CURRENTS
History: A Reporter Remembered
In the historical plaque department, reporters get little respect. When local kids take off for the big time, hometowns incline to forget them.
Hawley, Pennsylvania, however, is proud of its journalist son. On July 6, as part of the 175th anniversary of its naming, this town of 1,500 will place a plate on 824 Church Street, where Homer Bigart grew up. Bigart began his career as a copyboy at the New York Herald Tribune in 1927 and earned two Pulitzers there — for war correspondence in World War II and in Korea — as well as the first George Polk Award, before moving to The New York Times in 1955. For thirty years there was virtually no war, from Gaza to Tegucigalpa, that he did not see.
Bigart was admired in newspaper circles and his influence is wide for someone who wrote only for newsprint. Malcolm Browne, David Halberstam, and Neil Sheehan, who came to fame as young reporters in Vietnam, acknowledge that they struggled to follow his example of skepticism and persistence. Reporters love to look like experts, but Bigart was never reluctant to keep asking questions.
As it happens, twelve years after his death, a letter from Germany that arrived this spring gives some hint of why Bigart’s colleagues honored him. In 1961, when he was sent to the trial of the war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Bigart carried a note from his family’s lawyer in Hawley introducing him to Dr. Robert Servatius, Eichmann’s counsel. It won him a coveted interview. Eugene E. Glantz, a member of the Hawley Anniversary Committee, wrote Germany to pursue this old link.
He got a response from Dieter Wechtenbruch, who had assisted Servatius in the trial that the world was watching so many years ago. Wechtenbruch noted, among other things, that Bigart, instead of asking why Servatius “was defending a mass murderer — as most journalists did” — wanted to discuss subtle details of legal strategy. It was easy to compare Bigart with other journalists, Wechtenbruch wrote, saying the differences might explain his own esteem “for a man who was true and just, severe without being offensive and friendly without being condescending.”
“It is true,” the German lawyer wrote, “that young men sometimes in their lives meet older men who show them the right way. Homer Bigart is certainly one of the few I met.”
In the memorial department, this is probably better than a plaque.
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