[Walter Sullivan recently retired after nearly 50 years as science editor and science writer for The New York Times. Under the direction of Bruce V. Lewenstein, associate professor of communications at Cornell University and archivist of the National Association of Science Writers, an extended interview was conducted with Sullivan in Atlanta, Georgia, and New York City in February and April 1995. Also participating were James Cornell, publications manager of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory, and the editor of ScienceWriters. This article, as well as an earlier article in the Summer 1995 issue of ScienceWriters, is an edited excerpt of part of the interview.]
CORNELL: When you broke into the field, you were obviously one of very few science reporters.
In my generation we had a support network, people you could bounce
ideas off and share concepts. One of the things I've always been
impressed with in science journalism is the cooperation between
science
writers on difficult subjects, difficult questions. Did you have
colleagues to check with or was it with
the scientists themselves?
SULLIVAN: I always did it with the scientists, and the editor who says, "I don't understand this." Then you try to explain it better and perhaps bounce it off the scientist who might say, "Well, that's all right" or "That isn't quite right."
LEWENSTEIN: Did you read your copy to scientists to get help with the explanations?
SULLIVAN: On occasions, sure, if you are worried about accuracy. I'm not very well trained in science. Sometimes I would send them the whole story with the fax machine. But if it was controversial, if it was going to embarrass them, don't let them see it until it comes out in the paper.
CORNELL: Was there a year, a point where you think both science and the science-writing trade changed?
SULLIVAN: I think it was gradual. I don't think there was any dramatic thing. It just evolved and became more and more professional. It wasn't a profession when I started doing it. I was just another reporter who had moved from being a foreign reporter. It was partly because my wife was having a baby and she didn't want to have it in Berlin. She'd had two in Berlin. And the Antarctic tempted; especially now that it was becoming more and more scientific. Originally there wasn't that much science, but there was some. In 1953 I tried to organize my own Antarctic expedition. I was hooked by the Antarctic and I felt here was this continent and very little of it had ever been seen by any human eye. There might be mountains there higher than Everest. The new Boeing 707s that were just coming off the line in Seattle had the capability of flying from South America to New Zealand, from South Africa and so on, without ever landing but could see the whole Antarctic continent. The first thing I did was to go down to Washington to the office of the Chief of Naval Operations. I described my scheme, and they said, "We are planning to do something ourselves, and we're going to send an icebreaker down to pick out sites that could be used. Why don't you come along?" The result was the trip on the Atka in 1954. I was the only newspaper man. I think 12 publishers sent messages wanting a book.
I remember a meteorologist on the ship who told me about a scheme of a guy named Fred Singer to launch a "minimum orbital unmanned satellite of the earth," MOUSE. That was so sensational that I decided to bury it in the story as just another thing and it got cut out.
LEWENSTEIN: Why did you bury it instead of putting it into the lead?
SULLIVAN: Oh, because I thought it would never make it. The editors wouldn't believe it. I mean this was from a scientist on an icebreaker going to the Antarctic-not a likely source for that sort of thing.
CORNELL: The [1957-58]International Geophysical Year seems to be the moment when science in America changed, science in the world perhaps changed. Is that when science writing became a profession?
SULLIVAN: Yes, because The New York Times made the decision: "You are now going to cover the IGY." And that involved everything, going all over, eventually to the Soviet Union.
CORNELL: Do you think the Times's decision had an impact on the rest of the media?
SULLIVAN: Oh, I think so, because the news it began producing. It was space, of course, but also all those other sciences that were being featured in the IGY- seismology, the interior of the earth, and then eventually the ocean floor-and pretty exciting things began coming out. It's not quite as exciting at the moment as it was when all those things were happening. It is amazing when you look back at how much was happening. Maybe we're in a flat period.
LEWIS: I'd like to get some account of your experiences during the war. I gather you were in 12 naval engagements?
SULLIVAN: Only one was particularly dramatic. I was on the Fletcher, with the San Francisco when it got shot up. I was the skipper of the Overton, at the very end. Before I took command, We were declared unfit for sea in Hawaii. We had been through several typhoons, and our sound gear was stripped off-the ship wasn't worth fixing up. So they said to go back to Seattle and have what they called a "board of inspection and survey," to determine if the Overton should be scrapped. So we headed for Seattle. Well, Seattle aroused no enthusiasm whatsoever among the crew- a city of blue laws, no liquor, no fun on weekends. We ran into a severe storm. We were taking waves broadside, one of our landing boats was stove in. The skipper and I got together and we looked at each other and said, "Everyone wants to go to San Francisco." He said, "If we come around to a course for San Francisco, we will get the seas on a better heading." So I wrote out the dispatch, with my best journalistic talent, describing this terrible storm. I didn't ask permission. We changed course for San Francisco and anchored in the bay, inside of Treasure Island, while the Board of Inspection and Survey came on board. I took command there. When I went ashore to the Navy headquarters, a WAVE officer said, "You were the exec of the Overton? That was the most dramatic storm! Everyone in the department read that dispatch!" The Board of Inspection and Survey was all old admirals, retired admirals. We went all over the ship. I went down into a magazine with the chairman of the board. He saw some rust in the overhead, so he took out a knife and opened it up, and poked at it. We heard a yell from the deck above. There had been a sailor sitting on the deck, and this damn thing came right in and speared him in the rear end. So we were declared unfit for sea. Actually, our fuel tanks were also leaking water, mixing water with fuel. In fact, that saved our lives at one point in combat. A suicide plane was diving on us in the Lingayen Gulf, and we called for a burst of speed, which meant putting new burners into the firebox, and turning up the fuel and everything else, which produced-since so much of the fuel had water in it-a great cloud of steam. The plane apparently thought we'd already blown up, and peeled off and hit the cruiser next to us.
LEWENSTEIN: In preparing your books, you said your wife read them and edited them and helped you get the explanations right. In your daily journalism, how do you think about your readers? Do you imagine a reader? Are you writing for the general public?
SULLIVAN: Sometimes if you are writing about the top quark or something like that, you give them a nice easy lead, but then somewhere near the end of the story you've got to write the guts of it for the professional reader. You save that until the end, at which time you have lost most of your readers anyway.
LEWENSTEIN: But you're conscious that your professional readers are going to want that information.
SULLIVAN: If it's real news.
LEWENSTEIN: What kinds of reader response do you get? Do you get letters?
SULLIVAN: Most of the responses have been on my walking stories in the travel section. In fact I'm just now completing a book on mountain walks in China, Iceland, Ireland and so forth.
LEWENSTEIN: One thing I noticed in your books, there's a strong element of the explorer in you. You were going to the Arctic, and the Antarctic, and across the Gobi Desert, and so forth. How much of that is the thrill?
SULLIVAN: Oh, I think the exploration instinct is very strong. I was home on leave in '53 from Berlin. I really wanted to get back to the Antarctic. Turner Catledge was then the managing editor. Here was this great undiscovered continent. Only a narrow band going in to the South Pole had ever been seen. So I told him, I would like to go down to Washington and sniff around. He said, OK. I went down there and walked into the Times bureau and they said "The managing editor wants to talk to you." He said "I want to be clear on this: It's okay as long as it doesn't cost us anything." I had done this thing twice before. Right after the war when we had a double staff-all the veterans came back and we had a full complement already of reporters and yet they didn't want to fire anybody. The kind of assignments I got was covering an organizational meeting of hotel employees, that sort of thing. So I began to think about ways to break out of this. I thought, well, maybe I could go back to Alaska using my Navy credentials. I could ride MATS free and see what's happened to Alaska since 1935. Barely above the copy-boy level, I went up there and got about four front-page stories out of it. The Times didn't authorize me to do it at their expense. They just said, "If you get some stories, send them in." Four front page stories! Then the managing editor at that time called me in, Ed James, a big bulldog guy. "You're not married, are you Sullivan?" I said, no. "How would you like to go to the Antarctic with Byrd?" So I went down with Byrd in '46 & '47, along with Alton Blakeslee and Doc Quig, H D Quig. H D Quig was born in Missouri and in those days it was the fashion to name people with initials rather than names. Like Harry S No Point Truman, he was H No Point D No Point Quig, and this confused the army no end when he was a foreign correspondent in Korea. So being a meek little man he adopted the name Horatio Dasher Quig. He's still going strong. He and I became roommates on that trip, in the tent, on the ship, the whole time.. We lived in standard army tents, about 12 or 30 tents. It was 30 below zero. There was a latrine tent between the rows of regular tents, a three-holer. The wind blew in underneath, and came up through the holes. You would walk in there and see this little plume of snow blowing up through the hole, and the thing was to plug it fast.
LEWENSTEIN: Were there daily briefings?
SULLIVAN: Oh, never, everybody just went out on their own. I think there would be a briefing after a flight, maybe. There were only three of us. No, Roy Givens, the medical editor of the Chicago Tribune was also there. He had a briefcase, one of those square briefcases with nothing but pills for all the ailments that he had written stories about. Our tent was supported by a pole in the middle that held the whole thing up. We had a little pot-bellied stove, and we fired it up trying to get it warm. We wore gloves with the fingertips cut off, so we could type. We had that fire turned up until the stove was red. Then I noticed that this pole had a metal sheath around it, to protect it from the heat of the stove. I thought maybe I better look underneath, so I lifted this metal sheath and the pole had already charred down to a few feet off the floor. I envisioned this tent falling in and catching fire with all of us inside of it. I got a big CO2 fire extinguisher and I thought would take care of it. During the night-of course it never got dark-the wind was coming up through the boards in the floor of the tent and my beard kept blowing up getting into my nose. I thought I'll get up and cut some of the hair around my nose so I can sleep. In doing so I tripped over the CO2 fire extinguisher which immediately began thrashing around in the bottom of the tent. Roy Givens woke up and figured the tent was on fire and tried to run out-forgetting that he was zipped up to here in his sleeping bag. I got a whole lot of crates. I knew from the Museum of Natural History that the Eskimos dug the tunnels into their igloos very low so the cold air would drain out of the living area. I dug this deep approach tunnel and built a sort of cellar door into it and a roof over it. Admiral Byrd came over and saw that we had been working at the tent, getting it fixed up. He came up and climbed these little steps made up of these old crates. He was beautifully dressed-Byrd loved to wear all these fancy furs. He stuck his head inside the flap of the tent and said, "I see you fellows have done a fine...." Just at that point all those boxes gave way, and he just sank out of sight.
I came here to be a music critic, you remember, but there was a science story that I am proud of. In 1946, I saw a little tidbit saying that the Kodak people were having trouble with spotting of their X-ray film. The film had been packaged in a cardboard with straw in it. It turned out that the straw had been harvested in Illinois about a week after the Alamogordo bomb went off. I thought, "Well, this is interesting, maybe I better do some phoning. First, I called the Carnegie Institution and asked who measures radioactivity of the atmosphere. They said "There is this guy at the Naval Academy and somebody at our own field station in Tucson." I called both of them and indeed the one at Annapolis got a reading about a week after the bomb. The one in Tucson got one in the middle of the next day practically. So I wrote that fallout from the original Alamogordo explosion had been recorded over an area comparable in size to the continent of Australia. It was front page, the first fallout story. Waldemar Kaempffert, who was science editor when I started, said "You know, you should be a science writer." But I wanted to be a foreign correspondent.
LEWIS: One last question: Do you think it's possible for somebody coming into the field today to have a career like yours, or are those days gone?
SULLIVAN: It's a good question, because the young reporters now are so well trained and so sophisticated about all these things that I've only learned about over the years. It was a beginning trade and we could get away with asking a lot of stupid questions. Of course, now I'm mostly writing obituaries.