The press vs the power
Observer founder Robert Sam Anson had a contentious yet strong relationship with ND President Father Hesburgh.
In the turbulent late 1960s, Robert Sam Anson was a brash, cocksure liberal with real reporting chops when he was tapped to be the editor of Scholastic, the weekly student publication that was nearly as old as Notre Dame.
But the vice president for student affairs, Rev. Charles McCarragher, C.S.C., found Anson's campus radio addresses too edgy and critical, so he nixed the appointment despite administration approval usually being pro forma. When the editor of a failed student paper called The Voice asked Anson to leave his assistant editor job at Scholastic to lead a new venture, he decided he liked the idea of being in charge.
“He was right, I was a bad influence, but I was worse at The Observer,” Anson later said of Father McCarragher, whom Anson called the “hard-lining consigliere” to President Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. “The group we put together was bright, enthusiastic, committed to good journalism and giving the administration a bad time. The latter task we accomplished with no trouble.”
Anson immediately became a considerable thorn in Father Hesburgh's side, as any reporter is expected to be to those in power. The lifelong relationship between Anson and Father Hesburgh, always contentious but full of respect, offers a powerful archetype of how the media and those in power should treat each other—a model that seems long lost in this era.
The Observer turns 60 this year. Shortly after its 1966 birth, Anson decided on deadline to fill a hole in the layout with a humorous story from the Berkeley Barb, a more adventurous West Coast publication with decidedly different standards. It included the word “screw” in a story about free love.
Father McCarragher informed Anson that Father Hesburgh “believed our reprinting the Barb article was ‘the most irresponsible act in the history of the University'” and added that the paper was bent on “destroying the University piece by piece.” Anson and his co-editor were threatened with expulsion, which he called “a shocking testimonial to the myth of free speech.”
“Principle soon took a back seat to expediency,” Anson wrote in an Observer article celebrating the paper's ninth anniversary. “There was, after all, a war on, and we needed our student deferments. I envisioned us ending up in the Mekong Delta, and all over a five-letter word. We negotiated our surrender.”
Yet a few years later, Father Hesburgh would be instrumental in saving Anson's life when he was captured as a war reporter in Cambodia. And even that wouldn't stop Anson from writing critically about Father Hesburgh's leadership.
By the end of his life in 2015, Father Hesburgh had reconciled with the person he said was the most difficult student in his 35-year tenure leading Notre Dame. The “bare-knuckled” journalist who considered Father Hesburgh a father figure died five years later. This is their story.
Rebel with a cause
Anson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in a conservative Irish Catholic family that included nightly prayers for Communist hunter Sen. Joseph McCarthy. His sister would later become a nun, while he was expelled from one school for what he called “resistance to idiotic rules.”
He received a rigorous Jesuit education at St. Ignatius High School and developed a more liberal viewpoint than his family. One of his most prized possessions was a button supporting the Civil Rights Movement.
Journalism was in his blood. His maternal grandfather was a prominent Cleveland newspaper editor and publisher who regularly quizzed him on current events. His schoolteacher mother was an occasional contributor to the Jesuit magazine America and other journals. Anson reported and wrote for the Cleveland Press even before he enrolled at Notre Dame.
His parents divorced when he was only 4, and he had little contact with his father afterward. Father Hesburgh's portrait on the cover of a 1962 Time magazine persuaded Anson to attend Notre Dame despite its strict reputation.
“Notre Dame was a much different place,” Anson wrote in a National Catholic Reporter article titled “The most profound influence on my life.” “There were no women, for starters; Sunday Mass attendance was compulsory; student government recently had come within an eyelash of banning ‘The Twist' from campus; and checking out the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and his confreres on the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books required signed permission from a priest.”
Anson met Father Hesburgh during his first semester. On September 28, 1963, he and a friend hitchhiked to a civil rights demonstration outside the federal courthouse in South Bend to protest the death of four Black girls in a Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing. Father Hesburgh, a charter member of the US Civil Rights Commission, was the featured speaker.
Walking back to campus, Anson and his friend “heard the toot of a car horn behind us,” Anson wrote. “I turned around to see a black Studebaker Lark, Rev. Theodore Martin Hesburgh, C.S.C., at the wheel. He pulled to the curb and leaned over to roll down the passenger-side window. ‘You fellas want a lift?' he asked.”
On campus, Father Hesburgh invited the students to his office for a chat, an activity he often did late into the night. Only Anson agreed.
“I spent more than an hour talking with Hesburgh in his office about this, that, and everything,” Anson wrote for NCR. “When we were finished, he said, ‘Come back whenever you want. Don't call in advance. Just show up any time after midnight.'”
Anson would take him up on the offer several times for sometimes heated discussions.
Birth of a student paper
Anson put himself on the radar of the University administration through his radio diatribes against President Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War. He drew further attention as a junior with his picture on a 1966 South Bend Tribune article about the first antiwar, anti-ROTC demonstration on campus. His cheeky sign read, “War is good business. Invest your son.”
Anson considered Scholastic to be a mouthpiece of the Notre Dame administration and The Voice—“incredibly bad by all standards, in taste and journalism”—to be a mouthpiece of the student body government. When Steve Feldhaus, The Voice's former editor, knocked on his dorm door in October 1966 and asked him to lead a new student publication, Anson said he only considered the offer for about 10 seconds.
“Certainly, there was a bit of egotism in being master of your own ship,” he said in a 1970 interview with Scholastic.
Anson and Feldhaus put up posters in a small room in LaFortune Student Center, recruited writers of a similar mindset, and christened the effort The Observer because “The National Observer had a swell-looking and easily ripped-off logo.”
One of those writers, Pat Collins, would go on to become the second editor and a legendary Washington television news personality for 50 years.
“The idea was to have an independent newspaper supported by subscription fees from the students and advertising from the community ... a newspaper free of censorship and control by the University,” Collins wrote for The Observer's 20th anniversary. “Independence was a big thing then ... it still is. Because whoever controls the money you use to publish ultimately controls what you publish.”
On Nov. 3, 1966, the first Observer issue landed on campus. A front-page editorial blared: “A Promise, A Purpose, A Newspaper Is Born.”
Bill Giles, one of Anson's first recruits to the paper and a friend for 50 years, said Anson told him The Observer would attack the administration because Father Hesburgh, who was very involved in the Civil Rights Movement, would not come out against the war.
“If you look at that as the turmoil that was brewing, The Observer was the manifestation of it, and it hit a nerve,” Giles said in a December interview. “We believed in speaking truth to power, and Bob's feeling was that if we were righteous in what we said, we'd get a fair hearing.”
Giles said Anson was fun but intense: “If you invited him to a party, you knew somebody was going to get a finger in the chest and voices would be raised.”
In his biography of Father Hesburgh, Rev. Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C., wrote that The Observer “used its pages to regularly criticize the Hesburgh administration, although probably not as harshly as Hesburgh remembered when he claimed that he ‘got fried in oil every day.'”
“Those were heady days, that first year of The Observer,” Anson wrote for the paper's ninth anniversary. “We were so full of ourselves, and what we imagined was our power—not to be big men on campus (the single greatest danger for a student newspaper editor), but the power to print the truth, and, by printing it, somehow change the way the country was heading. It was a naive notion, but we were better men for having it.”
Power struggles
The age-old battle between administration and student paper was new only to Notre Dame, and it continues across the country today. Conflict between the reporter and reported-on is built-in, inevitable, and healthy for both. In October, the 158-year-old Indiana Daily Student clashed with Indiana University administrators in a standoff over student media that drew national attention.
At Notre Dame, early Observer issues poked the Father Hesburgh administration from its liberal viewpoint, such as a scoop that General William Westmoreland, who commanded US forces in the Vietnam War, would be chosen as “Patriot of the Year,” an annual award editors ridiculed enough to end the tradition.
But it was the Berkeley Barb article that brought the conflict to a head. Anson refused to print a front-page retraction or to resign. His own mother and sister urged Father Hesburgh to expel him. After what Anson called “irresistible coercion” from the administration's threats, he crafted an apology letter about offending “moral sensibilities” that he later claimed was “a masterpiece of equivocation.”
The apology letter was surrounded by student and local letters that criticized University decisions. It also printed Father Hesburgh's response to one: “Personally, I believe in the widest possible freedom for student editors, and I also believe in the corollary of this freedom, that they take personal responsibility for the Code for Student Editors as published in the Student Manual.”
An Anson editorial about the coercion and apology letter quoted Father McCarragher warning that The Observer would not be given any more second chances. “This is not Berkeley,” Father McCarragher reportedly said. “Don't make any mistake about that. And make it clear to yourselves who is running this University. It's the administration, not you.”
A few years later, Father Hesburgh told biographers Joel Connelly and Howard Dooley that he didn't expel Anson because “Bob had a martyr's complex ... I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.”
Prisoner of war
After graduation in 1967, Anson went to work for Time magazine and two years later volunteered to go to the place he'd been trying to avoid: Vietnam. The ambitious reporter said in his 1989 book, War News, that it was the “most exciting, interesting, dangerous story of all.”
In Saigon, Anson read about Father Hesburgh's famous “15-minute rule,” which gave student protestors on campus just 15 minutes to make their point before dispersing or they would face expulsion. Anson dashed off a telegram, which Father Hesburgh included in his autobiography:
“Statement on student protesters betrays utter disregard for due process. Will succeed only in provoking further disruption. For good of all, sadly but strongly suggest your immediate resignation.”
On assignment for Time, Anson was captured by North Vietnamese soldiers in Cambodia on August 1, 1970. He was driving alone in a risky area when an enemy column on the road fired a full clip of AK-47 shots over his car to bring it to a halt.
“They pitched me into a shallow foxhole with a trenching tool. Dig deeper, they gestured,” Anson recalled in War News. “I felt the coldness of his AK being pressed against my forehead. I began saying the Hail Mary.”
It was then that Anson remembered the Vietnamese word for peace, hòa bình. He said it several times until “the cold spot on my forehead disappeared” and the soldier who'd been about to shoot him repeated the word and helped him out of the hole. Anson was shocked, because more than a dozen other reporters had recently been killed in that region.
Despite the aggravation Anson caused, Father Hesburgh jumped into action after a Time editor requested his help in securing the release of a Notre Dame alumnus. Anson learned that Father Hesburgh later described the request as “being asked to get the devil out of hell.” Yet Father Hesburgh sent a “fairly lengthy telegram” to Pope Paul VI, who enlisted the Vatican diplomatic corps to contact the exiled Cambodian government led by Prince Sihanouk.
Anson's captors held him for nearly a month; he reported his treatment as decent and improving over time. He wrote that an officer told him he was freed because he had earlier assisted Vietnamese refugees after some were slaughtered by Khmer Rouge troops in Cambodia. Still, Father Hesburgh's intervention surely played a part, and Anson appreciated it.
A portion of the documentary 'Hesburgh' by O'Malley Creadon Productions
Father Hesburgh wrote in his autobiography that Anson “showed up late one night at Notre Dame and thanked me.”
“He mentioned our late-night conversations and voiced his amazement at how much I had changed in the last few years,” Father Hesburgh wrote. “It made me think of something that Mark Twain had once said about his father: ‘When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.'”
Anson remembered the visit a little differently.
“A few years ago, during one of my infrequent sojourns to Notre Dame, I stopped by for a chat with Father Hesburgh,” Anson wrote in 1975. “Naturally, the subject of The Observer came up, and I asked Father how it was doing. ‘Great,' he said. ‘Very responsible. Not like it was when you were running it.'
“Of course, Father smiled when he said that. At least I think he did.”
Storied career
Anson's gratitude did not extend to his journalism. In 1974, he returned to campus and wrote a scathing article about Father Hesburgh's leadership during a sexual assault allegation involving football players. Despite threats, Anson wrote that “Notre Dame never sued, and no eyewitnesses ever came forward. But it was years before Father Hesburgh and I ever talked again.”
Anson enjoyed a long career in journalism, including writing six books, but mostly specializing in penetrating exposés and profiles for magazines as varied as Life, The Atlantic, Esquire, and Vanity Fair. His range is shown in a sample of his diverse subjects: director Oliver Stone, rapper Tupac Shakur, music mogul David Geffen, and murdered reporter Daniel Pearl.
An Esquire editor described him as “the last of a breed of broad-shouldered, bare-knuckled, '70s magazine journalists who will chopper into any hellhole on Earth and come back with an epic story.”
Longtime friend Bill Giles said he went drinking one night with Anson and Hunter S. Thompson, the legendary gonzo journalist once beaten up while reporting undercover on the Hell's Angels biker gang. “I think Bob even intimidated Hunter Thompson,” Giles said.
Anson could also be difficult. Esquire colleague David Hirshey said: “Editing Bob is both a rewarding and debilitating experience. In the end you get a great piece, but not before you've lost two feet off of your colon.”
Anson returned to campus in 2006 at the request of Notre Dame Magazine editor Kerry Temple, who asked Anson to reflect on Father Hesburgh for a planned special issue. Temple said Anson asked him get Father Hesburgh's permission first because he was so nervous about facing his old frenemy. After the meeting, Anson told Temple, “I'm a foot off the ground.”
Still, Anson said he couldn't ethically write the story without including criticism he knew wasn't appropriate for the special issue. Temple loved Anson's stories about Father Hesburgh, especially his help in Cambodia, and explained why in the magazine's 2015 Hesburgh issue.
“I like the marvelous practicality of his calling the pope, and I like that Hesburgh supported the rights of student journalists even when they used those shields to give him grief,” Temple wrote. “The story's turns and layers reveal a lot about the man—his principles and his loyalties, the importance of relationships, the generosity of his spirit and his clout, the refreshing humanness and the priestly values of forgiveness and redemption.”
Reconciliation
But Anson did report on the meeting years later in his NCR article after Father Hesburgh's death. He said Father Hesburgh treated him so kindly it was like “being in a warm bath. I knew that I'd missed him but it wasn't until that moment that I realized how much.”
Their talk ranged from politics to personal. Anson apologized for “being a jerk with you.” Father Hesburgh responded: “Well, you know, you were a student editor. All student editors are trouble; I take that as a given. ... Goes with the territory.”
Bill Giles described the dynamic this way: “Between Hesburgh and Anson, there was a basis of respect, even though they both knew they were on different teams. There was a civility to the relationship that even though one was a priest and the other was an outrageous student, they weren't abusive.”
The push and pull of the press versus the power even continued after Father Hesburgh's death in 2015. At The Observer's 50th anniversary celebration in 2017, Anson urged the paper's student journalists to appreciate their role as reporters.
“[I hope] everyone has a great time, doesn't get pushed around by the administration, resists authority—including that of the president of the United States—and just feels so lucky they are working as journalists,” he said. “I just think it was a million to one shot that The Observer would work, and it did work.”
Anson's relationship with Father Hesburgh was so fascinating it made the cut in a 2018 documentary movie about the Notre Dame legend.
“It's very hard to neatly categorize my relationship with Father Hesburgh,” Anson said in the film. “I grew up without a father. When I got to Notre Dame, I had a father, and his name was Theodore M. Hesburgh. I didn't know he would be my father, but that's how he functioned. He was the largest figure in my life.”
Before Anson's death in 2020, he'd made his peace with his Freudian father figure. He emailed Temple that their love was more important than their “different generation” political fights. And in his NCR piece, Anson recalled their final interaction through letters.
“I said I was sorry most for failing to ask for his blessing when we'd seen each other. Father wrote back: ‘It's now 4:30 in the afternoon. Consider yourself blessed.'
“Was I ever, in so many ways.”