Hedrick Smith, Briefly

Hedrick Smith, an accomplished journalist for The New York Times and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of the Soviet Union and the Pentagon Papers, came to Exeter this past Tuesday. Smith is the author of numerous successful books on politics, including Who Stole the American Dream?, the subject of his assembly talk. He has created over 20 PBS specials and received an Emmy Award for his program The Wall Street Fix.Smith engaged with students in an open Q&A session over lunch. Below are his responses to a selection of questions asked by students.Mr. Smith on his involvement in journalism...I got involved in my student newspaper when I went to Choate, and my senior year I worked for my hometown paper. While I was in Choate, I read the autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, who was very much involved in the progress movement, trying to generate better government in America, and I also read the autobiography of William Allen Hoyte... Somehow, [their lives] just excited me, I thought they were digging up stories and that the stories had a real impact on the way society worked. Sixty-five years later and I’m still talking about the same things, so there must have been something that resonated.Mr. Smith on the relationship between the government and the “common people”...We need to reconnect with our government; our government needs to reconnect with us. There’s an enormous gulf today and people don’t feel connected… People feel really resentful. Washington’s up there and it’s run by folks with lots of money—they don’t care about folks like us, but getting involved at this grass roots level is important. I feel like first of all, we should do that. I believe we should require all campaign spending to be disclosed. We should know who is spending money. There is more and more covert funding in political campaigns not going to candidates, but going to what are called independent groups that are supposedly involved in issues, but are just as phony as a three-dollar bill.Mr. Smith on government surveillance and leakers...We have a serious problem… What’s happened with the National Security Agency is that they have begun to collect masses of data on cell phones, all of our emails, and they put it in a huge electronic warehouse. Then they search it to find out who is in touch with whom. I’m okay with that if one of [these people] is someone they have reason to suspect is a terrorist… But what they’ve done is they’ve collected this information in general and they just have it there... so they can have mass enormous amounts of data on any individual they want. What Snowden [said] is the public doesn’t know this, so he said ‘I have to go public’... Did he violate the law? Did he break his contract? Absolutely… [But] I believe that, as an enterprise, it was the proper thing to do.Smith on the biggest challenge facing America today...We are two countries, divided by money and divided by power. One of the greatest threats to any civilization is deep internal divisions… We are not responding well to this challenge; this is a challenge from within. We are interconnected—there is no way part of America can walk away from the rest of America, but we are sort of acting as if that can happen. If we don’t deal with that effectively, we are going down as a civilization..