Robin Toner, Times Reporter

Robin Toner, who was the first woman to be the national political correspondent of The New York Times and who had a significant hand in the coverage of five presidential elections, innumerable Congressional and gubernatorial campaigns and the great legislative debates of the day, died early Friday at her home in Washington. She was 54. The cause was complications of colon cancer, her family said.

In a career of nearly 25 years at The Times, and in an age of increasing specialization, Ms. Toner reported authoritatively on almost every domestic issue, whether it was taxes, welfare, Social Security, immigration or health-care policy.

Jamie Rose for The New York Times

Robin Toner at the U.S. Capitol in Washington in December 2006.

And in a craft in which small errors are commonplace and bigger mistakes a regular occupational hazard, Ms. Toner devised a meticulous personal method for checking and re-checking names, dates, facts and figures in her own raw copy, a step few reporters take. As a result: only half a dozen published corrections over the years, on more than 1,900 articles with her byline.

In 1992, Ms. Toner was The Times’s lead reporter on the election of Bill Clinton, a rollicking campaign in which her tough-minded coverage helped set the pace for other reporters. A few years later, after marriage and motherhood made long months on the campaign trail less practical for her, she became chief of correspondents on the paper’s national desk in New York, coaching reporters in bureaus around the country in their coverage of state legislatures, budget deficits (or surpluses) and assorted scandals, crises and crimes.

She later returned to the Washington bureau, where she held the title of senior writer, and covered a wide range of issues, including abortion rights, racial justice and judicial nominations, with a special feel for Southern politics.

“When you watched her work — relentless on the phone, gnawing her fingernails to the nub, a perfectionist on the keyboard — you’d think: a workhorse, not a showhorse,” said Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. “Then you’d read the result and it would be elegant. She was one of the best.”

Dan Balz, her frequent competitor at The Washington Post, said her articles were “grounded in her knowledge of what makes a good campaign, but not tethered to the language or minutiae of politics.”

And Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts said in a statement: “Robin was a reporter’s reporter who deeply cared about the people and the issues she covered. There was rarely a day during our health care debates that I didn’t open the paper to read Robin’s story and learn how what we were doing impacted people.”

Roberta Denise Toner grew up in Chadds Ford, Pa., outside Philadelphia, one of six children. Her father, Charles R. Toner, was an oil refinery supervisor and World War II B-17 pilot; her mother, the former Mary Louise Zern, was a homemaker who had worked as a “Rosie the Riveter” in a wartime aircraft plant. A summa cum laude graduate of Syracuse University, Ms. Toner began her reporting career in West Virginia at The Charleston Daily Mail and later worked for The Atlanta Journal and Constitution before joining The Times in 1985.

She had empathy for underdogs, a soft spot for politicians who did the hard work and a keen appreciation of the role of caste and class in American politics. In a 2004 article, noting that all four nominees on both major party presidential tickets were rich, white men, she described John Edwards, the senator from North Carolina, as “Atticus Finch with an attitude.”

In 1994, she summed up former Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta, whom she had covered for years, as “an extremely worldly man, whose career may have begun in the Congregational Church but who proceeded to inspire, enrage, annoy, uplift, disappoint, bewilder (but never bore) fans and critics on a much broader stage.”

While Ms. Toner loved the game of politics, she never lost sight of the practical problems that politicians often fail to resolve. “Reality often seemed to be just another subject for debate in the health care struggle,” she wrote after the collapse of the Clinton administration’s proposed restructuring in 1994. “But it has a way of reasserting itself when the shouting is over. As Congress and the White House move on to lobbying reform and trade issues, a variety of experts are quietly noting that the problems that prompted the health care struggle are still, ahem, very much here.”

It was in covering the health care debate that year that Ms. Toner met her husband, Peter Gosselin, then a reporter for The Boston Globe and now chief economic correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and author of “High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families.”

Mr. Gosselin survives her, as do their 11-year-old twins, Jacob and Nora. Ms. Toner is also survived by two brothers, Chuck, of Moorestown, N.J., and Mark, of Kensington, Md.; and three sisters, Gretchen Toner and Jane McConnell, both of Wilmington, Del., and Pat Lefever of West Chester, Pa.

When her longtime New York Times colleague David Rosenbaum was murdered as he walked near his Washington home in 2006, Ms. Toner described his approach to reporting in words that applied equally to hers: “He believed that, behind every arcane tax provision or line in an appropriations bill, there were real people getting something, or getting something taken away. He believed that there was, on most stories, something approximating truth out there if you were smart enough and hungry enough to find it.”

December 13, 2008
Robin Toner, Times Reporter, Is Dead at 54
By TODD S. PURDUM