Pulitzer Prize Board 1981-1982

Author Robert C. Christopher, Editor At Time, Newsweek
Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1992
By Kenan Heise

Robert C. Christopher, 68, an author and former editor at Time and Newsweek magazines, had been secretary of the Pulitzer Prize Board and administrator of Pulitzer Prizes at Columbia University since 1981. A resident of Old Lyme, Conn., he died of emphysema Sunday in Lawrence and Memorial Hospital, New London, Conn.

"He did an excellent job in guiding the board in its many tough decisions," Pulitzer Prize Board president Claude Sitton said. "He was personally a warm and wonderful fellow who was admired by all of us. He was also a great repository of information about the Pulitzers."

For the last 11 years, Mr. Christopher administered the annual selection of Pulitzer Prizes, arranging for the selection of jurors, handing in the thousands of entries and serving as a non-voting member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Awards are made in 21 areas of journalism, letters, drama and music.

The prestigious awards are announced by the president of Columbia University, where Mr. Christopher has been an adjunct professor in writing. Changes in the awards over recent years have seen increases in the monetary size of the prizes, to $3,000 from $1,000, and in the record number of women, 11, winning Pulitzer Prizes in 1991.

Mr. Christopher, a native of Thomaston, Conn., graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University. During World War II and the Korean War, he served as an officer in Army intelligence.

He spent 13 years at Time magazine in positions that included associate editor and Rome correspondent. From 1964 to 1978, he was at Newsweek, where he served as foreign editor, executive editor and international editions editor. Mr. Christopher wrote three books in the 1980s: "The Japanese Mind: The Goliath Explained," "Second to None: American Companies in Japan" and "Crashing the Gates: the DeWASPing of America's Power Elite."

Survivors include his wife, Rita; four sons, Nicholas, Thomas, Alistair and Gordon; two daughters, Ulrica and Valerie Moerler; three grandsons; and a sister.

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

by Bruce WeberMarch 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.

"When I think of Oz Elliott, I think of a person who embodies all the qualities of a good citizen—a practical man of high ideals, a courageous man who exercises self-restraint, a worldly man who loves his city." —David Dinkins, Newsweek, 09/27/08

(Article courtesy of The New York Times.)

Osborn Elliott, Father of Newsweek’s Rebirth, Dies at 83

By Michael T. Kaufman

September 28, 2008

Osborn Elliott, the courtly editor who revitalized Newsweek magazine in the 1960s before he went on to serve as a $1-a-year deputy mayor in charge of economic development for a financially desperate New York City, died at his home in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 83. He died of complications of cancer, said his daughter Dorinda Elliott.

When Mr. Elliott became Newsweek’s managing editor in 1959, the magazine lagged appreciably behind its chief competitor, Time, in circulation and advertising, and aped the sort of terse and idiosyncratic writing that Time had introduced. But Mr. Elliott, who rose to editor in 1961, was willing to experiment with formula and take a more ambitious journalistic path for Newsweek.

The magazine began shunning the backward-running sentences that Time and its founder, Henry R. Luce, favored, and it started giving reporters bylines, breaking a long news magazine practice of anonymous writing. More substantively, it began producing in-depth polling on national issues. In cover articles, often to attract a younger readership, it examined the war in Vietnam and the mounting opposition to it, the civil rights movement, racial unrest in the cities, popular culture, and the counterculture. The perspectives were generally liberal, as had been the case from the beginning of Newsweek’s rivalry with Time, which generally reflected the conservative outlook of Mr. Luce.

On Nov. 20, 1967, in a departure from its tradition of neutrality, Newsweek moved toward open advocacy with a 23-page section titled ‘The Negro in America: What Must Be Done.” In an editorial — the first in what was then the magazine’s 34-year history — Newsweek offered a 12-point program on how to accelerate the passage of black Americans into all aspects of society. The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism recognized the series in giving Newsweek its Magazine of the Year Award.

Newsweek also gave prominent coverage to the women’s movement — “Women in Revolt,” one cover said — though in 1970 the magazine itself was the subject of a federal discrimination complaint by 46 young women on its news staff, most of them hired as researchers to check facts, saying they had been denied writing positions because of their sex. Mr. Elliott, defending the magazine, said that most researchers were women because of a “news magazine tradition going back to almost 50 years.” In a negotiated agreement, the magazine promised to accelerate recruitment and promotion of women.

During Mr. Elliott’s tenure, Newsweek’s circulation, which stood at almost 1.5 million in 1961, rose to more than 2.7 million by 1976, the year he left, though even then it still trailed Time by nearly a million readers. Mr. Elliott reveled in the job. “I had interviews with five presidents, audiences with two popes and the emperor of Japan,” he wrote in 1977, reflecting on his career in an article in The New York Times Magazine, adding that he had “spent the most interesting and moving week of my life living, and learning, in the black ghettos of America.”

But he conceded that the pace in running the magazine was grueling and that he had promised himself to lessen his burden when men had landed on the moon. Thus, in 1969, he moved on to what he called the nonexistent job of editor in chief. He later had the titles of president, chief executive and board chairman.

Mr. Elliott left Newsweek in 1976 to become New York’s first deputy mayor for economic development. The year before, at the urging of Senator Jacob K. Javits, he had formed and led the Citizens Committee for New York City, a private group founded to organize volunteers for projects the city could no longer afford to finance.

The city was nearly bankrupt and had lost almost 650,000 jobs in the previous seven years. Its economic development administrator had resigned. Mayor Abraham D. Beame asked Mr. Elliott to take over the development agency and restructure it as the Office of Economic Opportunity. In taking the job at $1 a year, Mr. Elliott said a nominal salary would put him above the political process and give him more credibility with businesses. Charged with attracting businesses to the city, he shifted the emphasis from large corporations to smaller enterprises with fewer than 100 workers.

His turn as a public servant was brief. In 1977, he resigned to become dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a position he held until 1986, when he stepped down, although he stayed on as the George T. Delacorte Professor until 1994.

With his liberal urban enthusiasms — he helped organize a Save Our Cities march on Washington in 1992 — his polka-dot bow ties and his conservatively cut suits, Mr. Elliott was a familiar, old-money figure in some of the city’s citadels of power: the Century Association, the Harvard Club, the Council of Foreign Relations and the board rooms of the New York Public Library and the Asia Society.

The composer Lukas Foss, a friend, occasionally tutored him in his piano playing at Mr. Elliott’s Connecticut house. In 1983, his hospitable nature was exploited in a bizarre encounter that was to help inspire John Guare to write his award-winning play “Six Degrees of Separation.” An engaging young man had approached Mr. Elliot claiming to be the son of the actor Sidney Poitier and a classmate of one of Mr. Elliott’s daughters. When the young man said he had been mugged, Mr. Elliott invited him into his home and gave him money and clothes. It later turned out that the man was an imposter who had bilked other prominent New Yorkers.

Osborn Elliott was born on Oct. 25, 1924, a descendant of Stephen Coerte van Voorhees, who came to New Amsterdam from Holland in the early 17th century. The boy grew up in a town house on East 62nd Street, where his parents, John Elliott, a stockbroker, and the former Audrey Osborn, a prominent real-estate broker who had campaigned for women’s suffrage, entertained friends like the columnist Walter Lippmann and the author John Gunther.

Mr. Elliott attended the Browning School in New York, St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., and Harvard. In World War II, he saw combat in the Pacific aboard the heavy cruiser Boston. Discharged as a lieutenant, junior grade, in 1946, he considered pursuing a career in finance or following his elder brother, John, into advertising. (John, known as Jock, became chairman of Ogilvy & Mather. He died in 2005.) Instead, Mr. Elliott, who was known as Oz, chose journalism, joining The New York Journal of Commerce as a reporter. He had been working there for three years when his first wife, the former Deirdre Marie Spencer, who was working in the personnel department of Time, urged him to apply for a job with the magazine. He joined the staff as a contributing editor specializing in business and advanced to associate editor.

In 1955, Newsweek, historically the weaker of the two weeklies, asked Mr. Elliott to be its business editor, and he took the job, beginning his long association with the magazine.

In 1959 he published a book, “Men at the Top” (Harper), examining the qualities that had propelled executives to the upper ranks of corporations. In 1961, Philip L. Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, bought controlling interest in Newsweek and promoted Mr. Elliott from managing editor to editor. He continued in the job when Katharine Graham assumed control after her husband’s death in 1963.

Mr. Elliott’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1972. The following year he married the former Inger Abrahamsen McCabe, founder of China Seas, a fabric and carpeting importer. She survives him, as do three daughters by his first marriage, Diana Elliott Lidofsky of Providence, R.I.; Cynthia Elliott of Manhattan; and Dorinda, of Brooklyn; three stepchildren, Kari McCabe of Manhattan, Alexander McCabe of Brooklyn and Marit McCabe of Manhattan; 17 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. He is also survived by two foster sons, Samuel Wong of San Francisco and David Wong of St. Paul.

“I was hooked on journalism,” Mr. Elliott wrote in his Times Magazine article, recalling his earliest days as a reporter and summing up his career. “Impressed by its demands for compression and clarity. Enchanted — mostly — by its practitioners and their often feigned cynicism. Flattered by the access it offered to heads of state, artists and tycoons. Infuriated by its imperfections — though as often as not, no doubt, blind to them as well. In love with its humor. Humbled, sort of, by its power.”

(Courtesy of the University of Chicago)

Hanna Holborn Gray was president of the University of Chicago from July 1, 1978, through June 30, 1993.

Mrs. Gray is a historian with special interests in the history of humanism,  political and historical thought, and church history and politics in the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Mrs. Gray is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Renaissance Society of America, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Education, and the Council on Foreign Relations of New York. She holds honorary degrees from over sixty colleges and universities, including Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Michigan, Oxford, Princeton, Rockefeller, Toronto, and Yale.

Mrs. Gray currently serves as a trustee of the Newberry Library, the Marlboro School of Music, the Dan David Prize, and several other nonprofit institutions. She has served on the boards of Bryn Mawr College, Harvard University, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and Yale University, and among others.

Mrs. Gray was one of twelve distinguished foreign-born Americans to receive the Medal of Liberty from President Reagan at ceremonies marking the rekindling of the Statue of Liberty's lamp in 1986. In 1991 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, from President Bush. Among a number of other awards she has received the Jefferson Medal of the American Philosophical Society and the National Humanities Award in 1993. In 1996 Mrs. Gray received the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and in 2006 the Newberry Library Award. In 2008 she received the Chicago History Maker Award of the Chicago History Museum.

Mrs. Gray’s most recent publication is Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories, published by the University of California Press in 2011.

(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 The New York Times)

David Laventhol, Publisher on Both Coasts, Dies at 81

By Dennis Hevesi

April 9, 2015

David A. Laventhol, a former publisher of The Los Angeles Times and Newsday who made a journalistically acclaimed but financially doomed attempt to break into the New York City newspaper market by starting New York Newsday in 1985, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son, Peter, said.

(Courtesy of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.)

August 11, 2014

William F. McIlwain, NF ’58, a longtime reporter and editor who led newspapers in New York, Boston, and Florida, died at his home in North Carolina on August 8. He was 88.

McIlwain worked at several newspapers in the South after graduating from Wake Forest College in 1949. In 1954, he joined Newsday as chief copy editor, rising to editor in chief before leaving in 1970 for a residency at his alma mater.

He returned to newspapers in 1972, working as an editor at the Toronto Star, The (Bergen County, N.J.) Record, the Boston Herald-American, The Washington Star, and the Arkansas Gazette. In 1982, he became founding editor of Newsday’s New York City edition, then left in 1984 to take over as executive editor of the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune. He retired in 1990.

McIlwain was the author of several books. He wrote “The Glass Rooster,” a novel about the civil rights era, during his Nieman Fellowship. He also contributed to “Naked Came the Stranger,” a raunchy literary spoof created by a group of Newsday reporters led by Mike McGrady, NF ‘69.

He is survived by a son, two daughters, and five grandchildren.

(Courtesy of The New York Times)

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 Queens College)

Warren Phillips was born on June 28, 1926 and raised in Forest Hills, New York. Early on, he demonstrated an affinity for reporting – at the age of twelve, he collected news items and created a home newspaper, “The Snoopy Scoop.” He attended Queens College from 1942-1947, which was briefly interrupted by his enlistment in the armed forces after American entry into World War II. The war ended before he could be deployed, and upon his return, he began to devote himself to a career as a “newspaperman”, as journalists were then called.

Although he had difficulty gaining admittance to graduate journalism programs, he was able to secure a position as a proofreader at The Wall Street Journal. In 1949, he briefly left the Journal to work for the United States Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, stationed in Germany. He continued to submit freelance pieces to the Journal during this time, and soon returned as its official German correspondent. He covered events there as well as in Greece and Turkey. In 1950, he was transferred to London, where he became London Bureau Chief and met Barbara Thomas, whom he married in 1951.

Also in 1951, he was promoted to Foreign Editor, working out of New York. In 1954, the year his first child, Lisa, was born, he was appointed the second Managing Editor of the Journal’s Midwest Edition in Chicago. His second child, Leslie, was born two years later, followed by a third daughter, Nina, in 1962. In 1957 he was promoted to Managing Editor at the paper’s New York headquarters. Events at the time such as the onset of the space race and the Civil Rights era urged Phillips and the Journal to take on news coverage of sociopolitical events in addition to its largely financial perspective, a decision that proved instrumental to the paper’s expansion.

He became Executive Editor in 1965 and subsequently led Dow Jones’ expansion into global markets, including Asian and European editions of The Wall Street Journal, a partnership with the Associated Press to create an international news service, and agreements with various publishing companies in Japan, China, Singapore, and Malaysia. Phillips went on to become Vice President and Editorial Director in 1970, and finally President and CEO of Dow Jones two years later. In the early 70s, he also became involved in outside organizations such as the American Council on Education for Journalism (president 1971-73), the American Society of Newspaper Editors (president 1975-76) and the Pulitzer Prize Board (1977-1987).

In 1972, he was part of a press delegation to the People’s Republic of China, the first since diplomatic relations were established following President Richard Nixon’s visit in February of that year. He met with Premier Zhou Enlai and regular Chinese citizens, producing some of the first articles on culture and policy to come from Western sources inside the PRC. Other international visits in the 1980s included trips to the Soviet Union and the Middle East. At home, he continued to promote the company’s growth and led efforts to promote equal opportunity for women, minorities and other marginalized groups at the Journal. Dow Jones became an early adopter of digital technologies, ranging from electronic news delivery to online editions.

Warren Phillips retired from his duties at Dow Jones in 1991, to be succeeded by longtime colleague Peter Kann. He and his wife Barbara went on to found a publishing house, Bridge Works Publishing. In 2011, at the age of 85, he completed and published his autobiography, Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post)

William Raspberry dies at 76: Washington Post columnist wrote about social issues including race, poverty

By Matt Schudel

July 17, 2012

William Raspberry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post whose fiercely independent views illuminated conflicts concerning education, poverty, crime and race, and who was one of the first black journalists to gain a wide following in the mainstream press, died July 17 at his home in Washington. He was 76.

He had prostate cancer, said his wife, Sondra Raspberry.

Mr. Raspberry wrote an opinion column for The Post for nearly 40 years before retiring in 2005. More than 200 newspapers carried his syndicated columns, which were filtered through the prism of his experience growing up in the segregated South.

His writings were often provocative but seldom predictable. Although he considered himself a liberal, Mr. Raspberry often bucked many of the prevailing pieties of liberal orthodoxy. He favored integration but opposed busing children to achieve racial balance. He supported gun control but — during a time when the District seemed to be a free-fire zone for drug sellers — he could understand the impulse to shoot back.

When strident voices were shouting for attention, Mr. Raspberry often favored a moderate tone. He did not consider himself a political partisan and even stopped appearing on argumentative news-talk shows because, as he said in 2006, “they force you to pretend to be mad even when you’re not.”

Instead of following other pundits to Capitol Hill, Mr. Raspberry looked at another side of Washington: the problems facing ordinary people, sometimes voiced through an imaginary D.C. cabdriver — simply called “the cabbie” — who was a recurring figure in his columns.

“From the day Bill Raspberry wrote his first Post column, his advice was as wise and his voice as clear as anyone’s in Washington,” Donald E. Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Co., said in an interview. “To the city, Bill’s columns brought 40 years of smart, independent judgment.”

Mr. Raspberry stood slightly apart from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which he viewed not as a participant but from the detached perspective of a reporter. Because his views did not always conform to his readers’ expectations, he received pointed criticism from the right and the left.

“He was viewed as a truth-teller,” Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a lawyer, civil rights advocate and political adviser, said in an interview. “I am sure that I disagreed with him on a number of things. He had a way of telling you to go to hell and making you look forward to the trip.”

Mr. Raspberry derived some of his core principles from a bedrock belief in self-reliance and the importance of education. He often cited the example of his parents, both of whom were teachers. He challenged prominent civil rights figures to put their words into action to help build a better world for the poor and disenfranchised.

“Education is the one best hope black Americans have for a decent future,” Mr. Raspberry wrote in a 1982 column. “The civil rights leadership, for all its emphasis on desegregating schools, has done very little to improve them.”

Anger at the forces that caused racism was fine, Mr. Raspberry argued, but anger in itself did not solve problems. Recalling his own childhood in Mississippi, he recognized that children could thrive even when poverty was just beyond the window.

“It’s not racism that’s keeping our children from learning, it’s something much nearer home than that,” he told Washingtonian magazine in 2003. “We need to remember that the most influential resource a child can have is a parent who cares. And we need to admit that sometimes parents are the missing ingredient.”

When Mr. Raspberry began writing a column on local matters for The Post in 1966, the only nationally syndicated black columnist in the general press was Carl T. Rowan. In 1970, Mr. Raspberry’s column moved to the paper’s op-ed page.

“Bill Raspberry inspired a rising generation of African American columnists and commentators who followed in his path, including me,” Clarence Page, a Pulitzer-winning columnist with the Chicago Tribune, told The Post. He added that Mr. Raspberry and Rowan “blazed a trail for the rest of us, not only as journalists but as voices of courage against the narrow ideologies of the left or right.”

As a columnist, Mr. Raspberry disagreed with the journalistic credo of “cynical coldheartedness masquerading as objectivity,” he told Editor & Publisher magazine in 1994. Instead, he believed members of the press could “care about the people they report on and still retain the capacity to tell the story straight.”

When Mr. Raspberry won the Pulitzer for commentary in 1994, he was the second African American columnist to achieve the honor. (Page was the first, in 1989.) Mr. Raspberry’s Pulitzer-winning columns covered a range of topics, from female genital mutilation in Africa to urban violence, to musings on the legacies of civil rights leaders.

Mr. Raspberry drew analogies between Somalia, where U.S. troops were deployed at the time, and violent sections of the District, where — as in Mogadishu — heavily armed young men in fast vehicles controlled vast stretches of the city.

“How different are parts of Somalia from parts of the United States?” he wrote. “And how much more like Somalia would the United States become if the gun-rights people have their way?”

In another column, Mr. Raspberry appeared, at first glance, to deliver a rant about hip-hop music. But he made an unexpected turn, showing how tastes in music reflected the changing realities of young people’s lives.

“My children . . . easily tick off four, five, six friends who have died in the past few years,” he wrote. “Three were homicides — shot down either over drugs or over some offense that would have cost a member of my generation a bloody nose at most.

“ . . . And we worry about song lyrics?”

William James Raspberry was born Oct. 12, 1935, in the northeastern Mississippi town of Okolona. He was one of five children of James and Willie Mae Raspberry. His father taught shop and his mother taught English at a high school and a two-year college for African American students. He often cited his parents and the small academy in Okolona as crucial influences on his life.

“I grew up in apartheid,” he told the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., in 1996. “And yet it never induced my parents to teach us anything else than that we were responsible for our own behavior, for our own minds.”

Mr. Raspberry left Mississippi to attend Indiana Central College (now the University of Indianapolis). In college, he worked at the Indianapolis Recorder, a weekly newspaper geared toward black audiences.

After graduating in 1958, he served as a public information officer with the Army. In 1962, Mr. Raspberry was hired as a Teletype operator by The Post. Within months, he began working as one of the first black reporters for the newspaper’s Metro desk.

Seeking a way to stand out, he recalled in a 2005 interview with NPR, “I started asking myself, ‘What is it I know that the other guys don’t know? What am I better at?’ And my thought was that I’ve had a couple decades being black, and they haven’t.”

Mr. Raspberry made a name for himself in 1965, when The Post dispatched him to cover riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles. A year later, he was a columnist.

After the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, Mr. Raspberry wrote a series of dispatches from the strife-torn streets of Washington, chronicling a city on fire.

Mr. Raspberry was known as a careful monitor of racial politics, but some readers were incensed in 1990, when he appeared to voice grudging respect for the polarizing Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. A year earlier, Mr. Raspberry had excoriated what he called the “gratuitous antisemitism” of Farrakhan and some of his supporters.

“Blacks in particular are at pains to force America to face up to racism, blatant and subtle, and to demand that others be sensitive to our special concerns,” Mr. Raspberry wrote. “Is it too much to suggest that those who demand sensitivity have a duty to practice it?”

Survivors include Mr. Raspberry’s wife of 45 years, Sondra Dodson Raspberry of Washington; three children, Patricia D. Raspberry and Mark J. Raspberry, both of Washington, and Angela Raspberry Jackson of Detroit; a foster son, Reginald Harrison of Manassas; his 106-year-old mother, Willie Mae Tucker Raspberry of Indianapolis; a sister; and a brother.

Mr. Raspberry taught journalism for more than 10 years at Duke University and received more than 15 honorary doctorates. A collection of his columns, “Looking Backward at Us,” was published in 1991, and he received awards from the National Press Club and the National Association of Black Journalists.

In retirement, Mr. Raspberry devoted much of his time to an educational foundation, Baby Steps, that he organized in his hometown in Mississippi. He funded the project for low-income parents and children from his own pocket.

After writing more than 5,000 opinion columns, Mr. Raspberry said in a speech at the University of Virginia in 2006, he had learned two important lessons.

The first, he said, “is that in virtually every public controversy, most thoughtful people secretly believe both sides.”

“The second, which has kept my confidence from turning into arrogance, is that it is entirely possible for you to disagree with me without being, on that account, either a scoundrel or a fool.”

(Courtesy of The Washington Post)

Charlotte Saikowski, 73

April 14, 2000

Charlotte Saikowski, 73, the Washington bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor from 1983 until she retired in 1990, died of a heart ailment April 8 at Lynn House, a Christian Science nursing home in Alexandria. She lived in Washington.

Ms. Saikowski joined the Monitor in 1962 and came to its Washington bureau a decade later. She had previous assignments as bureau chief in Tokyo and Moscow and as chief editorial writer.

Fluent in Polish and Russian, she was best known for her foreign policy expertise, particularly Russian and Eastern European affairs. Some of her dispatches from abroad were reprinted in The Washington Post.

Her professional honors include an Overseas Press Club award and Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for international reporting, both in 1972, for her "Letters to President Nixon" series.

She was born in Chicago and graduated from Principia College in Illinois.

She received a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University.

Before joining the Monitor, she was an editor of Columbia University's Current Digest of the Soviet Press.

She had been a Pulitzer Prize advisory board member and member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, National Conference of Editorial Writers and Gridiron Club in Washington.

After retiring from the Monitor, she became a first reader and president of the 6th Church of Christ Scientist in Washington.

She leaves no immediate survivors.

Commendatore in the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy, 1991. Recipient, Citizens Union Civic Leadership Award, 1993. Columbia Law School Medal for Excellence, 1997. Town Hall Friend of the Arts Award, 2001. Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from Japan, 2004. Centennial Medal, American Academy in Rome, 2006. Lawrence A. Wien Prize for Social Responsibility, 2010. After two years on the faculty at the University of Minnesota Law School, joined the Columbia faculty in 1957. Served as chairman of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Columbia University, 1968-69; dean of the School of Law, 1970-79; executive vice president for academic affairs and provost of the University, 1979-1980; president of the University, 1980-93.

Former arbitrator for disputes between numerous private companies and public agencies and the unions representing their employees; mediator in negotiations between the New York Transit Authority and the Transport Workers Union, as well as between New York City and its firefighters and policemen; author-moderator, WNBC-TV series Due Process for the Accused; host, WNET-TV series, Leading Questions; special counsel, Governor of New Jersey; consultant on law to Time magazine; and consultant to the Ford Foundation. Member, Pulitzer Prize Board and NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Presidential Legal Expense Trustee.

Founding member of the board of directors of Mobilization for Youth’s Legal Services Unit; the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund; the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund; and Helsinki Watch. Chairman, New York City Charter Revision Commission, 1982-83. Chairman, State-City (New York) Commission on Integrity in Government, 1986.

Current member, board of directors of the Asian Cultural Council; WNET/13; and other corporate and nonprofit organizations. Member, Council on Foreign Relations; American Law Institute; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and the American Philosophical Society. Honorary Chairman, Japan Society. Chairman Emeritus, American Academy in Rome. President, Shubert Foundation. Past Chairman of Sotheby’s. Past member, board of directors of AT&T, Comcast, Pfizer and Chase.

--biography courtesy of Columbia University Law School

(Courtesy of George Mason University)

Roger Wilkins

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished professor Roger Wilkins was born in 1932 in Kansas City, Missouri. Wilkins attended the University of Michigan, receiving his B.A. in 1953 and his J.D. in 1956, interning with Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. Following graduation, Wilkins worked in several capacities as an advocate for justice. Beginning his career as a caseworker in the Ohio Welfare Department, Wilkins went on to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development and then as assistant attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Wilkins' interest in legal issues and equality stems partially from his family's background. His uncle, Roy Wilkins, was executive secretary of the NAACP from 1955 to 1977. In 1972, Wilkins began writing for the editorial page of The Washington Post just as the Watergate scandal was breaking. His critically informed editorials about the issues leading up to President Richard Nixon's resignation won him a shared Pulitzer Prize, along with reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and cartoonist Herb Block. He then moved to The New York Times, where he served as the first African American on its editorial board as well as a columnist. Subsequently, Wilkins worked for the Institute for Policy Studies, The Washington Star, National Public Radio and CBS Radio. He continues to be a major commentator and analyst on American public policy and social justice issues.

Roger Wilkins retired from teaching at George Mason University in 2007.

(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.