Five From ’55 Grab a Total of Six Pulitzer Prizes

The Class of 1955 holds an impressive record—five of its members went on to win no less than six Pulitzer Prizes over the course of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. All six were won in non-fiction fields, covering issues ranging from the civil rights movement to Florida housing projects to the early years of the Vietnam War.

These writers, defying notions of 1950s naivete, began investigating even in their college days some of the most intractable issues of the post-war period, both at home and overseas.

While they seemed to subscribe to no particular unifying trend­—their styles and topics varied from editorial writing to full-length popular histories—their work reflected a new interest in journalism as both criticism and social history, and explored in detail distinct elements of American life and foreign affairs.

WILLIAM M. BEECHER

As a Washington correspondent for the Boston Globe, William M. Beecher ’55 shared the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting with several other editors at the Globe for “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age,” a special feature about the nuclear arms race. Beecher, who had covered U.S.-Soviet relations in Washington, says he helped formulate the idea for the feature and wrote the 8,000-word lead story for the 56-page Sunday special.

“I was very much interested in the U.S.-Soviet relationship,” he says. “As Washington correspondent I did a lot of work in that area.”

The prize was a late highlight of Beecher’s 30-year career as a journalist, during which he served as a Washington correspondent for a host of newspapers, including the Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

But according to Beecher, the Pulitzer did not have a significant impact on his career. “I had a good career in Washington,” he says. “Having won a Pulitzer didn’t hurt, but I didn’t go around telling news sources that I’d won.”

“I wouldn’t say that it made a whole lot of difference,” he adds.

Nearly two decades before winning the Pulitzer, Beecher broke the story of the U.S. military’s secret bombing of Cambodia on the front page of the New York Times. The 1969 article, “Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested,” accurately described the first of the secret B-52 bombing campaigns in Cambodia.

“That was one of the most important stories that I broke in my career,” Beecher says. “It was something Nixon and Kissinger tried to hide from the Congress and the public, and we broke it on page one of the New York Times.”

While at Harvard, Beecher was the features editor of The Harvard Crimson, and also worked as a campus correspondent for the Globe and the Boston Herald Traveler. Beecher says that he came into college with a strong interest in the field, having worked for his high school paper.

But he says that a journalistic career wasn’t always a certainty. “I thought that I was either going into journalism or law,” he says, while adding that newspaper writing ultimately seemed more exciting. “I thought I might be bored in law, but I knew I wasn’t going to be bored in journalism.”

Beyond journalism, Beecher has had a varied career. In 1990 he penned “Mayday Man,” a novel about espionage and foreign intrigue, and has seen the media from the other side of the lens while working in government. He served as the Defense Department’s acting assistant secretary for public affairs, and he served for 10 years as director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Office of Public Affairs.

Beecher currently works as a principal at the Dilenschneider Group, a Park Avenue strategic communications firm.

DAVID L. HALBERSTAM

According to David L. Halberstam ’55, who shared the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting with Malcolm W. Browne of the Associated Press for coverage of the early years of the Vietnam War and the fall of the Diem government, journalism experienced a shift in the 1950s and 1960s.

Halberstam, who was well known for his defiance of the military’s sanguine reports on the intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s, says that the role of the journalist was beginning to require a more investigative intellect in the post-war period, as the U.S. grew to assume a more prominent role in international affairs.

“[We became journalists] 10 years after the end of World War II; America [was] becoming a world power,” he says. “Papers had to hire better-educated people....Journalism had to be better, more serious.”

He worked for the New York Times throughout the 1960s, much to the chagrin of Washington officials, who were angered by his incisive reports­—famously, President John F. Kennedy ’40 even personally requested that Halberstam be removed from the Saigon office, a request which the publisher of the Times refused.

“It was like buying a ticket to history,” Halberstam says. “It was a good profession in those years.”

Halberstam, who began covering combat in the Congo in the early 1960s before requesting a transfer to Saigon, became one of America’s prominent voices on the topic of Vietnam through his books “The Making of the Quagmire” and “The Best and the Brightest,” which both described the American involvement in Vietnam and criticized American policy.

Since the mid-1960s, Halberstam has penned 19 books. In addition to his reporting abroad, he covered the civil rights movement in the Deep South in the mid-1960s, and has written on American sports history, the trajectory of Robert F. Kennedy’s career, and the culture of the 1950s, among other topics.

JOHN R. HARRISON

John R. Harrison ’55 won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in recognition of his successful campaign for improved housing in the slums of Gainesville, Fla.

While he was publisher of the Gainesville Sun, a daily newspaper covering life in north and central Florida, Harrison grew interested in a local movement, led by the League of Women Voters in Gainesville, to secure federal urban renewal funds in order to revitalize the poorest sections of the city.

Harrison says that the inhabitants of the slums of Gainesville were living in squalor, while the real estate establishment both profited from them and opposed movements towards reform.

“People were living on dirt roads with no water in their houses,” Harrison recalls. “The landlords were the fat cats in town.”

Harrison was motivated to write a series of eight editorials on the issue, which upbraided the landlords of the slums.

While the Pulitzer Prize board was quick to appreciate his writings, his opinions did not win broad support so easily.

“I had everything going against me,” Harrison says. “I was a Yankee, I was a newcomer, I had gone to Harvard—you can’t have many more things against you in a small southern town in the ’60s.”

Nonetheless, the campaign for urban renewal funds was ultimately successful. Thousands of housing units were built, and the slums were demolished.

But even with this success, Harrison was not spared criticisms of his writing style. After reading Harrison’s acclaimed editorials, he says that his father-in-law told him, “They were written with great passion, but they weren’t very well-written.”

After winning the Pulitzer in 1965, Harrison went on to work for other newspapers across the country.

J. ANTHONY LUKAS

J. Anthony Lukas ’55 was one of the 20th century’s most important social historians.

In 1968, while working for the New York Times, Lukas won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting, after he chronicled the life and murder of Linda Fitzpatrick, an affluent Connecticut teenager caught up in the hippie drug culture of the 1960s.

The feature, entitled “The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick,” was published in 1967, and was quickly recognized as a powerful investigation into the blossoming counterculture of the hippie era.

Fifteen years later, Lukas won a second Pulitzer for General Nonfiction for his book “Common Ground,” which examined the desegregation of Boston’s school system. The book described the events between Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968 and the race riots that followed the court-ordered integration of the Boston schools in 1974.

Lukas, one of just a handful of writers to win the Pulitzer Prize twice, began his life as a journalist while still a Harvard undergraduate.

As a student journalist, Lukas investigated McCarthyism at Harvard and later served as the associate managing editor of The Crimson.

In addition to his dedicated work at the New York Times, Lukas ventured back into Cambridge throughout his career. He was a fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism in 1968-69, and then became a fellow at the Institute of Politics in 1976-77 and an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government in 1979.

In June 1997, at the age of 64, Lukas took his own life, just three months before the release of his last work, “Big Trouble,” which is about the turn-of-the-century class war between Idaho’s mining companies and its unionized miners.

SYDNEY H. SCHANBERG

During his time at Harvard, Sydney H. Schanberg ’55 didn’t consider journalism as a career option.

In his college days, Schanberg worked as an assistant bartender at the then-new, now-landmark Club Casablanca on Brattle Street, opting to avoid involvement in The Crimson “because it was too much time.”

“I liked to write when I was that age,” he says, “but I wasn’t thinking of journalism.”

Yet 21 years after graduating from Harvard, Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his coverage of Khmer Rouge’s rise to power in Cambodia. Schanberg elected to stay at his post even after the violent fall of Phnom Penh.

“I watched a city of two million being emptied in two and a half days,” Schanberg says. “It was a biblical scene. People were being herded with automatic weapons so fast that their sandals would fall off.”

“You could tell that these were people who were coming from a different planet,” he says.

Having witnessed such a cataclysmic event firsthand, he says that receiving the Pulitzer was comparably an “anticlimax.”

Schanberg has also written a book on the same topic­, “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” ­which tells the story of one Cambodian man’s struggle for survival during the Khmer Rouge regime. Schanberg described Dith as “my friend and interpreter and lifesaver.” The book inspired the 1984 film “The Killing Fields,” of which Schanberg is the protagonist.

Schanberg’s was introduced to journalism during a stint in the U.S. Army. Working for the division newspaper, Schanberg worked with the American foreign correspondents assigned to cover his division. He said that experience was pivotal for him.

“I met the New York Times’ correspondent in Germany, Arthur Olsen, and it looked like something I wanted to do,” he says. “It fascinated me.”

After leaving the army, Schanberg found employment as an office boy at the Times. Promoted to copy boy, then clerk, then news assistant, Schanberg eventually became a police reporter for the newspaper, an experience he called “crucial.”

Schanberg later spent six years as a foreign correspondent for the Times, first in India and then in Southeast Asia. He was a Times columnist before leaving the paper for the now-defunct New York Newsday. Schanberg is currently a columnist on media issues for the Village Voice.

“Serious reporting has stayed a big part of my life,” he says. “I’m still doing stories.”

But he adds that he does not think that he could be hired as a war correspondent today.

“I don’t think I could match the energy of people a generation younger,” he says.

—Staff writer Adam Goldenberg can be reached at goldenb@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Sam Teller can be reached at steller@fas.harvard.edu.