Washington Contributing Editor
TIME Magazine
Hugh Sidey has written about the American Presidency for more than thirty years. He began covering Dwight Eisenhower for the weekly LIFE Magazine in 1957, and later became TIME's political and White House correspondent. A former Washington bureau chief, Sidey is now Washington contributing editor. He's the author of TIME's column "The Presidency," which he started in LIFE in 1966.
Bill Clinton is the ninth President Sidey has known, and was the only reporter George Bush allowed on the plane when he left Washington in 1993. Sidey reported on Eisenhower in the U-2 crisis, followed Kennedy to the Vienna Summit with Nikita Khrushchev and was travelling with Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas. Sidey roamed the world with Lyndon Johnson, and was on board when Richard Nixon jetted into China in 1972. He reported on Nixon's exit from Washington two years later. Sidey journeyed to Vladivostok with Gerald Ford and wrote about Jimmy Carter and the Camp David accords with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.
Sidey grew up in Iowa listening to the Big Ten football games broadcast by WHO Radio's ace sportscaster "Dutch" Reagan. Years later, Sidey was one of the few reporters to whom Reagan talked regularly during his eight years in the White House, confiding his feelings about the emergence of the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev, and expressing his bitterness over the Iran-Contra scandal.
Sidey is a fourth generation journalist and son of a country editor. He was reared on the family's weekly paper in Greenfield, Iowa where he still occasionally goes and works. He received a B.S. in journalism from Iowa State College and began his career on newspapers in Council Bluffs and Omaha. He joined the staff of LIFE in New York in 1955 and came to TIME in 1957. He has authored or contributed to five books on Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Ford and was a panelist on television's Inside Washington (formerly Agronsky & Co.) for more than twenty years.
Sidey is married to the former Anne Trowbridge of Columbia, Missouri. They have four children and reside in Potomac, Maryland.