Editor, diplomat Wiggins dies> 75-year career in journalism includes roles in Washington, Ellsworth

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BROOKLIN – James Russell Wiggins, the dean of American journalism and a former ambassador to the United Nations, died early Sunday at his home. He was 96.

In his more than 75 years as a journalist, Wiggins served as editor of The Ellsworth American and The Washington Post.

Stephen Fay, managing editor of the American, said Wiggins died shortly after midnight following months of problems related to congestive heart failure.

His friends may remember him as a gardener or raiser of geese, an amateur violinist, a devotee of Thomas Jefferson and a voluminous reader, a sailor, a Mr. Ambassador, a homespun poet or even as a fine baritone who loved to sing Christmas carols at the American’s annual holiday get-together.

But those were his avocations.

Wiggins was first, foremost and always, a newspaperman.

“I’ve always had fun at this,” he told an interviewer in 1996. “I’m not nearly as active as I used to be, but I’ve never lost the passion for newspapers. It’s got to be the most interesting thing a person can do.”

Wiggins was as much at ease hobnobbing with presidents and ambassadors as he was with the fishermen and farmers who were his neighbors in Brooklin.

Though largely self-educated, he tutored several generations of reporters and editors, requiring by example that they strive to meet his standards of accuracy and fairness. In an age where style has too often been substituted for substance, Wiggins insisted on solid reporting and good writing, best summed up in his oft-cited dictum to the staff at The Washington Post more than three decades ago: “The customer is entitled to one clear crack at the facts.”

His tenacity in holding himself and his staff to this tenet helped to breath new life into the Post, which, when he began his tenure there in 1947, was running a poor third in a four-paper city.

It also helped him to take The Ellsworth American and mold it into the respected, award-winning weekly newspaper it has become.

“His greatness – it is not too strong a word – is in the accretion of his work, his unwillingness to lower his standards for the smallest of details,” said one interviewer writing on the occasion of Wiggins’ 90th birthday.

Wiggins’ career in journalism began while he was still in high school. He was born on a farm outside Luverne, Minn., in 1903, the son of James and Edith Wiggins, and moved to Luverne when he was 2.

He attended public schools in Luverne and has credited his start in the newspaper business to two high school teachers; one who instilled in him an interest in history, the other, an interest in literature and writing. At Luverne High School, Wiggins became editor of the school newspaper, and upon graduation he became a reporter with the Rock County Star, the local weekly paper. In 1923, he married Mabel Preston, who also was a Luverne native.

Wiggins sold the paper in 1930 and became an editorial writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and St. Paul Dispatch. Three years later, he moved to Washington, D.C., to become the Washington correspondent for the St. Paul papers. In 1938, he returned to St. Paul as the managing editor of the papers.

Wiggins enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942 and served as an intelligence officer in Washington, D.C., North Africa and Italy, earning the rank of major. At the end of the war, Wiggins returned to St. Paul. But in 1946, he became assistant to the publisher at The New York Times and, a year later, was named managing editor of The Washington Post. He was made executive editor and vice president at the Post in 1953 and editor and vice president in 1955.

Wiggins had planned to retire on his 65th birthday, Dec. 4, 1968, but instead resigned to accept an appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He resigned that post in February 1969 and retired with Mabel to a farm near Carleton Cove in Brooklin.

He and Mabel had bought The Ellsworth American in 1966, and upon arriving in Maine, Wiggins became the paper’s editor and publisher. He sold the paper in 1991, but continued to hold the post of editor until his death.

It was at the Post, however, that Wiggins made a name for himself nationally and internationally. At the invitation of then-Publisher Philip Graham, he became managing editor in 1947 and began immediately to set the paper on the course that made it the prominent national paper it is today. Wiggins beefed up the staff, raised newsroom standards for professionalism and instituted a policy of rigid integrity that prohibited any conflicts of interest.

“Russ has a real sense of excellence. He took the Post into another league entirely and made it the paper it has become,” Katharine Graham, who was publisher and chairman of the board of The Washington Post Co., once said. “He hired good people and supported them every step of the way. On the editorial pages, he specialized in righteous indignation. He got angry about malefaction, outrageous conduct by politicians or stupidity in government. But he never displayed that anger in the newsroom. He could be awfully funny and kind.”

Benjamin C. Bradlee, who served for three years as managing editor of the Post under Wiggins and succeeded him as executive editor and vice president of the company, also recalled Wiggins’ “righteous indignation” and the example he set at the Post.

“I’ve gotten a lot of credit, but it was really Russ who set the Post on its course,” Bradley said.

Wiggins’ good friend and neighbor, the late E.B. White, once said in a piece written for The New York Times that “Wiggins habitually grins like a cat who knows something you don’t know.”

That was because he usually did.

Wiggins read constantly – a passion developed early in life at the library in Luverne – and his tastes ran toward history, government, economics, world affairs and the newspaper business. But it was by no means limited to those areas.

His office at the American was filled with a wide variety of journals covering all sorts of disciplines. Recently, when a young relative was assigned to read “Bleak House,” Wiggins, realizing that he had never read it, picked up a copy and read it in a day.

The information he gleaned would often make it to the regular news meetings at the American, where he would impart the details and leave editors and reporters with the admonition: “I think there’s a story there.”

Often, the information also would fuel his “indignation,” which he would regularly transfer into print.

Wiggins rarely hesitated to tackle a local, national or international issue and continued to do so regularly on the editorial pages of the American until well into 2000. His observations, whether about presidents, world leaders, international affairs or school committees, city councilors and county government, often rankled and occasionally made him enemies, sometimes powerful enemies.

Wiggins helped stiffen the back of journalism in the 1950s when the Post’s editorial pages criticized Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and the anti-Communist hearings he ran on Capitol Hill. That stand provoked a savage attack on the Post, and McCarthy threatened to have Wiggins and others at the Post investigated as Red sympathizers.

One columnist suggested that the threat should have been a badge of honor for Wiggins and the Post.

Although a serious man, Wiggins had a wonderful sense of humor and could use that humor to tackle serious issues. In 1972, after grousing about the slow pace of mail delivery between Ellsworth and the neighboring town of Surry, Wiggins arranged a challenge race that pitted the U.S. Postal Service and a team of oxen. The team left from Main Street in a much ballyhooed departure and the oxen delivered the letter to a store in Surry just over three hours later.

The oxen’s success spurred a second contest a month later in which then-state Sen. Frank Whitehouse Anderson, a well-known outdoorsman, took on the Postal Service with a canoe, paddling from the city dock to Surry and delivering the letter to the same store.

(Later, E.B. White joined in the fun by delivering a letter by bicycle from his home in Brooklin to nearby Brooksville.)

Wiggins was not above taking a good-humored jab at himself, as evidenced by an incident he related to a co-worker years ago.

During the early part of his tenure as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Wiggins and his wife were preparing to attend a formal dinner. The ambassador’s residence had a chairlift, installed for a previous resident, and Wiggins eyed the contraption with curiosity mingled with mischief. He hopped onto the chairlift and headed downstairs to the main floor of the residence where Mabel and a handful of dignitaries, all dressed to the nines, were waiting for him. He was embarrassed, but not too embarrassed, to retell the tale.

Wiggins took to his adopted state of Maine and became involved in its affairs both locally and regionally. His efforts as honorary chairman of the local YMCA’s capital campaign won him lasting recognition when the Y was renamed as the James Russell Wiggins Down East YMCA.

Living along the coast, Wiggins developed a love affair with the ocean and regularly sailed his Friendship sloop Amity along the coast. A frequent companion on those sails was Walter Cronkite, a friend and fellow journalist who once said that Wiggins should be “a model for all young journalists to emulate.”

In a letter to The Ellsworth American on the occasion of Wiggins’ 90th birthday, Cronkite wrote that Wiggins was a man of’ “seemingly eternal vigor, a repository of the wisdom of the ages with the fresh outlook of a youth at baccalaureate.”

“He is my favorite sailing companion, not only for his hearty enthusiasm for the adventure itself, but for the conversation he brings to the cabin as we lie at anchor on a cool Maine evening,” Cronkite wrote.

Wiggins was a staunch advocate of the public’s right to know, and as a member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors he served for several years on the association’s Freedom of Information Committee. He also worked with the late Harold Cross to obtain passage of the first national Freedom of Information Act, and later testified before congressional committees on subsequent amendments to the law.

In 1956, Wiggins wrote “Freedom or Secrecy,” which dealt with secrecy in federal, state and local governments, and which was widely used in journalism schools.

During Wiggins’ tenure as editor of the American, the paper has regularly received awards, including the Best Newspaper award from the New England Press Association and the Maine Press Association, and frequent recognition for its editorial page.

Wiggins himself received numerous honors during his career. He was named the Journalist of the Year in 1977 by the Maine Press Association, which also honored him in 1994 by establishing the James Russell Wiggins Award for an Outstanding School Newspaper, which is awarded annually to the staff of a high school newspaper in Maine. Wiggins also was among the first class of Maine journalists inducted into the MPA’s Hall of Fame in 1998.

He received honorary degrees over the years, including degrees from most of the institutions in Maine, such as the University of Maine, Colby College, the University of New England, Husson College, Bowdoin College, Bates College, Maine Maritime Academy and, last spring, from the College of the Atlantic.

Wiggins’ career carried him into the 21st century with a sense of wonder that kept him involved with the world around him and which he continued to comment upon as editorialist, columnist and poet almost to the end.

His passing leaves a void in the world of journalism that will be felt from the coast of Maine to the shores of the Potomac and beyond, but also leaves a standard that print journalists can look to in the future.

Wiggins’ wife of 67 years, Mabel, died in 1990. Three of his children predeceased him: William James Wiggins, Geraldine Thomssen and John Russell “Jack” Wiggins.

He is survived by his daughter Patricia Schroth of Sedgwick, 10 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

A memorial service is planned for 4 p.m. Wednesday at the Blue Hill Congregational Church. He will be buried in Rural Cemetery, Sedgwick, beside his wife, Mabel, in a private ceremony.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the child care center at the James Russell Wiggins Down East YMCA, P.O. Box 25, Ellsworth 04605.