Ledyard Blair Clark was an American liberal journalist and political activist who played key roles both as a journalist and a political operator.
17 Facts About Blair Clark
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Blair Clark was general manager and vice president of CBS News from 1961 to 1964, and later became editor of The Nation magazine.
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Blair Clark was Senator Eugene McCarthy's national campaign manager for the 1968 presidential nomination.
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Blair Clark was named after his maternal grandfather, investment banker C Ledyard Blair.
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Blair Clark was raised in Princeton, New Jersey and attended boarding school at St Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts.
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Blair Clark was the editor and president of The Harvard Crimson.
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At St Mark's School, Blair Clark became friends with poet Robert Lowell.
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From 1941 to 1946, Blair Clark reported for the Joseph Pulitzer Jr.
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In 1946, Blair Clark used a $60,000 inheritance from his grandmother to found The New Hampshire Sunday News.
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Blair Clark expanded the radio and television coverage of CBS News by hiring additional correspondents in the United States and abroad.
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Blair Clark worked with Edward R Murrow, and among those he hired at CBS were Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Roger Mudd and Bill Plante.
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Blair Clark was an influential early supporter of The New York Review of Books.
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Blair Clark first met Senator Eugene McCarthy in 1965 at a party at Walter Lippmann's house in Washington, DC Two years later, when McCarthy announced that he would challenge President Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primaries as an anti-war candidate, Blair Clark wrote to McCarthy from London to express his support.
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Hoeh and Studds took the titles of New Hampshire campaign director and coordinator, and Blair Clark recruited the journalist Seymour Hersh to be McCarthy's press secretary.
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Blair Clark would go on to serve in the New Jersey Senate and as United States Ambassador to New Zealand.
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Blair Clark later became treasurer of the New Democratic Coalition, a group of disaffected liberals from the 1968 campaign.
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In 2000, Blair Clark died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey at the age of 82.