Hugh Sidey

SIDEY BUCK BURR

Posted By: Carlyss Noland (email)
Date: 8/4/2010 at 10:27:31

Hugh Sidey, Who Covered the Presidency for Time, Dies at 78

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: November 23, 2005
Hugh Sidey, who became intoxicated with journalism at his family's tiny Iowa newspaper and went on to carve out a career as Time magazine's chronicler of the American presidency, died in Paris on Monday. He was 78.

Associated Press
Hugh Sidey, at Time for 38 years.
Mr. Sidey died, apparently of a heart attack, at a restaurant during his annual Thanksgiving vacation in Paris, said his brother, Edwin.

Mr. Sidey knew and wrote about every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush, sometimes making headlines, as when he interviewed President Ronald Reagan immediately before Mr. Reagan addressed the nation in 1987 on his controversial sale of arms to Iran.

That interview addressed serious matters like motivations for the sale, but also touched on more personal issues, like the fact that Mr. Reagan's favorite job was working as a lifeguard when he was young.

Mr. Sidey had been a lifeguard himself in Greenfield, Iowa, the hometown he glorified in print and visited at least three or four times a year. He grew up boating and canoeing and listening to Big Ten football games on the radio, with commentary by the Des Moines radio station WHO's sportscaster, Mr. Reagan, then known as Dutch.

At Time, Mr. Sidey interviewed John F. Kennedy while swimming with him, listened to Lyndon B. Johnson gossip about world leaders while sitting with him on Air Force One and visited China with Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Nixon, in turn, took note of Mr. Sidey. He wrote a memorandum in 1972 to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, attacking Mr. Sidey and John Osborne, a columnist for The New Republic. The president said the "cold fact" was that the journalists were "totally against us."

The memorandum, released by the National Archives in 1987, said the two journalists used "vicious derogatory terms" in "the place where you really find out what people think - the Georgetown cocktail parties."

Mr. Sidey acknowledged that he was too close to some presidents, particularly Mr. Reagan, to appear completely objective. He told Washingtonian magazine in 1996, "I simply liked him too much."

Hugh Swanson Sidey was born in Greenfield on Sept. 3, 1927. When he turned 8, his grandfather told him it was high time he had a job at the family's Adair County Free Press and ordered him to sweep the floor.

After high school, Mr. Sidey served 18 months in the Army and earned a journalism degree from Iowa State University. He worked at newspapers in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and in Omaha.

He had been sending freelance articles and photographs to Time and Life, and Life magazine hired him in 1955 to cover science in New York. Three years later, he transferred to Time magazine in Washington, where he dived headfirst into the capital's political life. After his formal retirement in 1996, he continued to write occasional columns on the White House.

Mr. Sidey wrote or contributed to seven books about presidents. For 25 years, he appeared on the television program "Agronsky & Company" and its successor, "Inside Washington."

In addition to his brother, Edwin, who still works as publisher of the family newspaper, Mr. Sidey is survived by three daughters, Cynthia Anne Buck, Sandra Sidey and Bettina Burr, all of whom live in Washington's Maryland suburbs; a son, Edwin, of the Baltimore area; and seven grandchildren.