Barlett, Donald L. 1936–

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Barlett, Donald L. 1936–

(Donald Leon Barlett)

PERSONAL: Born July 17, 1936, in DuBois, PA; son of James L. and Mary V. (Wineberg) Barlett; married Shirley A. Jones (a nurse); married Eileen M. Reynolds; children: Matthew J.; Thomas H. Reynolds and Sean R. Reynolds (stepsons). Education: Attended Pennsylvania State University.

ADDRESSES: Home—195 E. Evergreen Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19118. Office—Time, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, PA, investigative reporter, 1970–97. Time, Inc., New York, NY, editor-at-large, 1997–. Military service: U.S. Army, Counter Intelligence Corps, special agent, 1958–61.

AWARDS, HONORS: George Polk Award, 1972, 1974, 1988, 1991, 1998, and 2000; Sigma Delta Chi Award, 1972, 1975, 1988, 1998, 2000, and 2002; Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, 1973, 1991, and 1998; Gavel Award, American Bar Association, 1974 and 1989; Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, 1975 and 1989; Award for Best Daily Newspaper or Wire Service Interpretation of Foreign Affairs, Overseas Press Club of America, 1975; Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism, University of Missouri, 1983; Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, 1984, 1988, 1991, and 1998; George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, National Council of Teachers of English, 1988 and 1992; James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Hunter College of the City University of New York, 1998; John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Journalism, Northwestern University, 1998; Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, 1999; National Magazine Award for Public Interest, 1999 and 2001; among fifty national awards for journalism.

WRITINGS:

(With James B. Steele) Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes (biography), Norton (New York, NY), 1979, 2nd edition published as Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness, 2004.

(With James B. Steele) Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America, Norton (New York, NY), 1985.

(With James B. Steele) America: What Went Wrong?, Andrews & McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 1992.

(With James B. Steele) America: Who Really Pays the Taxes?, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1994.

(With James B. Steele) America: Who Stole the Dream?, Andrews & McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 1996.

(With James B. Steele) The Great American Tax Dodge: How Spiraling Fraud and Avoidance Are Killing Fairness, Destroying the Income Tax, and Costing You, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2000.

(With James B. Steele) Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business—and Bad Medicine, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Nation and New Republic.

SIDELIGHTS: Since 1971 Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele have collaborated as investigative reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where their work together has garnered numerous awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes. They have also coauthored numerous books, dealing with topics from the disposal of nuclear waste to the inequities of the U.S. tax code and the ills of the U.S. health care system. Their collaborative efforts began in 1979 with a highly acclaimed biography, Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes, and since then Barlett and Steele have earned reputations for credible reporting by basing their stories on documentation rather than on scandal-hunting. Ac-cording to Nation reviewer Robert Sherrill, the pair constitutes "the finest team of investigative reporters west of The Times of London."

Before teaming up with Steele at the Inquirer, Barlett was "a traditional scandal-hunting investigative reporter," noted Leonard Downie, Jr., in The New Muckrakers. But while he had worked on a variety of newspapers and specialized in uncovering local corruption, Barlett had not been permitted to do the kind of aggressive investigative work he found most exciting. As a result, he eventually sought employment with the Knight newspaper chain, whose editors were said to support enterprising reporting. Barlett began work at the chain's Philadelphia paper, the Inquirer, in 1970, on the same day as future collaborator Steele, and was first assigned to write about narcotics traffic and phony business bankruptcies in the city. Before long, however, the two men were instructed to work together in the search for evidence of fraud in a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) subsidy program for rehabilitating and selling slum houses. The pair found they worked well together and after months of painstaking research, which included examining deeds and mortgages and interviewing families living in the substandard homes, Barlett and Steele published a thoroughly documented series of articles detailing abuse in the FHA program.

The award-winning FHA articles were the first of many successes for the two reporters. During subsequent investigations they disclosed inequities in Philadelphia's criminal courts and in tax law enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service; they revealed that the "oil crisis" of the early 1970s was largely the creation of policies designed by multinational firms and the U.S. government in order to control the supply of crude oil for their own ends; and they showed that funds of the U.S. Foreign Aid program more often ended up lining the pockets of the rich than helping the poor.

Especially fruitful for the two men was the time they spent systematically examining Howard Hughes's connections with the U.S. government. For eight months they searched through all kinds of records, including contracts, corporation documents, and financial statements, and finally assembled 10,000 pages of notes and documents—enough material not just for a series of articles, but for a book as well. Several critics praised the result, Empire. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Ted Morgan observed, "Of all the books written about Howard Hughes, 'Empire' is easily the best…. The authors have assembled the first fully documented, cradle-to-grave account of a unique American life." In Newsweek, reviewer Peter S. Prescott commented: "Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele … have made an impressive use of documents to fashion this longest, most responsible and authoritative biography of Hughes to date."

Their use of documentation has particularly distinguished Barlett and Steele. They are among the "new breed of muckraker," Downie related. Their journalism goes beyond the old reliance on stories from informants and looks to the public record for evidence. "It reveals with expert analysis and thorough documentation what has systematically gone wrong with the powerful, complex institutions that affect so much of life today," explained Downie. "The best of this work reaches far enough beneath the skin of those institutions to enlighten even those who run them, thus improving the chances for change."

Documentation of sources would be especially important in Barlett and Steele's 1985 work, Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America. Tackling an immense topic with dire implications—the problem of how to dispose of the growing amounts of high-level radioactive waste generated by nuclear power plants around the country—necessitated an authoritative factual basis, one which the authors gained through an eighteen-month investigation of nuclear waste disposal sites, interviews with key power plant personnel, scientists, and other witnesses to the growing problem, and the search for documentation of the options currently being weighed by U.S. policymakers with regard to the country's nuclear future. According to Mary Warnock in the Times Literary Supplement, the authors' central argument is that because of the public's growing awareness, "it is the prime duty of policy-makers to be open, to admit when decisions have been wrong, and … to establish categories of waste, from the most dangerous to the relatively safe" as a precursor to establishing regulated disposal methods. A Publishers Weekly reviewer deemed it "one of the most comprehensive studies to date of this important subject." An Economist contributor, noting that the "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" philosophy characteristic of the industry has caused the book's authors to have "little hope that things will improve," added that Barlett and Steele "find it hard to absolve anybody involved in the fiasco. So too, will readers of this compelling testament to ignorance."

America: What Went Wrong?, which Barlett and Steele released in 1992 and which would serve as a jumping-off point for Bill Moyers's television series, Listening to America, is gleaned from their essays published in the Inquirer's editorial pages between 1978 and 1982, partially during the early years of President Ronald Reagan's administration. Targeting the tax cuts of the Reagan administration as the source of the economic ills of the 1980s, the authors contend that "the political system is corrupt, the Japanese have been eating our economic lunch, and the Mexicans will … do … the same," with NAFTA looming on the horizon, remarked Business Week reviewer Howard Gleckman. However, Gleckman saw increased spending rather than tax cuts as the root of the decade's recessionary problems, and he thought "Barlett and Steele, with their exclusive focus on fairness, are just barking up the wrong tree." Their central theme—that the economic standing of the middle class is ultimately being eroded by government policies put in place by Reagan and, later, Bush, to favor the rich and the corporate—held water with some other critics, including Los Angeles Times Book Review writer Charles Solomon, who called America an "important and profoundly disturbing book [that] should be required reading for voters."

Barlett and Steele took on taxes again in The Great American Tax Dodge: How Spiraling Fraud and Avoidance Are Killing Fairness, Destroying the Income Tax, and Costing You. In this book they report that tax cheating by individuals has reached unprecedented proportions; they estimate it costs the U.S. Treasury 300 billion dollars a year, much more than the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estimate of 195 billion dollars, which is based on figures from the 1980s. People avoid paying taxes, Barlett and Steele say, by claiming deductions they do not deserve, by failing to report income, by claiming foreign residency, and in numerous other ways. The IRS, they say, lacks the staff to track down all the cheaters, but sometimes it pursues lower-and middle-income tax dodgers instead of the wealthiest ones. They make the case that tax fraud has grown because Congress has cut the IRS's budget and also because tax law is overly complicated, and they call for a simplified but still progressive tax code. Library Journal contributor Patrick J. Brunet found the book "a responsible and well-argued effort on a topic of great civic importance." Meanwhile, a Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: "This important, incendiary book may spark a national debate."

Both Barlett and Steele credit their success to teamwork and the support they received from the Inquirer. The paper gives the two-man team the time and resources they need and has never yet killed a story because of pressure from its advertisers, even though that has occasionally meant losing advertisements. Downie noted that Barlett believes it is important to have someone else to discuss ideas with; Barlett also thinks that he and Steele help prevent one another from becoming too personally involved in what they are reporting. The journalists have also been given almost complete autonomy in their work. They might consult with an editor before embarking on a new project or when submitting their articles for final editing, but otherwise, they are essentially on their own.

According to Barlett, this system suits him quite well. "When people ask me after each project we finish if I'm getting tired of this kind of work," he told Downie, "I say, 'Are you kidding? How could I get tired of this?'" And from Barlett's point of view, it is just as well that he does like it. He believes that the kind of in-depth reporting he and Steele do on a single subject is "where newspaper circulation is going to be ten years from now."

Barlett teamed up with Steele again for the 2004 title, Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business—and Bad Medicine, a book that examines the reasons why the United States has "the largest, most expensive, but least efficient and effective health-care system in the developed world," according to Booklist contributor, Vanessa Bush. Their book details the transformation of the country's health care system in the late twentieth century from what was mainly a nonprofit service to a huge profit-making concern. Using sources from interviews to studies from the World Health Organization and professional journals, their book further shows how this industry profits the insurance and drug companies while patients are rationed their care. For Barlett and Steele, a major revamping of the health care system is the only solution to a problem in which forty-five million Americans go uninsured. Their recommendation is to create a system that provides coverage for all and whose fees are collected by only one agency, rather than the plethora of private and public insurance schemes that now exist and which create extremely high administrative costs. This so-called single-payer system would then oversee health care in the country. Despite the remedies Barlett and Steele prescribe, the authors were less than sanguine about such a measure being adopted in the near future. As Scott Duke Harris noted in his Mother Jones review of the book: "But the authors also make a safe diagnosis: American health care will get worse before it gets better" Though the prognosis is not necessarily heartening, the efforts of Barlett and Steele won critical approval. For example, Norman Goldman, writing in Reviewer's Bookwatch, called the book a "riveting expose."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Downie, Leonard, Jr., The New Muckrakers, New Republic (Washington, DC), 1976.

Dygert, James H., The Investigative Journalist, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1976.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 1, 2004, Vanessa Bush, review of Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business—and Bad Medicine, p. 284.

Business Week, May 4, 1992, Howard Gleckman, review of America: What Went Wrong?, pp. 14-16.

Christian Science Monitor, May 21, 1979, review of Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes.

Economist, October 19, 1985, review of Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America, pp. 103-104.

Library Journal, March 1, 1986, review of Forevermore, p. 47; July, 2000, Patrick J. Brunet, review of The Great American Tax Dodge: How Spiraling Fraud and Avoidance Are Killing Fairness, Destroying the Income Tax, and Costing You, p. 111.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 22, 1992, Charles Solomon, review of America, p. 10.

Maclean's, June 4, 1979, review of Empire.

Mother Jones, September, 2000, Steve Weinberg, review of The Great American Tax Dodge, p. 81; November-December, 2004, Scott Duke Harris, review of Critical Condition, p. 93.

Nation, May 5, 1979, Robert Sherrill, review of Empire.

National Review, April 27, 1979, review of Empire.

Newsweek, April 23, 1979, Peter S. Prescott, review of Empire.

New West, May 21, 1979, review of Empire.

New York, May 7, 1979, review of Empire.

New York Review of Books, May 31, 1979, review of Empire.

New York Times Book Review, May 6, 1979, Ted Morgan, review of Empire; November 25, 1979, review of Empire; March, 17, 1985, Allen L. Hammond, review of Forevermore, pp. 9-10; April 5, 1992, James D. Atwater, review of America, p. 9.

Publishers Weekly, January 18, 1985, review of Forevermore, p. 64; February 24, 1992, review of America, p. 50; July 31, 2000, review of The Great American Tax Dodge, p. 83.

Quill, July, 2003, "Investigative Reporting—Magazines," p. 42.

Reviewer's Bookwatch, December, 2004, Norman Goldman, review of Critical Condition.

Times Literary Supplement, October 17, 1986, Mary Warnock, review of Forevermore, pp. 1155-1156.

Washington Monthly, April, 1979, review of Empire.

Washington Post Book World, December 2, 1979, review of Empire.

West Coast Review of Books, July, 1979, review of Empire.