Blair Clark; Journalist Managed McCarthy’s Run for President

Blair Clark, 82, a journalist, CBS network executive and avowed left-wing Democrat whose passion for liberal ideals was unfulfilled by his work as national campaign manager for Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy’s unsuccessful bid for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, died Tuesday at Princeton Medical Center in New Jersey. He had colon surgery last month.

Clark, who relished McCarthy’s youth-oriented, anti-Vietnam War platform, had a falling out with the Minnesota senator over McCarthy’s diffident campaign style, which Clark believed scuttled his chances.

“It was morally acceptable to take a position on an issue, to make a ‘judgment’ and ask others to support it,” Clark wrote in the Post in 1988. “But he could not bring himself to act to make that judgment effective in the political process. Except for the initial decision to run for the presidency on the issue of the war, most of what he did that year was reactive.”

Clark later became treasurer of the New Democratic Coalition, a group of disaffected liberals from the 1968 election that tried unsuccessfully to foment a national movement. By the early 1970s, he had become the Democratic National Committee’s communications director, a position he held during the Watergate break-in.

In addition to his political involvement, Clark had a prolific journalism career, ranging from his efforts in the late 1940s to run a crusading New Hampshire newspaper to his work from 1953 to 1964 at CBS, where he rose to general manager and vice president.

Clark helped raise money to start the New York Review of Books in the early 1960s, was associate publisher of the New York Post in the mid-1960s and capped his journalism career as top editor from 1976 to 1978 of the Nation, an opinion magazine.

Clark’s involvement in political work reached its apex in 1968 after McCarthy entered the race against then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. The senator’s strong showing against Johnson in the New Hampshire primary election made him a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Clark’s “principal achievement” during the campaign was to persuade his boss to pursue New Hampshire rather than start in Wisconsin, Charles Kaiser wrote in his book “1968 in America.”

Although Johnson announced in March of that year that he would not seek reelection, McCarthy eventually lost the nomination to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.

Clark retired after working at the Nation but remained active by teaching at Princeton University and New York University, raising funds for Harvard and, until his death, holding board memberships at the National Committee for an Effective Congress and the Human SERVE voter registration group.

Ledyard Blair Clark was born in East Hampton, N.Y., and grew up in Princeton. He was a 1940 graduate of Harvard.

While serving in the Army during World War II, Clark was deputy historian for Gen. George S. Patton Jr.’s 3rd Army.

In 1946, he co-founded--and until 1948, he co-published--the New Hampshire Sunday News, a general interest but pointedly progressive newspaper that received Associated Press awards for excellence. Clark eventually sold the News to William Loeb of the powerful and conservative Manchester Union Leader.

Clark was an editorial writer for a Boston paper before joining CBS News in Paris in 1953. He was moved to New York as a correspondent for CBS Radio before becoming general manager and vice president of CBS News in 1961.

At CBS, Clark persuaded his boss, news division President Richard S. Salant, to make Walter Cronkite anchor of the “Evening News.”

Survivors include his wife of 29 years, Joanna Clark of Princeton and New York; a son from his first marriage, Timothy B., of Bethesda, Md.; a son from his second marriage, Ian, of New York; a stepson, Tomasz Malinowski of Washington; a sister; a brother; and seven grandchildren.