The Public Editor
Pictures Worth a Thousand Questions
- Digg
- Newsvine
- Permalink
By CLARK HOYT
Published: September 16, 2007
LEWIS LORD lit his daily cigar and settled in with The New York Times on his deck in Falls Church, Va. As he went through the newspaper, his eye fell on a familiar photograph — 3-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s coffin. The image accompanied the obituary of Joe O’Donnell, “a longtime White House photographer” who supposedly took that and other famous pictures.
Skip to next paragraphLord, 70, thought something was wrong. Only a day or two before, he had been sorting through the memorabilia of a 52-year career in journalism and had come across an old United Press International sales brochure from November 1963, depicting U.P.I.’s accomplishments in covering the assassination and funeral of President Kennedy. The brochure featured a U.P.I. photo by Stanley Stearns — the same picture Lord was now looking at in The Times.
He went upstairs and fired off e-mail to Gary Haynes of Oregon, Ill., a fellow U.P.I. alumnus and a former picture editor at The Times. Haynes contacted Tom Bodkin, an assistant managing editor at The Times, and said the newspaper might have taken the wrong picture from its files to illustrate O’Donnell’s obit.
The truth was worse and much more painful. The Times — like the Associated Press, Time magazine, CBS News, The Tennessean in O’Donnell’s hometown of Nashville and other news organizations — had been taken in by a man who for years had inflated his life story.
It was, said Bill McDonald, the editor of obituaries, “our worst nightmare.”
And it was entirely avoidable. Warning signs went unheeded, and sources that would have cast doubt on O’Donnell’s claims went unchecked. They included the newspaper’s own archive. To examine what happened is to be reminded of an old newsroom maxim: If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.
The first word of the death of “former official White House photographer Joe O’Donnell” came to the obituary desk from Lon A. Bouldin, a Nashville public relations man known to Times staffers and considered reliable. Bouldin was a consultant to an art gallery that exhibited O’Donnell’s photographs. McDonald assigned the story to Douglas Martin, a veteran obituary writer. The Associated Press, meanwhile, sent out its own obituary, noting that O’Donnell was “one of several photographers to capture” the Kennedy salute.
Martin found plenty of other corroborating evidence that O’Donnell lived the life he said he did: copyrighted photographs on sale at the art gallery; a book of photographs that O’Donnell said he took of the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a National Public Radio interview with O’Donnell when those photographs caused a furor at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum; an article by O’Donnell in American Heritage about his experiences in Japan; and a CNN interview with him about the salute photo after young Kennedy was killed in a plane crash in 1999.
Martin also called the White House to check on O’Donnell’s service but was told that the staff could answer questions only about people in the current administration. It turned out that O’Donnell spent 20 years on the payroll of the United States Information Agency, whose photographers were sometimes detailed to the White House, but the agency no longer exists.
Anyway, Martin wasn’t trying to verify O’Donnell’s story so much as looking for “penetrating details about his life.” And because Martin was on deadline, he said, he felt it was more effective to focus on the existing record rather than hunt for contemporaries of an 85-year-old man.
That turned out to be a mistake. Times obituaries are often enriched by personal recollections, and there are many contemporaries from the years O’Donnell claimed to be a White House photographer. If Martin had reached any of them, their comments almost certainly would have stopped the story cold.
Cecil Stoughton, who was a White House photographer through many of the years when O’Donnell claimed to have been there, told me: “I never saw him before. I didn’t know he existed.” Stoughton, sharp at 87, lives in retirement in Merritt Island, Fla.
As it was, Martin had some doubts. He avoided the word “official” in his article because he knew there was no such thing as an official White House photographer in that era. He felt that one of the photos attributed to O’Donnell, a shot of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meeting in 1943 in Tehran, was “questionable.” O’Donnell was supposed to have been in the South Pacific with the Marines at that time. Martin left any reference to the picture out of his article but didn’t warn anyone about his doubts.
Steve Berman, the night photo editor, said he had “misgivings” about the same picture, based on O’Donnell’s age and the fact that he was supposed to be elsewhere at the time. Berman researched the Tehran photo and found two copies of it in the archive of The Times, but neither had credits that identified the photographer. Stoughton said the Tehran photo has always been attributed to the United States Army Signal Corps.
Although Berman, who knows photo history, had never heard of O’Donnell, he allowed “all my normal reservations” to be swept away. That The Times was writing the obituary made it “a done deal as far as I was concerned,” he said. “I assumed that Joe O’Donnell, famous photographer, had already been verified, and my job was to find iconic images to illustrate his career.”
Bouldin, the public relations man, had sent copies of the Tehran and Kennedy pictures, which Berman verified with him, the gallery and O’Donnell’s widow.
Because no one raised doubts about the Kennedy photo, Berman didn’t research it in the newspaper’s electronic archive. If he had, he would have found the image with this credit line: Stanley Stearns.
Still, the Tehran photo kept nagging. After the early edition, George Kaplan, a copy editor on the national desk, raised his own questions. Wallace Schroeder, the copy chief, said Kaplan told him that it didn’t make sense that an almost-teenager would have taken the picture in Tehran. Schroeder talked with Berman, who said the picture should stay in because it was one of the great photographs of World War II and was indicative of O’Donnell’s work.
It took too long, more than three weeks from the time the obituary was published on Aug. 14, for The Times to run a correction on the two photos and to say it was investigating other claims in the article. (A report on that investigation ran in yesterday’s Times.)
Martin said he heard from a reporter in Nashville a week later that there might be problems with O’Donnell’s story, but he was working on other deadline obits and didn’t start looking into it seriously for five more days, after Bill Keller, the executive editor, was alerted.
Bodkin said that two days after the obit ran, he compared the Stearns photo and the one supposedly taken by O’Donnell and thought they looked alike. But editors were cautious and wanted more information. “We don’t want to correct a correction,” McDonald said.
Michele McNally, the assistant managing editor in charge of the photo department, said she had Berman contact the Nashville gallery twice, and he was assured the photos were genuine. He contacted O’Donnell’s widow again and asked for fresh, verified prints made from negatives.
On Aug. 29, The Times received e-mail with a photo of the Kennedy picture pinned to a wall. Handwritten notes by O’Donnell describing some of his photographs were faxed at the same time. When McNally read his account of walking past the Oval Office, seeing President Kennedy alone in a rocker and snapping a candid photo, her heart sank. Photographers, official or not, cannot wander near the Oval Office, and its door is always closed and guarded.
The correction finally ran on Sept. 5. It was an especially bitter pill because The Times sets the standard for newspaper obituaries, producing deeply reported, beautifully written accounts of the lives of fascinating people. That normal newspaper safeguards failed in this case, and that so many little warning signs never caused anyone to hold the story for more reporting, is surprising and sobering.
“It’s a classic lesson in corroboration,” Berman said.