Washington College Magazine
Pundits, Politics, and the Man in the Middle
WHEN THE RICHARD L. HARWOOD PROGRAM IN American Journalism brings political conservative Karl Rove to campus next month, there’s bound to be some healthy debate with the resident liberals. Though many on campus might disapprove of Rove’s politics, Dick Harwood would have heartily approved of hearing a different point of view.
THE LATE DICK HARWOOD, the widely respected journalist who founded this lecture series ten years ago, grew very close to Robert Kennedy—and in fact was with him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Kennedy was gunned down. Yet, perhaps because of that experience, he was always wary of blurring the lines between journalism and politics. He knew it was dangerous to get too close—dangerous for the American populace and for the integrity of the American media. It’s tough to remain objective about someone you admire. Before his death in March 2001, Harwood made that point to the students of Washington College through the journalism classes he offered, and through the lecture series he founded to bring to the greater College community a balanced view of contemporary American politics and journalism. Now under the direction of his son John, who in the footsteps of his father is considered one of the nation’s foremost journalists working today, the Harwood Program still seeks that balance.
“We don’t want to bring just liberals or just conservatives to campus,” notes Harwood, who is the National Political Editor with the Wall Street Journal in Washington, DC, and a frequent political commentator on television broadcasts of Washington Week In Review, CNN, MSNBC and others. “We have no agenda other than to bring people over from Washington who people want to hear, and have lively discussions about politics and the press.”
Howard Dean, Mark Shields, Paul Gigot, James Carville, Bob Novak and John McCain are just a few of the noted figures John Harwood has persuaded to visit campus as guests of the Harwood Program in American Journalism.
“I felt like a lamb at the slaughter going up against James Carville,” recalls Terry Scout, who as faculty adviser to the College Republicans participated in the panel discussion with Carville. “This guy does it for a living. But I have to say, in all honesty, I enjoyed it and wouldn’t mind doing it again. I thought I scored a few zingers. And as far as the Harwood program goes, I’m very impressed. John Harwood brings a variety of political philosophies to campus, much more so than many of our other programs.”
All of the programs appeal to the broader Chestertown community, but Robert Novak and Howard Dean, in particular, rallied tremendous student interest.
James Vorhies ’06, president of the Maryland Student Legislature and Vice President of the Washington College Republicans, has attended many Harwood lectures, but “the best was Robert Novak,” he says, “because I was one in a group of students who met with him before the event. To be able to interact with powerful individuals is one of the highlights of my Washington College experience.”
Becky Binns ’06, a political science major, said the Howard Dean visit “was definitely the talk of the school for weeks leading up to the event.”
Mike Shaffer ’06, president of the Student Government Association and head of the College Democrats, was at the forefront of the Howard Dean fans.
“Considering the fact that Governor Dean may be our next Party Chairman, it was quite an honor to have the opportunity to talk personally to him after his talk in Tawes Theatre,” says Shaffer. “It’s great that Mr. Harwood shares his ‘insider’ connections with the students of Washington College.”
Yet John Harwood, a bright and personable figure who has covered five presidential elections, has proved to be an equally powerful draw: it was standing-room-only in Hodson Hall last November when Harwood, in a post-election analysis, outlined how George Bush had pulled off his second presidential race.
“This was the most enjoyable of all the campaigns I’ve covered because it was so unpredictable,” Harwood said that evening. “In Fall 2002, the Republicans had an exceptional gain in the number of Senate seats and a large victory was plausible early on. Then after Abu Ghraib, the Democrats thought they couldn’t lose. Dean became a clear and focused voice and Kerry looked like a candidate with no hope. With the debates, Kerry proved himself a viable candidate. It was a dead heat race, but in the final analysis, Bush had several things going for him.”
Harwood noted Bush’s resiliency with the American people after 9/11, a stronger economy, the failure of the Kerry campaign to make Social Security and Medicare reform significant platform issues, and Bush’s single-minded focus on national safety and security. The strongest factor in Bush’s win, however, may have been Karl Rove, Bush’s consummate political strategist.
“The Bush campaign was smart and disciplined in pursuing Republican-based voters,” Harwood notes. “Karl Rove figured out how to get the Republican vote out efficiently. It was the hidden Bush vote that turned the election his way. Social conservatives and economic conservatives came together. That’s why he won.”
THE HARWOOD HISTORY
John Harwood likes talking politics as much as his dad did. How fortuitous for Washington College that the entire Harwood family has also been drawn into Chestertown and the Washington College community. Soon after Dick and his wife, Bea, purchased a home on Langford Creek as a retreat from Washington, then-president Douglass Cater invited the Washington Post columnist to become involved with the College. Cater, a journalist who had worked for the Lyndon Johnson administration, was keenly interested in strengthening the College’s connection to the powers in Washington, and encouraged Dick Harwood to bring Washington Post colleagues to campus.
Robert Day, then director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House, was delighted to add journalists to the parade of novelists, poets and editors who frequented the Literary House. Ben Bradlee, Haynes Johnson and Bob Woodward were among the luminaries who first gave talks at Washington College as a favor to Dick Harwood.
Those visits set the stage for the creation of a formal program that would bring national figures from politics and the media every year (see sidebar). On the occasion of Dick Harwood’s 70th birthday, friends, family and admirers gathered on campus to honor Dick Harwood’s distinguished career, and helped establish the Richard L. Harwood Endowment Fund. The Fund was originally conceived to support a fellowship in journalism for the Elm’s editor-elect, the Harwood-Humphrey Talks on international journalism, an annual lecture in American journalism, and a colloquy on national affairs. Today, the Richard Harwood Lecture in American Journalism and the Richard Harwood Colloquy on National Affairs attract well-known figures from politics and the media.
“Dick Harwood was a great American journalist,” says Robert Day, “and we honor his accomplishments by doing all of these programs in his name.”
After Douglass Cater retired in 1990, it was Dick Harwood who connected the College to the journalistic and political worlds in Washington, recalls Dan Premo, professor of history and political science emeritus. “The establishment of the Richard Harwood Endowment in 1995 marked the beginning of a new era in the cultural and intellectual life of Washington College,” he says. “As curator of the Goldstein Program in Public Affairs, I had the pleasure of collaborating with Dick on some of the initial Harwood programs [including a visit by NBC reporter Bob Faw]. My assignment consisted mainly of organizing the pre-program dinner and working to ensure a representative student turnout. When Dick realized the food never varied—lobster bisque and chicken Kiev—and no alcohol was served, he took over and proceeded to offer a menu and libations that he considered more appropriate to the stature of his guests. I suspect that Dick, like many of us, enjoyed a good drink before dinner!”
Dick Harwood devoted some of his most productive years to Washington College. As a Senior Fellow, he was mentoring student journalists, teaching a course in journalistic ethics and advising the Elm newspaper staff. He later served on the College’s Board of Visitors and Governors, and founded the Literary House Press, the College’s own small book publishing house, where he served as Executive Editor.
Premo recalls that at Day’s suggestion, the early Harwood Annual Lectures in American Journalism provided the content for a Goldstein monograph on Contemporary Views of American Journalism—featuring the talks by Haynes Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with the Washington Post, and James M. Perry, former editor of the Wall Street Journal. This was followed several years later by a second volume, featuring the Post’s Geneva Overholser and James Warren from the Chicago Tribune. In between, Dick Harwood consented to the Literary House Press publication in 1998 of a selection of his own views on The News Business.
Today, Bea Harwood remains active with the Literary House Press, volunteering on its board of directors. In her role as business manager, says Bob Day, “she keeps our financial books orderly, our minutes spirited, and insofar as possible, our professorial minds on track.”
She reflected upon her husband’s career, as well as his motivation for getting involved with Washington College. “Dick, for all his contrariness, really did like young people,” Bea says. “He liked teaching young people what he knew. He was always independent-minded, always questioning. And he was a beautiful writer. Journalism was the perfect fit for him.”
Her husband had joined the Marines when he was 17, and served during World War II with distinction. He took part in four island campaigns in the Pacific, including the struggle for Iwo Jima. After the war, he went to college on the GI Bill, and then talked his way into a one-week trial position as a reporter with the National Tennessean. On the strength of his writing and reporting, he was hired.
“Dick was always a person who fought against the grain,” Bea Harwood recalls. “In college, he was the campus Bolshevik, far to the left politically. As time went on and he joined the Washington Post, which is considered a liberal institution, Dick became more conservative. He wanted people to think for themselves, to question the status quo. He felt journalism was important, and he wanted to direct the students’ thinking toward journalism.”
Dick Harwood had so much to offer students because of his historical perspective. His career had spanned five decades, and he had covered some of the most significant events in American political history while forging the standard for journalistic integrity. He was arrested and held in contempt for refusing to give up his source for a story involving a racial hate crime in Louisville in the mid-1950s. During the Vietnam War era, when four student protesters were killed at Kent State, Dick Harwood was there, dictating his story from a pay phone near the scene. He followed Bobby Kennedy’s career and his brief presidential campaign, which ended with his assassination after he had won the crucial Democratic primary in California. When Lyndon Johnson announced on television his decision to withdraw as a candidate for reelection in order to focus all his energies on bringing the Vietnam War to an end, Dick Harwood raced to his downtown office.
“He invited me to come along,” Bea recalls. “The scene in the newsroom was like something out of a movie. Dick would type out a page and call for a copy boy to take it to be typeset. He was extremely fast and thorough.
“But he was not as good on television as John is.”
IN HIS FATHER’S PLACE
“I always knew that journalism was an interesting and stimulating career,” John Harwood says, “but frankly I was intimidated by Dad and didn’t know if I’d be good enough at it.”
Dick Harwood was a tough man to impress. Bea Harwood recalls a few encounters between father and son.
“Dick never minced words,” Bea says. “In the last year of his life, after Dick had undergone surgery for lung cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital, John had written a front page story about the Bush/Gore presidential race.
“Dick read it and growled: ‘John, this is an example of what’s wrong with American journalism today!’”
In his gruff way, Dick Harwood impressed upon his son the enormous responsibilities journalists have to the American public, and held his son to the same high standards he set for himself. He was critical of reporters and editors who tended to color events with their own prejudices, and he believed some Washington reporters were too liberal, too elitist, and too close to those in power. John Harwood could scarcely have become anything except a journalist.
While still in high school, John took a job as a copy boy at the Washington Star, and was sports editor for his high school paper. In college, he took a newspaper internship between his junior and senior years at Duke University, where he studied economics and history. After graduation, he began covering local politics and government for the St. Petersburg Times. He covered the Florida State House, went to the nation’s capital as their Washington correspondent and then became Political Editor. His assignments ranged from presidential campaigns to unrest against the apartheid regime in South Africa, which he visited three times during the 1980s. He joined the Wall Street Journal in 1991 as White House correspondent. He subsequently covered Congress and national politics, and became National Political Editor in 1997. He writes the paper’s regular political column, Washington Wire, and offers political analysis on television programs including NBC’s Meet the Press and CNN’s Newsnight.
These days, he is spending a lot more time in front of a camera than behind a desk.
“Television commentary is new and fun, but it’s also weird and low-comedy,” Harwood says. “I get e-mails now from girls I dated in college, and from NBC executives who don’t like how I part my hair. I even got a phone call from my mother, admonishing me that my hair is too long.”
Beneath those boyish good looks and easy-going manner is a tough political analyst at the height of his career. John Harwood has the sharp intellect of his father and the amiable disposition of his mother. That combination goes a long way in Washington, where he maintains friendships with people in both camps, but keeps them at arm’s length. And he believes that the American press today is, in fact, doing a decent job, despite what Dick Harwood might have had to say about it.
“No one can be completely objective,” Bea Harwood muses. “John doesn’t usually say which candidates he prefers. Dick recognized that he was getting too close to Bobby Kennedy. He realized the danger. Back in those days, lots of reporters were close to the politicians they were covering.”
When John was growing up, it was not unusual for his parents to entertain journalists and political figures alike. Now, entertaining political figures in his own home would be, John says, “a very rare event.”
“There was a lot more personal interaction then,” he says. “There’s a higher level of suspicion for journalists these days,” he says.
He takes pleasure, instead, in bringing political and media figures of all stripes to Washington College.
“Dad pulled the whole family to Washington College,” John Harwood says, “and we’ve fallen in love with the place. My niece, Kelly, is a sophomore this year, and the Harwood Program has just been rolling along.”
“How fortunate for all of us at Washington College when John Harwood announced he would continue his father’s legacy,” Premo says. “What are the odds that one family would produce two such outstanding ‘political animals,’ as Aristotle would call them? John now does for the current student body what his father did for the first six years of the Harwood Program—bring to campus some of the nation’s most influential voices in journalism and public affairs.”
In his fast-paced life, it’s not always easy or convenient for John Harwood to race from the nation’s capital to Maryland’s Eastern Shore with political and media stars in tow, but he does it out of appreciation for Washington College, and out of respect for his father.
“It’s important to me that the Harwood Program flourish,” he says. “If Washington College has a desire for it, I want to do it. Secondly, this is something that preserves the memory of my dad, who made such a big contribution to journalism and to Washington College. It allows us to honor that relationship, and keep it alive.”
Marcia Landskroener, managing editor of the Washington College Magazine, keeps a letter from Dick Harwood in her desk as inspiration for her own writing.
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