Hugh Sidey, 78, Covered Presidents for Time

Hugh Sidey, the Time magazine journalist who covered the White House for decades and knew presidents and the presidency in a way that few others could match, died Monday in Paris. He was 78 and suffered a heart attack, his brother, Ed Sidey, reported.Sidey covered the nation’s chief executives from Dwight D. Eisenhower through Bill Clinton, traveled with them, saw them in times of triumph and in moments of disappointment and was witness to and chronicler of the history they made.Sidey, who was a contributing editor at the time of his death, “proved you can write about people in power and still be the gentleman journalist,” James Carney, Time’s Washington bureau chief, told the Associated Press. “He’s in some ways the model we all aspire to.”An Iowa-born heir to a family of journalistic tradition, Sidey wrote books on individual presidents: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Gerald R. Ford.He was known for the column “The Presidency,” which he wrote for Time. He joined the weekly newsmagazine in 1958 as White House correspondent.In the years before that, Sidey had a long apprenticeship in journalism, some of it at the side of his father at the Adair County (Iowa) Free Press, a family business founded by his great-grandfather.Known for his acquaintance with the powerful and the prominent, for his writing, and for his many appearances on television panel shows, Sidey was long regarded in Washington and throughout the nation as a leading journalism insider.But as he once told an interviewer, one of the most memorable periods in his career came in 1950. He had graduated from high school in his native Greenfield, Iowa. He had served for 18 months in the U.S. Army. He received a journalism degree from Iowa State University and then, for a few months, he went to work for his father.“It was the best summer of my life,” he said. On the small family newspaper, Sidey said, he “could do it all.” He not only wrote stories, but also sold advertising, took pictures, and saw to it that they got printed.From there he went to work for other Iowa newspapers, and then New York, to work for Life magazine and begin a 50-year connection with the Time Inc. publishing empire.He soon established himself as Time’s presidential reporter. When a prospective Cold War summit meeting was derailed during the Eisenhower administration by the U-2 spy plane crisis, Sidey reported from the White House. He was in Dallas with Kennedy on November 22, 1963.When Johnson traveled to Vietnam during the war there, Sidey went with him, and when Richard Nixon went to China, Sidey was along.He flew to the sites of great events with Mr. Ford and with President Jimmy Carter, taking the voluminous notes that became the raw material for his books.It was said that he was one of a handful of journalists in whom President Reagan confided regularly. When the Reagan presidency was in turmoil during the height of the Iran Contra affair, it was to Sidey that Reagan gave an exclusive interview. As often happened, Sidey’s prose tended toward the elegiac: “The great Houdini of American politics is neither as wounded and agonized as his critics claim or would like, nor as robust as he used to be. One thing is sure in this extraordinary season of end and intermission and beginning: He will fight as long as he breathes.”Yet if his presidential reporting was often Boswellian, he was not above resorting to subterfuge to investigate a long-standing Washington mystery: whether Reagan dyed his hair. He convinced Reagan’s barber, Milton Pitts, to smuggle a few tufts of the president’s hair out of the White House, for further investigation. “He didn’t,” Sidey told the Miami Herald in 2004.”Reagan had little white hairs throughout his hair.”Sidey was on the airplane that carried George H.W. Bush back to Texas after his presidency ended in 1993. He also wrote about President George W. Bush.Recalling 40 years later the days when he covered President Kennedy, Sidey insisted that the press corps knew about the President’s peccadilloes.“Quite honestly, we didn’t know what to do about it,” Sidey said. “We weren’t in the modern world yet. And quite honestly, I didn’t want to touch it. I sent memos to [Time-Life headquarters in New York] sometimes about the strange goings-on around the White House, and they didn’t want to touch it, either.”Of all the presidents he covered, Johnson seems to have intrigued him the most. “It is impossible to find your way through the labyrinth of Johnson’s mind,” he said.

Hugh Sidey, 78, Covered Presidents for Time

Hugh Sidey, 78, Covered Presidents for Time

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