On December 5, U.S. Representative Christopher Shays and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh will be among distinguished panelists at a symposium examining the relationship between news organizations and American security agencies as they face a new kind of war.
Sponsored by Yale’s political science department and the ethics, politics and economics program, “The Role of the Media in the War on Terror,” will take place at 7:45 p.m., at Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue. It is free and open to the public.
Strobe Talbott, former deputy secretary of state and now president of the Brookings Institution, will serve as moderator of the panel, which also includes Karen DeYoung, associate editor, the Washington Post, and Lt. General Bernard Trainor, Ret., a former military correspondent for The New York Times, and a previous director of the National Security Program at the Kennedy School, Harvard University.
Brief biographical sketches of the participants follow:
DeYoung joined the Washington Post in 1974 as a non-staff reporter based in West Africa. In 1975, she moved to the Washington staff and in 1977 became the Post’s Latin America bureau chief. She became foreign editor in 1981 and in 1985 became chief of the London bureau. From 1990 to 1999, DeYoung was the Post’s assistant managing editor for National News. She was appointed to her current position in 1999. In 2002, DeYoung received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting as part of a team covering the post-September 11 war against terrorism.
Hersh has written for The New Yorker magazine since 1971 and has worked at The New York Times on special assignment. He is the author of several books, among them: “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House,” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and “The Target Is Destroyed: What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It” He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and has won four George Polk Awards.
Shays, who represents Fairfield County, Connecticut, is a leader among moderates in the Republican Party. He was the driving force behind the Congressional Accountability Act, which requires Congress to live by the laws it sets for the rest of the country. He is also a leader of the coalition supporting Campaign Finance Reform, working with Rep. Marty Meehan (D-MA), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI). Shays is the chairman of the Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, which oversees the Departments of State, Defense and Veterans Affairs. As chairman of the Government Reform Subcommittee on Human Resources, he held hearings on Medicare and health care fraud, which led to passage of the law making health care fraud a federal offense.
Talbott assumed the presidency of the Brookings Institution in July 2002, after a career in journalism, government and academe. His immediate previous post was founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. He served in the State Department from 1993 to 2001, first as an ambassador-at-large and special adviser to the Secretary of State for the new independent states of the former Soviet Union. Talbott went on to become Deputy Secretary of State, a position he held for seven years. He entered government after 21 years with Time Magazine, where he was a reporter and then Washington bureau chief, editor-at-large, and foreign affairs columnist.
Trainor is a senior fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Associate at the Center for Science and International Affairs of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He was commissioned second lieutenant after graduation from Holy Cross College in 1951. He was a decorated officer who served in Korea and on two tours in Vietnam. General Trainor’s command assignments included Infantry, Reconnaissance and Exchange Service with the Royal Marine Commandos. Prior to retirement from the Marine Corps in 1985, he was deputy Chief of Staff for Plans, Policies and Operations, and Marine Corps deputy to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After retirement, Trainor joined The New York Times as its military correspondent. In 1990, he moved to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government as director of the National Security Program. He continues to be a columnist for the Times News Service and a military analyst for ABC Television.
