Globe writer wins Pulitzer for national reporting
Signing statements series gets honor
Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe yesterday won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, for a series of stories about President Bush's greatly expanded use of "signing statements," which he attached to laws passed by Congress to assert his authority to disregard them.
The Wall Street Journal won two Pulitzers, including the prize for public service, by a team of reporters at the Boston bureau whose investigation into backdated stock options turned into a major corporate scandal. The
In the arts, Boston-born playwright David Lindsay-Abaire took the prize in drama for his play "Rabbit Hole," novelist Cormac McCarthy won in fiction for his novel "The Road," and jazz legend Ornette Coleman won for his album "Sound Grammar." Natasha Trethewey won in poetry for "Native Guard," and the general nonfiction prize went to Lawrence Wright for "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."
Savage's stories, beginning in early 2006, reported that Bush had attached signing statements to 750 laws. While the Bush administration defended the practice by saying other administrations had done the same, Savage reported this February that Bush had issued more signing statements than all previous presidents combined.
The revelation set off a storm of criticism in Congress and in legal circles. It drew a rebuke from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which provides confidential reports to Congress, and the American Bar Association called the practice "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers." The House Judiciary Committee is investigating the president's use of the statements.
"The stories were only half about the signing statements themselves," Savage, 31, said in the Globe newsroom yesterday. "The other half was about the larger issue of presidential power. There has been a relentless effort on the part of this administration to expand executive power, of which the signing statements are only one manifestation."
Savage, who graduated from Harvard and earned a master's degree from Yale Law School, came to the Globe from the Miami Herald in 2003, with no prior Washington reporting experience.
Globe editor Martin Baron said yesterday that the signing statements had attracted little media notice prior to Savage's stories. "The consolidation of power in the presidency is something the country needed to be told about, and that is what Charlie did," Baron said. It was the Globe's 19th Pulitzer, and the fourth since 2000.
The Globe was also a finalist in the local reporting category for its series "Debtor's Hell," which exposed unscrupulous debt collectors. The series was reported by the paper's Spotlight Team -- Michael Rezendes, Beth Healy, Francie Latour, Heather Allen, and Walter V. Robinson, editor.
The Wall Street Journal's series reported that numerous senior executives of large corporations had been allowed to backdate their purchases of stock options, in effect lowering their prices below the market. "We are very gratified," Boston bureau chief Gary Putka said. "At a time when a lot of our retirements are tied up in stocks, this series showed that all of us are victims of thievery."
The series was written by James Bandler, Mark Maremont, Charles Forelle, and Steve Stecklow , and edited by Maremont. The Journal's other prize was for international reporting, a series on the adverse impact of China's booming capitalism.
"Rabbit Hole," which received several Tony Award nominations, concerns the death of a child. In her review of last fall's production by the Huntington Theater Company in Boston, Globe critic Louise Kennedy wrote: "What keeps it from being a mere tearjerker is its refusal to ooze sentiment, to force resolution, or to make any of its characters less complicated than they are."
Reached at his home in Brooklyn yesterday, Lindsay-Abaire said he was surprised to win. "I won't know what it means for a while -- I am numb from the nose down," he said. "I was in the middle of writing a lyric for the [stage version of the] 'Shrek' movie when the call came."
The playwright, who grew up in South Boston and was educated at Milton Academy, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Juilliard School' s playwrights program, said "Rabbit Hole" was a departure for him. "My other plays are absurdist comedies, and here I was writing a naturalistic drama. I was scared to write it, and it's incredibly gratifying that audiences liked it and that it won a Pulitzer Prize."
McCarthy, 73, had gained a loyal but less-than-mass audience over the course of 10 novels, and has previously won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.
"The Road," an eerie chronicle of a father and son traveling to an unknown destination through a future world devastated by an unknown disaster, recently rocketed to the top of The New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her TV book club. The press-shy author agreed to appear on her program, a first for him. More than 1 million copies of the book are now in print.
The most surprising Pulitzer may be the one for music, which is usually awarded for a classical composition. "Sound Grammar" is the first wholly jazz work to win the award. Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis won the Pulitzer in 1997, but it was for "Blood on the Fields," which most consider a classical composition. "Sound Grammar," by contrast, is a recording of mostly improvised music.
Coleman, 77, at first didn't believe it yesterday when told he won the Pulitzer. "I've been doing what I think I'm trying to achieve ever since I was teenager ," Coleman told the Associated Press. "I've never really thought about being smart; I've only really thought about being good."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 
