Washington Press Club Foundation

Eileen Shanahan: Interview #2

February 21, 1993 in Washington, D.C.

Mary Marshall Clark, Interviewer

Eileen Shanahan - February 21, 1993 Tape 1 of 2

February 21st, 1993
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Eileen Shanahan - February 21, 1993 Tape 2 of 2

February 21st, 1993
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Eileen Shanahan - February 21, 1993 Tape 1 of 1

February 21st, 1993
Listen to audio

Eileen Shanahan - February 21, 1993 Tape 1 of 2

February 21st, 1993
Listen to audio

Eileen Shanahan - February 21, 1993 Tape 2 of 2

February 21st, 1993
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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Clark: I wanted to ask you if you had any particular experience in covering Phyllis Schlafly, if you'd realized, you know, what she was about from the beginning—or if anyone really realized the impact she would have in the movement.

Shanahan: I'm not sure anybody really realized the impact she would have, although I was aware of her through some of my women journalist friends who had covered her effort to take over the Federation of Republican Women's Clubs back some years earlier. And the more moderate group did defeat her and put their own candidate in as the head of it. But they came away from that with a sense of this being a really smart, really vicious, really wrong-headed woman, and came away from it with a real deep-down dislike of her and fear of her, even though she'd gotten defeated in that instance.

So I had known something about her through them. But I don't think anybody—there were a lot of things we didn't understand. I think basically we didn't understand the depth and breadth of feeling in the country that women aren't equal, shouldn't be equal, would destroy the country if they became legally equal, et cetera. That runs deep to this very day. Look at the antagonism toward Hillary Rodham Clinton. I got a letter to me, not a piece of nut mail, a civil letter criticizing a story I had recently written about Clinton and the budget, which said, "Before you go too far in your admiration of the Mr. and Mrs. Clinton administration." Obviously this guy thinks it's terrible that she's not a traditional first lady.

So I did have some sense of Phyllis Schlafly. I didn't know that she would turn out to be the good organizer, the really brilliant spokeswoman for her point of view. She's a very pretty woman, which unfortunately matters, and speaks well and knows how to flirt with senators in a way that you couldn't quite blow the whistle on. But she has these beautiful blue eyes and knows how to kind of look up at men and laugh and make them feel masculine and strong and all those things which so many of the leaders of the women's movement just eschewed. They were having no parts of it, to the point where some of them were outright rude, which was counterproductive. But others just had decided that their self-image and self-respect didn't allow them to play that game—a view I share. And she knew how to play it superbly. She's a very smart woman and she knew how to tap all of the latent fears of everything that was represented by the goals of the women's movement, and did it very successfully.

I don't think there's too much doubt that the ERA would have gotten ratified if there had never been a Phyllis Schlafly. Maybe someone else would have risen to do the same job. But it's hard to see how there could have been somebody else with an equal talent and skill at that sort of thing. And of course, she had a rich husband who could pay all the mailing costs and various things. There were always a lot of rumors that she was supported by certain industrial interests. And I tried to—the insurance industry, in particular, which I spent a little time trying to track down. Ms. magazine spent a lot of time and nobody's able to prove it, so maybe it's not so. I'm inclined to think if some good reporters tried to find it and didn't find it, it probably was not there, at least, not in any comprehensive or national way.

My relationship with Schlafly is interesting. I called her and talked to her and quoted her at length. I knew—I think the first time I ever quoted her—and the first time her picture was ever in the New York Times was probably '73. I remember the story very well. ERA ratification was moving along a-pace in what we only subsequently recognized were all the easy states. I talked to her and she said—it may have been the story that I wrote, that began that ERA ratification was no longer assured. She said, "As people understand the issues,

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it will fail of ratification. But that's going to be hard to do because the kind of women I represent don't like to be shrieking and rude"—I forget the exact quote—"the way the advocates of it do."

You asked me earlier whether a man could have covered some of these things with the insight that I did. And I kind of turned the question inside out because the real question that was always asked was: Could a woman cover it fairly? I have to tell you, I for a long time had in my possession—I think I gave the original away to the deposition in the New York Times women's suit—a letter from Phyllis Schlafly thanking me for my fair coverage. That was early on. The minute she found out, when I was on a panel with her and disclosed that—I didn't take the position of an ERA advocate but apparently I said enough just being descriptive that led her to infer correctly that in fact I did support the Equal Rights Amendment, whereupon her whole attitude toward me changed. But the first year and a half or so, she was always courteous and happy to hear from me and believed that I reported what she said accurately—or when she testified or whatever.

My other favorite story that really shows the error of those who said women couldn't cover this fairly involves Senator Sam Ervin, who was really nuts on the subject in some respects, I mean real far-out in his views of the inherent inequality of women, not necessarily inferiority but inherent God-dictated differences. At one point in the course of the—I think it was the second time around on the ERA, one of the issues that had bubbled up was the legal requirement in a number of states that a woman must use her husband's name. He brought that out in a speech on the floor when he said that he "could imagine not why any virtuous woman wouldn't want to take her husband's name."

I had occasion after that speech to call Sam Ervin off the floor to ask him some question or another. And he said to me, "Can you understand why would any virtuous woman not want to take her husband's name?" Well, confronted with a direct question, I felt I had to answer it. And I said, "Well, as a matter of fact, Senator, Shanahan is my maiden name." And he looked at me and he said, "Oh, but you're not in favor of that Equal Rights Amendment, are you?" And so I had to say, since I felt I had to answer the question since it was asked, and I said, "Well, yes, as a matter of fact, Senator, I am." And he said, "Well, I never would have known that from what you wrote."

Well, hallelujah! I called either his legislative assistant or his press officer, I forget which, several days later, because I knew that there was an undercurrent at the New York Times about my work. And I had saved the Schlafly letter and so on in case anybody ever tried to accuse me of bias in what I wrote. And I asked his staffer, recounted the conversation to him, and I said, "Can you get the senator to write me a letter that says that?" Well, the senator didn't and no—whether the guy ever even asked him, I don't know. But anyway, I said, "Well, will you write me a letter saying the senator thinks this," which he did and which I had, and which I showed in the deposition in the women's suit to counter any criticism that my reporting had been biased, unfair.

Clark: Very interesting. The time period we're talking about, there were a lot of changes that were happening. In fact NOW, I mean, just something you said sparked me on this, that NOW itself was taking on an agenda that wasn't just about equality. It was really about more of a change in society. I mean, they were talking about more than equal pay, at least, you know. And a lot was happening in 1973 in general in terms of conflicts within the women's movement, et cetera. I guess feminism is really beginning to take some kind of hold in the media. Would you say that was true? Or that there was beginning to be a real women's beat?

Shanahan: Oh, yes, there was. And I remember in particular—I could mention that in the National Women's Political Caucus that was in Topeka, Kansas—it might have been '73 or '74. And there were, I don't know, eighteen or twenty of us reporters there from all over the country who were either full or part-time regularly doing women's beat stuff. And I remember being the one who suggested that, you know, we all have a drink and dinner together and really get acquainted, which we did. There were a couple of them, wonderful young women on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that I'm still in touch with whom I met at that meeting.

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So that yes, there was getting to be a core. And of course, in Washington, there was always a core. I don't think there ever was a core like that in New York. My sense of it was that—which may be distorted by the fact that the New York Times never had anybody regularly assigned to it or self-assigned; I think many of us were sort of self-assigned but the editors realized that it was a story and if we wanted to do it, that was fine.

That was certainly what happened with me. I started out covering the Equal Rights Amendment, as I told you, and somebody told me about all these lawsuits, declaring the so-called protective laws illegal—can't pick up anything heavier than fifteen pounds, et cetera, and can't work after seven o'clock at night and all the rest of it. Somebody told me about that, so I went after that story. And as is always the way when you get onto a beat and if you're the least bit industrious, you just go from person to person to person and you hear ever more things, the concept of what the story is widens out on you.

Clark: How did that—I mean, if you had to try to retrace that, how did it sort of widen out? I mean, if you had to describe what was the story?

Shanahan: It went from the Equal Rights Amendment to fairness in the workplace, really, all of the various things, the non-enforcement of the Equal Pay Act, just the economic statistics which I was well-qualified to deal with because of my whole background doing economic reporting, so that no statistic got past me, sort of, without my seeing that there was often new information here.

I didn't often try to influence outcomes. One I did try to influence—and I wasn't the principal person who did it. The unemployment statistics—the monthly major news story, out of the U.S. Department of Labor, the Bureau of Labor Statistics—every month, then and now, divided the sample in certain ways and presented certain segments of the sample. At that time, it was men, women, teenagers and married men. Going back to the days when not so very many women worked—there were always more than the mythology allowed—and the separate statistics were kept on married men with the idea in mind that it was a greater hardship for married men to be out of work than any other kind of person because they were responsible for the support of their families.

Well, divorce rates in the early 1970s hadn't reached what they've reached today though they were headed in that direction. But in any event, it was very clear that a whole lot of women were responsible for the support of their families. Also less recognized was the fact that in an awful lot of cases, though women had a husband in residence, it took her salary to bring them above the poverty level. I probably wrote more about that than anybody did, reflecting my background in economics—and my acquaintanceship with women economists who had begun to see me in the New York Times and call me up—

Clark: Aha, that's interesting. So you had a lot of spontaneous calls on this.

Shanahan: Oh, yes. And in any event, I remember starting to hector the people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to create a statistic—which they could easily do, they had the data—for women who were responsible for the support of a family. It took several years and I don't think it was actually done until a wonderful woman, Janet Norwood, became the head of the BLS. It might have been done before. I'm not sure. Anyway, she was my great ally. Or I was hers, more like it. And indeed, we now have head-of-household statistics, regardless of gender, and have had them every month ever since, whenever they first did that.

But the beat, it just, as I say, just gradually fanned out, for whatever reason, I became aware of the importance of the relative lack of women lawyers. There were women lawyers who were telling me this. My own daughter, in 1971 when I was researching that piece on women in the law, was a senior in undergrad school and preparing to go to law school. And we knew that even then she would not have an even chance to get into law school. As it turned out, she had such a good record and such good law boards, she did get into Harvard Law School and every other one she applied to. But it certainly wasn't equal admissions, even by 1972, the class of '75 which she was in.

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I can't really tell you where I got the idea for doing that piece on women in the law. I was thinking maybe it was a particular law school classmate of hers, but that can't be right because I did the story before that. That's the nature of any piece, that you start a story, maybe. I never imagined that doing the Equal Rights Amendment through Congress, through the two years that it took, was going to have such incredible spin-offs, so that I have dozens and dozens and dozens of stories here about over a period of five years, six years, about the changing roles, changing legal status, changing economic status, changing political status of women in this country.

Clark: What impact do you think the more systematic coverage in the media had on the women's movement?

Shanahan: Oh, I think some. I've mentioned what Millie Jeffrey said about me a while back. I think Millie was being a little exaggerated. But I think not just me but others. My importance was not me. It was that I was doing it for the New York Times. The New York Times as the pace-setter was even more then than it is now, was more clearly than now, the best paper in the country. The Post has closed the gap a lot, L.A. Times, some other papers, which were good then but I think they were farther behind. And some of the great regional papers like the Chicago Tribune have gotten much better in this period.

But at that time, the New York Times was also the only paper that kept an index that was accessible to researchers. And what that does for multiplying the importance of what you do as a reporter for the New York Times is just enormous. And it's for history, too, as well today. I'm awfully glad that that stuff of mine is all in the New York Times index.

Clark: Well, when the Times covered the civil rights movement, they put John Popham on the civil rights movement full-time. Did you ever want to go on the women's beat full-time?

Shanahan: I thought of that, at various times. There was enough to do. You could have made the case that there was enough to do to make it a full-time beat. And I never asked for it. You could say I chickened out and if you said that, you wouldn't be saying anything I hadn't said to myself.

I felt that if I—well, I'll have to back up a little and say I, despite salary discrimination and a lot of other things, I don't have a lot of doubt that I was a valued employee of the New York Times in my role as coverer of national economic policy. I was a beat reporter who was supposed to know what was going on on my beat. And ninety-plus percent of my stories were self-assigned, with concurrence. You would go tell the editor that the Ways and Means Committee was having an important hearing tomorrow and so and so was going to be there and you thought that was what you were going to cover tomorrow. Fine.

So then I think I was respected and valued in my regular role in economics. And what I feared, to the point of never suggesting it, was that if I had become full-time the national status-of-women beat reporter that within six months I would have lost all that respect because I was no longer covering stuff the power structure cared about. I mean, they care about the federal budget and Federal Reserve policy and where the economy is headed and all that stuff. That's important, second only to politics in the eyes of editors—and foreign policy.

But that within a very few months I would be crazy Shanahan, who's always trying to get some damn fool story about women on page one. As it was on my economics beat, when I would go up to the desk at four o'clock when I came back with the story, I'd say, "This one might just go 'outside,'" as we say, "on page one." My recommendation was taken seriously, not necessarily always followed because news is competitive and on a day when three humongous stories are breaking, your story has to be humongous to get out there. But I was listened to when I recommended that this story—even sometimes when they were a little arcane and the editors didn't quite understand what they were.

I figured six months, doing nothing but the women's beat—the point being that I was recognized in economics as somebody who knew my beat, knew what was important, covered the right things, covered them well,

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and as I started to say, within six months I think I'd have been crazy Shanahan who always wanted some damn fool thing about women on page one. And so that though I felt there were stories that could be covered that weren't getting covered by anybody, I felt I would be more effective covering economics and continuing as a respected person inside my own organization and doing the women's movement with three fingers of my left hand—and I'm right-handed. [Laughter.]

Clark: I was interested to see in, I guess 1973 and 1974, you were covering a lot of stories on minorities and difficulties with minority advancements as well as difficulties—and sometimes the same because NOW is beginning to take that up as an agenda. But I'm wondering—

Shanahan: And the Caucus [National Women's Political Caucus]. I'll never forget that very first meeting of the Caucus, they raised that question.

Clark: Actually, I'd like to get back and see—you said that was a very close fight, taking up the anti-racist agenda.

Shanahan: That's right, because, like often happens in Congress, the key vote was close and then the final vote, when it was clear who was going to win, was not close. But when, at the founding meeting of the Caucus, there was a lot of stuff about, "We're going to support women for public office. Our goal is fifty percent women in public office."

And Shirley Chisholm, who was one of the four conveners meeting, along with Gloria, Bella and Betty, promptly stood up and said, "My sisters"—what she said, and in a very kind of soft-spoken, gentle-spoken way, was that she had been concerned about some things she was hearing that made her think there were those who would support any woman against any man, even if the woman was a racist and the man was not. I think in the opening remarks she said, "I want to stay. But my sisters, if you take that view, I must leave."

And there was quite a debate. And in the end, someone proposed a resolution—I remember there was at that time a very racist woman from Boston, Louise Day Hicks, in the House of Representatives—or running for the House, I forget which—who had been one of the leaders of that awful, vicious, violent anti-school busing uprising in Boston. She became a symbol. "Would you support Louise Day Hicks, a woman and a racist?"

For a long time I remember sitting there and just being at the press table and being distressed at a lot of things I was hearing because while nobody stood up and said, "I hate blacks," or anything like that, there were things that were covertly racist that were being said. And I was afraid that the vote would be very, very close. It was fairly close on that first vote which I noticed—for some reason, I don't seem to have had that in the story I wrote, that I re-read quickly before this interview.

But it was one of the few times in my life that I—if you remember the movie Dr. Strangelove, where he has to take one arm and hold his other arm down to keep himself from giving the fascist salute! Well, that's almost the way I felt. I wanted so badly to vote because I was so concerned that it would go the wrong way. Well, I didn't, of course. Isabelle Shelton told me afterwards that she had felt the same way.

But we got past it and—we, we! [Laughter.] Oh, watch it, watch it, Eileen, watch it! That's what they say about you. They did get past it and voted that they would not support a racist candidate under any circumstances. The resolution was worded something like that.

I remember, too, that was—I'm not going to tell you who this was because I think she learned better. It was a very young woman who was subsequently very successful and everybody would recognize her name now but who was kind of running around doing the press for that meeting. After the vote, which was kind of right on my deadline, I'm dashing to the press room to write and she came in and said, "Oh, you're not going to write about this. You can't write about this. It'll make us look bad. You're not going to quote some things

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those people said, are you? I'll make us look bad." And I very nicely said, "Hey, you know, news is news and that's my job," and so on. [Tape interruption.]

Clark: Well, just out of that story I'd be interested to know, certainly seeing your clips in 1973 and '74, beginning to cover really kind of systematically the difficulties of minorities, and blacks in particular, and overcoming the hurdles of discrimination that had been set up, do you think that you were more capable of covering that because of having looked at the sociology, in a way; that's using the term imprecisely, but of the women's movement having covered a social issue, having watched the obstacles that were there?

Shanahan: I think there were two routes of my sensitivity about the way America wasn't even beginning to live up to its promises of equality as far as blacks were concerned. And I was—and to some degree still am—more focused on blacks than other minorities. One, I do think the discrimination is more severe, the hatred is more severe, than against Hispanics or Asians. But also having grown up in Washington, blacks were the only minorities I knew. I had one Chinese boy and one Japanese boy in my high school class and none in college that I knew, and no Hispanics that I knew, except those who'd been in this country so long that they weren't Hispanic any more than I'm Irish or German.

But of the twin roots of my sensitivity about blacks, the more important one has to do with being half-Jewish and having been thrown out of polite society of its time, the college sorority, for being half-Jewish and therefore having to re-think the bigotry with which I had been raised by my parents, my mother a self-despising Jew and my father a true bigot, about blacks, Jews, Italians, you name it. And I was as bigoted as they were. I knew I had to reject that because it wasn't true that I was a terrible person just because my mother was Jewish. And if I rejected that, recognized that plainly was false, what was true?

And it took me an awful long time, several years really, to come to a truth that is so simple that we ought all be born knowing it, which is everybody's an individual and deserves to be judged as an individual, and that any statement that categorizes a group of people is stupid, inaccurate, unfair and unjust. It just took me the longest time to figure that out. But once having—you know, the stuff you have to figure out for yourself really stays with you. The stuff that you learn because somebody taught it to you, you don't ever own it as fully as you own it if you had to struggle your way through to it. And I had to struggle my way through to that very simple conclusion, that everybody is an individual and deserves to be judged as such.

That was probably the deeper root, deeper than what I experienced as a woman and learned covering the women's movement in terms of my concern for the treatment of blacks in America and what I brought to the coverage.

The happy accident of my life that brought me in close contact with a lot of blacks and other minorities came a little later than the period we're discussing, which is still about 1973 or '74, where I began doing a lot of stories about discrimination against minorities, mostly economic, as an outgrowth of the two things. Sometimes it was in the same report about discrimination against women. Sometimes it was an economics story which I was covering because that was the other part of my beat.

But I think I was more alert to it. I was more consciously digging it out and making it a major part of some stories which fundamentally were maybe about something else because one, it was linked to women and two, because of my own sense of how far removed we were still from equal opportunity toward minorities in this country.

The happy thing that happened later, perhaps not very much reflected in my coverage because the year would have been 1975 or '6, was my becoming involved in something then known as the Summer Program for Minority Journalists. I had become acquainted with Robert C. Maynard, until recently the owner and editor of

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the Oakland, California, Tribune—not then, at this time that I'm talking about, he was a reporter on the Washington Post, and has since become far and away the most important black journalist in the country—and his wife, Nancy Maynard, Nancy Hicks Maynard, whom I worked with in the New York Times bureau. And I had become acquainted with Bob through a different extracurricular activity, the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of Press, we were both on the board. And Bob was just starting the Summer Program for Minority Journalists, he and three others, at U.C. [University of California at] Berkeley, it having been thrown out by Columbia University when the Ford Foundation took away the funding in 1974, about a four-year-old program at that time, on the ground that there was no longer any problem about minorities—zap, no more Ford Foundation money. Thank you, Fred W. Friendly.

Clark: Really.

Shanahan: Yes, people think he's a good man because of the Edward R. Murrow affiliation. Some of us have a different view.

In any event, Maynard and three other people, John Dodson, then of Newsweek, who's black, Steve Montiel, with the AP, who's Chicano, and Walter Stovall, who's white, the first husband of—what's her name, on MacNeil/Lehrer?

Clark: Charlayne Hunter-Gault?

Shanahan: Charlayne Hunter-Gault—were the four who did this, decided that that program needed to be saved and found Berkeley as a place that would house it. It was a program to train entry-level minority journalists whose numbers were then too small to measure in newsrooms.

And Maynard asked me one time before the program was starting up that summer—the first year at Berkeley, having been at Columbia for about four years, possibly five, before they terminated it—if I would come out and do a lecture on the use of numbers in journalism, telling me something I hadn't been aware of, that blacks, like women, have been socialized to believe that they just don't have a head for math and thus are math anxious in very much the same way that most women are.

I discussed it with him and became very excited when I found out what the program was and how it was working with working journalists, as all the profs; it was housed at Berkeley. But aside from the fact that they gave us free rent and telephone service and so on, it didn't really have anything to do with Berkeley. There weren't any professors teaching—all honors to the dean of the journalism school at Berkeley for doing this, I might add! So it was decided that—well, there was no point in my coming for a day, I'd come for a week, which I did. And from then until the end of that program in '89, I taught in that program for two weeks every summer except, I think, three I missed.

And that's just been one of the wonderful things in my life. I just know all manner of minority journalists who taught with me and then, of course, the younger ones whom I taught, many of whom have had very good careers. I counted as four of the most euphoric weeks of my entire life when I taught with someone who had been a former student in the program, one of them a black woman named Wilma Randall who's on the Chicago Tribune where she wants to be—she's from Chicago—and the other, Mireya Navaro who's now on the New York Times, though she was then on the San Francisco Chronicle. Both of them had kept in touch with me over the years. But to be able to remember what they were like and how little they knew when they got out of that program and then listen to them talking to this year's students and to see what total professionals they were—you don't need a better high than that.

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But I really came to know [them] and through talking to them—the fellow faculty members, other journalists in particular—that program was so intense, to try and take somebody with no journalism background and turn them into an entry-level reporter in eleven weeks—

Clark: What was the plan for them afterwards? I mean, what happened to them?

Shanahan: Oh, well, the program found them jobs if they completed the course. And sometimes that was tough but basically we did. I didn't do that part of it—I shouldn't say "we," but the people that were running it did. There were people who worked throughout the whole eleven weeks on salaried leave. Abe Rosenthal would never give me leave with pay to do it, even for two weeks. I had to take vacation time. Subsequent employers did.

The fellow faculty members, it was so intense. I mean, we thought about nothing but those young people; they weren't all young, a few were older, but most were right out of college. You kind of thought about it twenty-three and a half hours of the day and talked, so the relationships with your fellow faculty members were so intense.

And it was in the course of that that I came to some understanding, much deeper than I'd ever had, of what it was to be black in America, though I will repeat, right this very minute, lest there be misunderstanding, something Senator Bill Bradley said on the floor of the Senate, summer a year ago after the Los Angeles riots. Pardon me, I am wrong. This was before the Los Angeles riots. He had made a series of speeches about "To Be Black in America" just before that, which got some retrospective publicity after the riot. And he, of course, was a famous college and professional basketball player and as such, lived in an almost entirely black community among his teammates. And in one of those several speeches he made, he talked about that, talked about being a minority, talked about living in a culture that you did not instinctively understand and had never fully understood, and wound up saying—this is almost a direct quote—"I learned what it is to be black in America and I learned that I will never really know what it is to be black in America."

Well, that's where I am, too. I know a lot. I know more than most people. But I will never really know, which doesn't relieve me of my obligation to try and do something about it, nor does my very sorrowful sense that a lot of that hatred is programmed into us by nature as a survival mechanism. This is a very controversial view that I hold.

Clark: What do you mean exactly?

Shanahan: Just that, that nature has programmed into us to hate and fear that tribe on the other side of the valley who's going to come steal your food, rape your women, those people that don't look like you. And that we just lay a thin layer of civilization over top of something that is profoundly instinctive, to hate that other tribe, to fear that other tribe. Again, as I say, that doesn't relieve me one bit of my obligation to do what I can to diminish that.

And we do see, we have seen in this country—I remember and you do, too, anybody who was alive at the time when the first civil rights legislation was going through the Congress and people said, "Well, you can't legislate attitudes." Well, maybe you can't but you can legislate that you have to work next to one of them and maybe if you worked next to one of them, you'll find out they're worried about their sick parents and their teenage kids and not any savings in case somebody gets really sick and there's no health insurance and proud of their kids—there's so much more we have in common than there are differences. You can't legislate changes in attitude but if you legislate contact, it has changed attitudes and we see that. Not enough. But it has changed.

Anyway, I have done a lot less in my reporting about racial issues because other people were doing them. I mostly did it as part of economics stories where I may have given it more emphasis than other reporters. So what I've done in that arena has been in my extracurricular activities. But I'm not—I tell two

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stories about myself and I don't remember whether I've told either of them, about unconscious sex bias. This is something I wouldn't feel today but it's a good story to tell on myself and I'll tell it. And the other's about race.

When I was pregnant with my first child, my sister was in med school here in Washington at George Washington University. And one night, just a few weeks before the baby was due, we went to a movie together, without John, just the two of us—and she wasn't married then. In the course of it, going or coming, I said something to her about—she had recommended an obstetrician for me. It was the great favorite of their visiting professors at med school where she was and he was truly wonderful, obviously really liked women.

And I said, "Well, you know, this baby's going to be born in a few weeks now, if you've got a recommendation for a pediatrician." And she said, "Oh, yes, I know two. Either of them are perfectly wonderful," either Dorothy somebody or Caroline somebody. And I'm thinking, "Oh, no. A woman. Oh, no, I have to have the very best." And the thought passed in an instant and I'm ashamed of myself. Here I am, sitting and talking with my sister who's going to be a doctor and I'm so proud of her.

As I say, it passed. But it's good for me to remember that I had that instant. And I have liked telling that story to people who aren't where I think they ought to be on the issue of women, to say, "Hey, I'm not telling you I was always perfect. I'm not telling you I never ingested any of these societal biases. Here, let me tell you what I did. Let me tell you what I thought." And I think sometimes that it helped me get across bridges with people who weren't ready to hear what I think about women's equality.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Shanahan: The other thing about being unaware of race—and of course, there are a million stories about that. I was going to tell you one. I may tell you two.

Many states—they did at that time and I guess still do—have commissions on the status of women, which for the most part didn't matter a damn, I don't think, until about '72 or '73, somewhere in there. Again, it's all part of a movement and they suddenly became more important.

There was a convention of members of commissions on the status of women in Philadelphia sometime during the middle '70s. And I happened to ride back on the train from Philadelphia with the woman who was the head of the Washington, D.C. commission of women, a doctor, named Dr. Dorothy Ferrabee. And we sat together and talked, the two, two-and-a-half hour trip back from Philadelphia. She found out that I had grown up in Washington and asked me where and I told her the neighborhoods I most—we moved around a lot but where I mostly had lived.

And she said, "Oh, you remember the Jefferson playground." Oh, she had worked in a settlement house which was just a few blocks from one of the houses we had lived in. "Do you remember the Jefferson playground?" And I said, "Oh, sure. I mean, you could almost say I grew up on the Jefferson playground." And she said, "What do you remember about it?" And I remembered the swings and the slides and the monkey bars and all those standard playground kind of things. And she said, "Do you remember the fence around it?" And I said, "Oh, yes, sure. There was a fence around it." [Tape interruption.]

Shanahan: And she said, "Do you remember the policeman that was there?" And I said, "Oh, yes, Officer Horgan. I even remember his name." And she said, "Why was he there?" And replying with the only thing I ever saw him do, I said, "Well, to keep the boys from climbing the fence." And very gently and quietly she said to me, "No, it was to keep the colored children out."

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And with all I had thought about race in all those years, I had never thought back and focused on that simple fact, though I'd gone to segregated schools and all that. So people say things like, well, they didn't realize how bad it was. Well, okay, I can relate to that. End of that story.

Clark: You said you had another story.

Shanahan: Oh, yes. Again, again just we're all racists. And it may be the beginning of wisdom to know that. And maybe it's the beginning of wisdom to know we're all sexists, too, in some respects, although I don't think that's as deep for a lot of reasons because we live with the other sex. We don't live with the other race. We don't understand that there's so much more that unites us than separates us.

But one of the summers when I was teaching in the Berkeley summer program, a party was being held at the—Berkeley, of course, is on the same side, the east side of San Francisco Bay, as is Oakland. And there was a party being held at the boat house at Lake Merritt in Oakland. It's an artificial lake, a huge one, in the middle of Oakland. And I had driven over there by myself to the party and found Lake Merritt, which you could hardly miss, but couldn't find the boat house and had driven all the way around the lake. It was sort of dusk and I couldn't see anything that looked like a boat house to me, until finally I saw something down there someplace from the road and got out of the car to look and see if it looked like maybe that was the boat house.

And a couple of black kids on bikes came by and I thought, "Well, I'll ask these kids if that's the boat house," and then I suddenly thought, "Oh, no, I better not." Fifteen years old, sixteen-year-old kids. Before they got that close, because they were a block away or so when I spied them, I thought, "Eileen, for God's sake, here you are, out here, giving up your vacation to teach young people to be mainstream journalists so that journalism will change and hopefully the country will change on race and you're scared to talk to, at dusk, two black kids on bicycles, afraid they might do something to you."

So I asked them and they politely said, "Yes, ma'am, that is the boat house." And that was that. But I had had that instinctive racist response. And it's good to remember, that is in all of us. What I would do now is take a more careful look at them. But the burden of proof would be on their appearance to convince me that it was safe.

So there's still—I'm not judging fairly. So, it's a long hard climb. That's all. End of story.

Clark: Who were the people in the women's movement, in the National Women's Political Caucus and NOW who were sensitive to the race issue and who were some of the ones who weren't?

Shanahan: Gloria Steinem certainly stands out and so does Bella, who were sensitive to the race issue right from day one. In NOW, of course, a woman I subsequently became friends with, Aileen Hernandez, is black. She was, I think if I am not mistaken, a member of the first EEOC. And she was a president of NOW, about the second or third president of NOW. So there were always some black women in NOW.

I don't know. Gloria certainly stands out and so does Bella, as always having an eye on both race and sex. I don't especially remember others in that regard. It was a semi-non-issue. Black women were welcomed right from the beginning in that first vote. There was a real effort to recruit. I remember going to some things I never wrote about. I went to the founding meeting of the Maryland Women's Political Caucus in Baltimore. And the woman who was—the convener, I guess, at that meeting was—I mean, "ignorant" is a mild word. I mean, she said, "Oh, it's so nice. It's the first time I've ever met any black women"—or probably said "Negro" at that time—"any Negro women who weren't servants." And you know, you sit there and you flinch, just as you're flinching as you listen to me. This is a different question. I also went to the founding meeting of the Virginia Women's Political Caucus, which had quite a number of black women there and nobody said anything that bad, that I heard, anyway.

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What I remember about the Virginia meeting was—during the break, the meeting went later than they expected and a lot of these women had told their husbands lies about where they were going or else had said, "I'll be home in time to cook your dinner, honey." And the meeting was running late.

And I remember hearing a bunch of them swapping stories about what they told their husbands. And a number of them had said, "I'm going to see my sister," and called their sister and said, you know, "If Charlie calls, tell him I'm there, I just left, or whatever." And one of them talking about how she cooked his favorite dinner so that it just needed warming up. She told him the truth about where she was going.

And I remember realizing that the national women whom I had seen at the Washington meeting had not felt the need to do that. Virginia's just—you know, it's backward compared to some other parts of the country. And they had felt the need to do that. That particular meeting—I remember that Virginia meeting where the issue came up about the draft and quite a good debate about whether they should—was it the draft or the war? Maybe it was the war in Vietnam, whether they should pass a resolution denouncing it, and the issue was not for or against the war, the issue was: Is this our business or not? The narrow versus the broader definition of what the Women's Political Caucus should be about. And I don't remember for sure but I think the broader definition won, as it generally did in those debates.

Clark: Sometime in this general period, also, AT&T was successfully sued for $15 million in back money to not only women but women and minorities and set the standard for an affirmative action program. What kind of impact do you think that had on women who were beginning to engage in sex discrimination lawsuits?

Shanahan: I think it had some. And there were a number that followed, the United Airlines suit which went to the Supreme Court. Of course, AT&T settled without trial, partly because some very tough young lawyers, male and female, at the EEOC, had really constructed an airtight case. It had some effect but not as much as I certainly hoped at the time. There were efforts to—well, there were some terrible ones. There was a case against Sears which Sears fought and the women lost. I believe the judge was just plain wrong. And I don't know why, whether—of course, that was the case where a guy who'd been a famous civil rights lawyer, what was his name? A good friend of a lot of my Southern white male journalist friends, Charles Morgan had represented Sears in this case, taking the side against women. He subsequently got funny on race, too.

That never went as far as I hoped it might. A lot of it, of course, was that businesses saw the handwriting on the wall. That's not the right metaphor. They saw the federal gun at their heads. And then, of course, what's happened, what happened—not in the Nixon years but in the Reagan and Bush years, is that there wasn't any federal gun at anybody's head and a lot of things either went backwards or at best stood still. Now, with Clinton in the White House, whether we are going to see now a revitalization of anti-discrimination enforcement, I don't know. At least, I hope there won't be too many more backward moves. The Supreme Court appointments will make a difference on that, slowly, very slowly.

I'm trying to think about the salary discrimination lawsuits. I think there was a lot of voluntary compliance that was probably seldom as great as it should have been. [Tape interruption.]

Clark: You did some really nice in-depth comparison stories in '73 on comparing NOW and the National Women's Caucus.

Shanahan: National Women's Political Caucus.

Clark: Political Caucus, yes.

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Shanahan: Well, yes, "political" is important there because that's what they were. What they were after was enhanced political power for women, although both got beyond—the caucus certainly got beyond the basic of more women in public office and stood for a whole lot of things in terms of things that affected women's lives. But they were mostly things that were resolvable or not within the political framework, that they were within the power of government to grant or deny, like credit regulations, equality in credit and so on.

NOW, although I'm not sure its founders or those who are in it would agree with me, as I looked at the membership, they were more corporate women. And while there was always overlap, of course, I think a lot of the differences between the two—I don't think I ever felt much personal affection for any of the top people in NOW.

Corporate women have tougher lives than women in politics. They were inside those hierarchial structure where they were being bossed by people who probably weren't half as capable as they were much of the time. There was a level of anger in the NOW women because of that. You can understand why they were so angry compared to the political women who were having a hell of a time getting in but once they got in—and they were certainly ridiculed on the floor of their legislatures, there are a zillion stories about that—but it wasn't the day after day after day after day being ground down, being held back, being bossed by incompetents or, in any event, people that you felt had no inherent right by capability to be your boss, that the corporate women suffered.

As a result, there was a tremendous amount of anger among the NOW women and a kind of a lack of the ebullience that I saw in the Caucus women that made NOW conventions, for the most part, something not pleasant to cover. I remember one convention in the late seventies, it was in Philadelphia, when the press women finally after two and a half days of listening to these women zap each other—it was a year that had an election of the NOW president, a contested election, and they were saying horrible, ugly things about each other. We decided to go somewhere far away from the convention hotel and have dinner, and the first person who mentioned a word about that convention would be sent from the table. [Laughter.]

Actually, I had a nephew who was at the University of Pennsylvania at that time. And I called him up for advice on some kind of neighborhoody restaurant that would have a big table ten or twelve people could sit at near the university and he gave me such an idea and that's where we went and we didn't get into it. We just didn't discuss that convention at all. We were sick of it. We were sick of that poisoned atmosphere, the hatred, the anger, the point being—I'm not making my point very well—the misplaced anger. It was absolutely misplaced. They shouldn't have been that mad at each other. They were mad at something else and they were taking it out on who was handy.

Clark: What were some of the issues that they were taking it out over?

Shanahan: I don't even remember. I just remember the anger. And maybe the issues weren't something that I could describe even if I did remember. It was all kind of personal about who stood for what and why she would or would not be a good next president of NOW. That was the worst NOW convention I covered but they were headed that way for a long time. And I don't know what it's like now because I have not been to any kind of a NOW since, I guess, '76. Too bad.

But I saw that later in life when I went out to Pittsburgh, a very corporate town and a very backward city in a lot of ways, where there were women who were said to have high executive positions in various companies and when you looked at it, they didn't really have the power that should have gone with their titles.

There were a lot of things about NOW. There were certainly fewer lesbians, both out and not out, in the Caucus. I've never believed people who said X, Y and Z percent of the NOW members were lesbians. I suspect it was somewhere whatever the national average is is probably what it was. But there were a lot of

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very, very angry lesbians in NOW who just had an extra layer of things to be angry about. It was useful to me to see them and to see their—I mean the faces.

I remember in particular—I can't tell you whether this was NOW or the Caucus—I remember an occasion there were two older women who were lesbians and good friends, maybe even companions, I forget that detail, who were so angry, it just came out of them at everything, all the time, and the way that level of anger had just kind of distorted their faces, even in repose.

And whether it was Caucus or NOW, that was the first time I ever met Elaine Noble, who is a lesbian, a young woman maybe twenty-seven, something like that at the time I'm speaking of, and was just running for the Massachusetts legislature as an out lesbian and whom I had some dealings with because I talked to her because it was a story, that she was the first acknowledged lesbian. She was elected and served several terms and then had some appointive office in Massachusetts. She was the first acknowledged lesbian to run for any state legislature anywhere. So it was a news story and I had some long conversations with her and liked her enormously. And she was a very pretty young woman, too.

And I remember it so well because it was the first time that what being an outcast in society because of sexual orientation, hidden or open, that I had really understood in my heart a bit what that would be like. I think I'd understood it in my head for a long time. But I remember coming home from that meeting and saying to myself, "I want the world to change because I don't want Elaine Noble to look like that when she's fifty-five years old." End of story. That's all. That's all I have to say about that.

Clark: Okay. We're still talking about the clips. We're talking about the story that you were actually pulled off of in 1976.

Shanahan: Yes. That's a sad story that really I fear demonstrates that, despite everything I'd done about covering women in politics, covering it well, thoroughly, without bias, developed all the sources, what-have-you, that I was still—neither I nor the story was appreciated. It had to do with the '76 Democratic convention which Jimmy Carter went into all but assured of the nomination. Something dramatic would have had to happen to deny him the nomination. It was pretty clear he would be the nominee.

The women in the Democratic party—many of whom had labored long in the Democratic vineyard, some of whom were kind of feminist newcomers to the party, but most of them were old Democratic hands—wanted a commitment that the next convention, the 1980 convention would be fifty-fifty, half women delegates, not women relegated to alternate. That was their big demand. I was not assigned to cover the convention. When the assignments went up, I spoke to the editor about it, the Washington bureau chief—because I knew this was going to happen, I thought it was going to be a real fight or real effort to avoid a fight that would be some serious negotiation. No, he had the list and the budget was tight or something, and he didn't have another slot to fill. I couldn't go.

Linda Charlton, who was a great feature writer, had been assigned to go. And as it turned out, Queen Elizabeth was in the country and she covered Queen Elizabeth's visit. And as it turned out, Queen Elizabeth didn't leave until the Democratic convention was—or the events leading up to it were a couple of days old. So there were several days, three, in which they really needed that story covered because it turned out to be almost the only controversy at the convention. So I was sent up for those several days to cover it until Linda got rid of the queen and could come in and take over.

And it was quite a story. It was the only real, genuine news story, as opposed to just the formal stuff at that convention. And I for three days, with all my good sources—I mean, I covered what was happening before people's eyes but I also knew what the strategy was and what the fall-back position of the women were and what the fall-back positions on the other side were and could see it day by day moving toward a compromise but not there yet. Basically, they got a commitment out of Carter that all the committees would be fifty-fifty—

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also quite a striking commitment from him, which he pretty well lived up to as president, about the women he would appoint and so on.

But for reasons I never understood, he felt unable to commit—it probably was a matter of states' rights since the states were the ones that controlled who the convention delegates would be and how they would be selected—and as we know, in some cases they're selected by primaries and in others by various kinds of party caucuses. He probably had some feeling that he just couldn't give that kind of an order.

In any event, I covered it for three days and had stories that ran at length detailing the whole negotiation and so on. And then the Queen left and Linda was on her way to New York and I was told to come back to Washington. And I protested and said, you know, "No knock to Linda, she's wonderful, but I know the sources, the sources know me. And in a big stewpot full of people that any convention is, the simple fact that people recognize you when they see you walking down a corridor is useful."

Clark: That's normally how they assign people to stories, right?

Shanahan: To some degree, yes. That if you are known, people will say, "Hey, did you hear?" As well as the fact that the women's movement knew me and trusted me as a fair reporter and they didn't know Linda because she never covered any part of it. And I first protested to Rick Smith, the Washington bureau chief—incoming Washington bureau chief. And when he said no, he just couldn't do it, I asked his permission to go over his head and protest to Abe Rosenthal. And he said, "Sure. Talk to Abe."

Well, Abe was—brusque isn't the word for it. And of course, you've got to remember that the lawsuit was already underway at this time and I had already signed on as an additional named plaintiff. And I didn't really know until much later just how enraged with me Abe Rosenthal was because of that. I was just arguing this on its merits, you know. Why take the reporter that knows all the sources off the story and knows all the background and all the history? But Abe was quite brusque with me.

I learned much later that the reason they couldn't let me stay as a person one over the quota number of people they had established to cover the convention was that the number two guy in the bureau, Bill Kovach—his great buddy in the bureau whose name escapes me at the moment [Nick Horrack] had pitched a fit about not being on the convention coverage and had been assured by Bill that if they ever got a chance to add one person, he would be it. And that was the reason why they were absolutely unyielding about letting me stay to do it.

When Linda got into town, I did the right thing. I sat down with her and briefed her and gave her names, a list of who was staying at whose hotel so she could reach the relevant people. And I was sitting there feeling very noble—and crying. The only time I ever cried in public on the job. But I did the right thing for which I don't believe I ever got a dime's worth of credit. I could have just gotten on a train and said, "Screw 'em all," and gone back and let Linda sink or swim on her own. She was a good enough reporter so she wouldn't have totally screwed up, by any means. But I did the right thing and I would be very surprised if any of the male managers at the New York Times ever even noticed that fact.

It was very discouraging. I had already been looking to leave the New York Times because it was clear to me that as a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, they were, in the words that our lawyer Harriet Rabb used to me when I signed on, "They will retaliate in every way just short of anything that I could prove in court is illegal," because the law has some provisions against retaliation.

Clark: Do you feel that this was a retaliation to your signing up as a plaintiff?

Shanahan: No, I don't, actually. I think the reason that I was subsequently told that Bill Kovach had promised that if there was one more person added to the convention team, Horrack would be it.

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Clark: Did that kind of sort of buddy system exist in New York as much as it did in Washington, do you think?

Shanahan: Oh, I think New York was worse.

Clark: Worse?

Shanahan: Yes. Washington, for all that can be wrong with a meritocracy—and there are things wrong with a meritocracy—was fairly much a meritocracy. And this was not always—I have a lot of respect for Kovach as a journalist—he's now the head of the Nieman Foundation—a first-class journalist and a first-class editor, no two ways about that. But boy, was he terrible about women—was and is. I mean, I've heard stories since he's been at the Nieman Foundation of how, for example, when Eastern Europe was breaking out from under communist control, he assembled a group of what my friend Peg Simpson calls the "mega-white boys"—the very top editors, like Rosenthal and Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post—to go to Eastern Europe, and not a woman in the group. And she and some others protested and they added one or two. But that bias is still there.

The worst Kovach story was when Wilbur Mills, the powerful chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, often considered the most powerful man in the House or certainly second only to the Speaker, got involved with this stripper. You may remember the story. And they were arrested somewhere and it turned out he was an alcoholic and she was apparently on—they had some drugs and she dived into the Reflecting Pool, probably to ditch some drugs. So anyway, it was the end of his career.

The day after it all happened and we got the police records and the story came out, Kovach, who was the number two guy in the Times Washington bureau, on the news desk, the day-to-day operating chief, assigned a guy in the bureau who'd never been in the same room with Wilbur Mills, I don't think, to do kind of an assessment of Wilbur Mills' career in Congress. I was sitting right there. And I found out about it when this guy came over to me and very nicely—he was fairly new in the bureau—and said, "Oh, I've got this job but gosh, I don't know anything about Wilbur Mills. Can you help me?" And then again I did the right thing. I don't remember what I did specifically. I probably told him who to call and gave him some of my own history out of my head and why he became so powerful and how he used his power and so on.

I was beside myself. And I did give myself a couple days to cool off because I was afraid I'd either curse and swear, or else cry which is even worse. But I made up my mind I was going to ask Kovach about it. Why wasn't I assigned to that story? It should have been either me or Maggie Hunter, because Maggie Hunter had covered the House for all those years. And I knew him as the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. She knew more of his impact in the whole House. And either one of us would have been the right person to do the story. But not the guy they assigned it to.

So I went in and asked Kovach a couple of days later, "Why wasn't I assigned to that story?" He said, "Well, you weren't here." I said, "Yes, I was. I was sitting there all afternoon. I wrote one crumby, little four-hundred-word piece for the financial page all day and did the reporting by telephone. I never left the office all day." "Well, you weren't here. When I looked around for who to do the story, you weren't here." And I said, "Well, what time would that have been, roughly?" And he told me. And I said, "I don't think I even got up to go to the john for three minutes during that period."

That was one of my few experiences with being invisible which you've heard many, many women talk about. I was not usually invisible, partly because I was never inaudible. [Laughter.]

Clark: That's really so interesting to think about just the comment you made about you've heard a lot of other women describe themselves that way. And it's true. We all have—and I wonder, your career had been so stellar up until this point, you know, really.

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What was the sense about yourself that you had as yourself as a woman? Did you see yourself as an incredibly fortunate woman or especially talented woman? Or did you see yourself—how were you typical or how were you atypical, say, of the woman who felt invisible in society?

Shanahan: I didn't generically feel invisible. This was one of the few times in my life—the only really dramatic time in my entire life that I felt invisible was when he did not assign me the assessment of Wilbur Mills' career. I subsequently got a piece in the paper, a news analysis, having thought through another way of getting at it so it was fresh. I remember Flora Lewis wrote me a note about it, saying, "Boy, I never understood before how Wilbur Mills got his power and thank you for that great piece." I never even had met Flora at that time. She was in Paris then.

Basically, I always had a sense of myself as a smart person—and not a smart girl or a smart woman, a smart person—thanks to my father, I guess. Hey, you can do anything. You're smart. Do it. Work at it. You can do it. And while I had had various setbacks in my career and had wanted to be an editor and was almost literally scoffed at when I asked for various editing jobs—I worked for years and years and years at the New York Times just sort of so grateful that they let me work for them, let me work for the great New York Times—I never quite forgot that I wanted to be an editor but I certainly didn't think about it much or say anything much to anybody for years.

And then I did try—there was a job on the news desk that came open. Tom Wicker was bureau chief by then. And I went in and applied for it. Now, there was an earlier time, too, because I remember Reston—

Clark: I thought I saw—yes, in these deposition materials you gave me, there was an exchange with Reston—

Shanahan: Yes, that's right, because I remember he called me "Honey," which I didn't object to the way some people do. But, "Aw, Honey, the job you have now is so much better than that number three job on the desk." "Well, I don't care. I want to be an editor." Ever since I was editor of my college paper and was able to see the fun of having a staff at your disposal, to execute more of your ideas than you could ever execute just being yourself. That to me is the lure of being a boss. It's not power per se. It's what you can do with it and enlarge the scope of your own ability through other people, the range of what can be done. And that appeals to me to this day.

Clark: Did Reston explicitly tell you that a woman wouldn't be the editor?

Shanahan: No, that was Wicker that I made tell me that. Reston I think I was just over and said I wanted it. And "Well, no." But Wicker, when I went in and applied for—this was a subsequent vacancy on the news desk. And he again tried to say, "Oh, you don't want that job." And upon being pushed by me, I remember his saying, "Well, we're just not ready for that around here." And I said, "Not ready for what?" And he said—mad, he was furious with me—"Well, you know." "No, I don't know," I said. And I made him say it. I made him say it. "The New York Times is not ready for a woman."

That job didn't really have that much authority. But the Democratic convention thing was the final sort of disheartening thing to me. I was already aware of certain things that had happened because, I'm sure, of being becoming a named plaintiff in the women's suit. I was no longer allowed to do news analyses.

Clark: Really? That's interesting.

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Shanahan: I figured that out. Nobody ever told me that. I was one of the first three or four—it was considered a great honor to be permitted to do news analyses and not just be the invisible reporter reporting, you know, body-less facts but allowed to do interpretation—not opinion, not an editorial, but news analysis to interpret this means such and such. Not is it right or wrong, good or bad, which side you should be on. That's an editorial. But to explain more what it means and so on, how it came about, what the likely consequences are.

By now, all of journalism has moved more towards the news analysis kind of piece, rather than just spot news. But at that time, that movement hadn't started that much yet. It had started but it was not widespread or frequent. Reston was the first person, not surprisingly, who was allowed to do news analyses. And of course, he was a man of monumental stature, not only at the Times but in the business—and in the nation, to some extent. And subsequently I think the second one was Edwin Dale, my sidekick and senior on the economics beat, in large measure because somebody understood that economic news just reported as straight factual news was too hard for most people to understand, that you needed the interpretation so that people could understand it better.

In any event, whatever the sequence was, I was one of the first maybe four or five ever allowed to do it. And I did them quite consistently, was one of the major producers of news analyses, which were known as Q-heads. Every type of headline on the Times had a letter. That typical one-column headline was called an A-head. And there was a B-head and a C-head and so forth—called a Q-head.

And not immediately after I signed on as the seventh named plaintiff in the suit, having been asked to do so—

Clark: Sometime in—

Shanahan: '75, I guess? But not so very long thereafter, I'm making proposals for Q-heads, I'm being told, "No, we don't want that," which was unheard of. I always was a reporter who knew my beat and I also knew when an interpretive piece was called for and I don't think before the lawsuit I was ever turned down to do one I proposed. You don't do it every day. You do it when you perceive the need.

And those turndowns became so persistent that I decided to test something. I thought maybe there were orders out that I shouldn't be allowed to do Q-heads, I had dishonored the paper or something by joining in the suit. I used to do them both for the financial page and for the main news section. I figured if there was an order, somebody would be smart enough not to tell too many people, to say, "Now, don't tell anybody else," because this is illegal retaliation.

So one time when the financial editor was on vacation, I thought, "Well, I'll try and see if I can get a Q-head into the financial section. Maybe the acting financial editor doesn't know I'm not supposed to do them." And I did indeed while he was on vacation get two in. And you will see that those are the only two Q-heads I got in the paper the last year I was there.

Clark: And who was the man on vacation?

Shanahan: Tom Mullaney.

Clark: Tom Mullaney.

Shanahan: So, that's it. You know, the thing that was so sad about the lawsuit was the fact that we knew before we started and found out a hell of a lot more later that this great institution discriminated. And the reason the lawsuit was important was that it told the whole world this great institution discriminated. And that's why Times management was so lucky that the papers were on strike during the period, before and after the settlement,

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even though we did get some network coverage. But if there had been a New York Times printing, however distorted the story, incomplete, I think there would have been more network coverage. I think the network affiliate stations—I know the network affiliate stations in New York covered the story, the settlement, for example. But I don't believe it went out on the network news. And I think it would have if the Times had been published. So that's the way it goes.

Clark: Okay. Shall we shut down for today? Do we have time?

Shanahan: Well, we have about twenty minutes but I'm wondering what we should do.