Best Daily Newspaper or Wire Service Interpretation of Foreign Affairs 1967

AWARD DATE: 1967

AWARD NAME: Best Daily Newspaper or Wire Service Interpretation of Foreign Affairs

AWARD RECIPIENT:  Michael R. McGrady and R.W. Apple, Jr.

AWARD RECIPIENT AFFILIATION: Newsday (McGrady) and The New York Times (Apple, Jr.)

AWARD HONORED WORK: “A Dove in Vietnam” (McGrady) and “Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate ” (Apple, Jr.)

Call Michael R. McGrady of Newsday a dissenter and you won’t be far wrong. His series “A Dove in Vietnam,” which claims one-half of the award in category 2, stemmed from his disagreements with-among others-the Johnson administration, his own newspaper’s policy on the war, and John Steinbeck
in a column from East Asia published in Newsday in April, 1967. Steinbeck had expressed puzzlement that writers could object violently to the Vietnam hostilities without having been there. Conceding that Steinbeck had a point, however, McGrady proposed to Harry F. Guggenheim, Newsday president, that he be assigned to cover the war at least temporarily, “to demonstrate the paper’s policy of fair play
and independence.” The result was his “Dove” series, which will be published in hard cover next month (May) by Funk and Wagnalls.

Now 34, McGrady has been with Newsday since 1962, after stints with Associated Press, the Schenectady Union Star and the Newspaper Enterprise Association. He was the 1965 winner of the National Headliners Award for consistently outstanding columns, for his work in Newsday. A native New Yorker and graduate of Yale, he is the author of five other books, and of articles in various
magazines including Saturday Evening Post.

As a thoroughly professional wrap-up of a complex and critical situation, R. W. Apple, Jr.’s analysis
of “Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate” in the New York Times brought a shared award in category 2 for a correspondent who has long teamed ability with initiative. “Johnny” Apple, whose tour of duty in Saigon as correspondent and chief of bureau lasted from September, 1965, through January of this year, broke into reporting on the Wall Street Journal in 1956, after attendance at Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, his native State. From 1957 to 1959 he had a stretch of Army service,
during which he moonlighted as a reporter for the Newport News (Virginia) Daily Press. Returning to the Journal, he covered varied fields and in the process learned the reportorial art of the “takeout” by dint of frequent exercise with such extended articles. Concurrently he attended night courses at Columbia University, was graduated cum laude in 1961, and earned the John A. Krout prize as best undergraduate history student.

Two years with NBC followed, as writer on the Huntley-Brinkley program and as a news man with occasional assignments abroad as well as in the southern United States. He moved to the New York
Times in 1963, going from general assignments to the Robert Kennedy campaign; to Albany bureau chief; and from there to Saigon. In that locale he met and married Edith Smith, a former U.S. foreign service officer, in October, 1966. Last January he was a winner of a George Polk Memorial Award from Long Island University, for foreign reporting. At present he is again a Manhattan resident, assigned by the New York Times to cover the national political campaign, chiefly responsible for news about
Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Citation for Excellence: Mark W. Hopkins, Milwaukee Journal, for “USSR: 50 Years”.
Citation for Excellence: John C. Cooley and Bertram B. Johansson, Christian Science Monitor, for “Soviet Hand in the Mideast.”

Citation Page >>