And I offer some lessons learned from 37 years at this newspaper.
 | | David Smoler |
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This is a newsletter I never imagined I would send, at least not until I was old and gray. But I'm leaving The New York Times, after 37 years, to run for governor of Oregon, and so this is my last newsletter. |
All this is the topic of my farewell column in The Times today. I hope you'll read it and share it. I offer some lessons learned from 37 years at this newspaper — more hopeful ones than you might think, given the grim topics I covered — but also explain why I feel impelled to leave. |
To paraphrase Shakespeare, it's not that I loved The Times less but that I loved Oregon more. I exist only because Oregon welcomed my dad as an Armenian refugee from Eastern Europe in 1952, and it then afforded him (and his son) a great education and great opportunity. Yet that opportunity is fraying. My hometown, Yamhill, Ore., went through the wringer when good jobs left and then meth arrived, and more than a quarter of the kids on my old No. 6 school bus are now gone from drugs, alcohol and suicide. And there are No. 6 buses like that all over the state, plus problems with homelessness, education and more. I know we can do better. |
Back in June, I told my editor that I was thinking of a political run, and we agreed that to avoid any perceived conflict of interest, I would take a leave. When I decided to make the run, I formally resigned from The Times, which put out this lovely statement. |
I don't want anybody to think that I had the slightest discontent with The Times. I deeply admire the paper's leaders, as well as my former Times colleagues, and I benefited enormously from their guidance — including their periodic efforts to rescue me from myself. My new political team has wondered sometimes what silly things I have written over the past 37 years that will give fuel to my opponents (I'm hoping my rivals go broke hiring an oppo research firm to read all those columns!), but the truth is that great editors over the decades have repeatedly saved me. And The Times was always willing to lose money and accept risks when I wanted to travel to dangerous parts of Yemen or South Sudan or Myanmar. For a time in Iraq, it cost $10,000 each time any of us drove in from the Baghdad airport to the Times bureau, because of the security escort to prevent kidnapping or assassination, but the company always did what was necessary to keep us safe and get the story. I've been lucky to be a part of the greatest paper in the world. |
Forgive the sentimentality, but I also want to say: I have the best readers! I have been deeply moved by how often readers have contributed to causes and people I've written about. In particular, readers donated $21 million over a little more than a year to the charities I named in my giving guides — and that's a huge number of lives changed. I went into journalism to try to make a difference, and I think that together you and I did just that. |
For the rest of my life, I'll be sharing great stories about amazing people and scary times. The plane crash in Congo. Arrests in more countries than I can count for committing journalism, including detention in Darfur in a cell decorated with a mural of a man being impaled. Interrogation in Iran. The massacre at Tiananmen. The illiterate surgeon in Ethiopia. The king of Tonga. The nuns in Swaziland. The child head of household in Zimbabwe. And so on and so on. Thanks for joining me on this journey. |
There's unfinished business, of course. I wish I could have been in Kabul when the government fell and the Taliban took over. And I've written repeatedly about the case of a Black man named Kevin Cooper who is on death row in California for the murder of a white family: I believe he was framed by the sheriff's office, and I believe that an open investigation, which was prompted by my reporting, will clear him soon and he will be released after 38 years. I'd love to be able to stand with my reporter's notebook outside San Quentin and cover his release. |
While I'm giving up my column and this newsletter, I will still write occasional pieces for this newspaper and others. |
It's hard to give up a job I loved, and readers I cherished. But as the great philosopher Winnie the Pooh observed: "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard." It's time: Today I feel a calling to try to address problems in my beloved home state, so off I go. Do read my final column, and farewell! |
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