Clayton Fritchey; Political Advisor and Columnist

Clayton Fritchey, a retired columnist who also had been an assistant to President Harry S. Truman and to presidential candidate and U.N. Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson, has died.

Fritchey died Tuesday at Sibley Memorial Hospital after a fall at his Washington home. He was 96.

Fritchey’s columns about foreign and domestic affairs, published in about 100 newspapers, were liberal in tone. They were syndicated by Newsday and the Los Angeles Times from 1965 to 1984, when he retired. Fritchey also was Washington correspondent for Harper’s magazine.

In 1950, Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall asked Fritchey to come work as his assistant and head of the Pentagon’s office of public information. Fritchey was also a liaison with the White House on sensitive defense matters. In 1952, Truman asked him to join the White House staff as an administrative assistant.

One of his initial assignments was to help Stevenson, then governor of Illinois, gain the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. He was named White House liaison with Stevenson for the campaign and then served as Stevenson’s public information advisor. After Stevenson lost the election, Fritchey was named deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Fritchey was also Stevenson’s press secretary during the 1956 presidential campaign. He emerged as one of Stevenson’s top policy advisors during the campaign.

Fritchey began his weekly syndicated survey of national and international affairs, “State of Affairs,” for Newsday in 1965.

“At a time when most columnists tended to be rather conservative, he presented a fresh, very thoughtful perspective on the important issues of the time,” said Arnold Sagalyn, a former colleague.

Fritchey was born in Ohio and raised in Baltimore, where his father was an engineer with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. At 14, he quit school for a series of jobs, including work as a seaman, a real estate salesman and a railroad clerk.

When he was 19, he joined the staff of the Baltimore American. He was an editor at the Baltimore Post and the Pittsburgh Press before returning to the Baltimore Post as managing editor in the early 1930s.

He became a writer at the Cleveland Press in 1934, when Cleveland was known as one of the most corrupt cities in the country. A frequent subject of his articles was the city’s crusading public safety director, former Treasury agent Eliot Ness, who became a friend.

Fritchey went to work for the New Orleans Item in 1944. In 1950, his final year with the paper, the Louisiana Senate voted to rebuke him for an editorial describing state legislators as having as much independence as “trained seals.”

His first wife, Naomi Williamson Fritchey, died in 1942. In 1975, he married Polly Wisner.

Fritchey is survived by his second wife; a daughter, C. Phyllis Fritchey Nickel of Tucson; four stepchildren; and five grandchildren.