This year’s Tommie and Donald Zacharias Lecture series welcomes CBS news producer and documentary filmmaker Harry Moses to the Simrall Hall auditorium Feb. 4, to discuss the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Mississippi State’s College of Arts and Sciences is sponsoring the event, which honors MSU’s president emeritus and his wife.
With over 70 stories for news magazine “60 Minutes,” Moses has enjoyed a 30-year career as a television producer, director and writer. He has also been part of the investigative unit of “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather” and executive producer of special broadcasts.
This will be Moses’ third visit to MSU. He will arrive Sunday, and on Monday he will be interviewed at 9 a.m. by Channel Four news. Moses also has a 9:30 meeting with Zacharias, and other things, which have not yet been set. At noon, he will have lunch with the Schilling Scholars and in the afternoon, meet with the faculty of the communication department.
In the 1970s, John Marszalek, Giles Distinguished professor of history, wrote “Court Martial,” a book about an African-American man’s experience at West Point Military Academy. Marszalek and Moses met when Moses turned the book into a Showtime cable drama in 1994 called “Assault at West Point.”
“Assault” is the story of one of the first African-American cadets to attend the United States Military Academy. The drama starred Samuel L. Jackson and Sam Waterston, while addressing the issues around Johnson Whittaker’s controversial removal from the academy. Because of this film, Whittaker was awarded a U.S. Army commission in 1995 by President Bill Clinton.
Moses has also acted in many television dramas like “Murder, She Wrote,” “Hill Street Blues” and “Knots Landing.” Moses was also the producer of the 1988 docudrama the New York Times dubbed “the year’s best docudrama,” called “The Trial of Berhnhard Goetz.”
In 1994, Moses donated almost 12,000 pages of his manuscript materials used during his research for “Assault” to MSU’s Mitchell Memorial Library. These materials are available for research as part of Marszalek’s donated papers in the library’s special collections department.
The communication department is excited to have Moses as a guest speaker for the Feb. 4 event.
“The lecture is two parts on how the media has dealt with terrorism,” Marszalek said. “Moses will lecture for a while and then show a 15-minute documentary he put together, and he will be open for questions afterwards.”
Marszalek describes Moses as a “very caring person.”
“He is a nice individual who is very easy to talk to,” Marszalek said.
“One day the dean and I were talking about something totally different, and Moses’ name came up,” Marszalek said, while explaining why Moses is coming to lecture. “I talked to Moses, and he said he’d be happy to come to MSU.”
The lecture is open to students and anyone in the community. There is no cost, and the presentation begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Simrall Hall auditorium.