Pulitzer Prize Board 1985-1986

(Courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica)

Russell Baker, in full Russell Wayne Baker (born August 14, 1925, Loudoun County, Virginia, U.S.), American newspaper columnist, author, humorist, and political satirist, who used good-natured humour to comment slyly and trenchantly on a wide range of social and political matters.

When Baker was five years old, his father died. From that time on, he and his mother and one of his sisters moved frequently, living in Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1947, Baker worked as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun (1947–54). He also wrote a lively weekly column, “From a Window on Fleet Street.” At the Washington bureau of the New York Times (1954–62), he covered the White House, the State Department, and the Congress. In the early 1960s he began writing the “Observer” column on the paper’s editorial page. In this syndicated humour column he initially concentrated on political satire, writing about the administrations of U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. Moving to New York City in 1974, he found other subjects to skewer, and in 1979 he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. His topics included tax reform, the artist Norman Rockwell, inflation, and fear.

Baker’s Growing Up (1982), which recalls his peripatetic childhood, won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for biography. A sequel, The Good Times, was published in 1989. Baker’s other works include An American in Washington (1961), No Cause for Panic (1964), Poor Russell’s Almanac (1972), and further collections of his columns. Baker also edited The Norton Book of Light Verse (1986) and wrote the book for the musical play Home Again, Home Again (1979). In 1993 he succeeded Alistair Cooke as host of the television program Masterpiece Theatre. In that same year he published Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor, which, following an illuminating introduction, gives its due to figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and James Thurber. Baker’s final “Observer” column for the New York Times appeared on Christmas Day, 1998. In 2002 he published Looking Back: Heroes, Rascals, and Other Icons of the American Imagination.

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.

"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."

(Current biography as of March 2016)

Prior to joining Teneo, Mr. Hoge was Editor of Foreign Affairs, a bi-monthly, non-partisan magazine of analysis and commentary on international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. During his 18 years as editor, Foreign Affairs more than doubled its circulation to an all-time high of 161,000 and also launched editions in Spanish, Japanese and Russian. The magazine was founded in 1922 by the Council on Foreign Relations to educate the public on key international challenges and to enrich the debate on policy choices.

Prior to joining Foreign Affairs, Mr. Hoge spent three decades in newspaper journalism as a Washington correspondent, then editor and publisher of The Chicago Sun-Times and finally as publisher of The New York Daily News. Mr. Hoge has been a Fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Freedom Forum Media Center at Columbia University and on the American Political Science Association’s Congressional program.

He is a former Chairman of Human Rights Watch and The International Center for Journalists, as well as a member of the advisory board of the Center for Global Affairs at NYU-SCPS and of Brown University’s Watson Institute.

(Courtesy of Teneo Holdings)

(Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times)

C.K. McClatchy, 62; Head of Chain of Newspapers

By Edward J. Boyer

April 17, 1989

C.K. McClatchy, chairman of the McClatchy chain of newspapers in California, Washington state and Alaska, died Sunday after collapsing while jogging in Sacramento.

A soft-spoken man known for his abiding independence, McClatchy, 62, was jogging in William Land Park, near a school bearing his family's name, when he apparently suffered a heart attack, said McClatchy Newspapers President Erwin Potts.

"He was just a great friend and a great boss," said Potts, who knew McClatchy for 13 years. "He was a hell of a newspaperman and he was a hell of a guy. We're just going to miss him an awful lot."

McClatchy, who Potts said had no history of heart problems, was pronounced dead shortly after 1 p.m. at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento.

McClatchy Newspapers publishes the Sacramento Bee and 11 other West Coast newspapers. The Anchorage Daily News, one of the company's papers, won the Pulitzer Prize for public service last month.

"If you had to draw up a list of people most important to journalism in this country, you'd come to C.K. pretty early in the game," said Riverside Press-Enterprise Publisher Tim Hayes, a longtime McClatchy friend.

"I was most struck by his independence," Hayes said. "There's so little independence left in this profession. He was a wonderful guy without any pretense."

Los Angeles Times Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Tom Johnson described McClatchy as a "splendid newspaper leader who represented the very highest standards of editorial and managerial excellence."

"He was uncommonly dedicated to quality in his newspapers. His passing is a major loss to our profession."

McClatchy's family has been a powerful force in Sacramento since 1857, when C.K. McClatchy's great-grandfather, James McClatchy, served as the first editor of the Sacramento Bee. He later bought the newspaper.

C.K. (for Charles Kenny) McClatchy was born in Fresno on March 25, 1927, and earned a bachelor's degree from Stanford University in 1950. He began his career as a reporter for the Washington Post in 1953, and moved to the Sacramento Bee five years later.

He held several editorial and managerial posts at the Bee and with the parent company, and was elected chairman of the board when McClatchy Newspapers stock was offered for sale to the public last year.

At about the same time the company began offering its shares on the American Stock Exchange, McClatchy accused some newspaper chains of paying more attention to profits than to quality journalism.

Delivering the annual Press-Enterprise Lecture at UC Riverside, McClatchy pointedly criticized several newspaper groups, saying Rupert Murdoch's News America Co., then owner of the New York Post, "deserves mention in any listing of the appalling."

"He was saying we should talk candidly about the problems associated with group or chain ownership," said the Press-Enterprise's Hayes. "Groups should criticize each other and look at the problems--the sameness of papers in a chain, excessive rotation of editors. Nobody is in your town for more than three or four years."

McClatchy's great-grandfather came to California during the 1849 Gold Rush and sent dispatches to several newspapers, including Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. As the Bee's editor, he proved to be a forceful environmentalist, arguing against hydraulic mining.

The process ruined the environment, poured debris into the rivers and harmed farmers, James McClatchy argued. When he died in 1883, he was succeeded by C.K. McClatchy, a champion of the state's progressive movement, ally of reform Gov. Hiram Johnson and a foe of the Southern Pacific Railroad's grip on state government.

The elder C.K., who died in 1936, was succeeded by his daughter, Eleanor, who left Columbia University to run the company for the next 42 years. She, in turn, was followed by McClatchy, her nephew, and C.K.'s grandson.

The papers were characterized by their liberal editorial point of view, and McClatchy's endorsement was vigorously sought by Democratic Party candidates.

McClatchy had autographed photos of John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Earl Warren in his office. He worked as Stevenson's press secretary during the former Illinois governor's 1956 presidential campaign.

McClatchy's independence and courage made the newspaper company willing "to take on big, tough and potentially dangerous subjects, and to risk and fight through the litigation that this inevitably brings," former Sacramento Bee executive editor Frank McCulloch told The Times in a 1987 interview.

The newspapers once had seven libel suits pending simultaneously in Fresno County alone, McCulloch said.

Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt once sued the chain's Bee newspapers for $250 million, charging that he had been libeled in a story saying profits had been skimmed from a gambling casino he once owned. Laxalt and the papers settled the suit before trial, and both sides claimed victory.

"He can put whatever label on it he wants to, but the fact is he has dismissed (the suit) without (receiving) any apology, without any retraction and without any payment of money (for damages)," McClatchy said of Laxalt.

The newspapers' insurance carrier later paid Laxalt's lawyers $647,454 for their work in the unsuccessful suit.

Along with the Sacramento Bee and the Anchorage Daily News, McClatchy Newspapers publishes the Fresno Bee and Modesto Bee, the Tacoma News Tribune and Tri-City Herald in Washington state and several weekly newspapers.

At the time of McClatchy's death, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize board, the Newspaper Advertising Board of Directors, a trustee of the Washington Journalism Center in Washington, D.C., and a member of the executive committee of the American Press Institute.

McClatchy is survived by two sons, Charles, 30, of Phoenix, Ariz., and Kevin, 26, of Miami; a daughter, Adair, 28, of San Francisco; two brothers, James, 58, of Tiburon, and Ellery, 64, of Palm Beach, Fla., and his mother, Phebe, of Fresno.

Funeral arrangements were pending.

(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.”

(Courtesty of the Pennsylvania Center for the Book)

Gene Roberts, a former executive editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, achieved national fame for leading the paper to 17 Pulitzer Prizes in an 18-year span. He was widely respected for his high standards in journalism and ability to run a newspaper. A former reporter of his once said, “He’s the ideal editor that a reporter dreams about.”

Eugene Leslie Roberts Jr. was born on June 15, 1932, in Pikeville, North Carolina, to an area preacher, Eugene L. Roberts Sr., and Margaret (Ham) Roberts. While growing up in Goldsboro, North Carolina, Roberts’s interest in journalism began to grow. It started when Roberts helped his father print a small weekly paper that was distributed to the local community. This interest extended through his teens and into his college years. He attended Mars Hill College from 1950 to 1952 before graduating from the University of North Carolina with a degree in journalism in 1954. After college, Roberts enlisted in the military and served in the U.S. Army under the Counter-Intelligence Corps from 1954 to 1956.

After returning home from the Army, Roberts earned his first official newspaper job working for his home-town paper, Goldsboro News-Argus. At the time, it was the leading newspaper in Wayne County, North Carolina. His duties included writing for its farm column, “Rambling in Rural Wayne,” and reporting on the local government. Later in his life, Roberts recalled the column, saying that he covered “the first farmer of the season to transplant tobacco plants from the seed bed to the field” and “a sweet potato that looked like Gen. Charles de Gaulle.”

Roberts moved on to work for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot (1958 to 1959) and Raleigh News & Observer (1959 to 1961) before being selected for a Nieman Fellowship by Harvard University in 1962. The Nieman Fellowship is a prestigious 10-month appointment at Harvard University for reporters, editors, photographers, editorial writers, and cartoonists with at least five years of full-time professional experience in news media. According to Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, fellows use this time “to step back from deadlines, to renew their intellectual curiosity and to enrich their understanding of the worlds they cover as journalists.” As a result, Roberts spent his time at Harvard preparing a book with fellow Nieman award winner, Jack Nelson, called The Censors and the Schools (1963).

After spending time at Harvard, Roberts returned to the Goldsboro News-Argus and worked as its Sunday editor from 1962 to 1963. He then spent one year with the Detroit Free Press covering labor (1963 to 1964) and then one year as its city editor (1964 to 1965). In 1965, Roberts was one of the most promising young journalists in America. His hard work was not overlooked, as he was spotted by The New York Times. In 1965, they offered him a job as a chief Southern correspondent. Roberts accepted the position and spent two years covering many of the trials and tribulations of the Civil Rights Movement. When the Vietnam War started heating up, Roberts was quickly sent to South Vietnam in 1968. Once there, Roberts encountered a soldier who recognized his column from the Goldsboro News-Argus. Taken aback by the man, Roberts later wrote, “I learned never to underestimate readers. They can laugh with you at the Charles de Gaulle sweet potato stories, but they expect depth when stories arise that are important to them.”

When Roberts returned to the U.S., The Times named him its national editor in 1969. He stayed there until 1972, when the Philadelphia Inquirer came knocking on his door. The paper was losing money and its journalistic qualities were coming into question. The Inquirer sought out someone who could bring energy and uphold high standards of journalism. Roberts was the perfect fit. He was hired as its new executive editor and change was immediate. With Roberts at the helm, The Inquirer tackled various local, national, and international issues. Topics varied from Pentagon spending to mental hospitals to South Africa. Stories such as these earned the respect from other journalists and newspapers across the country. The hard work paid off as the paper earned 17 Pulitzer Prizes in an 18-year span.

In a stunning change of events, Roberts announced his decision to leave The Inquirer at a noon meeting in 1990. Surprising most of his staff with the decision, Roberts became so emotional during his announcement that he left the meeting early. After numerous confrontations over budget cuts, Roberts finally had enough and resented an industry obsessed with profit margins. Hearing of Roberts’s resignation, Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation, said, “Gene Roberts or persons like him were the kind of people that Jefferson and Madison and George Mason had in mind when they carved out the role of journalists in a self-governing society.” Roberts was known to say, “I didn’t want to work for another newspaper. This is my newspaper.”

Roberts kept his distance from newspapers by accepting a teaching job at the University of Maryland in 1991. In 1993, he received the National Press Club’s “Fourth Estate Award” as a tribute to his lifetime of achievements in journalism. After a few years of teaching journalism classes, Roberts was persuaded by friend and executive editor of The New York Times, Joe Lelyveld, to become managing editor of The Times in 1994. Roberts took a three year leave of absence from Maryland in order to help a newspaper find its old identity. According to some at the time the newspaper was “socially rigid and out of step with the mood, views, and concerns of New Yorkers.” Although Roberts was at The Times for only a few years, he reverted to the hard-nosed journalistic approach. By allowing journalists to take their time to find and write a good story rather than just write about the sensational, The Times produced several well-written stories and gained back some of its credibility. Roberts returned to the University of Maryland in 1997.

In 2007, Roberts, along with Hank Klibanoff, authored a book entitled The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, which explores how America’s press system has evolved over time, going from ignoring race issues to realizing the importance of the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement. Vanessa Bush, a Booklist contributor, wrote that Klibanoff and Roberts "demonstrate the profound changes the movement wrought not only on U.S. social justice but also on American journalism." Other reviewers in addition to Bush have applauded the Roberts and Klibanoff for how they recognize the black journalists and editors who had been historically ignored and gone unnoticed. In 2007, Klibanoff and Roberts won the Pulitzer Prize for this book.

Roberts currently lives in the Washington, D.C. area with his wife Susan and continues to teach journalism at the University of Maryland. Together Roberts and Susan have raised four children: Leslie Jane, Margaret Page, Elizabeth Susan, and Polly Ann. Roberts teaches classes on writing complex stories, newsroom management, and the press’ role in the Civil Rights Movement. He enjoys his time away from the news field saying, “Four months off at the end of spring. Four to six weeks off during the Christmas holiday...that wouldn’t have been possible if I were still in the newspaper business.” Roberts also served as the American chairman of both the International Press Institute and the Committee to Protect Journalists. He is a former chairman of the Pulitzer Board for awards in journalism and arts and letters.

(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.

(Courtesy of The New York Times)

Claude Sitton, 89, Acclaimed Civil Rights Reporter, Dies

By Dennis Hevesi

March 10, 2015

Claude Sitton, a son of the South whose unwavering coverage of the civil rights movement for The New York Times through most of that tumultuous era was hailed as a benchmark of 20th-century journalism, died on Tuesday in Atlanta. He was 89.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Clint said. Mr. Sitton had been in a hospice.

In later years Mr. Sitton won a Pulitzer Prize as a columnist for The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., where he was also the editor. But it was in the crucible of the Jim Crow South that he forged his most enduring legacy.

Roaming the region as a reporter from May 1958 to October 1964, Mr. Sitton was an eyewitness to one of the most wrenching but consequential episodes in American history, often spending weeks on the road, flying home to Atlanta for a night, then heading out again the next day.

By the end of those six and a half years he had written almost 900 articles, some analytical and steeped in his knowledge of the South, many drawn from on-the-scene reporting.

They recounted the strategizing by civil rights leaders in the courts and on the ground, explored the political dynamics of race in the statehouses and at the White House, and opened readers’ eyes to the violence with which the movement was often met — the beatings, bombings and church burnings.

He often portrayed the struggle through the individuals who gave it flesh: the demonstrators, freedom riders and ordinary Southern blacks who braved white mobs, brutal police officers and segregationist public officials simply to get an education or to vote.

When Turner Catledge, the Mississippi-born managing editor of The Times, chose Mr. Sitton to cover the South in 1958, “he was about to set in motion a level of reporting that would establish the national standard for two decades,” Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in 2006 in their Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation.” (Mr. Roberts was himself a managing editor of The Times.)

“Nobody in the news business,” the authors continued, “would have as much impact as he would — on the reporting of the civil rights movement, on the federal government’s response, or on the movement itself. Sitton’s byline would be atop the stories that landed on the desks of three presidents.”

One of his articles, in 1962, caught the attention of Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general at the time. It described a south Georgia sheriff and his deputies intruding on a voting rights meeting at a church in Terrell County and menacing the citizens there. One officer repeatedly struck his palm with a large flashlight as if it were a club; another ran his hand over his revolver and cartridge belt.

Mr. Sitton began by quoting the sheriff: “We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred years.”

Kennedy sent a Justice Department team to Terrell County to sue the sheriff two weeks later.

“It was not that Claude was some flaming liberal or liberator,” Mr. Klibanoff told The Associated Press in an interview. “He just liked a good story and liked to have it first. And frequently he was reporting on injustice — and they knew, on the civil rights side, that if The New York Times wrote about it, it would get attention from important people.”

Mr. Sitton covered the Little Rock school desegregation upheaval in 1958-59, after Gov. Orval E. Faubus of Arkansas ordered the city’s schools closed. He was there on June 11, 1963, when Gov. George C. Wallace fulfilled his campaign pledge to “stand in the schoolhouse door” before stepping aside when handed a presidential order to allow two black students to enroll at the University of Alabama.

And he was on the first bus carrying Freedom Riders out of Montgomery, Ala., on May 24, 1961, as it headed toward Jackson, Miss.

That bus trip was a three-day exception he had been granted after being barred from setting foot in Alabama — not by Alabama officials but, to his intense frustration, by the Times’s lawyers and top editors. The order was a cautionary response to two libel lawsuits that had been brought by Alabama officials (neither involving Mr. Sitton).

The Times eventually won both cases, one of them eliciting a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in Times v. Sullivan, setting the precedent that public officials cannot receive damages for criticism of their official performance unless they can prove actual malice.

Only after Governor Wallace was elected in November 1962 and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared Birmingham a new focus of the civil rights struggle was Mr. Sitton allowed to step again on Alabama soil after two and a half years. But there was no dearth of news elsewhere in the South.

He was in Oxford, Miss., on Sept. 30, 1962, when James H. Meredith, a black Air Force veteran, was admitted to the University of Mississippi. He wrote of the all-night riots on campus in which two people were killed.

After Medgar Evers, another civil rights leader, was shot to death outside his home in Jackson on June 12, 1963, enraged demonstrators took to the city’s streets. The next day, Mr. Sitton’s article on the front page of The Times described how police officers had charged demonstrators who were chanting “We want freedom!” and clubbed them into submission.

“Six Negroes were struck or choked by police nightsticks drawn across their throats,” he wrote.

Mr. Sitton would sometimes report what he observed and interpret it plainly without qualifiers or the filter of a quoted voice. In Oxford in 1963, he wrote, “Racists here, as elsewhere, have underscored this principle: The rights of dissent and freedom of association — which they so frequently invoke for themselves — do not extend to those who disagree with them.”

He could be evocative in his writing, as he was in a dispatch from 1963, datelined Greenwood, Miss.

“The night of Feb. 28 was mild with a hint of early spring as the black sedan rolled westward along U.S. Route 82 across the Mississippi Delta,” he began.

“One of its three Negro occupants recalled later that as a string of traffic faded to the rear near Itta Bena, a car that had trailed them from Greenwood pulled alongside. Two white men sat in front, one in back.

“Bursts of gunfire rang out. Thirteen .45 caliber bullets stitched a ragged seam of finger-sized holes along the sedan’s left side and a copper-jacketed slug burned into the driver’s shoulder to within an inch of his spine.”

In the so-called Freedom Summer of 1964, hundreds of college students from around the country went to Mississippi to register blacks to vote. On the night of June 21, 1964, three volunteers — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman — were stopped by the police near Philadelphia, Miss., taken to jail and released. Then they disappeared. Forty-four days passed before their bodies were found in the mud of an earthen dam. All three had been shot to death. Mr. Sitton wrote 13 articles about the search for the bodies and their discovery.

Describing the coverage of Freedom Summer, Newsweek magazine said: “One reporter stood above the rest. The best daily newspaperman on the Southern scene is the Atlanta-based Sitton.”

Claude Fox Sitton was born in Atlanta on Dec. 4, 1925, one of two sons of Claude and Pauline Sitton. His great-grandfather had been a tax collector for the Confederacy, a slave owner and mayor of Pendleton, N.C. His father was a railroad conductor who bought a farm during the Depression, outside of Conyers, Ga. Young Claude worked beside black sharecroppers there.

After graduating from high school in 1943, he joined the Navy and served in the Pacific. Home from the war, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Emory University in Atlanta in 1949 and worked for the International News Service and United Press.

In 1953, he married Eva Whetstone, who survives him. Besides his son Clint, he is also survived by two daughters, Lea Stanley and Suzanna Greene; another son, Mac; and nine grandchildren.

Mr. Sitton left journalism in 1955 to become a press attaché for the United States Information Agency in Ghana. But two years later he was hired by The Times as a copy editor. After nine months on the copy desk, he was asked by Mr. Catledge to return to the South.

He came back to New York in the fall of 1964, after Freedom Summer, having been named national editor of The Times. He soon instituted a rule that a staff reporter must cover Dr. King wherever he went. Earl Caldwell, a Times correspondent, was in Memphis on April 4, 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated.

Several weeks later, Mr. Sitton left The Times to become editor of The News & Observer, a post that he held until 1990. For many years, while editor, he wrote a Sunday column in which he continued to focus on civil rights but also on other topics, like the environment and public education. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1983. He also received a 1991 George Polk Award for career achievement.

That he returned to the South after his years with The Times did not surprise his colleagues. He had never lost his emotional bond with the South, nor his drawl, for that matter. And for a reporter covering the region for a Northern newspaper, a drawl could come in handy.

Roy Reed, a Times reporter hired by Mr. Sitton in 1965 to help cover the South, told how Mr. Sitton was once confronted by a group of menacing young men in Philadelphia, Miss.

“One of these young toughs said, ‘Who are you?’ ” Mr. Reed said in an interview. “And Claude, in his thick South Georgia accent, responded, ‘I’m with The New York Times.’ ”

“These guys thought this was patently ridiculous,” Mr. Reed said. “They laughed and walked away.”

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.