Tales from the National Press Club

By Gil Klein

A behind-the-scenes history of the organization behind the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—and the news-breakers and newsmakers who’ve been part of it.
 
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the National Press Club has been the hub of Washington journalism. Started by reporters as a watering hole for late-night card games, the Club soon attracted not only icons from Edward R. Murrow to Bob Woodward to Helen Thomas, but every US president from Theodore Roosevelt onward, and various newsmakers who shaped American and world history.
 
While adapting to changes in the news media, it continues to stand for the values of journalism and press freedom in the twenty-first century. Now journalist and longtime member Gil Klein tells just a few of the tales that stand out in the history of the Club, which CBS commentator Eric Sevareid once called “the only hallowed place I know of that’s absolutely bursting with irreverence.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781439669808

Book preview

PREFACE

The National Press Club’s motto is Where news happens.

Journalism, as former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham famously said, is the first rough draft of history.

This book combines those two concepts. For well over a century, news has been made at the National Press Club. Those events have shaped the history of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. World leaders have flocked to the podium. Every president from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump has spoken here either before, during or after his presidency. Not to mention the thousands of presidential wannabes, congressional leaders and Cabinet members, governors and mayors, generals and admirals, titans of industry, award-winning journalists, best-selling authors, media executives, civil rights leaders, kings and queens, dukes and duchesses, movie and television stars, entertainers, sports heroes and explorers from the ocean depths to the arctic to the moon.

And that’s just at official Club events. It doesn’t even include the thousands and thousands of organizations that have held press conferences at the Club to try to gain attention for their causes.

The Club’s history also parallels the social history of the United States, including the fight for women and African Americans to gain equal stature. It parallels the history of Washington, D.C., as it grew from a small city to a huge metropolitan area. Founded as a refuge for print journalists, the Club’s story parallels the history of journalism from the earliest days of radio and television news to the birth and explosion of internet-based news and social media.

What defines a journalist worthy of membership? That has been constantly examined and revised. What should be the relationship between journalists and politicians? How should journalistic freedom be defended? How should wars be covered? What is the role of censorship in wartime? All of these topics have been debated in the Club’s confines.

From the rise of fascism to the fall of the Berlin Wall, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Club has been a gathering place for reporters to hear the news.

Even before the term and profession of public relations were created after World War I, news sources and communicators have been an essential part of the membership. In fact, the profession of public relations was invented by a Club member—see the story about George Creel in chapter 9.

The trove of information about the Club is huge. Beginning in 1914, the Club occasionally published yearbooks that chronicled events. The 1928 yearbook, created for the Club’s twentieth anniversary, is considered the first real history. Written by people who were there when the Club was founded in 1908, it describes a long-vanished Washington, where the clip-clop of passing horses echoed through the open windows as presidents dropped in and politicians and reporters enjoyed farcical debates, such as, Resolved, that whiskers are a greater detriment to man than bald heads.

That history was followed by one written for the fortieth anniversary in 1948, called Dateline: Washington. It included essays not only by noted journalists of the time, such as New York Times columnist and bureau chief Arthur Krock, but also by journalists who went on to become famous writers. Fletcher Knebel wrote several political novels, including Seven Days in May, which became a major motion picture. Bruce Catton left his journalism career with the Scripps-Howard syndicate to become a narrative historian, writing a best-selling trilogy on the Civil War.

For its fiftieth anniversary, the Club published Shrdlu: An Affectionate Chronicle. Shrdlu was a term every journalist of 1958 would have known, but few do today. It came from the arrangement of letters on a Linotype machine, used for decades in the production of newspapers before offset presses. When the Linotype operator made a mistake, he would run his fingers down the keys on one side of the machine, which spelled out shrdlu. This was a signal that the operator had made a mistake that had to be fixed, but the letters got into newspapers so often that the nonsense word became common knowledge.

Led by President Richard Sammon, the Club published a history in 1998 called Reliable Sources: The National Press Club in the American Century. It was a coffee-table book loaded with photos of Club activities. I contributed to that book, and for the Club’s centennial, I was asked to update it and rewrite large portions of it. The new book was called Reliable Sources: 100 Years at the National Press Club. Accompanying it for the centennial was a Club-backed documentary, A Century of Headlines, produced by Gerald Krell and Auteur Productions, which aired on WETA-TV.

Assorted other books highlight Club history. In 1995, the Federal News Service published The National Press Club’s Best Contemporary Speakers, which is a selection of the best speeches, with illustrations, from 1994. Drunk Before Noon is an irreverent history of Washington journalists that features the Club. The Girls in the Balcony is a history of the struggle of women journalists to gain acceptance and features the fifty-year fight for women to gain full membership in the Club, as does Maurine Beasley’s Women of the Washington Press. Donald Ritchie’s Reporting from Washington offers other insights into the Club. Steven T. Usdin’s Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connection Between Espionage and Journalism in Washington gives an account of the intrigue in the National Press Building from before World War II until the early twenty-first century. To find out what Washington and the United States was like in the year the Club was founded, I recommend America 1908 by Jim Rasenberger.

The Club has always maintained an archive. While for many decades it was haphazardly stored and important pieces of history were lost, it is now housed in a modern facility that is overseen by archivist Jeff Schlosberg. It contains thousands of photographs and illustrations, videos and audio tapes of significant events, all of the Club’s official documents, all of the guest books signed by speakers going back to Buffalo Bill Cody in 1908 and oral histories of past presidents and noted journalists. The Women’s National Press Club/Washington Press Club also houses its archives there. This includes invaluable oral histories of pioneering women journalists.

But that is only part of what is available from the Club’s past. Audio tapes of all of the Club’s luncheon speakers from 1953 to 1991 are stored at the Library of Congress. The library chose twenty-five of what researchers consider the most significant speakers and arranged an online collection where people can hear the speeches, see photographs taken at the time and read summaries of the historic significance of the events and annotations of what was said.

Since 1980, C-SPAN has televised every Club luncheon speaker and has sent camera crews to countless events at the Club for broadcast. Now, C-SPAN’s archive of tapes is available online for free through Purdue University. If you do an internet search of C-SPAN, National Press Club and the person or the topic that interests you, something will pop up.

For the past twenty-five years, as the news business has been transformed and scrutinized, the Club has produced The Kalb Report with moderator Marvin Kalb. In one hundred programs, many available online from George Washington University, Kalb invited some of the great players in Washington journalism to delve into the changes and their effect on how people get information.

Videos of events can be found all over the internet, especially on YouTube. When I was looking for something entirely different, I came across a newsreel of British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald speaking at the Club in 1933. The newsreel announcer called the Club the shrine of American newspaperdom. And then it hit me: This was the very first National Press Club luncheon organized by a speakers committee.

When I typed Nikita Khrushchev and National Press Club into YouTube, I could watch six minutes of the Soviet leader’s historic speech. Looking carefully, I could spot Helen Thomas of United Press International, the first woman journalist to sit at a luncheon head table. Yes, there is a story there, and it is included here.

For several years, I kept my eye on eBay. I found an array of news photos from Club events for sale as newspapers shed their paper archives. Memorabilia popped up ranging from a cigar box to drinking glasses to playing cards to phonograph records to programs for events to cartoons and past histories of both the National Press Club and the Women’s National Press Club. I bought what I found interesting, made a copy for myself and donated the original to the archives, starting with a shot of John Kennedy speaking at the podium just days after announcing his 1960 bid for the presidency.

I joined the Club when I arrived in Washington in May 1985 to be a national correspondent for the Media General News Service. That means when this book is published, I will have been a member for thirty-five years—more than 30 percent of its history. I have been closely involved with everything that has happened, especially leading up to my presidency in 1994. People who I have known at the Club were members as far back as the 1940s. I enjoyed sitting in the Reliable Source dining room hearing their stories.

So, my problem has not been finding information to put in this book. Instead, I have wrestled with when to stop. This book is not a comprehensive history of the National Press Club. It does not include the Club’s inner workings or the great contributions of its staff. It is a compilation of some of the most interesting and historic events that touched and shaped the Club and the nation during the past 112 years. I wanted to examine why they were important and what lasting impact they had. Even as I was compiling this book, new events that may well make future history books kept happening.

The Club is a living organism. It is in constant motion as people move around to attend events, convene meetings and stop in for a meal or a drink. In the early decades, it was open seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. That was a lot of poker and a lot of scotch. A fire in the first Club house nearly got out of control. As smoke filled the rooms and the firemen arrived, the card game never stopped. Even today, with more limited hours, and journalists who are on call around the clock, something is usually happening at the Club. That’s why following its life from news to history is so compelling.

Introduction

APRIL 1, 2019

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Readers of the Washington Post on April 1, 2019, saw a full-page ad placed by the National Press Club supporting the release of Austin Tice, a freelance reporter working mostly for the Washington Post and McClatchy News Service, who had been captured in Syria in August 2012.

HELP US BRING HIM HOME.

The ad marked the Club’s aggressive new commitment to defend freedom of information and protect journalists around the world. Since the Club’s inception in 1908, promoting freedom of the press was part of its mission. But only in the past couple of years did the Club have the financial resources and the determination to do more than put out press releases.

Tice, a Georgetown University graduate and a former marine with combat experience in Afghanistan, was willing to risk going to Syria as a freelance journalist when most news organizations feared the work was too dangerous. As the reporter on the ground in Syria, he had been part of a McClatchy team that won a prestigious George Polk Award.

We think he was leaving Syria at the time he was captured, said Bill McCarren, the Club’s executive director. He was in a cab, on his cellphone as he was heading for the border with Lebanon. Someone was picking up that phone conversation. Someone stopped the cab; took him out. Five weeks later there was proof of a live video. He was blindfolded, calling to God for help. But his captors were not threatening to kill him. We believe he was taken on instructions of the Syrian government. But he is not being held in jail, and there has been no request for ransom that we know of. No one is claiming credit.

Logo for Austin Tice event. National Press Club.

But why would anyone think he was still alive after seven years with no contact?

The FBI had offered a $1 million reward for Tice’s safe return. That caught the Club’s attention. Why would the FBI be doing that now? McCarren and Club president Andrea Edney of Bloomberg News, along with the Club’s financial director Georgetta George, arranged a meeting with the FBI’s extraterritorial hostage unit. For three hours, they discussed the case.

When we asked them, ‘Do you think he is still alive?’ they said, ‘Look around the room. There are a dozen people from the FBI—field agents, lawyers. Do you think we would be doing this if we don’t have reason to believe he is alive? But we can’t tell you.’

McCarren and Edney told the FBI the Club would like to raise Austin Tice’s profile nationally by holding a Night Out for Austin Tice on May 2. This would not just be something at the Press Club. The Club would gin up support at restaurants across the country, asking them to publicize the situation and to send part of the proceeds for the evening to the Club to add to the FBI’s $1 million reward. By the time the ad appeared in the Post, the Club already had commitments from restaurants all over Washington, D.C., and in Maryland, Virginia, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas. And that was before the Club held a press conference and pushed the cause nationwide.

We want to raise awareness about the case, McCarren said. If you look back during the last few years, on every anniversary of Tice’s capture, people would just get together and wring their hands. This gives people something to do.

With forty thousand Syrian refugees in the United States, maybe one of them will hear about this and know something from friends and family back home, he said. And raising the issue at the Club spurred more high-level officials to talk about it on the record.

We will have Austin Tice’s picture all over the country, McCarren said. We want to say he was an Eagle Scout. He is from Texas. He was a marine. He gave it all up to go to Syria so you can be informed. What does the president say? He’s an ‘enemy of the people.’ No. He’s a journalist. It’s a way to push back.

On May 2, seventy restaurants in more than a dozen states participated.

At the time this book went to press, Austin Tice was still being held in Syria. New evidence indicated he was alive, bringing hope that he would be released soon. The Club continued to keep pressure on the U.S. government while planning another Night Out for Austin Tice in 2020 to keep Austin’s name in the news.

That was not all that was going on at the Club on April 1.

At an afternoon press conference marking one year before the 2020 Census Day, Grant Dillingham, director of the U.S. Census Bureau, defended the bureau’s plans to require every person to say whether he or she is an American citizen as part of the ten-year population count.

On the same day, President Trump tweeted, Can you believe that the Radical Left Democrats want to do our new and very important Census Report without the all-important Citizenship Question? Report would be meaningless and a waste of the $Billions (ridiculous) that it cost to put together.

Whether the census should ask people if they are citizens had become a hot-button issue. Since the Trump administration was taking an active role in deporting immigrants without documentation, Census Bureau researchers said the question would not produce the most accurate population count because it likely would discourage households with noncitizens from participating, according to an NPR report from that day.

I don’t follow tweets, but a few minutes ago, someone mentioned that to me, Dillingham said of what Trump had posted. The Census Bureau, he said, must remain totally objective.

With two federal courts blocking plans for the citizenship question, the issue was heading to the Supreme Court. Dillingham skirted the issue, not saying what he believed.

We think the courts will decide the issue, he said. Our job at Census will be to conduct a census whether the question’s in there or if it isn’t, whatever the court decides.

On the evening of April 1, veteran broadcaster Marvin Kalb moderated the ninety-eighth edition of The Kalb Report, the media affairs program launched by the Club in 1994, putting this program in its twenty-fifth year. For this series of programs, he has invited key players in the news media, public affairs and politics to talk about the impact of events on how they are covered.

This evening, his guest was Cokie Roberts, a mainstay of NPR since 1978 and ABC News since 1988, as well as a contributor to the PBS NewsHour. The conversation turned to the hot topic of the day, the #MeToo movement and the struggle women face to be taken seriously in journalism.

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