Well Geez, Can We Revoke Julia Roberts' Oscar Too?

There's a movement afoot to revoke the late Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize. Duranty, a reporter for the New York Times and an apologist for Stalin, won his award in 1932 for work one later observer described as a "dull and largely uncritical recitation of Soviet sources"; he subsequently failed to write about the famine that Stalin's policies were unleashing in Ukraine.

Duranty's prize has always been a black mark on the Pulitzers' admittedly less-than-stellar record. But revoking it would be, at best, a gesture as meaningless as Clinton's apology for slavery; at worst, a noxious attempt to rewrite history. The Pulitzer committee once chose to honor a man who didn't recognize that he was living under one of the century's most brutal dictatorships. Seven decades later, that's a decision it should still have to live with.