NYT Public Editor Says NYTBR Conflict of Interest Is a Conflict of Interest

Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times public editor, writes a quietly devastating critique of the preferred authorized biographer writing a review of the authorized biography of Kissinger:

In the italic identification line appearing with his review of a new biography of Henry Kissinger, Andrew Roberts is described only as “the Lehrman Institute distinguished fellow at the New-York Historical Society.” And that is true.

But what is also true is that Mr. Roberts had what many reasonable people would consider a conflict of interest as a reviewer: He was Mr. Kissinger’s first choice to write his authorized biography.

The Times Book Review editor, Pamela Paul, told me Thursday that she was unaware of that fact before the publication of a Gawker piece that makes much of that relationship and of Mr. Roberts’s acquaintance with the book’s author, Niall Ferguson.

Gawker’s headline: “Kissinger Biography Is Great, Says Pal of Author and Kissinger in New York Times.” Indeed, the review is kind to Mr. Kissinger and to Mr. Ferguson; it calls the book “comprehensive, well-written and riveting.”

“We rely on our reviewers to disclose conflicts of interest,” Ms. Paul said. Mr. Roberts disclosed no conflict, saying only that he had met Mr. Ferguson a few times but that this wouldn’t affect his review.

She made the point that Book Review editors cannot realistically open full-fledged investigations into their reviewers’ backgrounds. If Mr. Roberts had told editors that he had turned down the chance to write the book himself, Ms. Paul said that it might not have disqualified him as the reviewer but that she would have had him acknowledge that information in the review.

Should he have told editors? If she’d been in Mr. Roberts’s place, she said, “I would have disclosed it.”

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Indeed, Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Roberts will share a London stage to discuss Mr. Kissinger and the authorized biography later this month.

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My take: Both assignments were considerably less than ideal. Times readers must be able to believe that a review is an impartial assessment of a book’s merits. That assessment shouldn’t be influenced (or appear to be influenced) by deference to a fellow Times employee or by a significant relationship or circumstance — especially one that goes undisclosed to readers.

But, wait, there’s more.

Not only is Roberts, as Greg Grandin reported in his Gawker piece, a quarter-century-long friend of Ferguson’s (contrary to Roberts’s claim that they only met a few times). He also, my friend Jonathan Stein told me, co-wrote an article with Ferguson back in 1997. In a volume of essays edited by Ferguson.

Here’s the cite: Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, “Hitler’s England: What If Germany had Invaded Britain in May 1940?” in Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. Niall Ferguson (London: Picador, 1997), 281–320.

Update (11: 15 am)

One last question: How did Roberts come to be chosen as the reviewer of the Ferguson bio in the first place? He’s not exactly a natural choice in that he’s mostly written about British politics and European war in the 19th century and early 20th century; there are lot of experts on Kissinger and American foreign policy. Indeed, it was just such an expert whom the NYTBR chose to review Grandin’s book on Kissinger in the very same issue of the NYTBR that Roberts reviewed Ferguson’s bio. (And, incidentally, one can tell the difference in the choices: where Roberts’s review is a combination of pabulum and hagiography, the review of Grandin’s book is judicious, scholarly, and intelligently critical). So who suggested Roberts as the reviewer and dealt with him on his review?

Update (4:30 pm)

NYT Public Editor Margaret Sullivan has posted the following update to her post:

Corey Robin, an author and political science professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY, pointed out in a post today that Mr. Roberts and Mr. Ferguson co-authored a chapter in a 1999 book edited by Mr. Ferguson. That almost surely would have disqualified Mr. Roberts as a reviewer had it been known.

David Johnson pointed me to this: Four years ago, Roberts told an interviewer, “I stand in awe of friends such as Niall Ferguson.”

Greg Grandin turns the dialectical knife in this nice followup:

This kind of literary kerfuffle is usually presented as “conflicts of interest.” In this case, though, no conflict exists. There is a perfect convergence of interest and ideology. Like Ferguson and Kissinger (who was one of the first in 1990 to compare Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler), Roberts has been wrong, catastrophically so, when using history to justify militarism in the present. As was Winston Churchill, Roberts wrote in early 2003, Tony Blair will be vindicated “when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of mass destruction are unearthed.”

Kissinger, Ferguson, and Roberts are also unique among historians (Kissinger has in the past identified himself as an historian more than a statesman) in that they understand the study of history to be, primarily, a warrant for never, ever, apologizing. For anything. All three predictably respond to any catastrophe the US finds itself in as a result of intervention by arguing the problem wasn’t enough intervention. “He had no stomach for endless war,” Kissinger once said of Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ—as if endless war was a too spicy Bánh mì.

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On second thought, then, scratch any criticism: Roberts is the perfect reviewer for Kissinger’s perfect biographer.