John Bertram Oakes

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Bertram Oakes (* 23. April 1913 in Elkins Park, Montgomery County (Pennsylvania) ; † 5. April 2001 in Manhattan ) was a trend-setting , influential American journalist who early for the environment, civil rights and against the Vietnam War committed . He is considered the creator of the modern op-ed page and was from 1961 to 1976 editorial page editor (executive editor ) of the New York Times -Redaktionsseite.

Life

John Bertram Oakes was the second son of Bertie Gans Ochs and George Ochs . The family had their last name of German origin changed to Oakes out of indignation over the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by the German Imperial Navy in 1915 . His uncle was the then publisher of the New York Times, Adolph Ochs . Oakes attended Princeton University ( AB , 1934), where he graduated magna cum laude as a valedictorian in his class . He then became a Rhodes Fellow ( AB , AM , Queens College, Oxford , 1936).

New Deal Era

Upon his return to the United States, Oakes became a reporter for the Times in Trenton in 1936 . A supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal , he moved to Washington, DC in 1937 , where he became a political reporter for the Washington Post . In Washington he reported, among other things, on the US Congress , the Committee on Un-American Activities of Martin Dies and Roosevelt's 1940 campaign .

In Washington, DC, Oakes lived in a boisterous bachelor group and had numerous friends in the newspaper world, including a longtime editor of the Washington Post .

Second world war

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Oakes joined the United States Army as an infantry soldier . He was enlisted in the Office of Strategic Services and served two years in Europe identifying and “turning around” enemy agents who were still in contact with the Nazis as a double agent . In recognition of his services, he received the Bronze Star , the Croix de guerre , the French Medaille de Reconnaissance and the Order of the British Empire . He ended the war with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Career with the Times

Immediately after his demobilization in 1946, he joined the Family Newspaper as editor of the Review of the Week section of the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Three years later he became a member of the editorial board . As the author of the opinion pages, he convinced the editors-in-chief and publishers of the newspaper in 1951 to have a monthly column written on the then little-noticed topic of the environment - the first column of its kind in a national newspaper with high circulation. He also wrote for other areas of the newspaper such as the New York Times Book Review and Sunday Magazine . Eleanor Roosevelt took his critical account of Joseph McCarthy , "This Is the Real, the Lasting Damage," on March 7, 1954 as the basis for one of her columns published in various newspapers and was subsequently reprinted on a large scale.

His career in the newsroom, first as an editor (1949-1961) and then as editorial page editor (executive editor ; 1961-1976), included the governments Cabinet Truman , Cabinet Eisenhower , Cabinet Kennedy , Cabinet Lyndon B. Johnson , Cabinet Nixon and Cabinet Ford . He appointed the first woman in fifty years ( Ada Louise Huxtable ) and the first African American ( Roger Wilkins ) to the editorial team to be responsible for the editorial team .

Oakes stepped out of the shadows of his more conservative cousin Arthur Ochs Sulzberger , who became the Times editor in 1963 . Their most notable confrontation occurred in 1976, when the Times had to decide whom they as a New York junior Senator in the upcoming area code ( Primary ) of the Democratic Party should support. Sulzberger wanted Daniel Patrick Moynihan , but Oakes preferred Bella Trigger . Sulzberger overruled Oakes, but offered him to print a counter-argument. However, since Sulzberger found the draft of Oakes' opinion too emotional and divisive, Sulzberger had the text shortened to an unprecedented one-sentence contradiction. This was published on 11 September 1976 as a "letter to the editor" ( Letter to the Editor ) - essentially as a letter from Oakes itself - on the opinion page of the Times , "As editor of the opinion page [n] of the Times do I have my disagreement against the support ( endorsement ) given to Mr. Moynihan in today's editorials to the four other candidates in the New York State Democratic Party primary for the United States Senate. ”Since Moynihan is only around 9,000 (1%) more votes than Bella Abzug received, his primary victory was in many ways attributed to Times support.

Shortly thereafter, on January 1, 1977, Sulzberger replaced Oakes as the editorial page editor by Max Frankel , who described his own approach to politics as "funnier" in contrast to Oakes. Journalist John L. Hess said in 2002, on the occasion of Oakes' death the previous year, that "the editorials never recovered" after he left.

After retiring from the editorial team, Oakes became a columnist on the opinion side, writing mainly on domestic, foreign, human, civil, and environmental issues.

Focus

In 1961, the year Oakes was named in charge of the Times' opinion pages, Harper and Brothers published his book, The Edge of Freedom: A Report on Neutralism and New Forces in Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe Frontiers of Freedom: A Report on Neutralism and New Forces in Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe ”). His main concerns, however, were human rights and civil liberties , expressed through anti-McCarthyism and consistent support for the civil rights movement , as well as strong and early criticism of the Vietnam War (1963) - which made the New York Times one of the few papers to take such a stance and led to personal attacks on Oakes by President Lyndon B. Johnson , Dean Rusk, and others. Oakes also advocated the preservation and protection of natural resources. Under his direction , the Times turned against building projects by urban planner and administrator Robert Moses , whom Oakes accused of having too great a focus on road building projects at the expense of public transport and parks. In 1963 the Times opposed the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway and the Mid-Manhattan Expressway with editorials by Oakes .

In 1966 Oakes was honored with the George Polk Award because he gave the opinion side "a brilliance, intensity and comprehension" that made them "the most vital and influential journalistic voice in America".

After Oakes had pushed the idea for ten years with a number of editors, he initiated the first modern Op-Ed page (so called because it appeared "opposite the editorial page") on September 21, 1970 , after which similar pages in other American newspapers have since been introduced. As Oakes himself pointed out in the first text, his main motive was to create a space for ideas and opinions from non-journalists. The appearance of Times columnist on the new Op-Ed page (in the early years to one or two limited per day) reflected only the need, on the opinion page more space for "letters to the editor" ( Letters to the Editor ) to create - as Oakes later wrote, "again in the interest of creating more opportunities to depict external views". In a 2010 interview, David Shipley referred to the Op-Ed side as Oakes' Baby ( brainchild ).

Teaching

In 1977 and 1978, Oakes was visiting professor at the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University . He also lectured on American studies at the Salzburg Seminar and gave lectures on journalism at numerous universities. He was a board member of Temple Emanu El (New York City) and the Washington Journalism Center and a member of the Society of Silurians, an organization of experienced journalists in the New York area.

family

John married Margery Hartman in 1945, who survived him. They have three daughters, a son and seven grandchildren.

Honors

In 1960 he received the Columbia-Catherwood Award for international journalism and in 1970 the Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University. In 1976 Oakes received an honorary doctorate from the City University of New York and in the same year the Audubon Medal , the highest honor of the National Audubon Society . He has also received awards from the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council , which established the 1994 John B. Oakes Award for Excellent Environmental Journalism, now given by the Columbia University School of Journalism .

Two weeks before Oakes' death in 2001, he received a second George Polk Award for lifetime achievement . John L. Hess wrote in his obituary, "If people today regard the Times as a great and a liberal newspaper, it is largely an illusion, but Oakes believed in it and tried to make it come true." Oakes died on April 5th 2001 in Manhattan.

literature

  • Gay Talese : The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World . World Publishing, 1969, ISBN 978-0-8129-7768-4 (English).
  • Edwin Diamond: Behind the Times: Inside the New New York Times . University of Chicago Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-226-14472-6 .
  • Susan E. Tifft, Alex S. Jones: The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times . Little, Brown and Company, 1999, ISBN 978-0-316-83631-9 (English).
  • Michael J. Socolow: A Profitable Public Sphere: The Creation of the New York Times Op-Ed Page . Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2010 (English, digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu; full text ).

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Valedictorian are the names of the students who give the speech at the graduation ceremony.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 1893-1897 George W. Ochs. Chattanooga City Council , accessed January 6, 2020 .
  2. ^ A b Association of American Rhodes Scholars (Ed.): The American Oxonian, Volume 88 . 2001, p. 262 (English): “John Oakes, an outstanding fellow member of the 1934 Rhodes Scholar Class. John died on April 5th, at eighty-seven, in Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. [...] John was born on April 23, 1913, in Elkins Park, PA, the son of [...] ”
  3. ^ Association of American Rhodes Scholars (Ed.): The American Oxonian, Volume 88 . 2001, p. 263 (English): "[...] serving in Europe in the infantry and the Office of Strategic Services."
  4. ^ Eleanor Roosevelt : My Day (March 10, 1954) . March 10, 1954 (English, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Digital Edition (2017) ).
  5. ^ David W. Dunlap, At The Times, Roger Wilkins Fought Injustice. And The Times. In: The New York Times . March 30, 2017 (English, nytimes.com; full text ): “Mr. Wilkins was welcomed in 1974 by John B. Oakes, the editor of the editorial page, from the editorial page staff of The Washington Post. "
  6. ^ Edwin Diamond: Behind the Times: Inside the New New York Times . 1994, ISBN 978-0-226-14472-6 , pp. 126, 133 (English): “[...] Oakes shook up his page. The Times hired as editorial board members Ada Louise Huxtable [...] and Roger Wilkins [...]. Roger Wilkins, the sole black member of the editorial board [...]. "
  7. ^ Harrison Evans Salisbury: Without Fear Or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times . 1980, ISBN 978-0-226-14472-6 , pp. 50, 51 (English).
  8. ↑ Cynthia Cotts: The 'Times' of Their Time . In: The Village Voice . April 24, 2001 (English, villagevoice.com; full text ): “[Sulzberger] publicly embarrassed Oakes while the editor was vacationing in 1976, first vetoing Oakes's senatorial endorsement of Bella Abzug in favor of the more business-friendly Daniel Moynihan, and then reducing Oakes's stinging dissent to a one-sentence letter to the editor. (The Times was credited with giving Moynihan his one percent margin of victory.) ”
  9. ↑ Jonathan Mahler: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City . 1980, ISBN 978-0-312-42430-5 , pp. 69 (English): “After much deliberation, the Times's editorial page editor, John Oakes, settled on deduction. The paper's publisher, Punch Sulzberger, wasn't happy with the choice. [...] [Sulzberger] vetoed the deduction endorsement and ordered up a new editorial in support of her principal opponent, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wound up edging her out by a mere 1 percent. "
  10. ^ Edwin Diamond: Behind the Times: Inside the New New York Times . 1994, ISBN 978-0-226-14472-6 , pp. 132-134 (English): “Instead, the next day's edition, dated September 11, carried a one-paragraph, forty-word version of the original. [...] Moynihan won the primary [with] a difference of around nine thousand votes. "
  11. ^ Edwin Diamond: Behind the Times: Inside the New New York Times . 1994, ISBN 978-0-226-14472-6 , pp. 129 (English).
  12. ^ Robert A. Caro : The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York . 1974, ISBN 978-0-394-48076-3 , pp. 992 (English): “[B] y 1956 the brilliant conservationist John Oakes was taking a more active role on the editorial page; on April 20, the Times carried an editorial [on Central Park conservation that] contained statements that were, coming from the Times, especially remarkable. "
  13. ^ Robert A. Caro : The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York . 1974, ISBN 978-0-394-48076-3 , pp. 1095 (English): “Oakes had been attacking Moses' emphasis on highways at the expense of mass transit and parks. [...] In May 25, 1963, Oakes went further than he had ever before, spelling out the paper's change of heart [on] the Lower and Mid-Manhattan expressways. "
  14. ^ 'New York Times' Op-Ed Page Turns 40 . In: NPR , September 21, 2010. 
  15. ^ Association of American Rhodes Scholars (Ed.): The American Oxonian, Volume 88 . 2001, p. 264 : “In 1977 and 1978, John was a visiting professor at the SI Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. He also served on the faculty of the Salzburg Seminar on American Studies and lectured on journalism at many universities. He was a trustee of Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan and [...] ”
personal data
SURNAME Oakes, John Bertram
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist, columnist, and author
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Elkins Park, Pennsylvania , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 2001
Place of death New York City