Adam Clymer

Adam Clymer retired in July, 2003 as chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times, where he wrote on major issues in government and politics from privacy to campaign finance. The American Political Science Association honored him that year with its Carey McWilliams Award for distinguished correspondence. Previously, he had been Washington editor of The Times from 1997 through 1999. Before that, he was assistant Washington editor, in charge of coverage of Congress, since 1991. In that position, he won the 1993 Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for distinguished reporting on Congress.

He was The Times’ senior editor for weekends in 1990, responsible for the planning for the main news sections on Sunday and Monday and he managed the newsrooms on weekends. He had also been The Times’s political editor for the 1988 presidential campaign, and its polling editor from 1983 through 1990, supervising news polling and The Times’s Best Seller List.

Clymer joined The Times in Washington in 1977, reporting extensively on Congress, public opinion and politics and was The Times’s national political correspondent in the 1980 presidential campaign. In 1994 he won the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress.

Before The Times, Mr. Clymer worked at The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot from 1960 to 1963. He served 17 months in the Army in the midst of Norfolk job. He wrote for the Baltimore Sun from 1963 through 1976 and The New York Daily News in 1977. On The Sun, he was a foreign correspondent in Moscow, reporting the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev, and New Delhi. For the Sun, he covered the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and national politics, and the decline and fall of the Nixon Administration. In 1975, Branford College at Yale gave him its diploma of gratitude and esteem for his reporting from “the dank soil of Watergate.”

After his retirement from The Times, he served until July, 2005 as political director of the National Annenberg Election Survey, a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. He was the spokesman and chief analyst for its presidential election poll. In 2005-2006 he was an adjunct professor of journalism at George Washington University.

Clymer wrote two books, edited another and contributed to two more. His highly praised “Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography” was published in 1999 by William Morrow & Co. A second edition was published in the spring of 2009. In 2008, his “Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right,” was published by the University Press of Kansas. He edited “The New York Times Year in Review, 1986,” published in 1987, and contributed to “Reagan: The Man, The President,” a book by Times reporters published in 1981. In 2008 he contributed to William E. Mayer’s “The Swing Voter in American Politics,” published by Brookings Institution Press.

In retirement he did some free-lance writing, especially doing advance obituaries for the Times on political figures. Over his career, he published articles in the Reporter, the Nation, the New Republic, the Progressive, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, Politico and the Chicago Tribune.

His mother, Eleanor Clymer, was the author of more than 50 children’s books. His father, Kinsey Clymer, was a newspaperman in his youth and worked for many years at the New York City Department of Welfare. Born in New York City on April 27, 1937, Clymer graduated from the Walden School in 1954. In 1958 he earned his A.B. degree from Harvard College magna cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was also president of the Harvard Crimson. In 1959 he studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa on a Frank Knox Fellowship, and in 1963 he studied Russian at Georgetown University. In 2005 the University of Vermont awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters “as one of the great political journalists of your generation.”

Clymer married Ann Wood Fessenden in 1961. She died in 2013. Their only child, Jane emily [c.q.] Clymer, was born in 1966 and was killed by a drunk driver in 1985. He lives in a Washington, D.C., in an apartment once occupied by Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, when Major Eisenhower was an aide to General Douglas MacArthur at the War Department. He is a member of the National Press Club and the Delhi Golf Club and a dedicated fly fisherman.