William Waldo Cameron Forum on Public Affairs - 4/15/1998
Hugh Sidey
Hugh Sidey has written about the American Presidency for more than 40 years. He began covering Dwight Eisenhower for the old LIFE Magazine in 1957, later became TIME's political and White House correspondent. Sidey served as TIME bureau chief and has authored the column THE PRESIDENCY since 1966.
Bill Clinton is the ninth President Sidey has written about. He reported on Eisenhower in the U-2 crisis, followed John Kennedy to the Vienna Summit with Nikita Khrushchev and was with Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas. Sidey roamed the world with the impetuous Lyndon Johnson, often being summoned to Air Force One to hear LBJ's stories of his encounters with the world's leaders. Sidey was on board when Richard Nixon jetted into China in 1972. He reported Nixon's tragic exit from Washington two years later. The reporter journeyed to Vladivostok with Gerald Ford and he watched Jimmy Carter and the ailing Leonid Brezhnev embrace in Vienna in 1979.
Sidey was one of the few reporters to whom Ronald Reagan talked regularly during his eight years in the White House and he was in Red Square when Reagan strolled with his new friend Mikhail Gorbachev. Sidey began to write about Congressman George Bush in 1966 and followed his crowded career to the Presidency. Sidey was with Bush in Malta for the wave-tossed summit with Gorbachev and Sidey was the only reporter aboard Air Force One returning the President to Houston when he left office. The correspondent was on the South Lawn of the White House when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat were brought together by Clinton for the famous handshake that began peace talks between Israel and the PLO. And Sidey has followed Clinton through his dark season of personal scandal.
Sidey is the son of a country editor, reared on the family's weekly newspaper in Greenfield, Iowa, where he occasionally returns to work. He graduated from Iowa State University in 1950 and began his journalistic career on papers in the Midwest. He joined LIFE in New York in 1955, then moved to Washington and TIME. He has authored or contributed to seven books on the Presidency and was a panelist for nearly 25 years on Inside Washington (formerly Agronsky and Company). He is married to the former Anne Trowbridge, Columbia, Missouri. They have four children.