Guthman, Edwin O. 1919-2008 (Edwin Guthman, Edwin Otto Guthman)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born August 11, 1919, in Seattle, WA; died of amyloidosis, August 31, 2008, in Los Angeles, CA. Journalist, press representative, educator, editor, and author. Guthman won a Pulitzer Prize for national news reporting in 1950 for a series of articles in the Seattle Times. He exposed an attempt by the U.S. House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee to link a University of Washington professor to a Communist training center in the state of New York by confiscating evidence to the contrary. Guthman stayed with the Times from 1947 to 1960. He moved to the nation's capital as a public information specialist for the U.S. Department of Justice under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1964, then worked as Kennedy's press secretary in 1965, when he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Guthman was an active volunteer for Kennedy's civil rights initiatives and a longtime supporter of his brother's presidential administration. Perhaps coincidentally, Guthman's name later surfaced near the top of President Richard M. Nixon's famous "enemies list." Beginning in 1965, Guthman spent ten years as a national editor for the Los Angeles Times and another decade as the editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1987 he moved back to Los Angeles as a lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Southern California. He retired from teaching in 2007. Guthman reentered public life briefly in 1993, when he and two other individuals were selected by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to investigate a controversial government raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. The inquiry resulted in an even more scathing condemnation than his earlier prize-winning series on the House Un-American Activities Committee had produced. Guthman's years with Kennedy in the 1960s colored the rest of his life and prompted him to write about the man he admired. He wrote the Kennedy memoir We Band of Brothers (1968) and was the coeditor of An Honorable Profession (1968), a tribute to the senator. Guthman also coedited Robert Kennedy, in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (1988) and RFK: Collected Speeches (1993).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, September 2, 2008, sec. 3, p. 6.

New York Times, September 2, 2008, p. C17.

Times (London, England), September 11, 2008, p. 65.