| Subject: Whitelaw Reid, Heir to New York Herald Tribune, Dies at 95 |
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Date Posted: Monday, April 20, 2009, 11:25:58am
Whitelaw Reid, the scion of a prominent New York publishing family who joined The New York Herald Tribune in the late 1930s, became a war correspondent and later the paper’s editor, president and chairman, died on Saturday at White Plains Hospital Center. He was 95 and lived in Bedford Hills, N.Y.
The cause was complications of lung and heart failure, said his brother, Ogden R. Reid, the former congressman and ambassador to Israel, who was an editor and publisher of The Herald Tribune.
Although he had long been retired, Whitelaw Reid, an adventurer who had flown planes and sailed yachts, was in relatively good health most of his life. He had been a skier, a swimmer and a horseback rider, and he was a competitive tennis player into his 90s, winning United States Tennis Association tournaments and earning national rankings among senior players.
Known as Whitey, he was the namesake and grandson of Whitelaw Reid, who succeeded Horace Greeley as owner and editor of The New York Tribune in the 1870s and was later ambassador to France and Great Britain. He was also the son of Ogden Mills Reid, who merged The Tribune and The Herald in 1924 and for many years was editor and publisher of the paper and its European edition, known as the Paris Herald, now The International Herald Tribune and owned by The New York Times Company.
Groomed for a newspaper life, Mr. Reid, two years out of Yale, joined The Herald Tribune in 1938 in the mechanical department, and later worked in the business section. In 1940, he became a reporter and soon joined the paper’s London bureau. Over the next year, he filed dramatic eyewitness accounts of the London blitz and the German shelling of Dover; flew with Royal Air Force aviators on missions over the Continent; and patrolled the English Channel aboard a trawler searching for enemy invaders.
In 1941, he was commissioned a United States Navy aviator. For much of World War II, he ferried Navy planes around the United States, but in 1945 piloted a four-motor bomber across the Pacific and joined a squadron on Iwo Jima that surveyed Japan’s coasts for bombing raids in the final stages of the war.
In 1946, he returned to The Herald Tribune as assistant to the editor. Upon the death of his father in 1947, he became editor and vice president. From 1953 to 1955, he was editor and president, and from 1955 to 1958 was chairman. His mother, Helen Rogers Reid, was president from 1947 to 1953 and chairman from 1953 to 1955, and was known as a dominant figure at the paper in those years.
During Whitelaw Reid’s tenure, circulation was raised substantially. But despite some illustrious writers and columnists, The Herald Tribune, long known for independent Republican traditions and, journalistically, as a newspaperman’s newspaper, went into decline. Staff members said that its high standards gave way to puzzle contests and other gimmicks to raise circulation.
In 1958, the Reid family sold control to John Hay Whitney, the American ambassador to Britain, who redesigned the paper and hired talented new writers. But caught in a series of strikes and other reverses, the newspaper was merged in 1966 with other troubled publications into an amalgam called The World Journal Tribune, which folded in 1967.
For many years, Mr. Reid had been president of The Herald Tribune’s Fresh Air Fund, which provided underprivileged city children with summer vacations in the country. The New York Times took over sponsorship of the program after The Herald Tribune died.
After leaving the newspaper, Mr. Reid founded Reid Enterprises, a company that sold food and other products, and was its president until 1975.
In recent years, he devoted much of his time to environmental causes, and to tennis. In 1998, he won the national indoor singles championship for men 85 and older and was ranked fourth in the nation among those players. In 2003, he won the national clay court doubles championship for men in their 90s.
Whitelaw Reid was born on July 26, 1913, on the family’s estate, Ophir Hall, in Purchase, N.Y. He attended Lincoln School in New York and St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., and graduated from Yale in 1936 with a degree in sociology. With a half dozen college classmates, he sailed a small schooner from Norway to the United States.
After a course in printing at what is now the Rochester Institute of Technology, and training in the operation of Mergenthaler Linotype machines, he joined his father’s newspaper.
Mr. Reid married the former Joan Brandon in 1948 and, after a divorce, married the former Elizabeth Ann Brooks in 1959. In addition to his widow and his brother, of Waccabuc, N.Y., he is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Brandon, of Palm Beach, Fla., and Carson, of Delta, Colo.; two children from his second marriage, Gina, of Katonah, N.Y., and John, of Amherst, Mass.; 11 grandchildren; and 5 great-grandchildren.
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