Richard Reeves, 88, Was A Giant Of Journalism

Richard Reeves, journalist and author, and longtime resident of Sag Harbor, died last Wednesday, March 25, in Los Angeles, at age 83. The cause was cardiac arrest, and he had also been treated for cancer.

In his distinguished career, Mr. Reeves authored books on U.S. presidents, American politics, the role of the media, and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II in what The New York Times characterized as “muscular, passionate and occasionally acerbic prose.”

He was also a lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, appeared on PBS public affairs programs, and from 1979 to 2014 wrote a syndicated column that appeared in more than 100 newspapers. The topics sometimes included his eastern Long Island surroundings, such as a 1996 column telling the tale of Lieutenant Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs and the Battle of Sag Harbor in 1777.

Richard Furman Reeves was born in New York City on November 28, 1936, and grew up in Jersey City. His father, Furman W. Reeves, was a judge there, and his mother, Dorothy, had been an actress in early movies.

Mr. Reeves earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken but pivoted toward journalism, helping to found and edit The Phillipsburg Free Press, a weekly paper in Warren County, New Jersey. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Reeves was a reporter for The Newark Evening News, The New York Herald Tribune, and The New York Times, where his career took off as he covered everything from politics to riots to a famous music event.

The journalist and author Ken Auletta of Bridgehampton recalled that, in 1969, when he was the campaign manager for Howard Samuels, who hoped to run for governor, Mr. Reeves tried to persuade him to take a side trip from an upstate stop to investigate a music festival. Mr. Auletta begged off, claiming too many campaign responsibilities.

“That turned out to be Woodstock,” he said. “Dick had the lead story every day for a week. He had a great nose for news, and he didn’t hesitate to run down a good story.”

After leaving The Times, Mr. Reeves wrote for Esquire and New York magazine, producing a number of much-talked-about profiles. “Just like David Halberstam and Gay Talese and other terrific writers in the early ’70s, Dick wanted to do long-form journalism,” said Mr. Auletta. “Clay Felker recruited Dick to New York magazine, and he was so good that most of the political cover stories New York did were written by Dick. And he was the one who helped me become a journalist.”

Their decades-long friendship included Mr. Reeves being best man at Mr. Auletta’s wedding, and Mr. Auletta returning the favor.

On PBS, Mr. Reeves appeared as a regular panelist on public affairs programs in the 1970s and was chief correspondent for the investigative documentary series “Frontline” from 1981 to 1984. His work, in print and on television, won numerous awards, including an Emmy in 1980 for the ABC documentary “Lights, Camera … Politics!” about television’s impact on elections.

Among Mr. Reeves’s books were well-received portraits of John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. His most recent book was “Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II,” published in 2015.

Among recent presidents, Mr. Reeves rated Barack Obama fairly high. “No president since 1945 has been dealt such a difficult hand,” he asserted in a 2014 column, citing “the worst financial crisis since the 1930s” and “the legacy of George W. Bush’s disastrous, unnecessary war in Iraq.” In columns written while Mr. Bush was in the White House, Mr. Reeves ranked him among the worst presidents, in a class with James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding and Richard M. Nixon — whom Mr. Reeves voted for in 1960.

Mr. Reeves had even less use for President Donald Trump, whom he had covered closely in the 1980s while writing about American wealth. He saw Mr. Trump as “dangerous” to the country, likening him to “a hyperactive kid who’s lived in a bubble for his whole life,” as he told the Los Angeles radio station KCRW, adding, “The irony that people who voted for him think he relates to their lives — yeah, he’s been above their lives a hundred thousand feet in his private jet flying over Youngstown.”

As judgmental as he could be, Mr. Reeves understood that people in power sometimes do things they regret. “History is written backward,” he once said, “and it tends to clean up the mess.”

And he confessed to some regrets of his own. In his first book, “A Ford, Not a Lincoln” in 1975, he described Gerald R. Ford as an accidental president out of his depth and rejected Ford’s rationale for pardoning Nixon: that putting the disgraced former president on trial over the Watergate scandals would have consumed

the American people and left the country ungovernable for a time.

Two decades later, Mr. Reeves had changed his mind, concluding that, whatever his mistakes, Ford had been right about the biggest decision of his presidency.

During his years in Sag Harbor Mr. Reeves was a well-liked member of the area’s writer and journalist community. Myrna Davis and her husband, Paul, first met Mr. Reeves in the late 1960s when Paul Davis and Mr. Reeves were doing assignments for New York magazine. “He was handsome and friendly and had a great sense of humor,” she recalled.

Mr. Reeves and his wife, Catherine O’Neill, purchased a house on Main Street in 1980, and “they loved to entertain, and there was always a raft of opinionated journalists at their lively dinners.

“Richard absolutely adored and depended on Catherine, who was beautiful and dynamic and, among other things, founded the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children,” Ms. Davis said about Ms. O’Neill, who died in 2012.

In recent years, as his health declined, Mr. Reeves had been living in Los Angeles full-time, but old friends stayed in touch. A month ago, Mr. Auletta took an early morning flight there, spent three hours at the hospital with Mr. Reeves, then flew back to New York. “I knew it was the last time I would see him,” Mr. Auletta said.

Mr. Reeves’s first marriage, to Carol Wiegand, ended in divorce. He is survived by a son, Jeffrey; two daughters, Cynthia Fyfe and Fiona Reeves; two stepsons, Colin and Conor O’Neill; four grandchildren; and three step-grandchildren.

Mr. Reeves will be buried in Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, next to Ms. O’Neill. According to Ms. Davis, “They had chosen their plot close to the entrance, he told me, because, ‘We’re city people. We need to be close to the sidewalk.’”