Background
He was born on February 10, 1913 in Savannah, Georgia, United States, the son of Albert Clinton Smith, who engaged in farming, insurance, shipping, and the automobile business, and Juliet Worth Merriman.
He was born on February 10, 1913 in Savannah, Georgia, United States, the son of Albert Clinton Smith, who engaged in farming, insurance, shipping, and the automobile business, and Juliet Worth Merriman.
Smith attended elementary and secondary schools in Savannah, serving as editor of the high school newspaper. In 1931, following graduation from Savannah High School, Smith entered Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, where he majored in English.
He displayed an early interest in journalism, working as a newspaper carrier and want-ad collector. "It never occurred to me to do anything else, " he said later. While in college he worked as a sportswriter for the Atlanta Georgia-American.
He left Oglethorpe in 1934 without receiving a degree, to begin full-time newspaper work. Smith then joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. In 1935-1936, Smith was managing editor of the Athens (Ga. ) Daily Times, and in the latter year he became a staff correspondent for the United Press (UP, later United Press International, or UPI) and covered various assignments in the South.
In 1941, Smith was transferred to the UP Washington bureau to report on White House affairs. He was known to millions of Americans as the man who closed presidential press conferences with the words "Thank you, Mr. President. " He also wrote a column for UPI, "Backstairs at the White House, " covering personal aspects of White House life.
Smith accompanied presidents on many domestic and overseas trips, including Roosevelt's wartime conferences, the Potsdam Conference, the 1960 Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit, and Kennedy's meetings with Charles de Gaulle and Khrushchev.
Besides his newspaper work, Smith appeared frequently on radio and television news and talk shows and wrote dozens of articles in national magazines.
He died in 1970.
He cultivated the friendship of secretaries, Secret Service men, and other White House staff to get inside information. Smith was plagued by a serious drinking problem during the last several years of his life.
Smith, an aggressive and tireless reporter and a facile writer, saw himself as a reporter of both the public and private sides of presidents, not as a political analyst. He was rarely critical of his subjects in print, but on television talk shows he could be blunt. Smith was respected by his colleagues, despite his sometimes abrasive tactics in getting scoops.
Quotes from others about the person
The veteran White House correspondent Carroll Kilpatrick said that Smith "was never bored by his beat. " "Nor was he ever boring, " added Newsweek, "which is a considerable statement to make about any man. "
In 1937, Smith married Eleanor Doyle Brill, a social worker; they had three children before their divorce in 1966. Shortly after the divorce, he married Gailey L. Johnson; they had one child. His son died in the Vietnam War.