Memorable Mentors

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Edwin Diamond
News Critic

Throughout my career, people have asked, “How did an MIT graduate end up as a journalist?” My stock response: “I majored in the Tech.” Of course, that’s not what my transcript says. Decode the class numbers and my transcript shows that really I majored in Ed Diamond.

Edwin Diamond (1925–1997) came to MIT as a visiting lecturer in political science in 1969. MIT was the foundation for his second career. A science writer and editor, he had just turned down the editorship of Newsweek. Quitting the magazine, he landed a part-time spot in Course XVII. When I fell into his orbit in 1973, Ed was shuttling in from his home in New York for the academic life every Thursday and Friday.

Ed was the first real journalist I ever met. He embodied both the zest of a wire service newshound and the world-weary omniscience of a news magazine pundit. In those years of Vietnam and Watergate, he opened a window on the interaction between the press and politics at an institution largely indifferent to both.

On and off campus, Ed was a pioneering media critic. Today, analysis of the maneuvers behind the news appears in the second paragraph of practically every political story. But back then, Ed’s column in New York magazine and his TV commentaries were eyeopeners. He taught his MIT students how to find our own insights as we dissected newspaper stories, TV coverage, and politi­cal commercials.

Ed’s weekly 30-hour stint in Cambridge was a whirl. Thursday night was politics and television, in which Ed and his guests—from a young Dan Rather to a rising state legislator named Barney Frank—would expose the blossoming business of message management. Most weeks, the guest would venture up to Ed’s Eastgate apartment, trailed by 20 or 30 students, to talk well past midnight.

Ed and his acolytes would reconvene at 8:00 a.m. Friday for the media seminar. There, Ed would lead us in ripping apart the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Tech with equal zeal. Ed never hid his opinion that the Tech’s pallid news columns and quavering editorials were out of step with our tabloid format. But the standards he set spurred us to become real journalists.

Ed’s courses were the un-MIT: there were no problem sets or statistical analyses. The Thursday night scene seemed more like a mixer than a class. Whenever Ed felt obliged to lecture, we could puncture his pomposity by calling on “Professor Diamond.” Only later did I discover how cruel that needling was: despite his teaching skills, his many books, and the attention and funding he brought, Ed could never prove himself to MIT’s “real” academics. In 1984, New York University made him an offer—with tenure—that got him off the LaGuardia-to-Logan shuttle for good.

Fortunately for me, that was long after I’d graduated. Being the math genius of Frankton High School in Indiana got me to MIT and opened up the world. Connecting with Ed opened up another world—the juncture of politics, economics, and communications where I’ve made my life. No, MIT will never have a journalism school. But for a while, we had Ed.

By Mike McNamee ’76, editor in chief of volume 95 of the Tech and now deputy Washington bureau chief for BusinessWeek.