Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor

Wash Post obit: Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor
Benjamin C. Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post newsroom for 26 years and guided The Post’s transformation into one of the world’s leading newspapers, died Oct. 21 at his home in Washington of natural causes. He was 93.

Mr. Bradlee loved the Watergate story, not least because it gave the newspaper “impact,” his favorite word in his first years as editor. He wanted the paper to be noticed. In his personal vernacular — a vivid, blasphemous argot that combined the swearwords he mastered in the Navy during World War II with the impeccable enunciation of a blue-blooded Bostonian — a great story was “a real tube-ripper.” This meant a story was so hot that Post readers would rip the paper out of the tubes into which the paperboy delivered it. A bad story was “mego” — the acronym for “my eyes glaze over” — applied to anything that bored him. Maximizing the number of tube-rippers and minimizing mego was the Bradlee strategy.

Although he graduated from St. Mark’s School and Harvard University, the Navy left as much of a mark on Mr. Bradlee as did his early life among Boston’s WASP aristocracy. The Navy taught him to swear, as well as to respect talent wherever it appeared.


NY Times obit: Ben Bradlee, Editor Who Directed Watergate Coverage

Ben Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post’s Watergate reporting that led to the fall of President Richard M. Nixon and that stamped him in American culture as the quintessential newspaper editor of his era — gruff, charming and tenacious — died on Tuesday. He was 93.

When the trail of crimes and shenanigans led directly to the White House, Nixon was forced to resign in August 1974. The tapes that he himself had made of conversations in the Oval Office confirmed what The Post had been reporting. Mrs. Graham wrote to Mr. Bradlee in her Christmas letter that year, “We were only saved from extinction by someone mad enough not only to tape himself but to tape himself talking about how to conceal it.”

In their book, describing meetings in Mr. Bradlee’s office, Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein recalled how Mr. Bradlee would pick up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball and toss it at a small hoop attached to a window. “The gesture was indicative both of the editor’s short attention span and of a studied informality,” they wrote. “There was an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner about Bradlee.”

They observed that double-edged manner in Washington society, sometimes seeing it displayed in one swoop, as when Mr. Bradlee would “grind his cigarettes out in a demitasse cup during a formal dinner party.” “Bradlee,” they added, “was one of the few persons who could pull that kind of thing off and leave the hostess saying how charming he was.”

 

Bruce Morton, Veteran CBS News Reporter

Bruce Morton, an award-winning reporter during what CBS News veterans considered the organization’s glory days, from the 1960s through the 1980s, died on Friday at his home in Washington. He was 83.

The cause was complications of cancer, his daughter, Sarah Morton, said.

Mr. Morton, who later worked at CNN, gained a reputation as a solid reporter of expansive breadth and expertise, with special gifts as a writer. He covered most of the major news events of the era, including the Vietnam War, the space program, racial unrest, the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and the Watergate scandal.

William Worthy, a Reporter Drawn to Forbidden Datelines

William Worthy, a foreign correspondent who in the thick of the Cold War ventured where the United States did not want him to go — including the Soviet Union, China, Cuba — and became the subject of both a landmark federal case concerning travel rights and a ballad by the protest singer Phil Ochs, died on May 4 in Brewster, Mass. He was 92.

His death, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, was announced on the website of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Mr. Worthy was a Nieman Foundation fellow in the 1956-57 academic year.

A correspondent for The Afro-American of Baltimore, a weekly newspaper, from 1953 to 1980, Mr. Worthy also contributed freelance reports to CBS News, The New York Post and other publications. He became an international cause célèbre in the early 1960s when, returning from Cuba, he was found guilty of violating United States immigration law.

The son of a distinguished obstetrician, William Worthy Jr. was born in Boston on July 7, 1921.

“Despite the respect and certain privileges derived from membership in a professional ‘black bourgeoisie’ family, my sisters and I were clearly aware, as children, of our ‘inferior’ minority group status,” Mr. Worthy wrote in a 1968 article for The Boston Globe. “ ‘The problem’ was discussed at the dinner table. More importantly, it was all around us.”

After graduating from the Boston Latin School, Mr. Worthy earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Bates College in Lewiston, Me., in 1942. In World War II, though an ulcer would have let him be classified 4-F, he chose to become a conscientious objector.

Mr. Worthy began his career as a press aide for the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. During his years at The Afro-American, he kept one foot in the realm of direct advocacy, joining Freedom Riders on their pilgrimages through the South and later becoming a close ally of Malcolm X.

Chuck Stone, 89, Fiery Columnist

Chuck Stone, whose columns for The Philadelphia Daily News denouncing racism, political corruption and police brutality inspired such trust that wanted criminals sometimes surrendered to him rather than to the police and the authorities called on him to mediate prison crises, died on Sunday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 89.

The death was confirmed by his daughter Krishna, who said her father had congestive heart failure. He had been a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina.

Mr. Stone, who was a writer and editor for The Daily News from 1972 to ‘91, was the paper’s first black columnist and among the founders, in 1975, of the National Association of Black Journalists. He was also its first president.

Mr. Stone wrote colorful, propulsive prose with a wide range of cultural references, as likely to quote Rousseau or Abraham Lincoln as to break into the argot of black youth; he had street and statehouse cred.

His subject range was expansive as well — national and local politics, black history, civic and individual morality and always issues of race. Earlier in his career, when he worked for black newspapers in New York, Chicago and Washington — he covered the White House for The Washington Afro-American during the Kennedy administration — he was a fierce advocate for civil rights and black power. As a writer and editor for The New York Age, a paper based in Harlem, he befriended Malcolm X and Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., for whom he subsequently worked as an aide. He was fired from his job as editor in chief of The Chicago Defender when he refused to relent in his withering criticism of the city’s mayor, Richard J. Daley.

By the time he landed in Philadelphia, Mr. Stone was no less passionate, but his views had become more nuanced and independent. In the 1970s, he persistently criticized the city’s white mayor, Frank Rizzo, the former police commissioner whose department had an especially contentious relationship with the black community, and in the 1980s he persistently criticized the black mayor, Wilson Goode, for ineptitude, especially in 1985, after the mayor authorized the police bombing of a rowhouse inhabited by a radical black group known as MOVE, a calamitous event that started a destructive fire, killing 11 people, including five children.

Liberal on most social issues, Mr. Stone was in favor of the death penalty, and though he was a tenacious enemy of institutional racism, he also admonished blacks to disdain blame and seize opportunities to improve their own lives. In a 1982 column, he wrote about a coming light-heavyweight match between two local boxers, Dwight Braxton and Matthew Saad Muhammad, who had been locked up but had turned their lives around.

“I know a lot of you aren’t Dwight Braxtons or Matthew Saad Muhammads and you can’t find a job,” Mr. Stone wrote. “Hell, I’ll tell you how bad it is. Over 52 percent of all black teenagers are unemployed. ‘The world is a ghetto.’ But that’s no reason to rob a store or burglarize somebody’s home. You young brothers never think about how you would like it if another brother raped YOUR sister or burglarized YOUR home or snatched YOUR momma’s pocketbook. Black people are in terrible trouble as a race because there are not more Braxtons and Muhammads who go straight.”

“Chuck Stone was a product of his own design,” Elmer Smith, a member of The Daily News editorial board, wrote after Mr. Stone’s death, adding: “He didn’t study journalism. Objectivity was a polite convention that he didn’t have time for. He was a cause crusader because that’s what his people needed.”

Mr. Smith continued: “He was proudly and self-consciously black, which gave those of us who followed the confidence to be what we were and to cultivate our own distinctive voices.”

Joe McGinniss

Controversial writer and journalist known for Fatal Vision and The Selling of the President

Garrick Utley, Former NBC Anchor and Foreign Correspondent

Garrick Utley, a former anchor for NBC News who for many years was one of a rare breed in television news reporting, a full-time foreign correspondent, died on Thursday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 74. He died of prostate cancer, his wife, Gertje Utley, said.

From the battlefields of Vietnam and Iraq to the Soviet-led invasion of Prague, Mr. Utley was a forthright interviewer of troops and commanders in the field and of presidents and diplomats in the halls of power.

Fluent in Russian, German and French, he reported from some 75 countries in a multifaceted career that included 30 years at NBC. He was a bureau chief in London and Paris for the network, chief foreign correspondent, weekend news anchor and substitute for John Chancellor and Tom Brokaw on “NBC Nightly News.” He also hosted magazine programs and moderated the Sunday morning program “Meet the Press.” He later worked for ABC News and CNN.

Clifton Garrick Utley was born in Chicago on Nov. 19, 1939, to Clifton Utley, an NBC radio and television commentator, and Frayn Garrick Utley, a broadcast reporter for CBS and NBC and a Chicago civic leader. He graduated from Westtown School in West Chester, Pa., in 1957, and from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., in 1961.

After Army service and graduate studies at the Free University in Berlin, Mr. Utley joined NBC in Brussels in 1963 on the recommendation of a family friend, the correspondent Mr. Chancellor, who became his mentor. Mr. Utley was soon covering the war in Indochina.

In 1973 he married Gertje Rommeswinkel, an art historian and author who sometimes accompanied him on assignments. Besides his wife, he is survived by two brothers, Jonathan and David.

Jeffrey Zaslow

McLean & Eakin Booksellers - Jeffrey Zaslow giving his last lecture Thursday night in Michigan.


Jeffrey Zaslow, a longtime Wall Street Journal writer and best-selling author with a rare gift for writing about love, loss, and other life passages with humor and empathy, died at age 53 on Friday of injuries suffered in a car crash in northern Michigan. He died after losing control of his car while driving on a snowy road and colliding with a truck, according to his wife and the Antrim County Sheriff's Office. The condition of the truck driver wasn't available.


In addition to writing hundreds of memorable Journal articles and columns, Mr. Zaslow did a long stint as an advice columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, succeeding Ann Landers—a job he won after he entered a competition for the position as an angle for  a Journal front-page feature.

At the Journal his subjects ranged from the anguish of losing a car in the Disney World parking lot, to the power of fathers' lunchbox letters to their daughters, to the distinctive pain of watching a beloved childhood stadium go under the wrecking ball.

More recently, he became one of America's best-selling nonfiction writers, known internationally for such books as "The Girls from Ames," the story of a 40-year friendship among 10 women, and "The Last Lecture," about Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor who in 2007 was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given only a few months to live.

After Mr. Pausch gave an inspirational multimedia presentation about his life's lessons, Mr. Zaslow—a 1980 Carnegie Mellon graduate—wrote a Journal column about the lecture and posted it on the Journal's website with a video that became an online sensation. The resulting book spent more than a year on best-seller lists and was translated into dozens of languages.

I distinctly remember reading that column in the newspaper, back in the days when I read the physical paper (and when I had a subscription to it, before the tragedy - well, not tragedy; his death is a tragedy - the misfortune of Murdoch buying the paper).

The newspaper article that probably had the greatest impact on Mr. Zaslow’s own life was one he wrote in 1987 about a contest The Chicago Sun-Times was holding to fill the job left vacant when its advice columnist, Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers), de-camped for a competitor, The Chicago Tribune.

Mr. Zaslow, who was then a feature writer for The Wall Street Journal, entered the contest for the fun of it. And he won. In an interview with The New York Times, he said some people thought he was underqualified. “How could you have the audacity to give advice?,” people scolded him, he said. “My reply: ‘I’m 28, but I have the wisdom of a 29-year-old.’ ” He wrote the advice column, “All That Zazz,” until 2001. His annual singles party for charity, Zazz Bash, drew 7,000 readers a year and resulted in 78 marriages.

Captured Life Under Communism

Mr. Lockwood in Cuba with Fidel Castro, whom he persuaded to sit for a long and highly personal interview in 1965.

Lee Lockwood, an American photojournalist who had rare opportunities to capture political, military and civilian life in Communist countries — documenting the treatment of an American prisoner of war in North Vietnam and persuading Fidel Castro to sit for a long, discursive, smoke-filled and highly personal interview — died on July 31 in Tamarac, Fla. He was 78 and lived in Weston, Fla. The cause was complications of diabetes, his sister, Susan Lewinnek, said.

As his work through the decades made clear, Mr. Lockwood regarded photojournalism as a potent instrument for social change. A freelance photographer, he was associated for many years with the Black Star agency, which furnished his images to newspapers and magazines around the globe. He also wrote several books, including “Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel: An American Journalist’s Inside Look at Today’s Cuba in Text and Picture” (Macmillan, 1967).

Lee Lockwood/Black Star - Lt. Cmdr. Richard A. Stratton of the Navy, a prisoner of war in Hanoi in 1967. “His eyes were empty,” Lee Lockwood wrote.

In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, Mr. Lockwood was the first outside photographer in more than a decade to be allowed into North Vietnam. (Not long before, while in Havana to research his Castro book, he had prudently obtained a North Vietnamese visa there.)

The fruit of Mr. Lockwood’s 28-day visit, a long, heavily illustrated essay titled “North Vietnam Under Siege,” was published as the cover article of the April 7, 1967, edition of Life magazine.

Though Mr. Lockwood’s trip to North Vietnam was carefully controlled — he was forbidden to photograph military installations and had a government official with him at all times — he managed to traverse 1,000 miles in the month he spent there.

In words and photos, Mr. Lockwood portrayed the life of a country then under heavy bombardment by United States forces: bare, ruined villages; deserted factories; a boy with a missing leg, lost to a bomb. There were also calmer, quieter images of farmers, flower sellers and hemp dyers plying their trades.

His most striking encounter, in Hanoi, was with Lt. Cmdr. Richard A. Stratton, an American Navy pilot who had been captured in January 1967. As Mr. Lockwood and other foreign newsmen listened, a man identifying himself as Commander Stratton read over a loudspeaker a long “confession” attacking United States involvement in the region. Then, from behind a curtain, Commander Stratton appeared, looking, Mr. Lockwood wrote, “like a puppet.”

“His eyes were empty,” Mr. Lockwood wrote. “He stood stiffly at attention while movie lights were turned on and photographers took pictures. His expression never changed.” Accompanying Mr. Lockwood’s account was his photograph of Commander Stratton, clad in prison pajamas, making a deep, supplicating bow on orders from a North Vietnamese officer. The image, which occupied a full page of the Life article, was widely reproduced. Partly in response to Mr. Lockwood’s article, the State Department accused North Vietnam of brainwashing American prisoners to elicit antiwar statements from them. In an interview with The New York Times in 2008, Commander Stratton, who had been released in 1973, suggested that such statements were less the product of brainwashing than of common sense. “You are being tortured and all you have to do to get them to stop is say the same thing that Bobby Kennedy is saying,” Commander Stratton said.

Lee Jonathan Lockwood was born in New York City on May 4, 1932, and took up photography as a boy. He earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Boston University in 1954 and later did graduate work in the field at Columbia. In the mid-1950s, he served with the Army, stationed in Munich.

Besides his sister, Ms. Lewinnek, Mr. Lockwood is survived by his wife, the former Joyce Greenfield, whom he married in 1964; a brother, Roger; two children, Andrew Lockwood and Gillian Rubin; and six grandchildren.

His other books include “Conversation With Eldridge Cleaver: Algiers” (McGraw-Hill, 1970) and “Daniel Berrigan: Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes — Conversations After Prison With Lee Lockwood” (Random House, 1972).

Mr. Lockwood’s best-known book was the one born of his marathon interview with Mr. Castro, which unspooled over a full week in Cuba in 1965. The discourse ranged over Marxism, the Cuban missile crisis, American race relations, sex, prostitution and much else.

It was vital, Mr. Lockwood believed, that American readers be given a full portrait of a man known here as a cipher at best, a demon at worst.

“We don’t like Castro, so we close our eyes and hold our ears,” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “Yet if he is really our enemy, as dangerous to us as we are told he is, then we ought to know as much about him as possible.”

August 7, 2010

Lee Lockwood Dies at 78; Captured Life Under Communism

By MARGALIT FOX

Journalism pioneer Daniel Schorr dies at 93

Daniel Schorr, who began as a foreign newspaper correspondent in 1946, helped launch CNN.

A giant, a CBS reporter (when that meant something really special).

By Alan Duke, CNN - July 23, 2010 3:43 p.m. EDT

(CNN) -- Veteran broadcast journalist Daniel Schorr died at a Washington hospital Friday morning, according to National Public Radio. Schorr was 93. Schorr, who began as a foreign newspaper correspondent in 1946, helped launch CNN as its senior Washington correspondent in 1980 after two decades with CBS. NPR, which Schorr joined as senior news analyst in 1985, said he died peacefully after a short illness.

His coverage put him on Richard Nixon's infamous "enemies list."

A badge of honor.

"Dan Schorr was an indefatigable and very good reporter," former CBS anchor Dan Rather said. "He was an eye witness to many of the great events of the twentieth century. He covered them with accuracy and integrity."

Schorr's career was marked with controversy, but he served as an elder statesman of journalism in his last decades with NPR.


The host of NPR's "Weekend Edition" called Schorr "a fierce journalist."


"Nobody else in broadcast journalism -- or perhaps any field -- had as much experience and wisdom," Scott Simon said. "I am just glad that, after being known for so many years as a tough and uncompromising journalist, NPR listeners also got to know the Dan Schorr that was playful, funny and kind."


Schorr covered the rebuilding of Western Europe for the Christian Science Monitor starting in 1946.

He joined Edward R. Murrow's CBS news team as its Washington diplomatic correspondent in 1953.

Schorr resigned from CBS in 1976 after the network suspended him amid a controversy over the leaking of a secret U.S. intelligence report. Schorr refused to tell Congress the source of the document, citing his First Amendment protections.

CNN founder Ted Turner hired Schorr in 1979 as he was preparing to launch the Cable News Network the next summer.

"With Schorr in place, nobody in the news business would question CNN's integrity," Hank Whittemore wrote in his 1990 book "CNN: The Inside Story."

"In terms of the image presented to the journalism community, Turner and Schorr could be 'matching bookends,'" Whittemore wrote.

Schorr quit CNN in 1985 and soon joined NPR.

Schorr's many awards included a Peabody for "a lifetime of uncompromising reporting of the highest integrity," three Emmys and the duPont-Columbia Golden Baton.

Proud Muckraker

Having a discussion, his name came up; I remebered his journalism. I searched for him,. and found the obit.

Jack Newfield, 66, Proud Muckraker, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: December 22, 2004

Jack Newfield, a journalist and author who brought Brooklyn moxie, sassy cynicism and often zealous partisanship to muckraking reporting on subjects from New York politics to boxing, died on Monday night at New York-Presbyterian Medical Center. He was 66. The cause was kidney cancer that spread to his lungs, said Howard J. Rubenstein, a spokesman for the family.

Mainly as a writer for The Village Voice for 24 years but also for many other ublications, including The New York Daily News and The New York Post, Mr. Newfield carved out a reputation as a fierce champion of underdogs. He successfully pushed for a law outlawing lead paint, helped win an innocent man's release from prison, and contributed to the enactment of tougher campaign financing laws.

For many people, he came to embody The Voice during a golden period, the mid-1960's to the early 1970's, when it solidified its position as the exemplar of the alternative press, championing subjectivity and personal journalism.

For example, he was a leader in the movement to depose President Lyndon B. Johnson while he wrote political commentary in The Voice, which he gratefully noted made "no pretense of objectivity."

His fame grew as he periodically wrote articles about the city's "10 worst judges" and "10 worst landlords" for The Voice and other publications.

His books dug deeper still, as he and his co-authors uncovered the deals made with clubhouse barons while other journalists focused on the mayor. "The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York" (Viking, 1977), written with Paul Du Brul, is considered a classic in urban muckraking. A revised edition of the book, "The Permanent Government: Who Really Rules New York?" was published by Pilgrim in 1981.

Just as influential was "City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York" (Harper, 1988), written with Wayne Barrett.

But Mr. Newfield's methods attracted criticism from those who felt that he put crusading zeal ahead of the journalistic precept of impartiality, treating sources who cooperated with him better than those who did not. Some remarked on his deep participation in political issues, campaigns and movements that he also wrote about.

"There is no middle way to approach Jack Newfield," Martin F. Nolan, then chief of the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1971. "A reader either blisters, grits his teeth and curses, or he nods, murmurs 'right on' and again curses, but not at Jack Newfield."

As he grew powerful among liberals, Mr. Newfield sometimes appeared to wield his power like the kingmakers he excoriated in print. His words were weapons to promote friends like Governor Cuomo and castigate enemies like Mayor Edward I. Koch. For many years, people running or thinking of running for state or city office dined with him in the hope of passing his inspection.

Mr. Newfield himself suggested that facts should be subservient to larger understandings. "The point is not to confuse objectivity with truth," he wrote in his autobiography, "Somebody's Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working-Class Journalist" (St. Martin's, 2002).

His own life reverberated with the vigor and color of his hometown and his generation. He grew up on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant as a maniacal Dodgers fan, enlisted early on in the civil rights movement, and was an original member of the Students for a Democratic Society. He was so involved in Senator Robert F. Kennedy's campaign for the presidential nomination, he wrote, that he often considered himself part of it.

Mr. Newfield became friends with many prizefighters and often wrote about boxing, but this, too fell neatly into his leftist world view. Boxers, he wrote in his autobiography, are best seen as "exploited workers" and boxing promoters as "robber barons."

Jack Abraham Newfield was born on Feb. 18, 1938, into the Brooklyn of "open fire hydrants, spaldeens, the double-movie theaters, the comic books in candy stores, the egg creams, the stickball games with a broomstick handle," he wrote in his autobiography. He worshiped Jackie Robinson and other Dodgers, feeling "cold betrayal" when the team left for Los Angeles.

His campaign to commemorate the historic moment when Pee Wee Reese embraced Robinson in front of jeering racists with a statue of the scene was finally successful. It will be unveiled next summer at the Brooklyn Cyclones ballpark in Coney Island, Mr. Newfield wrote in a New York Sun column in October.

Mr. Newfield was 4 when his father died, and his mother struggled to raise her only child by working as a saleswoman in a department store. He graduated from Hunter College, which he called both "useless" and "priceless" in a short speech acknowledging his election to that school's alumni hall of fame in 1972.

His first journalism jobs were as a copy boy for The New York Daily Mirror and as editor of the weekly West Side News. In 1964, Dan Wolf, editor of The Voice, hired him as a $100-a-week staff writer. He wrote about anything he wanted, including a valiant defense of Bob Dylan's switch to an electric guitar.

But his thrust was as a crusader, from shedding light on abuse of the elderly and fraud in nursing homes to corrupt union leaders to lead-poisoning. He used what he called the "Joe Frazier method," referring to the daunting straight-ahead style of the heavyweight champion, to force reforms.

"Combine activism with writing," he wrote in a description of the approach. "Create a constituency for reform. And don't stop until you have achieved some progress or positive results."

When he went after bad nursing homes in the 1970's, he lobbied for Charles J. Hynes, then a Brooklyn prosecutor, to be appointed special prosecutor for nursing home abuses. He worked with civil liberties lawyers and others to win the release in 1986 of Bobby McLaughlin, a convicted murderer who new evidence showed was innocent.

During the riotous Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, an exasperated Mr. Newfield threw a typewriter from a hotel window at police officers beating demonstrators.

Because he saw himself as a participant in politics, not just a chronicler, he developed close friendships with politicians. Most prominent was former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, for whom his wife worked as a driver in his losing 1977 campaign for mayor against Mr. Koch.

That partisanship sometimes backfired. Mr. Cuomo wrote in his diary that Mr. Koch said he could not support him because of his close relationship with Mr. Newfield.

Mr. Newfield's 10 books include a biography of Don King, the boxing promoter. His Robert F. Kennedy biography, reissued in 2003 on the 35th anniversary of the senator's murder, received excellent reviews both times around.

Mr. Newfield, who worked for The News and The Post after leaving The Voice in 1988, is survived by his wife, Janie Eisenberg; a son, Joey; and a daughter, Rebecca.

Mr. Newfield, who was helping to produce two sports documentary films at the time of his death, wrote many of his later columns about the arts, including a series celebrating "The Sopranos" television show. He explained in his memoirs that, for him, politics had grown "more empty."

"I discovered I liked writing positive columns more than negative ones," he wrote.