Willamette University

News

Philip Taubman to Lecture

Philip Taubman, associate editor and special correspondent for The New York Times, will discuss "Why We Publish Secrets" Wednesday, Oct. 24, at 8 p.m. in Smith Auditorium at Willamette University. Admission is free and the public is invited.

The lecture is sponsored by the Associated Students of Willamette University in partnership with the Collegiate Readership Program.

Taubman became associate editor for The New York Times in March. National security is his special correspondent assignment. Prior this latest post, he had served as the paper's Washington bureau chief since August 2003.

Taubman was deputy editor of the editorial page from 2002 and assistant editorial page editor from 1994-02. He was deputy national editor from 1993-94 and deputy Washington editor from 1989-92. He was based in Moscow from 1985-88, covering the first turbulent years of Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as Soviet leader. He served as Moscow bureau chief from 1986-88.

He joined The Times in 1979 as a reporter in the Washington Bureau, initially covering the Justice Department and working on investigative projects and later specializing in national security and intelligence issues.

In 1970, Taubman became a correspondent for Time magazine in its Boston bureau. From 1973-76, he was a staff writer and the sports editor in Time's New York office and from 1976-77, he worked in the magazine's Washington bureau, covering labor and economic policy stories. His reporting in this assignment led to an article in Time, which exposed the tangled finances of Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter's budget director. In 1977, he left Time to become a writer at Esquire magazine.

Taubman has received two George Polk awards - the first in 1981 (shared with Jeff Gerth and Seymour M. Hersh) for national reporting about two former C.I.A. employees who provided aid to Libya, and the second in 1983 for foreign affairs reporting for coverage of American policy in Central America.

He graduated with a B.A. degree in history from Stanford in 1971 and was editor of the campus newspaper, The Stanford Daily. He was a member of the University's Board of Trustees from 1978-82.

He is the author of "Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage," (Simon & Schuster, 2003).

09-18-2007