Adam Clymer

When Adam Clymer ’58 was covering the 2000 presidential campaign, he wrote several articles that the Bush camp considered unfavorable. In a remark that was unintentionally picked up by microphones—and then by major media outlets—George W. Bush turned to Dick Cheney at a campaign stop in Illinois and said, “There’s Adam Clymer, major league asshole from The New York Times.”

Though Clymer, a former Lowell House resident, said recently that he was not angry about the comment, it created a minor controversy and gained him national attention.

Still, Clymer has been a prominent force in journalism beyond simply serving as the target of one of Bush’s most well-known verbal gaffes.

“He’s just a born journalist with all the complimentary adjectives that you can attach to that and perhaps some of the ones that aren’t so complimentary,” said George H. Watson ’58, managing editor of The Crimson while Clymer was president in 1957, and later best man at Clymer’s wedding in 1961.

Watson, a former vice president of ABC News, called Clymer—who also served as the chair of The Crimson’s Graduate Council until this past April—“one of the eminent political journalists of our time.”

REPORTING FROM JUNIOR HIGH

Clymer’s do-what-it-takes approach to reporting became apparent very early in his development as a journalist and stayed with him throughout his career.

When he was 12 years old, wanting to contribute in some capacity to the sports section of a newspaper, he took the initiative to write to the sports editors of all the papers in New York City, where he grew up. A New York Times sports writer responded and hired Clymer to collect high school basketball scores for the newspaper and eventually write minor sports stories.

When he arrived at Harvard and joined The Crimson his freshman year, Clymer continued to do whatever was needed in order to get a story for The Crimson or for The Times, where he reported as a freelance writer covering Harvard sports—even if it required being in two places at once.

When the basketball and hockey teams had games at the same time, Clymer and a friend who worked as a stringer for the Herald Tribune would split and meet up afterward at the Western Union office to exchange notes so that each of them could file a story on two different games.

“People who went out and got stories, original stories...were not that numerous,” Watson said. “Adam was certainly one of them. And it took him right to the top of our class at The Crimson.”

It was this active get-up-and-go that led Clymer not just to the top post at The Crimson but to historic journalistic moments during his tenure.

In Sept. 1957, he dispatched Watson to cover the school integration controversy on-site in Little Rock, Ark.

“We didn’t normally send reporters to cover national stories, but he felt that this was not an ordinary national story,” Watson said.

A HOOLIGAN’S CAREER?

Following his time on The Crimson, Clymer has perhaps been known best for his reporting on U.S. politics. But international journalism has continued to attract him, and some of his most memorable experiences have taken place abroad.

When The Baltimore Sun—where Clymer worked before going back to The Times—asked him if he wanted to go to Moscow, he readily accepted. Clymer, then 26, and his wife, Ann, set off for Russia.

There, Clymer covered Nikita Khrushchev’s fall from power. “That was an exciting story to cover, even if we weren’t entirely sure why it was happening,” he said recently.

But Clymer’s time in Russia got cut short when he got too close to a protest at the American embassy against the U.S. bombing of Vietnam. When the demonstrators, who were throwing rocks and bottles of ink, started beating Clymer up, he found himself separated from the other reporters covering the event.

Taken to a first aid center, he was accused of attacking a Soviet militia man and, about 10 days later, was expelled from the country for “hooliganism.”

Clymer also spent time in South Africa and India before returning to the United States, where he ultimately became the Times’ chief political correspondent.

GO FISH

Clymer particularly noted that, over the course of his career on The Times, he especially enjoyed his role in training a number of journalists, including E.J. Dionne ’73, a current Washington Post columnist and former Crimson editor; Gerald M. Boyd, the first black managing editor of The Times; and Pulitzer Prize-winning Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Clymer took this enthusiasm for mentorship and applied it to his role on The Crimson’s Graduate Council, managing to be a president at The Crimson once again.

Now, his tenure in the role has ended, and he is largely retired.

Clymer left The Times in 2003, and worked for a couple of years as political director for the National Annenberg Election Survey, leading an extensive national poll on the 2004 elections. Earlier this year, he covered the Wyoming Republican primary for The Times from his ranch in the state.

Clymer said he enjoys devoting more time to leisure activities: “Full-time work interferes with fishing.”

—Staff writer Alexandra Perloff-Giles can be reached at aperloff@fas.harvard.edu.