John Seigenthaler

John Seigenthaler, a legendary Tennessee journalist, intimate confidant to two near-presidents and fierce advocate for racial equality, died Friday, July 11th. Mr. Seigenthaler served three years in the Air Force, and when he returned home in the spring of 1949, his father was dying of lung cancer. His father, a building contractor, died later that year. (His mother, a state employee, died in 1989.) Mr. Seigenthaler attended George Peabody College for Teachers but never graduated. Instead he got a job from his uncle, Walter Seigenthaler, who was circulation director for The Nashville Tennessean and The Nashville Banner, as The Tennessean's lowest-paid reporter. When Mr. Seigenthaler began his journalism career, the South was experiencing the first hint of the movements to secure civil rights for black Americans and careers for women. The Tennessean had a newsroom full of talent, mostly men, loyal to one another and extremely competitive. In 1959, after a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, he returned to Nashville and was promoted to the job of assistant city editor, then city editor and special assignment reporter. During much of that period, Mr. Seigenthaler was flirting with a career in politics, not journalism. For two years, he moved in and out of The Tennessean newsroom, taking leaves to work with the Kennedy family in various positions, then returning. Mr. Seigenthaler became a member of the Kennedy inner circle. As attorney general, Bobby wanted loyal people next to him, too. He made Mr. Seigenthaler his administrative assistant in the U.S. Justice Department in 1961. March 21, 1962 Mr. Seigenthaler was named editor of The Tennessean at age 34. When Gannett Co. bought The Tennessean in 1979, he glibly quipped that he had "been sold into chains." When Gannett CEO Al Neuharth decided to launch a new national paper called USA Today in 1982, it was John Seigenthaler he asked to create a unique style of editorial page. Seigenthaler retired as publisher, chairman and CEO of The Tennessean, and from USA Today, in 1991.