Watergate-era NY Times editor to speak at NIC

Former New York Times editor and author Robert Phelps will speak at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 21 in North Idaho College Molstead Library's Todd Hall.

Phelps worked at the New York Times for about 20 years and was news editor of the paper's Washington D.C., bureau from 1965 to 1974 - during the Watergate scandal. Sponsored by the NIC Publications Club and the Sentinel, Phelps will speak about his former job and his new book. He will take questions from the audience.

As news editor of the Washington bureau, he dealt daily with Sy Hersh, Neil Sheehan, Johnny Apple and other New York Times stalwarts on such big stories as Watergate, the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the Cold War. The intermediary between Washington and New York, he was in an ideal position to assess the strengths and weaknesses of not only reporters but also editors like Tom Wicker, Abe Rosenthal, Harrison Salisbury, Clifton Daniel and Max Frankel. He retired from the New York Times in 1974 and signed on with The Boston Globe, where he supervised coverage of school desegregation, for which it won a Pulitzer Prize, and developed a forerunner of the Internet that failed to go public.

Syracuse University Press recently published his memoirs "God and the Editor: My Search for Meaning at The New York Times."

"With candor and keen observation, Phelps chronicles both the triumphant and the tragic events at the Times. He explains the mixed lessons of the Pentagon Papers, why the Times played catchup with the Washington Post on the Watergate scandal but eventually surpassed it on covering that seminal story, and how the Times failed to report a key element of the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention," according to a Syracuse University Press release.

He is co-author of "Libel: Rights, Risks, Responsibilities," a handbook for journalists; editor-rewriter of "Witness to History, the memoirs of Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen," and editor of two volumes of New York Times profiles. He has contributed to a number of Times books on politics and to various journalistic publications, including Nieman Reports, which he edited for 10 years at Harvard University.

Born July 19, 1919 in Erie, Pennsylvania, Phelps received a bachelor's of arts degree from the University of Michigan and a master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. A widower, he lives in Lincoln, Mass., where he tries to raise a few apples, plums, pears, peaches and blueberries. His wife used to say that if he had been a farmer "we would have starved to death."