Pulitzer Prize Board 1975-1976

Elie Abel, Newsman and Teacher, Dies at 83

July 24, 2004 by Jacques Steinberg

Elie Abel, a former foreign and domestic correspondent at both The New York Times and NBC News who drew on those experiences as dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in the 1970's, died on Thursday at a hospice in Rockville, Md. He was 83. The cause was pneumonia, said his son, Mark, but Mr. Abel had been in declining health since 1998, when he had a severe stroke. He also had Alzheimer's disease.

In nearly a quarter of a century as a working journalist, Mr. Abel saw a great deal of the country and the world. In one of his earliest newspaper jobs, he spent two years in Berlin in the late 1940's as a foreign correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, covering the Nuremberg war-crimes trials and the early attempts to govern postwar Germany. In 1949, he joined The Times, which sent him initially to Detroit and Washington, before appointing him bureau chief in Belgrade (1956 to 1959) and New Delhi (1958-1959.)

He left The Times in 1959 to spend two years at The Detroit News, as its Washington bureau chief, before beginning a six-year career at NBC that included tours as State Department correspondent, London bureau chief and chief diplomatic correspondent.

In December 1969, Mr. Abel was named dean of the journalism school of Columbia, from which he had graduated with a masters degree 27 years earlier. ''If you had asked me a year ago if I had any interest in this job, I would probably have said you were out of your mind,'' Mr. Abel was quoted as telling The Times, in a profile announcing his appointment. ''I decided I had done my share of running around the world and in more recent years of running to airports with microphones in my hand.''

In a decade as dean, Mr. Abel was credited with many innovations, including the creation, in the mid-1970's, of a program in economics and business reporting for midcareer professionals. The program is now known as the Knight-Bagheot Fellowship. He was also the first dean to place a woman in a tenure track position on the faculty of the journalism school, according to ''Pulitzer's School: Columbia University's School of Journalism, 1903-2003,'' by James Boylan. She is Phyllis T. Garland, a former editor and writer at The Pittsburgh Courier and Essence magazine who was hired at Columbia in 1973 and who retired last month. ''We totally respected him,'' Ms. Garland said in an interview yesterday. ''He was a complete journalist. And he put himself on the line when necessary. He was also one of the best-looking men I've ever seen. Tall, dark and handsome.''

Elie Abel was born in Montreal on Oct. 17, 1920. After graduating from McGill University in 1941 with a bachelor of arts degree, Mr. Abel earned his masters in science at Columbia a year later, but was forced to accept his degree in absentia because he was called to serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force, according to the profile in The Times. Stationed primarily in Scotland, he served as a radar officer and later as a combat correspondent. A day after his discharge, in 1945, he joined the staff of The Montreal Gazette.

Mr. Abel's first wife, the former Corinne Adelaide Prevost, died in 1991 after 45 years of marriage. In addition to his son, of Richmond, Calif., he is survived by his second wife, the former Charlotte Hammond Page Dunn, whom he married in 1995; a daughter, Suzanne, of Palo Alto, Calif.; and a granddaughter. Mr. Abel was the author or co-author of six books, including ''The Missile Crisis'' (Lippincott, 1966) and, with W. Averell Harriman, ''Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946'' (Random House, 1975).

When he was interviewed by The Times in 1969 at the time of his Columbia appointment, Mr. Abel recalled a pivotal encounter, at the age of 12 or 13, with a ''dashing fellow'' who happened to be driving a flashy convertible. ''How did you manage all this?'' Mr. Abel recalled asking. ''I'm a reporter,'' the man replied. The author of The Times profile, Lawrence Van Gelder, then observed, 'Mr. Abel's course in life was likely charted right then and there.''

-- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/24/us/elie-abel-newsman-and-teacher-dies-at-83.html?pagewanted=print

(Courtesy of The New York Times)

Ben Bradlee’s Charmed, Charming Life

By David Carr

October 22, 2014

Civilians, people who don’t think the toppling of a sitting American president with newspaper articles is one of humankind’s lasting achievements, will read encomiums to Ben Bradlee like this one and wonder: What’s the big deal?

After all, he didn’t cover the Watergate story for his Washington Post, he picked the reporters. It’s not as if he wrote the articles, he edited them. But journalists are people who will go where they are pointed, and Mr. Bradlee generally pointed to important, consequential subjects. People who worked for him went through walls to bring back those stories, some of which revealed the true course of American history and some of which altered it.

The newspaper business can be a grand endeavor, but most of the people who commit journalism would never be mistaken for larger than life. Journalists are bystanders who chronicle the exploits of people who actually do things.

But Ben Bradlee did things. He went to war, loved early and often, befriended and took on presidents, swore like a sailor, and partied like a movie star. Now that he is gone — he died on Tuesday at the age of 93 at his home in Georgetown — it is tough to imagine a newspaperman ever playing the kind of outsize role that he once did in Washington. Newspapers, and people’s regard for them, have shrunk since he ran The Post.

He took over an also-ran paper and turned it into a formidable fighting ship like the one on which he served in World War II. Once the newspaper he oversaw gained steam, there was only the relentless effort to beat the competition, to find and woo talent, to pursue targets that The Post deemed worthy.

In the more than quarter-century that he helped lead the newsroom, from 1965 to 1991, he doubled its staff and circulation, and multiplied its ambitions. He would have been a terrible newspaperman in the current context — buyouts, reduced print schedules, timidity about offending advertisers — but he was a perfect one for his time.

“I had a good seat,” he told The American Journalism Review in a 1995 interview. “I came along at the right time with the right job and I didn’t screw it up.”

Mr. Bradlee had the attention span of a gnat — anecdotes of him walking away from a conversation he ceased to find interesting were common — but he was completely hypnotized by the chase of a good story.

His own life and persona make for a pretty fair tale: Boston Brahmin, junior naval officer in World War II, Paris in the ’50s, friend of the Kennedys, tormentor of Nixon. He was Zelig-like in his ability to appear at critical junctures in American history.

I knew him in the mid-’90s, when he was vice president at large of The Post, but he was still large, still engaged, perpetually on the hunt for political gossip or newsroom intrigue. He was a decent, if relentlessly loyal, source when I covered The Post as the editor of the Washington City Paper. But even though I barely knew him, he was hilarious to bump into.

“I like your paper a lot,” he’d deadpan, “whenever it doesn’t have its,” insert sailor adjective, “finger in my eye.” Cue big roar of laughter, dancing eyes, deep pleasure at his own riposte.

Anybody who has ever watched Mr. Bradlee enter a room knows that whatever “it” is, he had a lot of it. There was the smile, a flash of white teeth matching the white collar of the custom striped shirts he wore without fail, and a voice that was a mix of gravel and gravitas that had a hearty (and generally profane) word for everybody. In a town notorious for big entrances — Bill Clinton, Marion Barry, Ronald Reagan, you name it — Mr. Bradlee tilted a room just by being himself.

“He was one of those people who could make you feel like a superstar just by being in the same room with him,” David Von Drehle, a longtime Post writer now at Time, told me by phone on Tuesday. “Every woman in the room wanted to be with him, and every man in the room wanted to be him.”

The executive editor of The Post from 1965 to 1991, Bradlee oversaw the Post's prize-winning coverage of the Watergate affair. He came to journalism via Harvard, did a stint working for the State Department in Paris, before becoming a reporter and editor at Newsweek and The Post. In 1971, he defied the Nixon administration by publishing the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of the Vietnam War and endured harsh criticism from Republicans during the early days of the Watergate scandal. Vindicated by Nixon's resignation, Bradlee was lionized in the movie version of "All the President's Men," where he was portrayed by Jason Robards. In retirement he published a memoir, "A Good Life." -- from washingtonpost.com 7/18/2014 Benjamin Bradlee joined the Pulitzer Board in 1969.

John Cowles Jr., 82, Dies; Led Minneapolis Newspapers

by Bruce Weber, March 19, 2012, The New York Times

John Cowles Jr., a Minneapolis newspaper executive and philanthropist whose support for arts, sports and entertainment helped elevate the Twin Cities' cultural community to national prominence, died on Saturday at home in Minneapolis. He was 82.

The cause was lung cancer, his son Jay said.

Scion of a family that owned The Des Moines Register, started Look magazine and came to dominate the newspaper business in Minneapolis for more than half a century, Mr. Cowles (rhymes with bowls) succeeded his father in 1961 as the editor of two Minneapolis papers, the morning Tribune and the evening Star. He became president and chief executive of The Minneapolis Star and Tribune Company (later renamed Cowles Media Company) in 1968.

His tenure was rocky, but during it the papers won praise for aggressive local reporting, increased arts and science coverage and support for the civil rights movement and the Equal Rights Amendment in editorials. (Though he was generally described as a progressive liberal, Mr. Cowles served on a White House committee in 1965 to generate support for President Johnson's war policies.)

The company's fortunes declined in the late 1960s, however, after several unsuccessful acquisitions, including Harper's magazine and the publisher Harper & Row. In 1979, The Star and Tribune Company bought The Buffalo Courier-Express but was forced to close it three years later.

In 1982, the company merged The Star and The Tribune and cut its work force, prompting the editor of the merged papers to quit in protest. Mr. Cowles subsequently fired the publisher and assumed the role himself. But just a few months later, in early 1983, the board of Cowles Media, which included his sister and two cousins, dismissed him as publisher and head of the company as well.

He remained on the board until 1984 and into the 1990s continued to control a substantial percentage of company stock through his management of a family trust. Cowles Media was sold to the McClatchy Company in 1998.

Beyond his turbulent stewardship of the newspapers, Mr. Cowles was known in Minneapolis and St. Paul for his philanthropy and his belief that arts institutions and sports teams were necessary for cities to grow and thrive. In 1960, he served on a steering committee -- and by most accounts was its leading voice -- that persuaded the British director Tyrone Guthrie to establish a resident theater company in Minneapolis to perform classic works in repertory. He then helped raise $2.2 million, and the Guthrie Theater opened in 1963 with a production of "Hamlet." It became a model for nonprofit theaters across the country. Four decades later, he was co-chairman of the architecture committee for the new Guthrie Theater that opened in 2006.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Cowles was active in the construction of the Metrodome, a state-financed domed stadium in downtown Minneapolis for the city's two major sports franchises, the Minnesota Twins and the Minnesota Vikings.

His position on the project was controversial. Opponents, including staff members at The Minneapolis Tribune, thought it was a clear conflict of interest for the owner of a newspaper to take a public position on an important local issue it was covering. In 1979, staff members placed an ad in their own paper disassociating themselves from the company's involvement.

The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome opened in 1982; the Twins have since moved to Target Field.

Mr. Cowles said in a 2010 interview that the impetus for his support of the Guthrie and the Metrodome were the same.

"Strengthening the cultural organization and life of the Twin Cities was not only going to make life more interesting and attractive for our families,"  he said, "but was going to attract business and keep business here in town, and it was going to be just plain good business."

Mr. Cowles was born on May 27, 1929, in Des Moines, Iowa, where his grandfather, Gardner Cowles, had been publisher of The Des Moines Register since 1903. His father, John, and his uncle Gardner Cowles Jr., known as Mike, founded Look magazine. John Cowles Sr. bought The Minneapolis Star in 1935 and moved his family to Minneapolis in 1938.

The next year, the family business bought The Minneapolis Journal and merged it with The Star, and then added The Minneapolis Tribune in 1941. Young John graduated from the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and Harvard, and spent two years in the Army before joining the family business as a reporter.

After his dismissal from the company in 1983, Mr. Cowles began a somewhat eclectic career. He studied agricultural economics, taught aerobics, toured in the United States and Europe with a modern dance company, and helped establish a women's professional fast-pitch softball league. He also continued his arts philanthropy around the Twin Cities; most recently, the Cowles Center, a theater devoted to dance, opened in Minneapolis last fall.

Besides his son John III, known as Jay, Mr. Cowles is survived by his wife, the former Jane Sage Fuller, who is known as Sage Fuller Cowles and whom he married in 1952; another son, Charles; a daughter, Jane Sage Cowles; a stepdaughter, Tessa Flores; a sister, Sarah Cowles Doering; a brother, Russell; 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

(Courtesy of The Press-Democrat.)

RIVERSIDE: Former P-E publisher and editor Tim Hays dies

Pulitzer Prize winner who led the newspaper for decades won landmark First Amendment cases

From Staff Reports

October 14, 2011

Howard H. "€œTim" Hays Jr., the Harvard-educated lawyer who chose a newspaperman'™s life and led what became The Press-Enterprise into national prominence as a Pulitzer Prize-winning advocate of open government and defender of the First Amendment, died Friday in St. Louis. He was 94.

Mr. Hays had been struggling with Alzheimer's disease, his son Tom Hays said Friday. He said his father died in the afternoon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital following a brief acute illness.

Mr. Hays spent 51 years at The Press-Enterprise. He was an FBI special agent during World War II and joined the newspaper as assistant editor in 1946. He passed the bar the same year but never practiced law.

His subsequent roles included editor, co-publisher, publisher and chairman. He continued as chairman until 1997, when The Press-Enterprise was sold to the A.H. Belo Co., ending 67 years of family ownership of the Riverside-based newspaper.

The news organization's five-story office on Fourteenth Street was named in 2006 as the Howard H. "Tim"€ Hays Media Center.

"Tim was a rarity, a man whose moral compass was set on true," said Mel Opotowsky, the former managing editor of The Press-Enterprise. "That is especially important as a newspaper owner because of the obligation as a public trust. There are many instances of Tim's beneficence, not only to his employees, but to his readers and to principles of quality journalism."

Mr. Hays once joked that his choice of journalism over law and his “semi-meteoric rise at the newspaper were due to "€œdiligence, and the fact that my father was co-owner."

Courtly, soft-voiced and with a penchant for remembering anyone'€™s name, from civic leaders to cleaning crews in the hallways of his newspaper, Mr. Hays' personality contrasted sharply with flamboyant news-executive contemporaries. His memos were to his "Fellow Employees."

But his reserved manner was matched with a steely resolve.

He stood up to pressure and confrontation to lead his newspaper to a Pulitzer Prize. He took two open-government cases to the U.S. Supreme Court, winning both.

Media attorneys use shorthand to refer to two landmark cases won by the newspaper, Press-Enterprise One and Two.

In January 1984, the newspaper won a case establishing the public's right to attend jury selection in criminal trial proceedings. In a 1986 case, the court asserted the right of the public to attend pre-trial hearings in criminal cases with few exceptions.

Mr. Hays oversaw publication of a series of articles in 1967 that exposed malpractice in the conservatorship program for Agua Caliente Indians in Palm Springs. Editorials combined with more than 100 stories, mostly written by reporter George Ringwald, earned the newspaper the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service in 1968. (Ringwald died in 2005.)

During the newspaper's reporting of that issue, a judge who was under investigation became infuriated by a Press-Enterprise editorial and ordered Mr. Hays arrested.

The publisher stood his ground and was not jailed.

Mr. Hays also stood by his reporters, even as advertisers took their business away in protest over investigative pieces.

Despite national recognition, Mr. Hays kept his community at the foreground of his work. He was among the civic leaders who worked to get a University of California campus established here. UC Riverside opened in 1954.

"€œTim had a very active mind that saw beyond the ordinary but was able to bring it down to earth,"€ said his former executive secretary, Jean Wingard. "He was an excellent newsman, and had the respect of those who worked with him and for him."

Mr. Hays established the Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture in 1966, which was underwritten in 1998 by a $100,000 endowment after the newspaper was sold.

The free lectures, open to the public, featured leaders in news media, including retired Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee; Gene Roberts, former managing editor of the New York Times; and W. Thomas Johnson, who was then president of Cable News Network.

Mr. Hays also undertook the cause of preserving the Mission Inn.

He and other civic leaders maintained their effort during a seven-year stretch in which the state and national historic landmark in downtown Riverside was closed at one time surrounded by a chain-link fence.

Several attempts to reopen the Inn failed. Some suggested the land was a prime spot for a parking lot. In 1992, Duane Roberts bought the hotel and invested millions of dollars in renovations.

The Press-Enterprise under Mr. Hays also quietly helped to underwrite local cultural and arts organizations.

"I a€™m not married to any cause," Mr. Hays once said. "I believe in generosity to the community in which you live. I think you can contribute more with time and energy than with dollars. But I guess the money can be pretty dandy, too."

Retired appellate court Justice John Gabbert said Mr. Hays, similar to his brothers, developed his sense of community engagement early in life.

"He was motivated by the very strong civic background that he probably inherited from his father," Gabbert said Friday. "€œThey were all there, out in the community, making it better."

Contemporaries of Mr. Hays said he was less likely to deliver a fiery speech, and more likely to argue his points over lunch or in a casual conversation. Former state Sen. Robert Presley said each time he would meet Mr. Hays at the same downtown Riverside restaurant, the publisher would prod him for support of downtown Riverside projects.

"He didn't seem to have a lot of ego, although he could be vigorous and persuasive in his arguments," Presley said Friday from Sacramento.

"He was a very special person," said Marcia McQuern who worked for Hays at The Press-Enterprise and eventually became the paper'€™s publisher. "€œHe had a true journalist'€™s heart. He always tried to live up to his standards and ideals."

McQuern remembered Hays being well tied into the community. So much so that he often knew what was going on before his reporters did.

"€œI would come to him with a story and he'd say, 'You finally found that out,' she said. But he never would kill anything."

Even when it may have been unpopular among the community leaders he mingled with.

"He took a lot of heat. He really stuck by the newsroom. That'€™s where his heart was," she said.

McQuern remembered one instance where the paper wanted the name behind a large anonymous donation to UC Riverside.

"We fought for access," she said. "€œHe let us go fight for the information. We were about to file suit and he finally admitted it was him."

Howard H. "Tim"€ Hays Jr. was born in Chicago on June 2, 1917, the son of Howard H Hays Sr. and Margaret Mauger Hays. He came to Riverside with his parents in 1924.

A graduate of Riverside Polytechnic High School, he was editor of the school newspaper, Poly Spotlight, during his senior year.

Mr. Hays earned a bachelor's degree in social sciences at Stanford University, graduating in 1939.

In 1942, he received a law degree from Harvard Law School. After his service with the FBI, he briefly served as a reporter at the San Bernardino Sun before joining the family newspaper and beginning his leadership role in American journalism.

Mr. Hays moved to St. Louis part time in 1989, and began living there full time after his retirement from The Press-Enterprise, his son Tom said.

In a message read at the 2007 dedication of the news building named after him, Mr. Hays noted that he still read every day the newspaper that he had led for so long.

Survivors include wife Susie Hays of St. Louis, sons Bill Hays of Corona Del Mar and Tom Hays of New York City, and brother Dan Hays of Riverside. His brother, William H. Hays, died earlier this year. Mr. Hays' first wife, Helen Hays Yeager, died two years earlier, to the day, of Mr. Hays' death.

The family was still considering memorial services, Tom Hays said Friday. The family requested that donations in lieu of flowers be made to the UCR Foundation, 120A Highlander Hall, 900 University Ave., Riverside CA 92521.

The website is ucr.edu/giving.

Said Tom Hays, "He lived a very long and productive and fortunate life, and he died very peacefully, so we are thankful for that."

(Courtesy of Brigham Young University)

John Hughes was editor of the Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City from 1997 to 2006, and returned to BYU as a professor of communications in 2007. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former editor of The Christian Science Monitor.

Hughes has also served as U.S. assistant secretary of state and as assistant secretary-general of the United Nations, and he has chaired presidential and congressional commissions on international broadcasting.

Born in Wales and educated in England, Hughes served for six years as the Monitor’s Africa correspondent and six years as Far East correspondent before serving for nine years as the paper’s editor. For three of those years he was both editor and publisher.

He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Indonesia and the Overseas Press Club award for an investigation into the international narcotics traffic. He is a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Hughes has written two books and writes a nationally-syndicated column for The Christian Science Monitor.

Hughes and his wife Peggy, a Brigham Young University graduate, have three children — Mark, Wendy, and Evan — and have six grandchildren.

(Courtesy of The New York Times)

Clayton Kirkpatrick, 89, Editor Who Changed Chicago Tribune

By Thomas J. Lucek

June 23, 2004

Clayton Kirkpatrick, a former editor of The Chicago Tribune who presided over a sweeping transformation of the newspaper's editorial approach, died Saturday at his home in Glen Ellyn, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. He was 89.

The cause was congestive heart failure, The Tribune reported yesterday.

Mr. Kirkpatrick was The Tribune's editor from 1969 to 1979. He took the job when the newspaper adhered to traditions of partisan reporting that had originated under Col. Robert R. McCormick, a former owner who died in 1955. According to its own account yesterday, The Tribune ''had been the Republican bible for the first half of the 20th century,'' and, until Mr. Kirkpatrick was made editor on Jan. 1, 1969, ''was caught in a time warp.''

Mr. Kirkpatrick immediately wrote an editorial telling Tribune readers that they could expect changes in both the editorial page and news columns, and that ''no political party should take The Tribune for granted.''

In the years that followed, Mr. Kirkpatrick encountered resistance from conservative members of the Tribune Company's board and complaints from readers, but in the long run the newspaper reversed a lengthy decline in circulation and increased its profits under Mr. Kirkpatrick's leadership.

At the height of the Watergate scandals in May 1974, the newspaper demonstrated its break with its past with a 44-page special section that contained the entire transcript of President Richard M. Nixon's Watergate-related conversations. Eight days later, a Tribune editorial that was headlined ''Listen, Mr. Nixon'' called on him to resign.

Mr. Kirkpatrick also introduced new specialized sections and changed the appearance of The Tribune, using more photographs and graphic material. In the case of the Moon landing in 1969, the normal front page mix of type and headlines was replaced with one huge headline, three short paragraphs of large type and a photograph of the Moon's surface.

Mr. Kirkpatrick was born on Jan. 8, 1915, and grew up in Waterman, Ill. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he graduated in 1937.

A year later, he was hired as a reporter by the City News Bureau, a news service in Chicago, and he became a local reporter at The Tribune that year.

He enlisted in the Army in 1942, and was awarded a Bronze Star before his discharge in 1945.

At The Tribune, he worked his way from an editor on the copy desk to city editor in 1961. He was made assistant managing editor in 1963, managing editor in 1965 and executive editor in 1967.

After his 10 years as editor, Mr. Kirkpatrick was made president and chief executive of the Tribune Company in 1979 and retired in 1981.

Mr. Kirkpatrick's wife, Thelma, died in 1998. He is survived by two sons, Bruce and James; two daughters, Eileen Vaughan and Pamela Kirkpatrick; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

(Courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Longtime Journal editor Dick Leonard dies at 92

By Meg Jones

May 18, 2014

Richard H. Leonard always knew he wanted to be a newspaperman — correction, make that editor — ever since he worked on his fifth-grade newspaper back in Ridgewood, N.J.

And he did just that.

In 1967, Leonard was named the sixth editor of The Milwaukee Journal. He served longer than any other editor in the history of the newspaper, with the exception of Lucius W. Nieman, who founded it in 1882.

Leonard, 92, died of natural causes Sunday in Milwaukee.

He worked at The Journal for 39 years, including 18 as its top editor, where he celebrated the paper winning two Pulitzer Prizes, embraced the concept of a newspaper ombudsman, founded the Sunday Journal's weekly magazine Insight, championed the hiring of women and minorities in the newsroom and boosted international coverage by sending Journal reporters and photographers to foreign countries and to cover the Vietnam War.

"He was a believer in bringing the world to Wisconsin," said Sig Gissler, who succeeded Leonard as editor. "I think that was one of the distinctive features of The Milwaukee Journal for many years."

Leonard made extensive reporting and study trips to Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, the Soviet Union, the Middle East and was among the first journalists to enter China after President Richard Nixon's historic visit.

He actually became a world traveler before he became a professional journalist. Enlisting in the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he served in the Transportation Corps in Europe, the Philippines, New Guinea and Japan during and after World War II.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and raised in Ridgewood, N.J., he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1939. He worked as editor for the Daily Cardinal, where he met his wife, Barbara. He returned to college after the war, earned a journalism degree in 1947 and was hired by The Milwaukee Journal.

Leonard never forgot his first Journal assignment. He was sent to an interview at the old Schroeder Hotel, now the Hilton Milwaukee City Center. Suddenly a body hurtled past the window, in what would turn out to be a suicide. Leonard's news instincts kicked in and he planned to go after the story, first calling the city desk.

"We'll send a reporter right over!" someone on the desk told him.

"That," Leonard recalled, "was the biggest put-down I've ever experienced."

After that, he had nowhere to go but up.

Leonard next worked on the newspaper's picture desk and then its Madison bureau. He handled state news in 1951 and became state editor in 1952. By 1962, he was managing editor. Leonard covered everything from stories on the notorious Ed Gein murders to visits by Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

"I saw Truman in Madison when he was running for election against Dewey in 1948," said Leonard, noting that Truman wasn't given much of a chance of winning. "He joked about the Republicans putting 'two veterans in every garage,' and he cracked some other jokes, getting tremendous applause, tremendous laughter — a great reaction. I felt right then that he was going to win the election, even though the odds were heavily against him."

In another political encounter, Leonard caught up with Eisenhower in Madison.

"I stopped him," Leonard said, "and asked him if there was any truth to the rumors that he was going to run for president. He said absolutely not, and he poked his finger in my chest and added that 'if anybody asks you who said so, you tell them that Ike told you he's not going to run for president.' That story was a big thing for me, except that a week later Eisenhower announced his candidacy."

Bob Wills worked with Leonard at The Journal and moved to the Milwaukee Sentinel as city editor when The Journal bought its rival in 1962. Then they became competitors professionally while remaining personal friends, traveling on vacations with their wives.

"He was very thorough, very forward looking, very good humored. He wanted a paper that would be of interest to everyone in the metropolitan area," said Wills.

Howard Fibich was hired to work at The Journal in 1956 and rose through the ranks to deputy managing editor before retiring in 1994.

"I thought Dick Leonard was the best editor we had," said Fibich. "I'll always remember him for the things he didn't do. He did not micromanage. ... No one wanted to disappoint Dick."

Leonard was involved with numerous journalism organizations, including the International Press Institute, Society of Professional Journalists and the Milwaukee Press Club. After retiring from The Journal, he worked in Honolulu for four years as Editor-in-Residence at the East-West Center, a government exchange program for American and Pacific Rim journalists. He was an assistant professor of communications at Marquette University for many years, spent a decade on the Pulitzer Prize Board and served on Harvard University's Nieman Fellowship selection committee.

He is survived by his wife and two daughters, Laurie Leonard and Lisa Heck. Services are pending.

Former Journal Sentinel staff writer Amy Silvers contributed to this report.

William J. McGill, distinguished psychologist, author and president of Columbia University during the decade of the 1970s, died Sunday, Oct. 19, in La Jolla, Calif. He was 75 years old. He had suffered a severe heart attack last Wednesday and was a patient in John M. and Sally B. Thornton Hospital of the University of California, San Diego. He had been chancellor of UCSD from 1968 to 1970, before joining Columbia, and had been an adjunct professor there again for the past 17 years. 

Dr. McGill was a leading mathematical psychologist, highly regarded as both a theoretician and experimentalist. He made lasting research contributions in quantitative psychology, particularly in information processing, among them the precise measurement of reaction times to stimuli.

At the time of his death, he had nearly completed a book with a former Columbia colleague on how the brain processes sound and light to expand the range of human perception.

But it was Dr. McGill's skill in handling conflict that brought him public attention as chancellor of UCSD and recommended him for the Columbia presidency at the turbulent start of the 1970s. He calmed the San Diego campus when student demonstrations occurred and a controversial appointment was criticized. At Columbia, he began his decade-long term by dealing with student unrest face-to-face, at times plunging into crowds of anti-war and civil rights protesters to talk with their leaders.

His legacy at both Columbia and San Diego includes heightened curricular and scholarly attention to human rights issues. "Dr. McGill made an invaluable contribution to Columbia during a crucial decade in its history,"

The University's current president, George Rupp, said. "He continued to be a great friend of Columbia, and he will be missed tremendously both here in New York and in California."

"Bill McGill was one of the great figures in higher education in the period following World War II," said University of California President Richard C. Atkinson. "He was a superb scientist, distinguished president of two of America's leading universities, and a passionate advocate of university involvement in addressing the challenging issues facing society."

William James McGill was born Feb. 27, 1922, in New York City, the son of a musician and grandson of an Irish immigrant dockworker. Raised in the Bronx, he sold shoes and ran an elevator at Radio City Music Hall as a schoolboy. After receiving bachelor's and master's degrees at Fordham University, he earned the Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1953 at Harvard University and was an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 1956, when he joined Columbia.

He was chairman of the psychology department from 1961 to 1963 and left in 1965 to co-found the psychology department at the newly established UCSD campus. His research contributions were at the forefront of advanced knowledge of sensory mechanisms.

He published many scientific papers analyzing the flow of sensory information, particularly between the ear and the brain. The week before he died, he and Malvin C. Teich, professor emeritus of engineering science and applied physics at Columbia and now a professor at Boston University, had spent days polishing a final text for a new book. It will propose that the brain amplifies, and in the process adds, a special kind of noise in transmitting visual and auditory signals up the sensory pathways so that we can hear and see both very faint and very strong sound and light. "It's a book he long wanted to write, and it will be published," Dr. Teich said today.

In 1968, Dr. McGill chaired a search committee to select a new UCSD chancellor for what was becoming a restless campus. When five finalists refused the offer, he was recruited for the post himself, which he accepted warily. Confrontation ensued when he stood his ground against then-governor Ronald Reagan in re-appointing Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse and when he reasoned with militant students who in sit-ins and teach-ins demanded a curriculum emphasizing Marxist doctrine.

His style and courage, as well as his scholarly stature, attracted the search committee at Columbia, and he became the University's 16th president on Sept. 1, 1970, at the age of 48. He immediately faced many of the same anti-war and civil rights protests on a campus memorably struck by student unrest two years earlier. He modernized the administration, created a dialogue with student leaders and finished the job of peacemaking that his predecessor, Andrew W. Cordier, had begun.

During his presidency, the University's fund-raising performance recovered dramatically; he balanced the budget and completed $100 million in new construction. New buildings included the Sherman Fairchild Center for the Life Sciences, the Julius and Armand Hammer Health Sciences Center, the International Affairs Building, the Geosciences building at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Dodge Physical Fitness Center and an expanded Avery Hall. Faculty honors and research advances multiplied across the campus.

The concept of general education, pioneered at Columbia in 1919, was expanded to systematically introduce humanities instruction at the graduate and professional levels. Curricular innovations in the schools of architecture, engineering, business and medicine resulted, and a new Center for the Study of Human Rights was established. In 1976, the University created and endowed the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, which supports the work of outstanding young scholars on annual appointments. The programs became models for other American universities.

When he announced in 1979 that he would retire the following year, the chairman of the Trustees, Arthur Krim, said: "You leave Columbia with its academic excellence intact, its campus vibrant, its administration reorganized and its budget in balance. You have won the confidence of students and faculty, not by throttling but by encouraging the rights of dissent so important to an academic environment, yet leading whenever required with a firm and just hand. All this adds up to a considerable personal accomplishment. We Trustees who have lived through these years with you believe it to be the single most outstanding contribution made by any university leader in the past decade to the preservation and enhancement of a great private university."

Dr. McGill returned to UCSD in 1980, became an adjunct professor of psychology and continued his research. In 1983 McGraw-Hill published his book, The Year of the Monkey: Revolt on Campus, in which he chronicled his first year as UCSD chancellor. His office was in William J. McGill Hall, the former psychology-linguistics building named for him in 1990 in honor of his contributions as administrator and scientist.

Dr. McGill was awarded 22 honorary degrees and received Columbia's highest honor: the Alexander Hamilton Medal of Columbia College. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received the Gold Medal of the National Institute for Social Science and was a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

He was chairman of the New York State Special Advisory Panel on Medical Malpractice in 1975-76, of the American Council on Education in 1976 and of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting in 1977.

He is survived by his wife, the former Ann Rowe; a daughter, Mrs. Thomas B. (Rowena) Springer of Reno, Nev.; a son, William R., of San Diego, and two grandsons. The funeral will be private. Memorial services are being planned. --

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/pr/97/19206.html

Eugene C. Patterson, Editor and Civil Rights Crusader, Dies at 89

By Robert D. McFadden

January 13, 2013

Eugene C. Patterson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of The Atlanta Constitution during the civil rights conflicts of the 1960s and later the managing editor of The Washington Post and editor of The St. Petersburg Times in Florida, died on Saturday in St. Petersburg. He was 89.

The cause was complications from cancer, said George Rahdert, Mr. Patterson’s lawyer and longtime friend, who said he had been sick since last February.

In 41 years as a reporter, editor and news executive, Mr. Patterson, who won the 1967 Pulitzer for editorial columns, was one of America’s most highly regarded journalists — a plain-talking, hard-driving competitor known for fairness and integrity as the nation confronted racial turmoil, divisions over the Vietnam War and new ethical challenges in journalism.

Mr. Patterson succeeded the celebrated Ralph McGill as editor of The Constitution, and from 1960 to 1968 was a voice of conscience and progressive politics on the editorial page. He wrote thousands of columns, many of which addressed white Southerners directly, like letters from home, and cumulatively painted a portrait of the South during the civil rights struggle.

Raised on Georgia farm and serving as a tank commander in World War II, he worked at small-town newspapers in Texas and Georgia as a young man, and although he moved up to wire service jobs in New York and London, he had been steeped in the droll wit and down-home sociability of the South.

There were no simple solutions to the racial problems, and he offered none. Instead, he drew poignant scenes of suffering and loss to condemn violence and miscarriages of justice. And he explored themes of courage and questions of responsibility that went beyond mindless acts of racism to challenge a people with traditions of decency.

At the ruins of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., where a bomb killed four girls on Sept. 15, 1963, he crafted his most famous column, “A Flower for the Graves.” Walter Cronkite was so moved that he asked Mr. Patterson to read it on the “CBS Evening News.”

It began: “A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her. Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.”

He also protested the Georgia legislature’s refusal to seat Julian Bond, the black civil rights leader, for opposing American involvement in Vietnam and supporting draft resisters. His exclusion was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in 1966, and Mr. Bond served 20 years in the legislature.

Mr. Patterson joined The Washington Post in 1968 as managing editor, succeeding Benjamin C. Bradlee, who became executive editor. The two led the newsroom in June 1971 when The Post followed The New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers, the secret study of American duplicity in Indochina. Nixon administration challenges to both publications were struck down in a historic Supreme Court ruling.

Later in 1971, Mr. Patterson left The Post and taught for a year at Duke University. In 1972 he became editor of The St. Petersburg Times (now known as The Tampa Bay Times) and two sister publications, The Evening Independent in St. Petersburg and Congressional Quarterly, covering the government in Washington. After the death of the publications’ owner, Nelson Poynter, in 1978, he became the company’s chairman until his own retirement in 1988.

Eugene Corbett Patterson was born on Oct. 15, 1923, in Valdosta, Ga., to William C. and Annabel Corbett Patterson. He grew up on a farm, did office work for The Adel News, edited a campus newspaper at North Georgia College at Dahlonega and majored in journalism at the University of Georgia at Athens, graduating in 1943.

He joined the Army in World War II, became a tank platoon commander in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After Germany’s defeat he sailed for the Pacific, but learned on the way of Japan’s surrender. He became an Army pilot after the war, but left the service in 1947 to go into journalism.

In 1950, he married Mary Sue Carter. She died in 1999. Mr. Patterson, who lived in St. Petersburg, is survived by their daughter, Mary Patterson Fausch, and three grandchildren.

Mr. Patterson was a reporter for The Temple Daily Telegram in Texas and The Macon Telegraph in Georgia in 1947 and 1948 and worked for United Press in Atlanta in 1948, in New York in 1949 and in London as bureau chief from 1953 to 1956. He then became vice president and executive editor of The Atlanta Journal and The Constitution, both owned by Cox Enterprises, and four years later was named editor of The Constitution.

From 1964 to 1968, Mr. Patterson was vice chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, an appointee of President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1977 and 1978, and served from 1974 to 1985 on Columbia’s Pulitzer Prize Board, selecting winners of those prestigious awards in journalism and the arts.

In 1981, Mr. Patterson was one of the few board members who opposed a feature-writing Pulitzer for Janet Cooke of The Washington Post for an article about an 8-year-old heroin addict, which proved to be a hoax. He objected because the article was about an anonymous boy and relied on unnamed sources. The Pulitzer was returned, Ms. Cooke resigned, and the episode was a profound embarrassment for The Post.

Mr. Patterson also scoffed at the idea of journalists posing as someone else to get a story. “If this becomes the standard for news coverage in America, then we have set a standard that young reporters are going to follow, and misrepresenting oneself, misleading, camouflaging one’s identity, will become a way of life,” he said in a discussion on the CBS News program “60 Minutes.”

In a newsroom with his sleeves rolled up or at an awards ceremony in a tuxedo, he carried himself with military bearing, a stocky, barrel-chested man with the rolling gait of James Cagney, whom he resembled in style and grit. Colleagues said he seemed always to be on the verge of a smile or a good idea.

“Every day you had to have an idea,” he said in 2003 of his column-writing years. “You kept your pockets stuffed with quotations and ideas and turns of thought, famous sayings that you could credit and work into your columns. At laundry time, you had an awful lot of chewed-up paper in your pockets.”

In 2002, a collection of his columns for The Constitution was published as a book, “The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968.” He was the author of “Patton’s Unsung Armor of the Ardennes: The Tenth Armored Division’s Secret Dash to Bastogne” (2008). A chair in journalism was established in his name at Duke, where he was a trustee from 1988 to 1994.

In a 2008 interview with Florida Trend magazine, Mr. Patterson remembered a day when his daughter, Mary, then 9, called him at The Constitution. She was sobbing. Someone had shot her dog in the backyard. He hurried home. “I kept telling my daughter, ‘Look, we don’t know who shot her,’ ” he recalled. “But my daughter said she knew — that it was ‘somebody who doesn’t like what you’ve been writing in the paper.’ ”

“I tried to explain to her,” he said. “It was tough for a child.”

But there was no turning back. “You had to address the issue of race relations because the civil rights marchers were in the streets, the sit-ins were going on, the riots, the fire hoses, the police dogs, the killings,” he said. “This had to be addressed and not simply by reporting it, but by editors who would stand up and say what we had been doing was wrong, and we had to change.”

Correction: January 18, 2013 

An obituary on Monday about the newspaper editor Eugene C. Patterson misidentified his birthplace. It is Valdosta, Ga., — not Adel, a small town where his family moved when he was a child.

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.

(Courtesy of The New York Times)

James Reston, a Giant of Journalism, Dies at 86

By R.W. Apple Jr.

December 7, 1995

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6— James Reston, former columnist, Washington correspondent and executive editor of The New York Times, died tonight at his home here. He was 86.

The cause was cancer, said his son Thomas.

First as a reporter and then, beginning in 1953, as a columnist, Mr. Reston was perhaps the most influential journalist of his generation. In Washington, where he was based, and also in other capitals around the world, he had unrivaled access to the high and the mighty. Yet he retained a wry, self-deprecating personality, free of bombast, and always sought to reduce political complexity to plain language.

"What I try to do," he said, "is write a letter to a friend who doesn't have time to find out all the goofy things that go on in Washington."

Interested in China and the Soviet Union as well as the United States, a student of diplomacy as well as domestic politics, he won two Pulitzer Prizes and dozens of other awards.

Mr. Reston was forgiving of the frailties of soldiers, statesmen and party hacks -- too forgiving, some of his critics later said, because he was too close to them. But his stern moral standards, rooted in the Victorian values of his youth, never wavered. He remained an idealist in a world of cynics.

From his strong-minded mother he inherited a Presbyterian conscience and an abiding sense of duty and responsibility. Work hard, he was taught. Work for large goals that transcend self-interest. Be cooperative. Be modest.

A talent scout of prodigious capacity, Mr. Reston hired and trained many of The Times's best-known journalists, and served as mentor to many more. To each of them, he passed along a lifetime's lessons about craft and country.

Mr. Reston's 50-year association with The Times began when he joined its London bureau on Sept. 1, 1939, the day Hitler's armies marched into Poland, igniting World War II. It was a fitting day on which to start his career at the paper, much of which would be spent recording and reflecting upon the aftermath of that fateful day.

His nationally syndicated column appeared regularly until 1987, when he became senior columnist. He retired from The Times in 1989, without ceremony, on his 80th birthday.

In an interview marking the occasion, he said the two greatest political triumphs in his lifetime had been the common defense system developed by the West after World War II and the improvement in the lot of black people in America since 1960.

Mr. Reston, who was born in Scotland, described the men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the Constitution as the great heroes in his adopted country's history. The document that they produced, he said, made possible "the triumph of the moderates" over the next two centuries.

A moderate himself, hostile to both fascism and communism, he described journalism's role in their eclipse as "one of the great pleasures of my life."

Asked whom he had most admired, he cited Franklin D. Roosevelt as the finest President he had known and Dean Acheson, Secretary of State in the Truman Administration, as "the key man" who "came to the fork in the road" and concluded that containing the Soviet Union would require a new alliance.

But he chose Jean Monnet, the French visionary who conceived the European Community, as the greatest man he had ever known as well as the person who had most deeply influenced his own thinking. Monnet proved, Mr. Reston often said, that "if you don't demand credit for things, you can push them through."

Mr. Reston thought of himself primarily as a reporter, and he often beat his competitors to be the first to write about major news events. His coverage of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington in 1944, which laid the groundwork for the United Nations, was one of the era's most important exclusives and won him his first Pulitzer, in 1945. Those articles disclosed the substance of secret documents that were then being circulated among delegations from the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and China on the structure of the proposed international organization.

Mr. Reston won his second Pulitzer in 1957 for distinguished reporting from Washington. The articles cited were written in June 1956 and analyzed the effects of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's illness on the functioning of the executive branch.

He was also responsible for The Times's publication in 1955 of the documents of the 1945 Yalta Conference. And in 1954 he disclosed that J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had directed the making of the first atomic bomb, had subsequently been denied access to secret documents by the Atomic Energy Commission because of suspicion that he was passing information to the Soviet Union, a charge of which Oppenheimer was later cleared.

One exclusive dispatch came by accident. In 1971, as one of the first American reporters allowed into China, Mr. Reston developed appendicitis. His report, filed from his bed in the Anti-Imperialist Hospital in the capital, ran on the front page under the headline "Now, About My Operation in Peking."

From the 1950's on, Mr. Reston interviewed most of the world's leaders, often producing major news accounts that were scrutinized at the State Department for their every nuance. The interviews often bore the special Reston stamp: He sought to reveal not only the policies and the politics of the people he interviewed, but also their vision of life and their view of history.

Mr. Reston, who was called Scotty by virtually everyone who knew him, was 5 feet 8 inches tall and had a round and ruddy face, gray-green eyes, an ever-present pipe and an invariably pleasant manner. He was courteous not only to high-level officials but also to the young people who worked for him.

"He believes in hard work, in thrift, honor your parents, woman's place is in the home, play by the rules and live clean," his colleague Russell Baker once said.

Mr. Reston was credited by competitors with having more high-level news sources in Washington than almost any other reporter, although some critics felt that he was too kind in print to some of them. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, reviewing Mr. Reston's "The Artillery of the Press," a 1967 collection of his talks before the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that Mr. Reston had learned to his disadvantage "to treat all people in the manner of a newspaperman who must one day go back and see them again."

But in a 1980 article in The New Republic, Mr. Reston was quoted as saying: "If you spend your life as a hatchet man -- and there's something to be said for that -- then eventually you find that everybody's out to lunch when you call. You're left with only your own opinion. I wouldn't like that because my own opinions aren't that good."

Writing his column three times a week, Mr. Reston was a procrastinator, often filing right on deadline, to the dismay of night editors at The Times. A two-finger typist, he regularly wore out typewriters because he banged so hard on the keys, and his desk was a litter of papers, many of which bore tiny black marks where a stream of smoldering matches had landed in the course of a never-ending pipe-lighting ritual.

His columns, laced with quotations from Walter Lippmann, H. G. Wells, Matthew Arnold and Churchill, were a combination of high moral tone, detailed reporting, allusions to sports, impish humor and evocative descriptions of seasonal changes along the Potomac. They seldom offered absolute judgments about people or events; he used the word "maybe" more than most pundits.

His first column, on Oct. 18, 1953, established the Reston style.

"This town is still full of echoes from the days of America's isolation," he wrote of Washington. "It has changed in policy and personnel, more than any other world capital in the last generation. No nation has taken on so much or moved so far in such a hurry. Yet the habits of the past, like the bent figures of homeless former senators, still haunt the capital."

He often returned to certain themes, such as the role of the press. In his column of Oct. 30, 1968, when Spiro T. Agnew, soon to be elected Vice President, was denouncing news organizations, Mr. Reston wrote:

"The candidates and the press are fussing at each other again, and this is the way it should be. They have different jobs, and in many ways they are natural enemies, like cats and dogs. The first job of the candidate is to win, and he usually says what he thinks will help him win. The job of the reporter is to report what happens and decontaminate as much of the political poison as he can. The conflict is obvious."

In addition to his two Pulitzer Prizes, Mr. Reston was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986 and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award in 1991. He received the Overseas Press Club award for interpretation of international news three times, the George Polk Memorial Award for national reporting and the French Legion of Honor, and was named Commander, Order of the British Empire. He also received 28 honorary degrees.

After retiring, he fulfilled a longtime promise to his wife, Sally, by writing his memoirs. Titled "Deadline," they were published by Random House in 1991.

Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Ronald Steel, author of "Walter Lippmann and the American Century," called Mr. Reston "the quintessential Washington insider."

"Officials used him to test out new ideas on the public or to drop leaks for which they did not want to be held accountable," Mr. Steel wrote. "Because of his high position at The Times and his personal integrity, he was trusted both by those who provided the news and by those who read it.

"But what he did so well and so usefully for so long could not be done today. Journalism and the political world have changed too much."

James Barrett Reston began life about as far from the Washington power center as one could get.

He was born in Clydebank, Scotland, on Nov. 3, 1909, the son of James, a machinist, and Johanna Irving Reston. The Restons migrated to the United States when he was an infant, but Mrs. Reston became ill, and the family returned to Scotland.

There followed years of harsh poverty, of life in a brick tenement where young James and his sister slept crosswise at the foot of their parents' bed. In 1920 the family returned to the United States and settled in Dayton, Ohio. His father worked for the Delco Remy Division of General Motors.

When his parents were naturalized, young James automatically became an American citizen. In 1932, he graduated from the University of Illinois with an undistinguished academic record. He had majored in journalism, skipping the course in governmental reporting but getting an A in sportswriting.

During his high school years he caddied at the Dayton Country Club golf course. His own game became so good that he twice won the Ohio state public links championship and at Illinois was captain of the Big Ten championship golf team in 1932. His father wanted him to become a golf pro. His mother wanted him to be a preacher, which, he was to say later, is really what he became.

In the winters during his school days, he hung around The Dayton Daily News. "When the phone rang, I'd pick it up and take down the scores," he later recalled. "And from that I just moved into newspapering. I never thought of anything else."

Another link to the world of newspapers was Gov. James M. Cox, the Ohio publisher and 1920 Democratic Presidential candidate, for whom young Reston had caddied. Mr. Cox gave him his first job after college on one of the Cox newspapers in Ohio, The Springfield Daily News, where he earned $10 a week as the sports editor.

Later he was hired as traveling secretary and publicity director for the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. In 1934 he moved to New York as a sportswriter for the Associated Press Feature Service.

The next year he married Sally Jane Fulton, a former college classmate who had been president of her sorority, an A student and a Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year. Named Sara but always called Sally, she was the daughter of a judge from Sycamore, Ill., a small town near Chicago.

Mr. Reston once told a University of Illinois graduating class, "I should say in passing that I myself married a recklessly beautiful girl whom I first saw on Wright Street wearing a scarlet coat."

"My Gal Sal," as he called her in the dedication of "Sketches in the Sand," a collection of his columns published in 1967, became his closest confidante, frequent collaborator and steadiest supporter.

They had three sons, Richard, James Jr. and Thomas. Mr. Reston's own happy situation made him a champion of marriage, and he was forever asking his young bachelor colleagues when they were going to wed.

In 1937 The Associated Press sent Mr. Reston to London on a rather loose dual assignment: in summer covering sports events, in winter the British Foreign Office.

In 1939 he joined The Times and became low man on the totem pole in the London bureau, with a salary of $85 a week. He was so little known on the foreign desk in New York that his first byline in The Times had his name wrong -- John instead of James.

Then came the London blitz. The Times's office for much of the war was on the seventh floor of the Reuters Building on Fleet Street, which offered a view of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. He described this view of the battle in his first book, "Prelude to Victory."

"Before we got better sense, we used to put the lights off in the Times office every night and watch this effort," he wrote. "With uncanny regularity, the German bombers would come over just about 10 minutes after blackout and start dropping incendiary bombs all over this section. About an hour before we could see the flames, we would begin to hear the steady throb of scores of engines along the banks of the Thames; these were the pumps, driving the muddy water from the river up through miles of new hose. . . .

"A little later the sky would begin to change in color from midnight blue to a reddish glow, and soon the great dome of the cathedral would stand out in silhouette against the flames of perhaps a dozen raging fires. Night after night we watched this incredible scene, and morning after morning we marveled at the fact that the fires were somehow put out."

In December 1940 he was reassigned to Washington, and in 1942 published "Prelude to Victory," a call to action to the American people that was acclaimed here and abroad. Its theme was pure Reston: Unless Americans put aside personal aims and materialistic thinking and made sacrifices in a crusade for their country, the war would not be won.

In late 1942, Elmer Davis, head of the Office of War Information, obtained a leave of absence from The Times for Mr. Reston and sent him to London to set up the agency's effort there.

John G. Winant, the United States Ambassador to Britain, recommended him to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, then president and publisher of The Times, who was looking for an assistant. It was the beginning of Mr. Reston's close friendship with the Sulzberger family.

Mr. Reston returned to Washington and was named national correspondent in 1945. He made his mark with his coverage of Dumbarton Oaks, which illustrated a Reston maxim: Seek out the disgruntled party. His theory was that people who were disenchanted were more likely to talk candidly.

In this case, it was the Chinese representatives to the conference who were disenchanted. In his memoirs, Mr. Reston told of having met Chen Yi, one of the Chinese delegates, some years before the war through Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, wife of The Times's publisher. At Mr. Reston's urging, Chen Yi slipped him the complete texts of the proposals.

Instead of writing one long article, Mr. Reston doled out the information, producing an exclusive a day. The Russians thought Washington had leaked the material; Washington suspected the British, and the F.B.I. started an investigation of Mr. Reston.

In 1948 Mr. Reston became diplomatic correspondent for The Times, and in 1953 he became Washington bureau chief, succeeding Arthur Krock.

Mr. Reston continued as bureau chief until 1964, when he voluntarily relinquished the post to concentrate on his column.

In 1968 he was summoned to New York by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who had become publisher, to succeed Turner Catledge as executive editor, in charge of the entire news operation. The internal politics of the news department had received publicity after an unsuccessful effort by editors in New York to exert more control over the Washington bureau. Mr. Reston's mandate was to re-establish peace.

For 13 months he ran the news department while commuting to Washington a few times a week to write his column. It was an almost impossible job. In 1969, knowing that his column was suffering and that he had to choose between it and the editor's post, he gladly chose the column.

Mr. Reston was eminently a Washington man. He loved and understood the capital. Moreover, he had helped shape the Washington bureau. These were his people, and many of them regarded him as a father figure. The New York office, on the other hand, seemed a vast, impersonal beehive, and Mr. Reston never felt totally comfortable there.

During these years the Restons lived in a pleasant red brick house on Woodley Road in leafy northwest Washington and spent weekends at their log cabin in Fiery Run, Va. Mr. Reston often used Fiery Run as the dateline on his Thoreau-like columns about the restorative life in the country.

In 1968 the Restons purchased The Vineyard Gazette, a 122-year-old weekly on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where they vacationed in the summer. The paper has remained in the family; their son Richard is editor and publisher, and his wife, Mary Jo, is publisher and general manager.

Mr. Reston played a part in the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and in two other major news events involving The Times in questions of national security. The others were the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

In the spring of 1961, The Times was preparing to publish an article by Tad Szulc reporting that 5,000 or 6,000 Cuban exiles who had been training in the United States and in Central America for nine months were about to launch an invasion of Cuba to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro.

The article was planned for page 1 on April 7, under a four-column headline. But Orvil Dryfoos, then the publisher, was troubled by the security implications of the report. On April 6, he and Mr. Catledge, then managing editor, telephoned Mr. Reston, who advised them not to publish the article and cautioned against giving away the proposed timing of the landing as "imminent."

The article was published on April 7 under a one-column headline and with no mention of the invasion's date. The Bay of Pigs invasion took place 10 days later and ended in debacle. President John F. Kennedy, who took full responsibility, said that if The Times had published more about the operation, it might have saved the Administration from making such a colossal mistake.

"If I had it to do over, I would do exactly what we did at the time," Mr. Reston said later. "It is ridiculous to think that publishing the fact that the invasion was imminent would have avoided this disaster."

In 1962 Mr. Reston was apparently the only reporter who had found out that the Soviet Union, then under the leadership of Nikita S. Khrushchev, had secreted nuclear missiles in Cuba, only 90 miles from Florida. When Kennedy realized that Mr. Reston had the information, he telephoned him directly.

Four years later, Mr. Reston recounted the incident to E. Clifton Daniel, then managing editor of The Times.

"The President told me that he was going on television on Monday evening to report to the American people," Mr. Reston recalled. "He said that if we published the news about the missiles, Khrushchev could actually give him an ultimatum before he went on the air.

"I told the President I would report to my office in New York," Mr. Reston continued. "And if my advice was asked, I would recommend that we not publish. It was not my duty to decide."

Kennedy then called Mr. Dryfoos, the publisher, and asked him not to print Mr. Reston's article. Mr. Dryfoos left the matter up to Mr. Reston and his staff, and the article was withheld.

It was a different story, however, in 1971 when The Times obtained and published what became known as the Pentagon Papers, the Government's top-secret documents on the Vietnam War. Seeing this at once as "the story of the century," Mr. Reston was one of the editors who felt that the documents should be published because they were history and that therefore no question of national security was involved.

One of Mr. Reston's contributions to journalism was the corps of young reporters he discovered and developed.

In 1961 he instituted a program of internships for young would-be reporters, modeled on the clerkships at the United States Supreme Court and suggested to him by the late Justice Felix Frankfurter. Each year he would recruit a new college graduate as his clerk and researcher. He paid a price for this program, as time and again the young clerks with lofty journalistic thoughts would mix up his airline reservations or keep the Secretary of State waiting because they had failed to cancel a scheduled appointment.

Linda Greenhouse, who went on to report on the Supreme Court for The Times, recalled that on her first day as a clerk, Mr. Reston asked her to get Ted Sorensen on the phone and suggested she try Paul Weiss in New York. After unsuccessfully calling every Weiss-comma-Paul in the Manhattan phone book, she reported back to Mr. Reston.

"He didn't groan, tear his hair or -- more important, and the reason for my undying gratitude -- laugh at me," Ms. Greenhouse said. "He gently explained that Paul, Weiss was a New York law firm where Ted Sorensen was working, looked up the number and gave it to me."

It was perhaps this quality, this unfailing kindliness, that constituted his special attractiveness. It enabled him to view the faults and frailties of the world with compassion and to carry on in the belief that the best in mankind would eventually win out over the worst.

"Stick with the optimists, Niftie," he wrote in a column in February 1980, welcoming his new grandson, Devin Fitzgerald Reston, to the human race. "It's going to be tough enough even if they're right."

Mr. Reston is survived by his wife; his sons, Richard F. Reston of Martha's Vineyard, James B. Reston Jr. of Chevy Chase, Md., and Thomas B. Reston of Washington; his sister, Joanna Richey of Santa Cruz, Calif., and five grandchildren.

New York Times obituary, July 23, 1996

Vermont Royster, a former editor of The Wall Street Journal who won two Pulitzer Prizes and helped to shape his newspaper into the country's leading business daily, died yesterday in a retirement community in Raleigh, N.C., The Journal said. He was 82.

The Journal said Mr. Royster had been in ill health for several years.

Mr. Royster started as a reporter at The Journal in 1936 and worked his way up the ranks, becoming Washington correspondent, Washington bureau chief, editorial writer and editor.

Mr. Royster was also a senior vice president for Dow Jones & Company, the newspaper's publisher, and was a director of the company. After his 1971 retirement, he was named editor emeritus of The Journal and continued to write his weekly column, Thinking Things Over, until 1986.

Mr. Royster won his first Pulitzer in 1953, for editorial writing. The Pulitzer was awarded not for a specific editorial but for his work in general, which was praised for its "warmth, simplicity and understanding of the basic outlook of the American people."

In awarding him his second Pulitzer, in 1984, for distinguished commentary, the judges cited his column for its compassion and for putting contemporary events in a historical context.

Vermont Connecticut Royster was born in Raleigh. His given names were the same as those of his grandfather, whose own father named his children after states in the Union.

Mr. Royster graduated from the University of North Carolina and was a reporter for several newspapers in his home state before joining The Journal.

Mr. Royster interrupted his journalistic career to serve in the Navy during World War II. He was on convoy duty in the Atlantic and later served in the Pacific. He commanded a submarine chaser, a gunboat and a destroyer escort.

In person and in print, Mr. Royster was known for the gentle tone and rigorous thought that underlay his words. He was, in the words of one fellow journalist, "a gentle essayist among the shrillers of his time."

In 1953, Mr. Royster deplored the fact that some businessmen were discussing the truce in Korea in terms of bull markets and bear markets. "War itself is a terrible thing," he wrote, "but we find more terrible the fact that there are men walking about who talk of peace as if it were terrible."

In 1962, Mr. Royster was one of a group of American newspaper editors who had an audience with Nikita S. Khrushchev in which the Soviet leader said that, while he would rather invest in farm machinery than in rockets, his country had an anti-missile missile that could hit "a fly in outer space."

After retiring from The Journal, Mr. Royster became a professor of journalism and public affairs at the University of North Carolina.

In 1967, Mr. Royster's book "A Pride of Prejudices," a collection of some 100 editorials he wrote over two decades, was published by Knopf. His 1983 book, "My Own, My Country's Time: A Journalist's Journey," published by Algonquin Books, was an account of his childhood, his combat experiences and his years as a journalist.

In 1986, Mr. Royster received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. Mr. Royster, President Reagan said, had a common sense "that exploded the pretensions of 'expert opinion,' and his compelling eloquence warned of the evils of a society loosed from its moorings in faith."

Mr. Royster is survived by his wife, Frances, and two daughters.

(Courtesy of The New York Times)

Thomas Winship, Ex-Editor of Boston Globe, Dies at 81

By Douglas Martin

March 15, 2002

Thomas Winship, who as editor of The Boston Globe for two decades propelled the newspaper to regional leadership and national stature, in part through tireless coverage of the court-ordered school busing that split the city in the 1970's, died yesterday in Boston. He was 81 and lived in Lincoln, Mass.

He had been under care for lymphoma at Massachusetts General Hospital, said his son Laurence.

Mr. Winship, who started out as a reporter in Washington, grew up in a newspaper family. His grandfather A. E. Winship had been editor of The Boston Traveller. His father, Laurence, joined The Globe in 1911 as a reporter and was named editor in 1955. Thomas Winship succeeded him in 1965 and by his retirement in 1984 built The Globe's circulation and prestige in a period of often disruptive economic and social change. At the height of the busing dispute, bullets flew through The Globe's newsroom windows.

Mr. Winship made The Globe the third newspaper, after The New York Times and The Washington Post, to defy government secrecy and publish the Pentagon papers on the Vietnam War. His staff covered the school busing crisis with such voluminous and balanced reporting that it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1975. The paper won 12 Pulitzer Prizes under his leadership.

Mr. Winship fit the mold of the crusading big-city editor, a position made easier because, until 1981, he directed both the news and editorial pages, roles that are usually separate at major newspapers. The Globe was the second major newspaper, after The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to call for American withdrawal from Vietnam.

Often, in the view of critics and admirers, Mr. Winship's advocacy was apparent not just in editorials but in the news pages. For example, when The Globe campaigned for handgun control and a bottle-redemption bill, Time magazine said, the newspaper ran hundreds of articles that argued for its views.

In ''Common Ground,'' by J. Anthony Lukas (Knopf 1985), a pain staking examination of the way court-ordered racial integration affected three Boston families, Mr. Winship was quoted as calling traditional journalistic objectivity ''a code word for playing it safe.''

Mr. Winship did not shrink from pursuing stories wherever they went. He said his most painful decision was to publish an investigation of the finances of the liberal Republican Edward W. Brooke, the first black United States senator since Reconstruction. The inquiry contributed greatly to Senator Brooke's defeat in 1978.

Mr. Winship believed that quality journalism was good business, and he proved it, expanding The Globe's coverage of sports, science and the arts. When he began, there were five newspapers in Boston and The Globe was just beginning to pull ahead of The Boston Herald in circulation. In his tenure The Globe's daily circulation rose by 40 percent, to 520,000, and Sunday circulation by 50 percent, to 792,786. The newspaper became dominant, though some purists worried that its focus had become more suburban as its circulation crept ever outward.

In the newsroom, in the corridors of Harvard and at the journalism conventions he loved to attend, Mr. Winship's casual flamboyance -- reflected in flowered bow ties, red suspenders and the battered pickup truck he drove to work -- was reinforced by the breezy affability of an Irish politician.

''Whadya say, pal? Howya doing?'' he would call to colleagues.

With his own sense of style, this WASP scion (though not a Boston Brahmin) worked to bridge the gap between The Globe and its readers.

Thomas Winship was born in Cambridge, Mass., on July 1, 1920. Soon after, his family moved to Sudbury, a farming community 16 miles west of Boston. His family was of modest means, and his early education was unusual.

The industrialist Henry Ford had discovered a one-room schoolhouse linked by legend to the story of Mary and her little lamb. He installed it on a Sudbury hillside and furnished it with 19th-century desks and a potbellied stove. He then recruited a teacher and 16 local children, Tom Winship among them.

When Mr. Ford produced a movie about Mary and the lamb, Tom's job was to hide the animal under his desk until the director was ready for it.

Mr. Winship followed his father to Harvard, where he founded the ski club and met Elizabeth Coolidge, who became his wife. She survives him, as do a sister, Joanna Crawford of Lincoln, Mass.; two sons, Laurence, of Minneapolis, and Benjamin, of Victor, Idaho; two daughters, Margaret, of Eagle Bridge, N.Y., and Joanna, of Minneapolis; and eight grandchildren.

After graduating from Harvard in 1942, Mr. Winship took laboring jobs and then joined the Coast Guard. He served as a combat correspondent aboard a troop ship on D-Day. After the war, while working at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, he got a night job writing obituaries for The Washington Post. He continued at the paper, covering the police, after his discharge.

He considered himself apolitical and said he was surprised when Senator Leverett Saltonstall, a Massachusetts Republican, offered him a job as press secretary. The experience awakened a political streak in the young man, who became a Democrat. He said he thought Republicans were too negative.

Mr. Winship returned to The Post for six years, then joined The Globe as its Washington correspondent. He returned to Boston in 1958 to be metropolitan editor, then managing editor.

He was in charge when The Globe broke the news that Senator Edward M. Kennedy had cheated on a test as a Harvard undergraduate. Later, as executive editor, he published a series of articles on the senator's auto accident at Chappaquiddick that Mr. Kennedy called ''ugly, untrue and grossly unfair.''

Yesterday, Mr. Kennedy said in a statement that Mr. Winship ''was truly the hallmark of what a newspaper editor should be.''

Succeeding his father in 1965, he immediately defined himself as his own man by taking on the remnants of McCarthyism, decaying neighborhoods and racial segregation, subjects on which his father on which his father's Globe had often declined to comment. The Globe won its first Pulitzer Prize for articles on the unsuitability for the federal bench of Francis X. Morrissey, a Kennedy family retainer.

Mr. Winship broke more new ground by banning advertisements from the front page and eliminating the signature ''Uncle Dudley'' from editorials, which had been a folksy tradition at The Globe. The newspaper also made its first political endorsement in 72 years, for Kevin H. White over Louise Day Hicks, a school board member and busing opponent, in the 1967 mayoral race. He signed up columnists like Ellen Goodman and Peter Gammons, the baseball writer.

After his retirement from The Globe, he was the first senior fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies (now the Freedom Forum) and the founding chairman of the Center for Foreign Journalists, a nonprofit institute offering seminars for Third World journalists.

Two decades after the swirling, violent fight over integrating Boston schools, Mr. Winship said his biggest disappointment in journalism was not suggesting more nuanced approaches. But he said he still believed that his support for integration was absolutely right.