Adam Clymer, veteran New York Times political reporter and editor, dies at 81

Adam Clymer, who covered national politics for the New York Times and other newspapers in a career that took him from the “Boys on the Bus” era of campaign-trail reportage to the hot center of the 2000 presidential race, died Sept. 10 at his home in Washington. He was 81.

He had pancreatic cancer, said his friend Rick Berke, a former Times colleague and the executive editor of the health news website Stat.

A crusty veteran of the Washington press corps, Clymer wrote books on President Ronald Reagan and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and spent decades covering the White House and the halls of Congress, where he often called members by their first name — “a reflection of how things used to be more cozy with reporters and politicians,” Berke speculated, “or, more likely, the fact that he had covered them for so long.”

The son of a onetime newspaper reporter and a children’s book author, Clymer established his journalistic bona fides at the Baltimore Sun, where he reported on the fall of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev from Red Square, covered President Richard Nixon’s resignation from the White House lawn, and helmed the paper’s South Asia bureau from New Delhi.

For his first of eight presidential campaigns, in 1972, he traveled aboard the campaign bus of Democratic candidate George McGovern — an assignment that made him a featured player in “The Boys on the Bus,” journalist Timothy Crouse’s seminal chronicle of that year’s boisterous, often cutthroat campaign trail.

Clymer worked briefly at the New York Daily News before joining the New York Times in 1977, returning to the hometown paper that had once hired him to collect high school basketball scores in his youth.