Reporting for Duty: Robert Boyd Brings Decency to Four Decades of D.C. Journalism

Robert Skinner Boyd '49 has always been a linguist.

When he came to Harvard College more than 50 years ago, the young Boyd dreamed of someday uncovering an ancient and long-forgotten language and writing about his discovery for the edification of equally obscure academics.

But Boyd--who speaks a half-dozen languages--ultimately built a life around the art of English itself, rather than anything so foreign as the phonology of ancient Mesopotamia.

Washington politics proved sufficiently exotic.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Boyd has spent decades covering the glorious--and the ignominious--scenes of American political life.

Through some of the most remarkable moments of the 20th century, Boyd has had a front row seat.

He received a personal tour in Cuba from a young Fidel Castro, following the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Later Castro took center stage for Boyd as he witnessed the Cuban missile crisis.

He traipsed around China with Nixon. He visited Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam conflict. He covered political campaigns and conventions from Kennedy to Clinton--not to mention McCarthy and McGovern.

He has known them all, watched them rise and watched them fall.

And for a man who never chased the limelight, accolades still came, largely due to--rather than in spite of--the decency he brought to his trade.

Boyd won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973--which he shared with one of his reporters--for his investigation of George McGovern's running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton.

Eagleton, Boyd learned, had undergone electric shock treatment as part of a program of psychological therapy. It was a stunning revelation.

But Boyd did not rush to print the story. Instead, he and his partner trekked to North Dakota to find McGovern and give him advance warning of the story and a chance to respond.

"It was the only fair and decent thing to do," Boyd says.

In return, McGovern "double-crossed" the Knight Ridder team, according to McCartney, holding a press conference that revealed Eagleton's psychological history and destroyed Boyd's exclusive story.

"They said 'Sorry boys, we're going public,'" Boyd recalls. "It was a frustrating thing for us."

But Boyd's touch of compassion--to the surprise of many in the Washington establishment--did not go unnoticed by the Pulitzer committee. The committee bestowed one of its coveted prizes on Boyd and in doing so, tipped its hat to him for his judicious restraint, a trait that Broder concedes is "not usually acknowledged in journalism."

Boyd, who once chronicled the ins and outs of cattle smuggling and shrimp boats for a small paper deep in Louisiana's Cajun country, rose quickly in Washington to become bureau chief.

During his 20 years at the helm of the Knight Ridder bureau, Boyd presided over an expansion in which the D.C. team grew from a staff of seven to more than 50.

"He was the antithesis of the sort of ego-driven Washington bureau chief who stepped all over his reporters," says James McCartney, a 25-year Knight Ridder veteran columnist and reporter who worked under Boyd. "He was the best editor I ever had."

According to McCartney, Boyd's linguistic gift as a political storyteller was closely connected to his "low key" nature.

"The hallmark of Bob Boyd's writing," McCartney says, "is that he can explain in simple and understandable language very un-understandable things."

Boyd's understated style--McCartney remembers one day walking into his own office to find the bureau chief vacuuming it--never compromised the tenacity of his reporting, according to his colleagues and competitors. Washington Post reporter David Broder says his colleague brings tremendous energy to his work.

"He's exactly the same age he was when he graduated," Broder says. "He has as much or more enthusiasm for reporting than anyone I've ever met."

Broder adds that he believes Boyd is one of the most honest and fair reporters in Washington.

"He's totally independent," Broder says. "I have no idea what his politics may be, and I've known him for 30 years."

But in the past six years, politics have played a much smaller role in Boyd's reporting.

"The campaigns got to be less fun because the press corps got so swollen, you lost close contact with the candidate and his senior people," Boyd says.

When he began covering presidential campaigns, Boyd says he routinely got to talk with candidates and their senior supporters around the bars of New Hampshire.

"You'd get on the airplane with Goldwater, and maybe there'd be 20 reporters," Boyd says. "He'd come back and there was a chance to talk to you informally. T here was a sense of closeness that's kind of lost now in this monster corps."

Instead of a crew of 20 regulars, a serious presidential candidate today can expect three whole planes of reporters to follow in tow.

And so it was that Robert Skinner Boyd made a rather large leap in 1993. The veteran political reporter stepped down as Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau Chief to become its Washington science writer.

At the age of 71, he found himself spending weeks in Antarctica "talking to scientists and building igloos."

But Boyd still carries out the same job he always did, using his gift with words to tell complicated stories with ease and simplicity. Fifty years after his last class in a Harvard hall, his lessons in language are still with him.

"Harvard was a great place to go and study," Boyd says, and his academic interest in language still lives on.

"Just the other day, I picked up a Hittite grammar," Boyd says.

But in the end, Boyd's gift with words found a much more practical outlet. Harvard may have taught Boyd about languages, but as a reporter, Boyd spent a career showing exactly how words are to be used, and what they are to be used for.