Craig R. Whitney papers

Craig R. Whitney was a reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor at The New York Times until his retirement in 2009 as assistant managing editor in charge of standards and ethics. He began his career in journalism during two years at the Worcester Telegram in Worcester (Mass.). Following completion of his degree from Harvard College in 1965, he became assistant to James Reston in the Washington Bureau at the New York Times. He enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve in 1966, serving as an ensign in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy under Paul H. Nitze and Paul Ignatius and as a lieutenant (junior grade) with the Seventh Fleet detachment in Saigon, Vietnam, from 1968 to 1969. Returning to The Times in 1969 as a reporter in New York City, he went back to Saigon in 1971 as a war correspondent, serving as bureau chief from 1972 to 1973. Later he reported from Bonn, Moscow, London, Berlin and Paris during the Cold War and the collapse of Communism in East Germany, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He returned to the United States in 2000. He returned to the United States in 2000.

As New York Times bureau chief in Moscow from 1977 to 1980, Whitney was tried in a Soviet court on charges of slandering the Soviet State Radio and Television Committee in a news report about the televised confession of dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia; after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gamsakhurdia became president of Georgia before being killed during the first of its civil wars. Whitney and his colleague, Harold D. Piper of the Baltimore Sun, were convicted in absentia of slander and fined but allowed to remain in Moscow until the end of their assignments.