asked the question. At that point he totally denied that he ever said such a thing. After that news conference, Leslie Stahl ran over to me and said, 'Tell your parents to watch tonight.' And of all the evening news shows there I was asking some questions of the President, and him basically providing a not terribly straightforward answer, then of course the network rolled the tapes of him saying exactly what I had said he had said. So that was the moment that propelled me into television. It wasn't any grand plan on my part, it was really unscripted. I just got after -- but I got offers after that, but the Washington Star gave me a big raise and I was interested in covering the Reagan White House so I stayed there until the Star folded in 1981. And then after that I went to work for NBC." And of course she became the network's chief investigative correspondent. There's -- after boomers I did a different type of chapter, which I called "Right Place, Wrong Place." It was about people who unfortunately worked for the Washington Star instead of the Washington Post, who worked for the UPI, rather than AP, and what really happens to them when their job changes like that. It starts with a woman I was very fond of named, "Roberta Hornet Draper" [assumed spelling]. And she said -- never forget the day, "Aside from my husband's death, the day the Washington Star folded was the worst day of my life. I had no notice. My boss called at 6 a.m. to tell me so I wouldn't hear it on the radio. So I walked into the kitchen and made myself a Manhattan. I thought, 'How many times do you have a death in the family?' It was intense. I had been there since 1957. I started out as a copy boy. It was a wonderful place to work, even though it was conservative, because they gave reporters absolute free reign. No one ever told you what to do." And then she says later, "A friend from NBC called with the job offer. I became their senate producer, which is a euphemism for 'off-camera.' I did all the Tuesday lunches, all the interviews, all the press conferences, wrote memos, told the reporters what to report. I stayed at NBC for 20 years." And what happened, of course, was a superstar. It's like Mary McGreary [phonetic], who have quickly grabbed up the people who weren't superstars sometimes and often had to go to even other cities to find work. TV networks; let's try TV networks. TV networks were always a place with a very 2-tier situation, the stars that I talk about, and then the others that were not stars. If you were a specialist, it could be exceedingly difficult for you when the shows were the half hour nightly news. I interviewed all 3 of the specialists, ABC, NBC, and CBS for Supreme Court, and their interest in part -- this is -- this first is Carl Stern, who was with NBC, and he said, "The principle problem was that what had been a reporters business became a producers business. The principle produce to whom I reported in New York had very strong views as to what she thought the court was doing, which occasionally did parallel what the court was doing, but not always. She would change my copy, and I'd say, 'Well, they didn't say that.' And she'd say, 'Well, it means the same thing, and people will understand it better.' Frequently it reached the point where I didn't believe half the things I was saying on the air. Not that it was blatantly false, but that it was inaccurate. I had this phone call from Steven Friedman, the evening news senior executive, and he's balling me out. He says, 'I've had this feritous [phonetic] bullshit up to here. What matters is not whether we're fair in this story or fair in that story, what matters is whether we're fair overall.' Now, I ask you as a rational human being how you get to be fair overall. It's sort of like the guy with one foot in boiling water, and one foot in the ice. On average is he comfortable? It just became an entirely different business, and I was relieved to go onto something else." He went onto be the spokesman for Janet Reno, the attorney general, and then had a very long, successful career, mostly often teaching ethics at George Washington University where we were colleagues. The other person's sort of interesting, because you get the same sort of thing, was Fred Graham, who was with CBS. All 3 of these were people who we're covering, by the way, were lawyers themselves. Fred Graham had come from the New York Times. "CBS changed. They brought in 2 executives from Los Angeles, Van Goren Sauder [phonetic], and Ed Joyce, to run the news division. And they had this idea that news should be what they call 'infotainment,' a mixture of information and entertainment. And Sauder had a concept that he calls 'moments,' and he said, 'The way to engage the viewer is for you to find out in every story a poignant moment in which someone is involved in the story discovers a tear-filled moment, a happy moment, anything, an emotional moment, and that moment as a part of the story will build your news viewership and your ratings will go up. The problem was that what was one person's moment, might not be another person's moment. So at CBS we'd lost the definition of 'news.'" Now, there was another part that was sort of special to being a television correspondent, even more than a print correspondent I think. And that was the ability to be at the right time at the right -- be at the right place at the right time. And this was [inaudible]. Let's see. This was Ike Pappas, Ike Pappas of CBS. He was at Dallas Police Headquarters 1963. "I entered the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters. I didn't know where I was going to stand to try to report the story of the departure of Oswald. So I found a little spot by the fender of the chase car of the armored truck and I squeezed in, and I didn't realize it, but I was squeezing in right in front of Jack Ruby. And I saw the man jump in front of me with a black coat on, Fedora hat, and suddenly there's a bang and a flash on Oswald's sweater, and a moan and he goes down, and here's, 'My God, what's happening now?' The things that cross your mind as your mind as reporter, 'Could this possibly be the assassination of the President of the United States being killed?' Put that in words, and I just said what I saw." New York Times -- talk a little about the -- how are we doing on time? New York Times was by far my favorite chapter because there were 30 reporters in the bureau, and I interviewed 17 of them. And they're by now -- for those who are political junkies like this audience, they became pretty famous people and we see their stories imposing on each other. And you started with the bureau chief who was Hedrick Smith and then you went on to Steve Roberts, and Bernie Gortzman [assumed spelling], and Rick Smith, who became US ambassador to Germany and so forth. I'll read a rather long one from Marty Tolshen [assumed spelling], because in various ways it reflected how you worked your way through the New York Times. And he said, "I got a Bachelor of Law Degree, and then I was in the service for 2 years, and I came out and took a VA course called 'How To Get A Job,' the burden of which was to go for something that you're really interested in. So I wrote 110 editors and got 6 interviews and 4 job offers in 1954. What I was offered was copyboy jobs and mailroom jobs, and I took the one at the New York Times. And then when you get that job, according to the VA of course, consider it as a foot in the door and make yourself useful to the people who are doing the kind of work you want to do, and someday a task will come up and someone will be in on a project, or someone will be on vacation, or someone will be sick, and they will need somebody and they will look at you and they'll say, 'Well, what the heck, he knows how to bring us coffee and he knows how to rip copy off the old teletype machine. Let's give the kid a break.' And I followed that to a tee and it worked for me. I was a copyboy for a year. At that time if you weren't promoted after a year, you were expected to resign, but I was promoted, not to a reporter, but to news clerk, which meant I did a little writing, but basically I was still a gofer, and after 6 months I was promoted to news assistant at the United Nations Bureau, and then 3 years later, start to finish, I was promoted to reporter. My first reporting job was on the women's page, which in those days was food, fashions, furnishings and family, and I was family reporting on the economics of aging. After 5 years of that, Abe Rosenthal, came in as a metropolitan editor, and he persuaded me to join the news staff. Since I had only done features, I had a lot of difficulty with deadlines. So they put me on night rewrite, which meant 7 at night until 3 in the morning, days off middle of the week. After about 2 years of that, I was brought down to cover health and hospitals, in which capacity I wrote a series that led to a few arrests, a few convictions, after which I was sent to City Hall as bureau chief, after which I did politics of general New York, and then I was transferred to Washington. So I came to Washington in 1973 as a regional reporter, because as Abe said, in those days you couldn't get there from here. The Washington Bureau had its own hierarchy and was constantly at war with New York, and hired its own people. And so the only way I could get to Washington was as the regional reporter, which meant that I covered New York, Connecticut and New Jersey Congressional delegations. I did that for about 2 years, 2-1/2 years, and then they asked me if I would like to be a congressional correspondent working for the Washington Bureau, and I said, 'Sure, I'll do that.'" Now, everything's going very nice for him, and then he said, "I left the Times because a New York financier asked me to start a newspaper to cover Capitol Hill. I turned him down several times, and he kept coming back and coming back. Finally I told the financier, 'Yes, I'm interested.' Took 6 months to get them to give me what I wanted, which basically was a piece of the action. I would not do it unless I had an equity interest in this. And I had spent my life as a reporter, I had almost zero managerial experience. I had to find an office, I had to find a printer and distributor, and then I had to hire personnel. The hardest thing was hiring an advertising staff because I didn't know anything about advertising. It was really quite harrowing. People tell me the 2 things about a startup, 'You'll never work harder and you'll never have more fun.' And in both cases that's been true. I was then 66 years old when I started 'The Hill.' Everybody knows the magazine, the newspaper, 'The Hill, a time when by right I should have been in a nursing home, right? It took 3 years before we made a profit. We launched it in September of '94, and just lost $100,000 that year. The next year we lot a lot of money, about $800,000, but the third year we made a modest profit, about $200,000. And now it really is a cash cow. It's raking in multimillions, multimillions; multi, multi, multibillions of dollars." It's a story of Bart, who tells the next story. I don't want to tell too much, is Bernie Gortzman, who was a great diplomatic correspondent, foreign correspondent, foreign editor, and when he was 60 and thinking that maybe this is about it, he happened to go to Harvard to visit his son who was in computer science. His son shows him something that he never saw before, and he said, "My God, we can do that on a newspaper." He comes back and convinces Joe Lollivel [assumed spelling], the editor, and becomes the first editor of the New York Times online. So he went by this particular fluke, from being a traditional reporter to a website journalist. >> John Cole: Steve, you want to leave some time for questions. >> Stephen Hess: Yes, okay. Let me cut right to conclusions, what this all adds up to; and this is it. When expected -- because this is what reporters told you at the time when we interviewed them, that this would be their mentoring, which was you go until your legs go. And basically it's sort of about 4 parts. First, it is that Washington is a semi-profession. You don't have to go to journalism school, you're not -- you don't have to be accredited thanks to the Constitution, all you need to do is get a job in journalism. By then journalism is poorly paid, which is all right if you're young, not so good if you're getting older and having family. It's a high-energy job, meaning that your hours are strange, your work habits are long, and ultimately it's a bridge semi-profession. You learn things and have contacts that you can move into other areas. So that what we expected to find, what the reporters told us was there'd become a time when they suddenly around and they're worried about having money to put their kids into college. And so they find higher-paid jobs in public relations and other things. So we call it the [inaudible] they find, and so forth and so on. What happened, of course, was exactly the reverse of that. And when we broke this all down, counted them one by one by one from the beginning of their careers even before they got to Washington until they finally ended, we found that there were 13% who were the dropouts, 23% who were the transitional journalists, the ones I just described, that went onto something else in sort of mid-career, and 64% were lifers, journalists for life, 30 years, 40 years, even 50 years. That simply wasn't the way it was expected to be. And why was that? Well, there are various reasons that we did. But first of all you start with the proposition that these people absolutely love being journalists. I never saw anything like that in the response. I mean, most people talk about having fun after you leave the office. These people had their fun in the office. And okay, they're in this and why can they stay in this? Well, journalism wasn't quite as ill-paid as perhaps we thought. It got a little well-paid, and in Washington like in [inaudible], you're covering New York for Wall Street or Hollywood, you could make some money freelancing on the side. But there was another reason that we all understand, and it's not just journalism. Over this period of time, women went into the job market big time. And who do you marry, you marry someone like you. If you're a college graduate, you marry another college graduate. He looked around and suddenly you had 2 professionals, 2 upper middle-class types of people, and you didn't have to leave this job you love because between your salary and your spouse's salary, usually your wife's salary, but not necessarily, you could stay in journalism. These are the folks that I call "trophy husbands." And indeed they did stay in journalism, and happily. And that in a sense is how I close my story. I should say, by the way, that if you haven't had enough about journalism in Washington, if you're really a journalism junkie as I am, should tell you that Smithsonian associates on May 16th, Thursday, from 7 to 9, I'm putting on a program called, "On The Record," and my guest will be Nina Totenberg, again, David Leonhardt, the bureau chief of the New York Times, Clarence Page, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Washington -- for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Wallace, you know, has the Sunday program now on Fox, and Karen Tumulty, one of the best political reporters of the Washington Post. So that, I assume is available for those who haven't had enough of Washington journalism right now. But sure, let's have some questions. [ Applause ] I'm a little blinded by the light [inaudible]. No questions? Oh, good, I can just sign books and go home. [Laughter] Yes; there is one back way in the back. >> James: Yes, it's one book. I'm James. I'm from Georgetown, and I was wondering if you were planning to write a book about American journalists who were reporting overseas. For example, covering an area that is increasingly, you know, more complicated and important to America's future. >> Stephen Hess: Well, what I did was -- >> Repeat the question. >> Stephen Hess: I'm sorry, was I going to go back to covering reporters, particularly foreign correspondents or particularly in a section of the world, and of course there have been many studies have been done that way. I start with the proposition -- I'm out of the business. This is my seventh and final volume. As I told some friends that I haven't seen in a very long time here, my next book will actually be on Moynihan in the Nixon White House, because Moynihan was in 1969 the assistant to the President, a very odd combination, a liberal advisor to a conservative president. And I happened to be the deputy assistant to the President basically, his chief of staff. So it's an unusual story of these 2 people from different sides of the political fence who meet, like each other. And ultimately Moynihan convinces the President to put forward what was the most liberal progressive piece of social legislation, at least since Medicare. So that's where I'm going, and there's a limit to how many things I will go. My story on foreign correspondents, which is part just going around the world and talking to people like Nick Kristof, and John Palfrit, and Bob Simon in Israel, and so forth, is added all up. And some other -- my computations were disturbing, where we were covering it, what we were covering, mostly crises, the crisis went away, and we weren't any longer interested in that part of the world. Our language facilities were not good. They had gotten better in a place like Russia because we had been in conflict with them for so long. When that died out they were not any good in terms of Arabic, for example. So it was a very discouraging picture of the system, not of the men and women who were foreign correspondents. And again, there it was very interesting covering the women, because this was a place that women broke in big time because they could go places that men didn't want to go. They were willing to go places that men didn't want to go. They could get in their Geo and drive to Venezuela, you know, and find a war, that sort of thing. And that was very interesting. So that was it. The story of how the rest of the world covered us was really quite different. And again, I watched the coverage move from New York where it had originally been with the UN and Wall Street to Washington, and it was very heavy. And if they were here long enough to cover a presidential election, they did get a chance to see the rest of the country, or at least Iowa, and New Hampshire, and South Carolina, that sort of thing. But they had their gaps too. They were big on Washington and not very big on Des Moines unless they had to be. Oh, yes sir. >> Yes. Over the course of time you've been studying the correspondents over this period of time. Do you think that the quality of information that is getting out is better, worse, or the same as it was? >> Stephen Hess: Yes; that's the key question, of course, because it is changing so radically. And it's moving so that if you pick up the paper here in Washington both today and yesterday, you'll already see 2 major changes, and this is just today and yesterday. Yesterday the Washington Post decided that they would put in a pay wall [phonetic] and charge for online. The New York Times did it a year or so ago. The Wall Street Journal was the only one smart enough to do it from the beginning. But in other words, they were giving their product for free. And it's very hard to pull back. So they're looking for ways to find a living. The other was the other side of the coin. An interesting paper like the Washington Examiner, decided it would go out of business in June, and instead would be a slick magazine for political want to be sort of thing. So what's happening is we're in a terrible transition -- and not terrible, we're in a transition moment, which why I didn't write about it, I don't know, the future. And it's going to work itself out. It has to work itself out. This is a business that will always be with us. There will always be people -- at least I prove in this book who want to be journalists. But at the moment I would say that if you were reading this morning's Washington Post and you read the Washington Post when you started -- when I started this book in 1978, it would have been better then. Part of the reason it would be better then it was better edited. That's who you cut, you cut your editors, which means it's more full of errors and that sort of thing. But there's another part of it that is really sort of interesting. And that's the totality of news. Back when -- I guess when the first book came out, I was on a talking show, I think Public Radio, Diane Rehm, and a woman called in and she was concerned. Somehow she wasn't getting the news somehow that she wanted, that she needed, and didn't know how to do it, maybe I could advise her. Of course there's a lot of news out there. I suddenly thought to myself, "Hey, you know, diets, boy, best-seller list is full of diet books. I could make a lot of money being a media diet -- write a media diet book, or being a media doctor." And I said, "You know, there really are only 3 things I need from you: what are your interests, how much time are you willing to spend on information, and how much are you willing to spend? If I know those 3 things, I can write a diet for you, because it's all out there." Remember, this was a long time ago. Today not only is it all out there, but there are people who actually do this. You can set your own diet. There are -- when I -- one of my interests, of course, is the media. When I turn on my computer in the morning, I have 2 aggregators that are just telling me all of the media stories from 2 different angles that appeared yesterday. I have another that tells me the headlines of the major sources. And then they're on, and on, and on. I have another that tells me what are the stories in the Middle East that are going on, and so forth. So we have moved to that state. Now, again, it goes back to the initial question of there's no editor of that. I don't -- I can't judge the quality of some of the news I'm getting. And we're going to have to come around to a system that cares about the filter, that cares about getting from the raw material and to the consumer. [Applause] >> John Cole: And thank you, thank you very much. Thank you, Steve. Well, I want to thank Stephen Hess for sharing not only the stories of his -- behind all of his books, but also showing us a little bit of why he is such an astute observer of the American political scene. It was really an enjoyable presentation, and now you'll have a chance to talk with him a little more at the book signing, which will be just outside the foyer. That way you can also get copies of books -- purchase copies of the books. And thank you for joining us, and let's give our speaker another hand. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.