Robert Elliott Thompson (June 28, 1921 – November 19, 2003) was a top political writer and Washington journalist known for his sharp analysis and crisp writing of political affairs, who knew and covered every president from Harry Truman to George W. Bush. Over the course of a long career he rose through the ranks to become, among other things, a White House correspondent, publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and national editor and Washington D.C. bureau chief for Hearst Newspapers. He also worked as John F. Kennedy's press secretary in the late 1950s, quitting just prior to the then-Senator's presidential campaign.
Early life
Thompson was born in Los Angeles and lived there until the start of World War II. Fresh out of high school, he joined the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor and was stationed in the South Pacific until the end of the war. As a radioman on a PBY Catalina in the famed Black Cats Squadron stationed in the Solomon Islands, he participated in numerous bombing runs on the Japanese Fleet, as well as reconnaissance and search-and-rescue missions.
He was involved in several key battles during the war as the allies pushed northward, including the Battle of Vella Lavella, the Bougainville Campaign and the liberation of the Philippine Islands. He once came under fire when a Japanese Mitsubishi G4M attacked Canton Island where his crew had stopped to refuel on their way to Guadalcanal and watched from a short distance as a direct hit completely destroyed his PBY-5A.
After the war he attended Indiana University where he studied journalism and received the Ernie Pyle award, became the editor of the Daily Student, the school's newspaper, and served on the student governing board. After graduation in 1949 with a B.A. in journalism, Thompson joined the staff of the Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, Indiana, his first job as a reporter. Many years later he returned to his Alma Mater as the Ernie Pyle lecturer on journalism.
Journalistic career
In 1951, after working as a reporter for only two years, Thompson fulfilled his big ambition of covering Washington politics when he was hired on as a reporter for the International News Service (INS), a wire service owned by Hearst Corporation, to cover the Department of Agriculture. When he arrived one day to interview Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, he met the Secretary's administrative assistant Mary C. Mattern, whom he married in 1954, only three months after they met. Secretary Benson was a guest at their wedding.
In 1956 he covered the first of many presidential campaigns he would attend, beginning with the campaign of Democratic Candidate Adlai Stevenson whom he traversed the country with for several months, followed by the much shorter trip of Vice President Richard Nixon who was campaigning for the incumbent President Dwight Eisenhower.
It was on Stevenson's campaign that Thompson first met Robert F. Kennedy. The two would form a friendship months later during the McClellan Committee hearings into labor racketeering, on which Kennedy served as counsel and which Thompson covered for INS.
Kennedy and Johnson administrations
In 1958 INS merged with United Press to become United Press International (UPI). In the transition many people lost their jobs, including Thompson. That same night he attended a party at Robert F. Kennedy's McLean, VA home Hickory Hill and while in conversation with then-Senator John F. Kennedy, the future President offered Bob a position as his press secretary. One of Bob's major contributions to JFK's 1958 senatorial reelection campaign was a movie he put together entitled "The U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy Story" that was broadcast on television in Massachusetts. Kennedy later said "it was the best thing (he) had in the campaign."
Thompson once remarked in an interview that he had been grateful to Kennedy for the job offer "during a very dark night in my life," but he was "always more comfortable as a political observer than a political participant" and in 1959, despite Kennedy's presidential ambitions, Bob quit his staff and joined the Washington Bureau of the New York Daily News where he soon became their White House correspondent and was assigned to cover the new President, his former boss, John F. Kennedy. In 1962 he joined the Los Angeles Times and that same year, only days before the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he published the first biography ever written about the President's brother, the budding United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, entitled Robert F. Kennedy: The Brother Within.