Standing Up to 'Pushback' On the Editorial Page

By: Jim Boyd On Dec. 8 at a State Department ceremony, Jim Boyd, deputy editorial page editor at the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis, was awarded the 2005 Arthur Ross media award by the American Academy of Diplomacy, "for critical, perceptive and non-partisan commentary on the policies of governments and international organizations, reflecting exhaustive research, a willingness to tell truth to power and a consistent appreciation for the importance of cooperation among nations." Previous winners include Jim Lehrer and Anne Garrels. What follows is a revised version of the speech he gave in accepting that award. --The Editors

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I have a very difficult time believing I deserve this award, but I am grateful for it. The last three years have been difficult. The pushback for our aggressive views has been intense. Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt organized a campaign to get people to drop subscriptions; we lost about 200, and it scared my superiors. Bloggers like Powerline harassed us continuously. A senator who shall go unnamed (hint: he's no fan of Kofi Annan) had breakfast with our publisher and warned him that we were beginning to be associated with the loony left and that I had an angry agenda.

Well, you folks are not the loony left. So thank you for honoring me; it will help.

I want to assure you that I am not an angry bomb thrower. Most of my writings on foreign affairs involve topics such as: Can the European Union make the single currency succeed; must NATO go "out of area or out of business?" Should NATO be enlarged? Whither Russia? And so on.

I've also organized seminars so that editorial writers could hear from the top diplomats at State. It was one of those at which I heard a terrific joke about diplomats Richard Holbrooke and Robert Gelbard flying into Sarayevo. When they arrived, the story goes, the message transmitted back to State was: "The egos have landed." At the last seminar I organized, in 2001, we heard from Secretary Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage and quite a few others, including Undersecretary John Bolton.

I also raised $400,000 from foundations to underwrite trips abroad for editorial writers, and led trips to India and Pakistan shortly after the Pakistan nuclear test, to Russia, to Mexico and, the most ambitious, not to a place but to two concepts: NATO and the EU. Colleagues from the Star-Tribune editorial pages led trips to China, to Mozambique and South Africa, to Thailand and India corresponding with the AIDS conference in Bangkok.

So we have always worked (at least until travel funds dried up completely) to bring to the heartland a sense of distant places. When you've actually been somewhere, it becomes more than a construct in your mind; it becomes a real place, with real people living real lives and facing real challenges. And they are different from you in so many ways you hadn't appreciated before.

I think two factors caused our more aggressive editorializing over the last three or four years. The first is our deeply felt belief in multilateralism. John Cowles Sr., the publisher who started Cowles family ownership of the Star Tribune, was a friend of President Dwight Eisenhower and a passionate believer in the United Nations -- as a prophylactic I'm sure, against a repeat of the carnage of World War II. Cowles pretty much single-handedly pulled Minnesota out of the isolationism of the Charles Lindbergh crowd. So to see all of the multilateral institutions pretty well trashed was offensive.

Second, I am a Vietnam veteran. I went there as an Army case officer, under cover actually as a Foreign Service Reserve officer attached to Mac/Coords. The kids I went through basic training with at Ft. Lewis were mostly farm kids from around the Northwest. Most went straight from basic to advanced infantry training to Vietnam. About half did not come home. I cannot tell you how deeply I feel a commitment to them and through them to today's young men and women to help ensure that whenever they are put in a combat zone it is because we literally have no other option.

That's what has motivated my writings. Not partisanship certainly; not a generalized angry outlook, but specific issues about which we -- I -- feel quite deeply. At our paper, for example, we were with Bush so long as he worked with the Security Council; when he decided to go it alone, we became quite critical, long before other newspapers, especially The New York Times and Washington Post.

Another topic I'm passionate about, and which I would commend to you for future work by the academy is public diplomacy. We had so much good stuff going on during the Cold War, with our libraries and cultural centers, USIA films like "Nine from Little Rock" and so on. Much of that has been tossed aside. That is really unwise. The goals of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act -- to create a better understanding of the United States abroad, and better understanding between Americans and foreigners -- were not just Cold War necessities. They are necessities for all time.