Clark had a knack for connecting with talented and ambitious people. At St. Mark's School, Clark became friends with poet Robert Lowell. At Harvard he befriended classmate John F. Kennedy; they remained in touch throughout Kennedy's political career, and Clark and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis corresponded for decades. Journalist Theodore H. White was also a long-time contact.
In 1946, Clark used a $60,000 inheritance from his grandmother to found The New Hampshire Sunday News. The newspaper's star reporter was Ben Bradlee, who was also an alumnus of St. Mark's and Harvard and later become executive editor of The Washington Post. Within two years, the Sunday News had the highest circulation in New Hampshire. When the New Hampshire Union Leader threatened to compete with its own Sunday paper, Clark sold the Sunday News to Union-Leader Corporation in 1948 for a substantial profit.[6]
In 1953, he joined CBS News in Paris, and later became producer and anchor of The World Tonight on the CBS Radio Network, now known as the nighttime edition of the CBS World News Roundup. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy offered Clark the ambassadorship to Mexico, but instead he became general manager and vice president of CBS News. He expanded the radio and television coverage of CBS News by hiring additional correspondents in the United States and abroad. He worked with Edward R. Murrow, and among those he hired at CBS were Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Roger Mudd and Bill Plante.[5][6]
Clark first met Senator Eugene McCarthy in 1965 at a party at Walter Lippmann's house in Washington, D.C. Two years later, when McCarthy announced that he would challenge President Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primaries as an anti-war candidate, Clark wrote to McCarthy from London to express his support. With his friend, Theodore H. White, Clark traveled to Chicago in December 1967 to hear McCarthy address the Conference of Concerned Democrats, a group of anti-war activists. Soon after meeting in Chicago, McCarthy asked Clark to be his campaign manager.[6]
In his new position within the campaign, Clark set about convincing McCarthy to enter the New Hampshireprimary. McCarthy had initially planned to skip New Hampshire and begin campaigning in Wisconsin. The case to run in New Hampshire was laid out by two members of the New Hampshire delegation of the Conference of Concerned Democrats: Dartmouth College official David C. Hoeh and St. Paul's School teacher (and future congressman) Gerry Studds. After more convincing from Clark, McCarthy decided that he would declare his entry to the New Hampshire primary. Hoeh and Studds took the titles of New Hampshire campaign director and coordinator, and Clark recruited the journalist Seymour Hersh to be McCarthy's press secretary.[6]
McCarthy's surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire led to the rapid growth of his supporters, but the campaign was in increasing disarray. When Senator Robert F. Kennedy entered the race as a second anti-war candidate, Clark and other McCarthy advisers initially tried to broker an agreement with Kennedy to meet head-to-head only in the California primary, with both campaigns supporting the winner of that primary, but McCarthy flatly rejected the proposal. Bitterness between the McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns only deepened after Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election and Hubert Humphrey emerged as the choice of the Democratic establishment. In the wake of Kennedy's assassination the night that he won the California primary, many Kennedy delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention refused to support McCarthy. McCarthy publicly conceded that Humphrey had enough delegates to win the nomination, a move that enraged Clark and other McCarthy supporters who felt that the candidate still had a chance of defeating Humphrey.[6]
Clark later became treasurer of the New Democratic Coalition, a group of disaffected liberals from the 1968 campaign. When the Watergate break-in occurred, Clark was the Democratic National Committee's communications director.[5]
Personal life
In 1941,[3] he was married to Jessie Holladay Philbin,[8] daughter of Jesse Holliday Philbin (d. 1978)[9] and granddaughter of Eugene A. Philbin (1857–1920), the New York County District Attorney.[10] They had two children, Timothy B. Clark[7] and Cameron Clark.[11] The couple divorced in 1960.
Jessie Philbin remarried John Sumner Runnells James in 1965.[12] In 1971, Blair married his second wife Joanna (née Rostropowicz) Malinowski (b. 1939), who was born in Warsaw, Poland and was the daughter of Wladyslaw and Helena (née Baranski) Rostropowicz.[13] Joanna, the mother of Tomasz Malinowski (b. 1965), received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is a writer.[14] They had a son.[7]
^Society, American-Irish Historical; Murray, Thomas Hamilton; Lawler, Thomas Bonaventure; McGowan, Patrick F.; Lee, Thomas Zanslaur; Daly, Edward Hamilton; Coyle, John G.; McSweeney, Edward Francis; Murphy, John Joseph; O'Brien, Michael Joseph (1921). The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society ... The Society. p. 93. Retrieved 30 September 2017.
^Wierzbianski, Boleslaw. "Clark, (Rostropowicz), Joanna". www.poles.org. Who's Who in Polish America | Bicentennial Publishing Corporation. Retrieved 30 September 2017.
