Gup, Ted 1950- (Ted S. Gup)

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Gup, Ted 1950- (Ted S. Gup)

PERSONAL:

Born September 14, 1950, in Lima, OH; son of Theodore Stern Gup (a merchant) and Virginia Stone Gup Sharpe (a travel agent); married Peggy Watts (a business consultant/marketing), June 6, 1982; children: David Marcus, Matthew Stanley. Education: Attended Trinity College (Ireland), 1971; Brandeis University, B.A. (cum laude), 1972; Case Western Reserve University, J.D., 1978. Hobbies and other interests: Fly fishing, running, photography, reading, billiards.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Pepper Pike, OH; Bucksport, ME. Office—31220 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pike, OH 44124; Case Western Reserve University, 215 Guilford, Cleveland, OH 44106. Agent—David Black Literary Agency, 156 5th Ave., New York, NY 10010. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, journalist, editor, educator, lecturer, attorney, and consultant. Admitted to the Bar of District of Columbia, 1978. Akron Beacon-Journal, news reporter, 1974-75; Washington Post, Washington, DC, staff writer and editor, Investigative Projects Team, 1978-87; Time, Washington, DC, correspondent, 1987-93; freelance writer, 1990—. Georgetown University, lecturer in journalism, 1982-99; Case Western Reserve University, Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism, 1999—; also taught at George Washington University, 1981-82, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 1985-86, Johns Hopkins University, 1997, University of Maryland, 1997-98, Chautauqua Institute, 2001, and Sterling College; consultant, Columbia Pictures, Tristar, Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. (CBS), 60 Minutes, Freedom Forum, and Center for Public Integrity; numerous interviews and public appearances, including Larry King Live, Today Show, Good Morning America, News Hour (Public Broadcasting Service), CBS Sunday Morning, Talk of the Nation (National Public Radio [NPR]), All Things Considered (NPR), Booknotes (CSPAN), CNN World News, the U.S. Archives Author Lecture Series, Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and the Shorenstein Center of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

MEMBER:

Investigative Reporters and Editors.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow, Thomas J. Watson Foundation, 1972; fellow, Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, 1978; George Polk Award, Gerald Loeb Award for Financial Journalism, Worth Bingham Prize, Front Page Award Grand Prize and First Prize from Newspaper Guild, and Pulitzer Prize finalist, all 1981, all for journalism work; Washington Monthly Journalism Award, 1982 and 1983; honorable mention, Gerald Loeb Award for Financial Journalism, 1984; Fulbright scholar, Beijing, China, 1985; John S. Knight Teaching Fellowship, 1990; Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award, 1992; National Conservation Achievement Award from National Wildlife Federation, Sunday Magazine Editors Association Award, Washington Monthly Journalism Award, and Linda Moody Community Service Award, all 1993; grant, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 1997-98; nominated for Pulitzer Prize, for The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA; Book of the Year Award, Investigative Reporters and Editors, for The Book of Honor; fellow, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, & Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Guggenheim fellowship.

WRITINGS:

The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2000, published as Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals and newspapers, including National Geographic, Gentleman's Quarterly, Sports Illustrated, Washington Post, Travel & Leisure, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, Media Studies Journal, Audubon, New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal. Modern Maturity, Far Eastern Economic Review, National Wildlife, International Wildlife, Forbes, FYI, Salon, American Journalism Review, Parenting, Mother Jones, Chronicle of Higher Education, Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA), and Akron Beacon Journal.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author, journalist, and editor Ted Gup has worked as a freelance writer since 1990. He is the Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism at Case Western Reserve University, where he earned a law degree in 1978. He served as editor of the Investigative Projects Team of the Washington Post, where he worked for renowned journalist Bob Woodward. A frequent contributor to national newspapers and magazines, Gup has received numerous awards for his work, including the George Polk Award, and was once a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the national reporting category.

Gup's books address issues of secrecy and suppression of information in the U.S. government. The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA, which a Library Journal reviewer called a "stunning work of reportage," delves into a seemingly innocuous government secret: the identity of forty-one unidentified agents who died in the line of duty. A marble memorial at CIA headquarters contains seventy-one engraved stars memorializing the agents who gave their lives in service to their country. The Book of Honor, a volume that records their names and death dates, excludes almost half. Gup wondered why these names would be kept secret, sometimes for decades, and undertook a detailed investigation to uncover their identities. He conducted more than 400 painstaking interviews with former agents and surviving family members, finally piecing together the stories behind many of the forty-one agents' lives, the reasons for their anonymity, and the events that led to their deaths. "In a triumph of investigative journalism—and without the cooperation of the spy agency—he succeeded" in uncovering stories the CIA has inexplicably kept hidden, noted Steve Aftergood in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Gup "does an astonishing job of uncovering the names and stories behind the nameless stars," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer.

Gup views the government's widespread reliance on secrecy as a distinct threat to the country's very foundations. In Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life, he explores the enormous increase in government secrecy and how this tendency to keep important matters hidden from the American people is rapidly eroding the country's most cherished freedoms. He pinpoints the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ill-defined War on Terror as major factors in escalating government secrecy, but also notes that the amount of classified material held by the government had increased fourfold prior to these events. Technology, he explains, makes it much easier to practice secrecy; worse, he notes that there is little oversight of the numerous agencies and thousands of government employees who have the authority to create a secret or classified document. Gup also sees the encroachment of greater secrecy in other areas of American life, including in colleges and universities, in employment, in business, and even in journalism. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book a "sobering survey of the new culture of secrecy, which has spread from government to industry to academia and, it seems, to everyday life." A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that Gup's book presents a "cogent critique of a tight-lipped America that is increasingly paranoid, dysfunctional, and absurd." Booklist contributor Vernon Ford found it to be "a most timely critique in this age of an endless and amorphous war on terror."

Gup told CA: "At the age of fifty I am still not quite comfortable calling myself a writer. It is something I aspire to but am still quite content to call myself a reporter who tells stories. I write because it is my way of attempting to make sense of things, a public exploration of private spaces. I don't read nearly enough, but what I read is very good—E.B. White; George Orwell; the essayists Ruskin, Emerson, and Bacon; and the poets Philip Larkin, William Butler Yeats, John Donne. Until recently I saw little pattern in the subjects I choose to write about. Now I do see some common threads. I think it is important that we do not forget each other, that we remember. That seems to me to be one of the duties of a writer, to recollect those who have been forgotten. I think what I do is part archivist, part investigative reporter, part story-teller. I can tell that I am getting better at what I do, but mostly I am overwhelmed by how much more I must learn and how inadequate my work is. I still think of books as sacred objects. I draw considerable satisfaction from teaching and, at the risk of sounding trite, I learn a great deal from my students, probably more than they learn from me."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2000, Bonnie Smothers, review of The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA, p. 1799; July 1, 2007, Vernon Ford, review of Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life, p. 14.

Books, May 26, 2007, William C. Gaines, "An Open-and-Shut Case: An Investigative Journalist Makes a One-Sided Argument against Secret Records," review of Nation of Secrets,p. 5.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March, 2001, Steven Aftergood, review of The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA, p. 71.

Commentary, June, 2007, Dan Seligman, "Hush Hush," review of Nation of Secrets, p. 65.

IRE Journal, September-October, 2007, Steve Weinberg, review of Nation of Secrets, p. 34.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2007, review of Nation of Secrets.

Library Journal, March 1, 2000, review of The Book of Honor, p. 10.

Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2000, review of The Book of Honor, p. 106; August 7, 2000, audiobook review of The Book of Honor, p. 42; April 9, 2007, review of Nation of Secrets, p. 42.

Time, August 10, 1992, Elizabeth P. Valk, "From the Publisher," commentary on Ted Gup, p. 4.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 1, 2001, review of The Book of Honor, p. 6.