Blair Clark - Career in Journalism

Career in Journalism

Clark reported for the Joseph Pulitzer Jr.-owned St. Louis Post-Dispatch before serving in the United States Army from 1941 to 1946.

In 1946 Clark used a $60,000 inheritance from his grandmother to found The New Hampshire Sunday News. The newspaper's star reporter was Ben Bradlee, who was also an alumnus of St. Mark's and Harvard and would later become executive editor of the Washington Post. Within two years, the Sunday News had the highest circulation in New Hampshire. When the New Hampshire Union Leader threatened to compete with its own Sunday paper, Clark sold the Sunday News to Union-Leader Corporation in 1948 for a substantial profit.

In 1953 he joined CBS News in Paris, and later became producer and anchor of The World Tonight on the CBS Radio Network, now known as the nighttime edition of the CBS World News Roundup. In 1961 President Kennedy offered Clark the ambassadorship to Mexico, but instead he became general manager and vice president of CBS News. He expanded the radio and television coverage of CBS News by hiring additional correspondents in the United States and abroad. He 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.

After leaving CBS, Clark was associate publisher of the New York Post, editor of The Nation magazine, and a fellow of the New York Institute for Humanities at New York University. He was an influential early supporter of The New York Review of Books. Subsequently he taught at New York University and Princeton University.