Carl Hartman, 89, retired this summer after a 62-year career at the Associated Press that made him the AP’s longest-serving newsman. Hartman reported from bureaus across Europe for the wire service before moving to its Washington bureau in 1978, where he covered economics and then arts and culture. Hartman first worked in journalism for his father’s short-lived daily newspaper, the Washington Sun, in the early 1930s, and was later a copy boy for the New York Daily News (making $19 a week) and an editor for the Puerto Rico World Journal before he joined the AP in 1944.
Edward B. Colby: You just wrapped up a journalism career that began in the 1930s. How did you manage to stay at it that long?
Carl Hartman: Well, I realized pretty early that I was not going to write the great American novel. So the next best thing, the biggest audience you can get for whatever you have to say, is the Associated Press. In two words, it’s just sheer vanity.
EBC: Why retire now?
CH: Well, things are different from 62 years ago. It seems to me I see too many references to the “news business.” Of course, under our entrepreneurial system, getting out the news has got to be a business too. But I’d be happier to see more references to Thomas Jefferson’s opinion that he’d rather see newspapers without government than government without newspapers. I wish I’d spent more time and energy fighting for the idea of journalism as an essential tool of free government, and not just a business where the main object is to supply the customers with what he or she wants.
EBC: During your AP career you reported from New York, Madrid, Paris, Budapest, Berlin, Bonn, Brussels and, since 1978, from Washington, D.C. Which was your best job?
CH: Well, the job I remember now with most pleasure was Budapest. That was in the late 1950s, and the country was [under] a Communist government. There’d just been an uprising that the Russians had come in and suppressed. The job gave me the opportunity to write several stories pointing out that the government was making a big fuss about holding an election. But there was only one party on the ballot. Now those stories may not have had much play, but it was enough to get me thrown out of the country, which in retrospect I enjoyed.
EBC: In retrospect, what did you enjoy about getting thrown out of Hungary?
CH: Well, I felt that I’d gotten across a point. And the point was that you can have something you call an election, but if you’ve only got one party, it’s not what we think of as a decent and honest way to run a government.
EBC: Looking back over the 20,000 AP stories you wrote, which ones stand out in your mind now? Can you tell us about some of the unique characters you met, or dicey situations you encountered in your reporting?
CH: Well, I guess the most important — but certainly not very spectacular — was the development of what we now call Europe, which had various names, including the European Coal and Steel Community, and the European Community, and may someday be, although people don’t talk about it much now, a United States of Europe. And I was in not exactly on the beginning but on the early development of it, and it was a highly interesting and significant period, I think.
EBC: Newsday and the Baltimore Sun recently announced that they will be closing the last of their foreign bureaus. The two papers will still get coverage from the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune, but, as a Times columnist wrote, “with each such reduction American journalism loses more of the redundancy that helps keep it honest and the multiplicity of perspectives that helps keep it fair.” How important is competition in foreign news coverage?
CH: Well, I agree the redundancy helps keep us both honest and industrious. If one of us sticks to one side of an issue whether here or abroad, the second opinion is bound to point out that there’s another side, and to dig for the facts that back it up. As the newspapers reduce their international coverage, an important question now is whether the networks will also see the redundancy as important and keep permanent staff on spots that ought to be covered, instead of relying on staffers just, as they say, “parachuted in” when a crisis erupts.
EBC: Your AP career lasted more than twice as long as my life has thus far. What advice would you offer young journalists like me?
CH: Well, my advice on getting to be the boss of any particular operation wouldn’t be worth very much — it wasn’t ever one of my ambitions either … [For] turning out copy that may be interesting and useful, the advice is pretty mundane. Get out of the office and talk to as many different kinds of people as you have time for on any given story, use a tape recorder, and if you can’t do that, improve your handwriting so when you sit down to write you can read your notes!
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.