Pulitzer Prize’s birthday sparks reflections

The Pulitzer Prizes threw a party at the end of January that had everything journalists like: a forum to think and argue about public policy, a chance to rub elbows with famous and exalted people and free food and a well-stocked bar.

The occasion was the kick-off of a year-long celebration to mark the 100th anniversary of the prizes. Held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., it brought together hundreds of former winners, the largest-ever gathering of its kind. 

Along with the big party, the gathering provided an opportunity to ponder the nation’s path and the press’s role in charting it. 

The two-day celebration included reflections on our past and future by some of the most distinguished prize-winners. Bob Woodward headlined a panel on the legacy of President Barack Obama. Poet Rita Dove, playwright Ayad Akhtar, novelist Jane Smiley, and historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Hank Klibanoff described their disciplines’ different ways of searching for truth. But it was a panel on the Vietnam War that offered the clearest opportunity to think about where our country has been and where it is going. 

On that panel were four men who had combined clear eyes with courage to show the American people the reality of that war: Peter Arnett, of the Associated Press whose dispatches in 1965 sounded an early alarm;  UPI photographer David Hume Kennerly, whose haunting images of weary soldiers won the award in 1972; Nick Ut, who took the iconic photograph of a naked 9-year-old, burned by napalm and shrieking with pain; and Neil Sheehan, a two-time Pulitzer winner, who obtained the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times in 1971 and whose book on Vietnam, “Bright Shining Lie,” won the nonfiction prize in 1989.  

Vietnam’s “lesson is to stay out of what you don’t need to get into,” said Mr. Sheehan — a conclusion Mr. Arnett underlined when he added that he sees “escalation parallel to the Mideast now.” 

Our government learned a different lesson, the panelists said. Reporters today are blindfolded and soldiers are gagged.