Hugh Sidey, 1927-2005

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I've always been a fan of biographies.

As a boy I started out reading every baseball biography I could get my hands on (even The Mel Ott Story as well as that second one about Red Schoendienst). I loved playing baseball and, reading the biographies, I was getting further immersed in the game. I also began to learn about the history of baseball which is closely related to the history of America.

Because of this, I moved on to reading biographies of the Presidents, which I do to this day. I enjoy them because they not only tell you about the man, but also about the times he lived in -- it gives you some perspective. It's an approach I used to teach my kids about American history -- start with a story about the President and then tell them about the surrounding context in which he lived. You can even compare and contrast the story of one President with another -- how one man reacted to an event, how another shaped the events around him. And I encouraged them to follow current events because, after all, it's all just history in the making, isn't it?

That said, the one man who most engaged my imagination in this area, early on, was Hugh Sidey. I began reading him in Life magazine in the early 60's. I guess what attracted me was that he took a personal approach to the subjects of his articles. He also had an easy-to-read style (important for a fourth grader) and he always seemed to be at the scene of the most amazing events:

As the decades passed and the presidents and the presidency came to be at the focus of momentous events, Mr. Sidey was there to watch, to interview and to inform the public.

When a prospective Cold War summit meeting was derailed during the Eisenhower administration by the U-2 spy plane crisis, Mr. Sidey reported from the White House. He was in Dallas with Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

When Johnson traveled to Vietnam during the war there, Mr. Sidey went with him, and when Richard Nixon went to China, Mr. Sidey was along.

He flew to the sites of great events with Ford and with President Jimmy Carter, taking the voluminous notes that became the raw material for his books.

It was said that he was one of a handful of journalists in whom President Ronald Reagan confided regularly. Mr. Sidey was on the airplane that carried George H.W. Bush back to Texas after his presidency ended in 1993. He also wrote about President George W. Bush.

Whenever I saw him on TV, he seemed like a gentleman; and his peers -- and the Presidents themselves -- all said the same thing which, given his attitude on living, is not surprising:

A sense of humor... is needed armor. Joy in one's heart and some laughter on one's lips is a sign that the person down deep has a pretty good grasp of life.

He'll be missed.