Peter Irvin Lisagor was born on August 5, 1915 in Keystone, West Virginia, United States. He was one of four children of Paris Lisagor, who ran a small general store, and Fanny Simpkins. Growing up in the coalfield region of McDowell County, Lisagor moved to Chicago in 1930.
He graduated from Marshall High School on the city's West Side. A star high school athlete, Lisagor first had an ambition to play professional baseball. He attended Northwestern University in 1933, then transferred after a year to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1939. Lisagor was also awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University for the 1948-1949 academic year and studied international affairs.
At Michigan, Lisagor excelled as a second baseman on the Wolverine baseball team and as a writer and editor for the Michigan Daily. Playing under the name of "Pete Lyons, " he had a brief minor league baseball career in Iowa. Lisagor recalled that his baseball salary amounted to "$65 a month and hamburgers. " Later Lisagor joined the sports department of the Chicago Daily News and was named the newspaper's American League baseball writer, covering the Chicago White Sox. After three years on the sports beat, he left the Daily News to become a general reporter in the Chicago bureau of the United Press.
During World War II, Lisagor served in the United States Army's Eleventh Armored Division. For two of his three years in the Army he was assigned to Stars and Stripes, serving as managing editor of the London edition in 1944 and 1945 and as editor of Stars and Stripes magazine in Paris in 1945. Following his discharge in 1945, he worked briefly as news editor of the Paris Post, then returned to Chicago late in the year and rejoined the Daily News as a general news reporter. As a member of the Daily News staff, Lisagor covered Chicago's city hall and Illinois government. In February 1947 he wrote a series of articles exposing the substandard conditions of Illinois mental hospitals. Later he was assigned to the foreign desk and spent a year in New York as United Nations correspondent.
Beginning in 1950, Lisagor reported on national politics and the presidency as a Washington, D. C. , correspondent and special writer for the Daily News, and from 1959, as chief of the Washington bureau. From the Korean War through the era of détente, Lisagor also covered international affairs. Bringing the tough style of Chicago front-page journalism to the nation's capital, he was renowned for asking hard questions of senior officials with wit and irreverence. In 1969, when White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler attempted to explain to a press briefing that General Lewis Hershey had not been fired as Selective Service System director but had been "promoted" to an advisory position, Lisagor cut Ziegler short by asking: "How did he take the good news, Ron?" In a political town, Lisagor set a standard for fairness. "An old editor once told me to walk down the middle of the street and shoot windows out on both sides, " Lisagor said of his nonideological approach to political writing.
In a 1970 Time magazine profile, Lisagor was described as "the newspaper correspondent conceded by his colleagues to be Washington's all-around best. " Lisagor's writing style was distinctive. In the wake of the violence that erupted at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, overshadowing Hubert H. Humphrey's nomination for the presidency, Lisagor wrote: "Humphrey could have gotten a better deal in bankruptcy court. " Lisagor was adept at scooping his competitors on major news developments. Using excellent sources, he gave his readers the inside story of the Korean War. John F. Kennedy shared with Lisagor his strategy for debating Richard M. Nixon in 1960 and, later, for dealing with Khrushchev.
In December 1966, Lisagor reported the first authentic account of the dispute between the family of the late President Kennedy and author William Manchester over the publication of Manchester's The Death of a President in 1967. Lisagor disclosed the family's efforts to delete from the book Jacqueline Kennedy's personal recollections about the aftermath of her husband's assassination. In his final interview as president, Lyndon B. Johnson acknowledged to Lisagor that he should have involved the public more in decision-making about the Vietnam War. Johnson also told Lisagor that he had failed to build trust among younger Americans.
For all of his accomplishments as a print journalist, it was as a television personality that Lisagor developed a national following. He was the most frequent guest interviewer on NBC's "Meet the Press" and a regular on CBS's "Face the Nation. " In February 1967, Lisagor became a panelist on "Washington Week in Review, " a political commentary show aired by the Public Broadcasting Service. Two years later he joined "Agronsky & Co. ," a nationally syndicated public affairs program. Although he was a leading member of the journalistic establishment and shaper of conventional wisdom, Lisagor was sometimes off the mark in assessing the mood of voters beyond Washington. He seriously underestimated, for example, the strength of Ronald Reagan's challenge to Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination.
Early in 1976, Lisagor was diagnosed with lung cancer and began receiving radiation and chemotherapy. He directed Daily News coverage of both political conventions that summer and continued writing his column, but reduced his television appearances. He died at Northern Virginia Doctors Hospital. By order of President Ford, Lisagor was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger remembered Lisagor as "the Renaissance man of the Washington Press. " His headstone at Arlington is inscribed with a tribute from President Johnson: "Americans will always respect the responsibility with which you have carried forward the strategic freedom of the press. "
Lisagor was one of the most respected and best-known journalists in the United States. He gained a reputation as one of the nation's most incisive political analysts for his syndicated column and appearances on public-affairs broadcasts. He was a major influence in the development of the Watergate scandal as a serious news story at a time when the journalistic and political establishments were reluctant to pursue it. In reaction to Lisagor's articles, the Illinois General Assembly launched an investigation of mental institutions and adopted reforms, including a new personnel code to raise professional standards in mental hospitals. Lisagor won a George Foster Peabody Award in 1974 for his contributions to broadcasting news. The Chicago Society of Professional Journalists presents annual awards for distinguished journalism in Lisagor's name.
Quotations: "Traveling with Khrushchev is like holding a stick of dynamite with a sputtering fuse. This man has an endless repertoire of moods. He can flit from a touching recital of his life as a soiled coal miner dreaming of a Communist paradise to a fist-clenching menace. "
Lisagor was tall and athletic in build and had a good-natured demeanor and a wry sense of humor. A master storyteller with a hearty laugh, Lisagor was well liked by his colleagues and the people he covered.
Quotes from others about the person
"His personal authority was so immense, he was so smart and funny and tough of mind, so unconnable, that he was taken very seriously by his peers. It was Lisagor, smart, quick, verbal, who always seemed to be able to define an event in a few words. " - journalist David Halberstam
"He was a journalist in every sense of the term, fair and thorough. " - Ford.
Lisagor married Myra K. Murphy in 1942. They had two children.
