It was almost the perfect photo. Ricky Clemons had just drained a three-point shot at the buzzer, and the Missouri Tigers were strutting jubilantly off home court at halftime with a two-point lead over Colorado. The players’ arms were flung high in the air, like the arms of the referee who’d just called the trey, and like hundreds of arms in the background raised by ecstatic fans.
Last July 4 the president was entertaining at home when Clemons dropped by. It was a family occasion, and no other students were present. But Clemons was welcomed, and when he showed an interest in an ATV owned by the president’s wife he was allowed to take it for a spin. The ATV overturned on a gravel road, landing Clemons in the hospital with broken ribs and a punctured lung. Then it turned out he’d been enjoying himself at the president’s house long after he was due back at the work-release center from what was supposed to have been a “study session.” A local judge ordered him to spend the rest of his sentence in the county jail. The coach visited him there and threw him off the team.
“I know if I did that to a picture it would mean my job and it would be national news,” Pfueller told Daily Tribune columnist Tony Messenger. But the athletic department didn’t see a problem. The director of media relations told the Associated Press, “We do that with photos quite frequently if there is something in the photo we don’t like.”
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But Duranty won the Pulitzer for a series of articles examining the first five years of “Stalinism,” a word he apparently coined. At the time the judges praised his “scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and clarity.” No one would now, and the Pulitzer Board just spent six months deciding whether the Pulitzer should be revoked. McCollam tells us Duranty’s pieces “are flawed in many respects, but overall seem sound, and even include notes of moral condemnation rarely found elsewhere in his work.” A harsher verdict was returned earlier this year by Columbia University historian Mark von Hagen, whom the Times asked to review Duranty’s entire 1931 output, not simply the nominated stories. Von Hagen concluded the work was “cynical in tone and apologist in purpose and effect.”
On November 21 the board announced that Duranty’s Pulitzer would stand–though not for the reason Sulzberger suggested. Its statement called the famine “horrific” but noted that Duranty had won the Pulitzer for other coverage. “Measured by today’s standards,” that work “falls seriously short,” said the board, but “there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case. Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that threshold.”
While I had Gissler on the phone I asked him a second question: would the Pulitzer Board be more open to reconsidering a sin of omission than a sin of commission? In 1977 the board that oversaw the Pulitzers–at that time it was called the advisory board–refused to give a prize to A River Runs Through It, a book that has never been out of print, has sold more than a million copies, has been translated into a dozen languages, and was turned into a movie.
