Acclaimed journalist Mike Feinsilber dies at age 89
Mike Feinsilber, whose masterful way with words and mischievous wit enlivened American journalism for five decades, the bulk of them at The Associated Press, died Monday. He was a month shy of 90.
Feinsilber died at home, said his wife of 55 years, Doris Feinsilber, a pioneering computer programmer at the
CIA. “He was doing poorly, but was not in pain,” she said.
Feinsilber’s career was rooted in the wire services and their epic rivalry — working first for United Press International, then for the AP. But he never embodied the just-the-facts stereotype of that trade, though he was as fast as any in the competition to be first.
He wrote with elegance, style, authority, brevity and a gentle playfulness, all in service of finding the humanity in things.
Feinsilber covered a Pennsylvania mine collapse where three trapped miners were rescued. He covered Saigon in the Vietnam War, the impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon and 18 political conventions, where he was always on the lookout for “outlandish aspects.”
In 1987, as Oliver North submitted to a grilling from a blockbuster congressional hearing on the Iran-contra scandal, Feinsilber summoned the ghosts of scandals past as he related the figures of history who had faced a reckoning in the same room:
“Where Oliver North sits, Joseph McCarthy once sat, on trial on grainy television before the bar of public opinion. Nicholas Katzenbach, representing then-President Lyndon Johnson, sat there in a different decade, defending the making of an undeclared war. All the president’s men sat there, in the summer of 1973, before the dancing eyebrows of Sen. Sam Ervin.”
He loved to write, he said, “especially about the human, the quirky and the unimportant but revealing.”
As much as he defied the wire service stereotypes, he enjoyed them, as in 2018 when he looked back on the rivalry of old.
“AP people believed that AP stories were invariably superior,” he wrote. “They believed they were more thoroughly reported, more deeply backgrounded, more dependably accurate.
“UPI people believed that their stories were invariably more compelling, more sharply and concisely written, more interesting. UPI’s nickname for AP was ‘Grandma.’”
He traced his interest in journalism to a school paper he started in Grade 5, calling it “The Daily Stink” until a teacher persuaded him to call it something else.
After stints as the editor of the Penn State college paper, then as a late-night police reporter at the Intelligencer-Journal of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he joined UPI upon his graduation in 1956, reporting for over 20 years from Pittsburgh; Columbus, Ohio; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Newark, New Jersey; New York; Saigon and finally Washington.