Diana Henriques is a senior financial writer at The New York Times. She has been a Pulitzer finalist and was granted the first interview with felon Bernie Madoff upon his incarceration. She has authored four books, including “The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and The Death of Trust.”
Harvard Political Review: How did you first get interested in journalism?
Diana Henriques: I became involved at age 13 with my first newspaper with a local student group. I came to love the newsroom environment and my love for journalism followed. In college, I was a campus journalist at The George Washington University Hatchet in the late-1960s, which were exciting times to be a journalist in Washington. I eventually made the shift into financial journalism at the Philadelphia Inquirer and have worked for The Times since 1989.
HPR: What obstacles have you had to overcome to get to the bottom of investigative financial stories?
DH: My initial reaction was to say that actually financial journalism is easier, and here’s why. When I first covered government issues for different New Jersey newspapers, it was the era of “shmooze” reporting where you gathered information for political coverage by shmoozing with politicians and for crime stories by shmoozing with cops. I was a young woman, and it was a time when a young woman reporter had to navigate the landscape rather carefully. In contrast, next to the bureau where I worked was the county hall of records. I learned how to trace land records, ownerships, and deeds, and I started to get good stories about, say, county commissioners who were planning highway routes past land they had just purchased. This was my first introduction to document-based reporting, and I quickly realized a document doesn’t know if you’re a woman or a man. I started to focus on avenues of reporting where legal papers were the skeletons of the stories, and it was a breakthrough for me.
The financial corporate world is an intensely difficult place to develop sources. The document landscape is wonderful, but the source-building landscape remains the most challenging I have ever worked in. The current environment with so much hostility aimed at corporate America has intensified that challenge.
HPR: How did you establish such a strong level of trust with the Madoff family?
DH: The goal is to put the interviewee enough at ease so that you can see the real person and communicate that to your readers. Why Bernie agreed to talk to me is a mystery, but I have to assume that the only reason he would agree to talk would be that he had an agenda. He ignored my interview requests for six months and, finally, in August 2010, two months before my book was due, I got to sit down with him and witness his personality in person. You hear people say how charming and convincing he was, but if you haven’t met him, you haven’t seen it fully. The visit was not particularly factually helpful, and I was able to catch him in lies because of my preparation. But what I never could have prepared for was his ability to drift seamlessly between truth and lie, which is truly a master act.
My relationship with Ruth has been a little different. She is not a professional public figure and lived her life entirely as a private woman and, in dealing with people like that, any responsible journalist will tell you that it’s a different game. You’re dealing with someone who may not realize the power of the published word, and I think that in such a situation any journalist has an obligation to take care, and I did.
I felt that if I could help Ruth feel at ease then I could help the public see something remotely resembling the real Ruth Madoff. My aim was not to decide how the public viewed her but, rather, to say this was as close as I can get to showing you Ruth Madoff, and then let the reader decide whether she is a sympathetic person or not.
HPR: What advice would you give to females looking to pursue a career in journalism?
DH: I think women entering the field of journalism have a much easier path than they once did. They’re walking through doors that my predecessors chopped down with brute force and lawsuits. I think that to the extent that I succeeded in what most times was a men’s world was because I kept the chip off my shoulder. Anger is not a useful tool, diplomacy is. But if it’s really what you want to do, you’ll find common ground with the men for whom it is their dream job, and that’s really how I’ve been able to navigate.
The views expressed in this interview are those of Diana Henriques and do not necessarily reflect the views of The New York Times. Simon Thompson ’14 is the Interviews Editor. This interview has been condensed and edited.