By David K. Shipler
The phone
at Ed Walsh’s Jerusalem home rang during a small dinner party one evening in
the early 1980s. He was the Washington Post’s bureau chief, but the call was
for me. In those pre-cell phone days, I made it a practice to let the New York
Times Foreign Desk know where I’d be and how to reach me.
Ed said I
could take it in his office, which was near enough to the dining room that the
guests could hear my end of the conversation. An editor in New York wanted me
to expand on a short piece I’d done on a small and insignificant event. They
were considering it for the front page.
No, I said,
please don’t. It will send readers the wrong message. It will inflate the
importance of a minor incident. I no longer remember exactly what it was:
perhaps a cabinet minister threatening to resign from the governing coalition,
which always got New York excited although it was the Israelis’ routine method
of conducting politics. Or, it might have been the time when a couple of
Palestinian would-be terrorists crossed the well-patrolled border from Jordan
into the West Bank, prompting a manhunt by the Israeli army, which caught them
before they launched an attack. In any case, it needed to be reported but certainly
didn’t rise to the level of major news, and I managed to talk the editor down
from the height of what would have been embarrassing hype.
I returned
to the table to see quizzical looks from a couple who were not journalists.
Five minutes later, the phone rang again. This time it was for Ed, and we could
hear him in the same conversation, working to dissuade his editor in Washington
from overplaying the story. When he came back, one of the non-journalists laughed
in amazement: I thought you guys were always pushing to get ONTO page one, and
here you were trying to stay OFF!
