Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

I was turned on to this book by a friend and when I next saw him, he asked me, refering to the author Laurel Leff's revelations, "did you know that?" I answered that I didn't know that the Times had basically hidden the news of the holocaust but, on the other hand, finding this out didn't surprise me. Sulzberger was an assimilated Jew, the descendent of Rabbi Steven Wise, a renowned Reform Rabbi whose theology was very assimilationist. Thus, despite his Jewishness, the Times rarely ran a major story about what was going on in the concentration camps and the stories that were written were not positioned in a prominent place. If they made the front page, it would not be postioned as the lead story.

Incredibly, the coverage of the holocaust did not mention "Jews" specifically. By reading the Times, you would not have known the extent of the genocide nor would you have known that Jews were the major target of the Nazi extermination efforts. It is important to note that there was never a "smoking gun" uncovered, i.e., a memo or written directive from Sulzberger ordering the staff of the Times to soft pedal the events in the concentration camps. What is beyond dispute is that the Sulzberger family was secular and did not view Jews as a people. What is further beyond dispute is that the coverage by the Times was scant. Thus, whether by directive or not, the Times failed miserably in its role as "journal of record," making a mockery of its motto "all the news that's fit to print. What is particularly reprehensible is that members of the Sulzberger family were being rescued while the details of the holocaust were being quashed.

The Times, could have been influential but, tragically, it failed to exercise it's influence. Roosevelt basically looked the other way and, in sadness, we can only wonder whether he could have withstood the pressure and continued to do little if the Times had fully covered the events. Back then the Times obviously had an agenda and today, it still does. There was daily coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses with one breathless headline after another. That was the more recent Times' agenda, specifically, to discredit the efforts in Iraq, particularly in an election year when the events there might have been a campaign issue. Tragically, there were no such breathless headlines during the darkest hours of the holocaust.

Laurel Leff has provided not only an exhaustively researched account of the New York Times' coverage of the Holocaust, but also a nuanced account of how newspapers make decisions on the placement of news items. She shows how the failure of the nation's most important newspaper to recognize the importance of the Holocaust while it was occurring was in part traceable to the fact that those making the decisions on Page One play were lower-level editors without much clout. So they simply did what had always been done, and downplayed the importance of the Jews' suffering. Her portrayal of Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger's anti-Zionist leanings and connections also breaks new ground. This book is must reading for anyone interested in the history of America in the 1940s and for any student, professional or amateur, of American journalism. This goes far beyond the usual, cliched critique of the Times or other papers as being "biased" in one way or another. Leff also has a fine sense of style and tremendous command of her material.

This is a very good book about how the New York Times family owners purposefully avoided dealing with the issue of anti-Semitism in Europe, and particularly Nazi Germany, while at the same time the Sulzberger family did everything it could to get its relatives out before the deluge. Laurel Leff has done a masterful job of showing how the Sulzberger clan became complicit in one of the darkest chapters in human history by not using the power of the paper to expose the real nature of the evil that Nazism was. Of course she does address the fact that anti-Semitism was not just a German issue, but from my perspective she does not go into enough detail about the extent of anti-Semitism in the US, and particularly major movers and shakers such as Joseph Kennedy who hated Jews so much that he always referred to them as "kikes" and opposed any action by the Roosevelt administration to educate the American public about the threat to Western civilization, even though he was ambassador to the Court of St. James at the time.

But the problem with this book is that it focuses on the Times as if it somehow committed this sin for the first time in misleading the American public. I agree with her thesis that the Times has been hoisted as the most influential paper in the world among lazy elites, including those who have reviewed her book, but that is rapidly changing now, primarily due to the fact that the paper has failed so miserably in many areas, including the latest diversions of small change like Jason Blair. But the biggest holocaust of the last century did not occur in the ovens built by the Nazis, it was committed in the Ukraine when Stalin's forced collectivization starved far more Ukrainians to death than Hitler killed with his Zyklon-B. And the Times had a reporter, Walter Duranty, in Moscow at the time who won a Pulitzer Prize for mis-reporting this horror. Duranty was "Stalin's apologist" in many ways, dismissing honest reporters who covered the biggest holocaust as "overwrought" when they filed stories about the millions murdered by Stalin, filing stories about the "show trials" of Stalin as if they were legitimate trials that led to the deaths of millions more, and many other atrocities. Most serious scholars now have to acknowledge that the starvation of 8 million Ukrainians was not just an "unintentional consequence" of collectivization, and it really remains the NY Times most outrageous attack on the truth, the Nazi death camps notwithstanding. There are many stories in the NY Times that reveal the lie that is it's masthead of "All the news that's fit to print." The Times fought mightily to keep Duranty's prize last year when serious reporters wanted to take it away because it was gained by fraudulent means. Of course the paper has done a great job of condemning the awarding of Olympic medals by drug-enhanced athletes, but can't see the hypocrisy of its own efforts to keep Duranty's decades of duplicity being rewarded with a Pulitzer.

I recommend this book because it shows the hypocrisy of the Sulzberger clan in dealing with Hitler's "final solution" but it is not the biggest sin committed by this paper in miseducating the people it supposedly serves.