The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Suppressed: Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent by Robert M. Smith

Episode Date: May 29, 2021

Suppressed: Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent by Robert M. Smith Four million people in nearly 200 countries read The New York Times. Of these, many are opinion-leaders. Journalists everywhere read the paper to get a supposedly objective view of the news and to learn what The Times thinks is important. But they aren’t getting that kind of view – despite the ads The Times runs proclaiming its attachment to rock-solid truth. A Times former White House and investigative correspondent, Robert M. Smith, discloses how some stories make it to print, some do not, how the filters work, and how the paper may have suppressed the most important U.S. political story of the day—Watergate. Smith shows how the paper stepped into the ring and begun slugging it out with President Trump, instead of staying outside the ring and neutrally reporting what it saw. The book argues that the paper would have been far more effective in countering and exposing the President if it had remained true to its nearly two-hundred-year-old tradition and remained neutral -- that is, remained credible (as it so loudly maintains that it is). The book contends that objectivity on the part of the press might have made people believe the unfavorable things reported about Trump instead of dismissing them as the predictable product of leftist partiality. The book explains how to read the press like an insider. It discloses that The Times assigned Smith to hire a reporter of a particular partisan stripe; that the paper’s business journalists refused to cover negative stories about business, and that its Pentagon correspondent refused to cover the My Lai massacre committed by American troops in Vietnam. Written with candor and humor, Suppressed traces a young investigative reporter’s arc from naïveté to cynicism, from covering the White House to leaving the paper for Yale Law School and ultimately becoming a barrister in London and teaching at Oxford.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The chrisvossshow.com.

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all those kids are hanging out these days. You can check it out as well. Today, we have a most excellent, exceptional author on the show. We're going to be talking about some really interesting stuff. He is the author of the book that just came out May 14th, 2021. The title of it, Suppressed Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent. His name is Robert M. Smith, and he's going to be talking about some of his experiences, insights, and everything else. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com, and their Micro-iDSD Signature. It's a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones.

It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will deccharge your headphones. It has two brown burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound eradicate noise distortion and hiss from your listening experience check out their new incredible lineup of dax and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com robert is a former new york times white house and investigative correspondent who has witnessed some of the most important stories in modern history, including Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the Maile Massacre.

Smith is a graduate of Harvard College, Columbia Graduate School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and Yale Law School. In addition to his career in journalism, he worked in a large law firm, ran overseas litigation worldwide for a major bank, and founded his own trial law firm. Smith served in the administration of the president, Jimmy Carter. He is a barrister of the Inner Temple in England and was a director of mediation at an international center in London. He has lectured to the United Nations and to groups in many places in Africa, Asia, and Europe, including the University of Oxford. And he now lives in San Francisco. And by golly, here he is in the flesh to talk to us today.

Welcome to the show, Robert. How are you? Fine. Thank you very much, Chris. Thank you. Thank you. Give us your plugs for people to find you on the interwebs and learn more about you. If they go to, I don't have a website for the book. I can point people to Amazon and Barnes and Noble, which has some bio of me and some fair detail about the book. My own website relates to my principal work as a commercial mediator here and in Europe. There you go. There you go. So what motivated you to write

this book? I think it sprang from the fact that my careers have combined journalism and law and mediation. And you look at, there are some facts you can start with that are absolutely indisputable. This country is divided down the middle, and the people on the right don't think too much or know much about, perhaps, the people on the left, and vice versa. And historically, the press, as the French visitor and author said in the 18th century, de Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville, the newspaper comes to you every day, unbidden, to your home to speak to you about public affairs. So the common will, he called it. So in doing that, newspapers and the media more generally could make people on both sides of the divide aware of themselves, of what they're like, and focus to some extent on those things that they have in common,

and perhaps help heal this awful divide in the country. So I saw that as a mediator, and as a former New York Times Washington correspondent, I remembered the days when people actually trusted the newspapers and the media generally. And the polls show now that people or lots of people simply don't trust the media. That means the media, including the New York Times, can't help solve this division in the country. And the next question is, why is that? So why don't people trust the media? And I think in some cases, they're right to see the media as biased

because the media has some large amount these days of what's called advocacy journalism. That is not neutral, effectual journalism, but journalism in pursuit of some advocacy journalism. That is not neutral to factual journalism, but journalism in pursuit of some advocacy goal. There you are. That's why. Advocate journalism. So how would you define that?

What does that mean? Well, there's a difference between, let's contrast investigative journalism and advocacy journalism. I think everybody knows what investigative journalism is. You start off looking for the answer, looking for what's really happening in this particular affair. And you don't know, but you're looking.

With advocacy journalism, you start off also looking for what's going on here, but you already know the result that you're going to find or intend to find. That's the difference. So you experienced some of this starting with your career at the New York Times. What years did you work for the New York Times? And let's get into some of that stuff. It was quite some time ago, basically roughly 1967 to 1977 or so with three years out for Yale Law School. I left the Washington Bureau of the Paper, went to Yale Law School and went back to the paper and then wrote about law and business and government and so on.

And so you had some interesting things that happened with different stories you were working on there, Watergate especially. Do you want to talk about some of that? Watergate was my last story before going off to law school. Actually, the day before, I was cleaning out my desk, and I had a lunch scheduled with the then-acting director of the FBI. And when I got to, who was Patrick Gray? Al Patrick Gray. And when I got to the French, sort of fancy French restaurant in Washington, we're sitting, I was on a banquette, we're at a table there. In plain view,

the restaurant was filled with people eating French food. He began to talk to me about Watergate. And I asked him, how far does this go? And he started telling me about some of the people involved. I was truly in an awkward position because I couldn't very well take out my notebook, put it on the table and start taking notes. Everybody, here I was, whatever, 31 or something. I'm a youngster and I'm with the FBI director and I'm in this restaurant. They're all going to say, what the hell is going on here? So I had to come up with some mnemonics. I'm terrible with memory.

And I said, OK, he's mentioned Segretti's name. I said, ah, Segretti's spaghetti. And that's how I got through this interview. But he told me that the attorney general was involved. And I said, does it go up to the president? Can you imagine this at a restaurant like that, at a meal? And he didn't say anything, which confirmed. He he didn't deny it that's what was going on so i raced back to the office at the end of the meal grabbed the news editor of the bureau bob phelps pushed him into his office

closed the door put up a don't disturb sign turned on a tape recorder so he'd be able to listen to it later gave him a pad to take notes and told him what had happened and we went through the whole thing in detail and then he went back to the newsroom which had i don't know say three dozen really good reporters present company accepted and i went back to clean out my desk and i fully expected when i got to new haven to school uh that i'd be seeing this story i didn't wow and i didn't and i didn't and it wasn't until months later three months later or something when woodward and bernstein were really beating the times up very badly that the times in a sense paid very serious attention to catching up and doing this story. So the question becomes, what happened here?

And I don't know, but years later, I talked with the Phelps on the phone and said, OK, why didn't you use the story? Why didn't you get another reporter to write it, to follow up? What happened? And he said, incredibly enough, my wife and I were going on an Alaskan cruise. I said that cruise wasn't for a week. And a week in journalistic time is centuries. And so it couldn't be that. He said, I don't remember. I said, what do he said i don't remember i said what do you mean you don't remember it's the story of the century and you don't remember why you did nothing with it and he said what do you want me to do take take a truth serum and i said if it would help yes

so he just couldn't remember and just took it as face value. But you saw, here's the editor, the news editor of the Washington Bureau of the Times, and the guy who went on to run the Boston Globe and so on. He's been a very good editor for years. Is it credible that he simply did nothing and forgot about this whole story, Watergate, and he can't remember why? It's hard to believe. You talk about in your book about how the paper may have suppressed that and how filters work, how it chose some stories that it decided to take to print and how some didn't.

Can you tell us about the filters and some of that, or is that the context of the story you just gave us? No, the filters reflect, always do reflect, the values of the editors. And Washington, there are a series of little anecdotes and so on that are, in my mind, quite important for my time in the Washington Bureau of the Times about things that just weren't covered that I was covering. And to me, even as I look back on it, it's somewhat mystifying. And just to do it as briefly as possible, to pick a couple, I was leaked a story from the government, the control of the currency had determined that there were problem banks.

They called them problem banks. So you'd think people would like to know about these problem banks. So I got the document and I was writing the story. And the two business financial reporters wouldn't touch the story. Wow. story. Or when I covered My Lai, which I also covered, it went on for some time, starting with the discovery of the story and going through the Army's internal reports, so to speak, that called General Peer's report. The Pentagon reporter sat almost next to me in the Washington Bureau of the Times, and he wouldn't touch the

story, not until the Pentagon finally had a press conference with its giving its view of the massacre. And then he covered that one. So there's a tremendous amount of being beholden, obviously, to, in a way, the entities and institutions and sources. That this is a circumstance in which the sources can leak or not leak you information or be cooperative with you about it or not. And if you offend them, that's a problem. Yeah. And is one of the filters potential legal battles with being sued?

The Pentagon Papers, I think, was another story of yours. And then, of course, I think just recently it was the anniversary of the ruling on the Pentagon Papers. You are. Yes, Chris, that's correct. Funny, perhaps it's not funny, but I was so young at the time, I didn't know any better. The law firm that represented the Times in Washington on the Pentagon Papers case needed some affidavits, or at least my affidavit, very quickly. And I think a couple of others from working stiff journalists who were covering the Pentagon, the White House, the State Department, whatever, basically saying this business of your getting secret material, purportedly secret material, stuff that's been stamped as secret is normal. You can't function without it. When I was covering the State Department or the Pentagon, this stuff was given to me pretty routinely. That was the nature of things. People within

that environment leaked stuff because they wished to in aid of their support for often a particular program or project or something or other, right? And obviously you were pledged to keep it completely secret, but it was the way the mill grinds, so to speak. If you couldn't actually get any information that the government chose to stamp secret, if you couldn't get it, you really couldn't function. So it was normal. And so I was asked to sign an affidavit saying that essentially that as part of my business i was always getting secret stuff okay i signed it now the interesting thing is i and all my innocence it was before i'd gone to law school i said to the lawyer who wanted me to sign it gee will this get me in any trouble they're prosecuting they're they're going after they she and in the times and all this stuff is this going to get me in trouble and And he said, no, I wouldn't worry. So I signed.

So it's an interesting concept. And so you walk through some of these different issues and you show how you take it from there. How do you go in the book from the arc to talking about some of these different things that the Times was doing? Let me ask you this first. So was a lot of the things, your impression or knowledge, was a these different things that the times was doing let me ask you this first so where it was a lot of the things your impression or knowledge was a lot of things that were going on with the times also going on with washington post and other top uh news agencies at the time this is fairly common practice i guess the the leaking was although since the times was seen in that day as having uh power it was the government speaking to the government somebody at state who was in favor of particular treaty or something or other would speak to somebody else in the white house on the subject in a way through the times

so the times was in a particular position. Now it's much more diffuse with the Washington Post and so on. Although I was going to say the LA Times, but now look what's happening to the LA Times. There you are. Yes, it was extremely common practice, so common that you remind me that when I was covering the State Department, people were lying all the time. You wonder, it created sort of clinically paranoia in the Washington press corps, right? Yeah, everybody's lying to you all the time, really. Yeah. So I went over to the State Department one day, and there was a very nice fellow I really liked.

And I'd already read the incoming cable traffic about the subject I was talking about with him, asking him about which was the Mideast. So I knew what was going on. But nevertheless, I asked him about it, and he sat there, and he had the cables in his hands, and he was telling me the truth. I was so shocked that I said, my goodness, why is this guy telling me the truth? It was that bad. Wow, that's crazy, man.

That's crazy. So you talk about in the book how in today's things and also about how, I guess, the times and how they went after Trump or covered the Trump administration. Let's talk a little bit about that and your thoughts on it in the book. I think that was very unfortunate. And I have to say right off, people in this circumstance usually ask the question, are you on the right wing or left wing or what are your politics? And I always say my politics shouldn't and don't matter because I'm not a journalist anymore.

But if I were, everybody's got his or her values, really. But the idea is that they shouldn't color your work, your story, and so on. So I hope that's true in my own case. But what happened here is that the Times chose to get into the ring with former President Trump and begin slugging it out. It's that simple. Instead of staying outside the ring where it belonged and reporting on what was happening in the ring. Now, there are a lot of possible explanations for that,

but I'm sorry I personally don't accept them for a variety of reasons. The most important is they're journalists. They shouldn't be in the ring number one you're two if you step in the ring then how can people trust you you're writing about somebody you're in a brawl with i would you trust somebody doing that would you trust johnny who's fighting with jimmy and about his account i i don't think so. That was a problem. And more seriously, and the very odd thing about this is in some ways, both of them profited. I know it sounds strange, but Trump's supporters liked his attack on the media and particularly on the Times. And the

Times readers liked their slugging out with the president and circulation rose and revenue rose. But what's what happened? More importantly than any of that, if you'll permit me, is the usual role of the Times to deliver the news in a straight way, a credible way, a way that would have people believe what they were saying about Trump and others evaporated. Wow. Did you see, what were some examples of this where you saw that they were really attacking him and taking it on the head as opposed to doing unbiased journalism? In the book, I'm glad you asked because I can't go through them all, but there's a whole section in the book where I do. I said the problem was this.

Really, Chris, how do you prove in some way? I was a trial lawyer, right? So how do you show the jury that the coverage was less than unbiased, was biased? How do you do that? So what I decided to do was take a really neutral source of the news, which in my mind was the Associated Press, AP. Why AP? Because AP has thousands, I don't know how many thousands, of media clients around the world.

And those clients are some on the left, some on the right, some in the middle. I don't know. They're all over. And so it is absolutely necessary for the Associated Press to be neutral or it will lose some of those clients if it steps in a ring or does something like that. Therefore, its accounts are likely to be reasonably straightforward. So I took the same story, the story about the same event, the same speech, the same action decision on the part of, just that part, you'll see that sometimes it's bewildering that the event is being talked about in two different ways like that. So that's my evidence. And in the book, I leave it up to the reader, read this and see what you think. It was a spectacular time for news agencies. They were almost on the fence financially, all of them, before Donald Trump.

And he brought them all back. And they were all doing record numbers for people wanting to buy subscriptions and downloading it. I never owned so many new subscriptions in my life up until that time. Do you think that they were creating maybe some clickbaity stuff so that they could get those subscriptions up? I hope the Times wasn't deliberately doing that, but just don't question that we live in a world of clickbait. And what I'm often asked, is there any hope? Can we get back to a neutral form of journalism that folks can rely on? And of course, I can't predict the future. Who can? But not me. And I don't know the answer. But I think there is one point. There's a role that the Times used to have for

the sort of traditional, reliable, honest paper. People will pay for that, perhaps especially business people who really need to know what's going on without bias. And I think that I'm hoping. I grew up at the Times in a very real sense. Seriously, I was 27 or whatever it was. And I'm hoping that it'll come back to its traditional role. What's happened in part is not just the entire circumstance or the entire environment you've been kind enough to point to about clickbait and all the rest of this madness, but also young journalists, or young from my point of view, but journalists in their 20s and early mid-30s maybe, they, a lot of them, and I know some of them, have been brought up with the notion that advocacy journalism is a good thing. Their professors believe this. The deans sometimes believe it. As a result of which, they come in properly, appropriately, envying Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein, and they should, but

their intention is to be advocates for this, that, or the other thing. And I would imagine with the kind of employment modalities we have these days in the newsrooms, that pressure is felt by their editors and superiors i don't know that but you certainly have young journalists who for whom advocacy journalism is really why they went into the business the craft yeah yeah do you think the opinion page scandals there's been just so many opinion page, opinion department scandals with the papers lately.

Do you think that has hurt the trust of the papers? I find some of those scandals very confusing. I don't want my own personal sentiments to flow over too much, but I felt very badly for the reporter, the science reporter at the New York Times. And I don't know the facts. And I was a trial lawyer. So maybe I'm speaking slightly out of turn. But really, how can you not sympathize with a guy who's given his life to paper and to its readers for 45 years who they just tossed aside? Yeah.

So one of the things you talk about in your book is how to read the press like an insider. I think this is pretty interesting. Do you want to give us a little bit of insight to that? There's a whole section, a separate section at the end of the book. Gosh, I don't know what you would call it. A little bonus section or something. Afterword? Yes, exactly. Thank you. And it's called The Spike, How to Read a Newspaper Like an Inside Dope Toaster. And it tells you, to the extent I can quickly, how to watch out for bias, ask who says so, and just simple-minded things that reporters know, editors know, but maybe the general public doesn't. For example, I think everybody understands that the lead

of the story, the first paragraph, or maybe the the first two or even perhaps three, give you the substance of it. But then if you hop down, assuming the story hasn't been surgically amputated, down to the last paragraph or two sometimes, it gives you the point that the reporter is trying to explicate and tell you about. If you're quickly reading the story, you can get the drift of it at the top and then hop on down to the end and find out why it's there and what the point is. And a lot of people, in my experience, don't do that. They look at the first couple of paragraphs and move on, which is a shame.

It's just a trick, obviously. Yeah, it's interesting. I never knew. I'll have to watch for that as I read articles and stuff. I still get a lot of the different stuff, a lot of different papers and stuff from the Trump era. The news has definitely changed a lot with Biden being president. You don't wake up every morning going, what's on fire today? It's quite different.

Anything we haven't covered in the book that you want to tease out to get people to pick up the book? I guess there's only one other last point I would make. People, a lot of people don't trust the press. And in my day, we couldn't trust the government. And maybe that's become absolutely clear. Maybe not. But I'll tell you, the FBI watched the press with great care, including obviously eavesdropping, getting phone numbers and that kind of stuff. But I think that the most telling example I can give is this. I got a story leaked to me.

It was, from my point of view, a very exciting story. It talked about the fact that the FBI had broken off relations with the CIA. I repeat, the FBI broke off relations, communication with the CIA. I mean, what kind of world is this, right? And so agents were going around to the two agencies meeting in bars and exchanging notes to get around this ban, which Hoover had put in place because he'd been offended by something that the CIA had done. So I wrote this story. I had it in such detail that it was difficult to say it wasn't. And I did not use the Times in those days, Telex Run.

I didn't dictate it in New York on the phone. I didn't feel I could do any of those things with security. So I wrote this story on a typewriter in those days and got on a plane and took it to the newsroom in New York and gave it to them on a Saturday. It was going to be on the front page on Sunday. And the paper went to bed on Saturday afternoon at three or four o'clock. I can't remember something like that. And so I knew I had to get comment from the FBI. I said, well, tomorrow we're writing a story about you breaking off relations with the CIA. So please, would you comment on that? And the FBI public affairs officer said, it's not true. I was shocked because normally they would say no comment, pretty much no matter what you asked, no comment. For them to actively say not true gave me a momentary pause.

Could this somehow be wrong? The Times going to put it on page one and then carry on for a lot of space inside. I said, OK. going to put it on page one and then carry on for a lot of space inside i said okay and i put in a little paragraph they were saying asked about it the fbi said not true and i called the cia and i they said no comment as i knew they would okay so down the road a few years a of years later or something, I don't know, I get my FBI file. And I see in the file that the public affairs guy sent a note to, obviously, his superior saying, a Smith of the Times called and asked about and outlined what I had asked and said he had said, not true. And in the margin, there's a little hand-scrawled note that says, well done. And it's got this initial, I first thought it was K, but it was not K. And then the another note in the file below the story, same scrawled handwriting. And it said, what think ratted on us? And it wasn't K,

it was H for Hoover. Holy moly, moly. One example. There you go. Wow. All the way to Hoover. that's quite extraordinary man that's a crazy story in fact you were telling me a story before the show about how you had walked over to get a coffee i think you want to briefly tell that before you go oh the coca-cola story yeah i was covering the justice department but i didn't usually go over to the justice department and really wasn't necessary to do that but i was over over there one day, and it gets very hot in Washington, as you may know, especially when the air conditioning in those days wasn't that efficient. And I wanted to get a Diet Coke, and the soda machine was on one end of the corridor. So I went down the corridor to get the soda machine to put in my coins and get the drink. As I got there, I saw that the

soda machine was directly a foot behind a glass door. And the glass door said, entering FBI. This was in the time when the FBI was in the Justice Department building before they built the Hoover building across the street. And I said, oh, my gosh, what do I do? That Coke looks that Coke is really good there. I see Coke and here's this door and I'm a foot away and I have the coinage. Ah, what the heck? I went in, got my Diet Coke or Coke and went back through the glass door immediately didn't go any further than the machine and in my file the fbi duly noted obviously through security cameras

or some sort of surveillance smith came into the premises of the fbi got a coke a complete subversive subversive nature yeah you should have had pepsi right yeah i mean this maybe that was what the thing was your biggest crime there you go there you go he ordered anyway so this is really wonderful to have you on robert give us your plugs so we can find you on the interwebs or wherever you want people you know to go search you and of course order up the book The book is in the national distribution. You can go to Amazon. It's got a distinctive cover. Or you can go to Barnes & Noble.

Or you can go to your local bookseller or whatever way you typically buy books. And you will find out a lot about the book, certainly on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites, and I assume lots of other places it's described. And what's interesting to me, as I wrote a legal textbook but not this sort of stuff before, is just how international the scope is quite remarkable. It's pretty cool. There you are. And if you want to find out about the book, go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, whatever.

And there'll be a link on the Chris Foss show. You can take and click as well. So Robert, it's been wonderful, insightful, and historical to take and have you on the show and speak to you. Thank you very much, sir, for coming by and spending some time with us today. Thank you very much, Chris.

It was very new to have me and I very much appreciate it. It's been fun. Yeah, you as well. To my It was very new to have me, and I very much appreciate it. It's been fun. Yeah, you as well. To my audience, go check out the book, Ordered Up as Suppressed Confessions of a Former New York Times Washington Correspondent. Robert M. Smith is the author. Thanks for joining us today, Robert.

Thanks, my honest, for tuning in. Go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Subscribe to the podcast. Refer to your friends, neighbors, relatives, all that good stuff. Go to Goodreads.com, Forge has Chris Voss. You can also go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different places, and check out what we're doing there. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in.

Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.