Arthur M. Sulzberger, Jr. The New York Times

April 13, 2010

Arthur M. Sulzberger, Jr.
The New York Times
860 8th Avenue
New York, New York 10018

RE: Time to say Goodbye. The stars are aligned.

Mr. Sulzberger,

When the Masters Golf Tournament is played and the Pulitzer Prize announcement is almost simultaneous it means that the stars are aligned. I don’t need to examine the entrails of an owl to know that it is time to say Goodbye.

I come from a literate family.

My father read Owen Wister stories to me. Smokey, then the Virginian. He also read the New York Times to me. The two Arthurs, Krock and Daley, were regular fare. Brooks Atkinson got me to my first Broadway play. As I much as I enjoyed Bosley Crowther’s reviews when first read I must tell you that they have not stood up to the calendar.[Look at his typical modern American Liberal guilt-ridden review of “Guns at Batasi” from 1964.] I had lunch in your dining room at least 20 times. I remember the first time I finished the daily puzzle. I remember the first time I finished the Sunday puzzle. [As an interesting aside it must be noted that the last time I did one of your puzzles its completion was noted and commented on by a Pulitzer Prize winner. His comment was, “You do them in ink”?]

The death spin of your editorial page, what with Frank Rich and his perpetually knotted knickers coupled with his caterwauling and wailing when “Angels in America” is not recited before the Super Bowl and Paul Krugman, toes up on the edge of barking mad when ever someone says “Are you Rasputin’s evil twin” or “Where did you stash the ENRON loot”, continues when these two drown more polar bears with their screeds than all the SUVs ands coal fired plants ever manufactured

There is some good news I can tell you.

Your confirmation as a Perpetual Life Plus Tenured Emeritus Member of the Lucky, I Mean Really, Really Lucky Sperm Club has been confirmed and will be announced shortly. Who says Rupert Murdock isn’t a good reporter?



From losing $1,100,000,000 – that’s one billion one hundred million – of your unequal shareholders’ money – the Boston Globe, remember? – to making hitting from the Ladies’ Tees the moral equivalent of this country going to war allows me to recast the great Dr. Johnson. “It was a stupid thing done stupidly”.

The only place where such failures would be tolerated would be the Department of Education, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Energy. Intentions and efforts count for all. The real world, the world where “stones are hard and water is wet” is looked on as an aberration, a speed bump on the road to the earthly paradise of living large. “Your search for a system so perfect that no one will have to be good” has not and will not transit safely between the twin contingent disasters of Scylla or Charybdis

You actually devoted more Page 1 space in 2003 to the Masters Tournament lack of chicks than to the United States going to war.

Another chapter of the Masters has been written without Oprah or Billie Jean King yelling for a “Mulligan” because some red necked misogynist yelled “Iron my shirts” when they were eyeballing a short putt. In fact, that golf course by itself is probably the largest contributing factor to Global Warming, Climate Change, and drowning polar bears. Those greens look like every barber from Seville was working overtime lest an errant sprout misdirect a putt. How those rich White guys gets those flowers to bloom on time every year is proof positive of something evil, pernicious, and contra the common weal. The club probably has thousand of sheep and cows engaging in nocturnal borborygymous eructations since the middle of February to make sure those azaleas and magnolias do what they are supposed to do, Damnit. What they do with all those critters during the day is one of those enduring mysteries. Mysteries like The Bermuda Triangle. The dead voting in Cook County. The never living voting in Hudson County. Taxing our way to prosperity. “Midnight Basketball”. “Alternative Shopping”. Neville Chamberlain as a diplomatic role model. The Post Office running health care. The IRS running the DMV offices.. Focusing on the heartbreak of psoriasis and teenage obesity. Hope and change. “The triumph of hope over experience.” Things like that.

But then came the Pulitzer Prize announcements.

Two things of note:

#1 – The National Enquirer didn’t win any.

#2 – You let Walter Duranty, Times employee and Pulitzer Prize winner, slide for another year on your Hall of Fame.

Walter Duranty, for those with the great gift so common of modern American Liberals, that gift being “eclectic indignation”, won the Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Reporting when he was your correspondent, your employee, in Moscow in 1932.

You may remember that 15 years after John Reed, 15 years after Upton Sinclair, 15 years after Armand Hammer – ask Al Gore, 15 years after Scientific Socialism, 15 years after the NKVD, 15 years of failed crop after failed crop after failed crop, 15 years after the Lubyanka, Stalin, like Nero, needed a scapegoat. He blamed the Kulaks. I mention 15 years because after those happy times Uncle Joe, Koba the Dread to his fellow countrymen, didn’t have enough bullets to kill the 8,000,000 Kulaks. He took the path of least resistance; he starved them.

Your man in Moscow, Walter Duranty, filed report after report saying the opposite. “Sure there were problems but it was a case of two chickens rather than three in every pot. Besides, most of the Kulaks were Jews and you know how high their cholesterol is. A few months of half rations would do them a world of good.”

That’s what he wrote. That’s what you printed.

We know for certain of two readers.

The guy who gave him the Pulitzer Prize was one.

The other was Adolph Hitler.

But wait. There’s more.

I left out the best part.

Your man in Moscow, Walter Duranty, your employee, was a bought and paid for agent of the KGB.

Leaving aside the poser of how long did you know that – What did you know and when did you know it? – the achingly nasty question, a question that I have been asking since the late 1980s, a question that I asked so many times in so many ways that you assigned a Mr. William Borders to answer my requests for what you wanted to do about this terrible thing.

Every year when the Pulitzers are awarded you have a chance to man up, to cleanse your corporate soul, to shout out a mea culpa. Every year you turn down the chance.

Duranty was the 1932 Pulitzer winner for Foreign Reporting

The 1934 winner for Foreign Reporting, Frederick T. Birchall, was also a New York Times employee. He was your man in Berlin. I believe that if he had been shown to be a bought and paid for agent of the Gesztapo your grief and remorse would have known no bounds. You would have bought ethnic cleansing to a level that the Serbs and Tutsis would have greatly envied. Every year you would have prostrated yourself on the altar of public opinion and begged for forgiveness. Every year the monks of the Church of Modern American Liberalism would flog you like Henry the 2nd on Pulitzer Day.

Perhaps another employee, San Tannenhaus, he of the Whittaker Chambers biography, could explain why a 78 year old sin concerning the first genocide in Europe in the 20th century goes on and on in an unrepented state. God’s grace extends to corporations. Dante’s traveler finding himself “in the dark wood of error” gathers the grace to “look up and see the stars”. Somewhere there are Jews who are entitled to Kaddish. Somewhere there is disquiet in the universe that needs to be healed.

Your silence is sickeningly deafening.

I hereby declare the 60 year bond between me, the reader, and you, the paper to be broken.

Perhaps it is not uncoincidental that we are hard upon the anniversary of the Titanic. Senor Shylock, your Mexican note holder, cares not whether the ship flounders. He owns the salvage rights.

Kevin Smith


PS – Is your dislike of Lincoln and his handling of the Civil War still fair game? Did it mean you were in favor of slavery? You were opposed to Sherman’s “surge”. Is that why you were opposed to Bush’s?