The Titanic Disaster Hearings

When Tom Kuntz, the "Word for Word" section editor of the New York Times, started researching a column on the Senate hearings about the Titanic disaster, he discovered that this supposedly public information was tough for the public to come by--it was stuck away in archives on cumbersome microfiche. The Times just hates anything that comes between people and information--just look at its historic efforts to publicize the government's Vietnam policy in the recent book The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case. So Kuntz intelligently excerpted and published, for the first time ever, these transcripts, noting without fear or favor his own paper's participation in the then-common practice of checkbook journalism and presenting hundreds of pages of gripping eyewitness testimony. The Titanic Disaster Hearings also includes a helpful, if rather brief, index to the testimony, so you can look up "Lookout men, glasses for" and turn to the page with this heartbreaking discussion of the owners' inexplicable refusal to give the lookouts binoculars: SENATOR SMITH: Suppose you had had [binoculars], could you have seen this black object [the iceberg] a greater distance? MR. FLEET [a Titanic lookout]: We could have seen it a bit sooner. SENATOR SMITH: How much sooner? MR. FLEET: Well, enough to get out of the way... "Here the world learned of Isidor and Ida Straus's decision to die together rather than separate under the 'women and children first' evacuation tradition," writes Kuntz. "Archibald Gracie vividly described people swarming up the Titanic's rear decks as the ship plunged deeper into the sea." One does not envy the wireless operators explaining how their state-of-the-art system managed to screw up so badly, nor Titanic officer Pitman, who claimed his passengers and crewmen refused his order to row back to pick up screaming survivors in their boat, which had room for 20 more people, because they feared those in the water would swamp them: SENATOR SMITH: How many of these cries were there? Was it a chorus, or was it-- MR. PITMAN: I would rather you did not speak about that. SENATOR SMITH: I would like to know how you were impressed by it. MR. PITMAN: Well, I can not very well describe it. I would rather you would not speak of it. SENATOR SMITH: I realize that it is not a pleasant theme, and yet I would like to know whether these cries were general and in chorus, or desultory and occasional? MR. PITMAN: There was a continual moan for about an hour. There are 32 useful pictures in the book, but its raison d'être is words, which Kuntz has compiled and arranged in an addictively readable fashion.