Jonathan Worth Daniels

• Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Worth_Daniels

Jonathan Worth Daniels (April 26, 1902 - November 6, 1981) was an American author, editor, and White House Press Secretary. Daniels' term serving as White House Press Secretary was the shortest since the inception of the position in 1937. He held the position in 1945 under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. For most of his life, he worked at The News & Observer, and later founded The Island Packet. In 1966, he revealed the affair between Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd in his book The Time Between the Wars.

Education

Jonathan Worth Daniels attended Centennial School in Raleigh from 1908 to 1913. When his father, Josephus Daniels, became United States Secretary of the Navy in 1913, the family moved to Washington, D.C., where he studied at the John Eaton School from 1913 to 1915, and St. Albans School from 1915 to 1918. Daniels attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and graduated in 1921 with a B.A. He continued at UNC for graduate school, earning an M.A. in English in 1921. As a student in Chapel Hill, he edited The Daily Tar Heel and participated in the Carolina Playmakers. Daniels passed the North Carolina bar exam despite failing out of Columbia University Law School, but never practiced law.[2]

Obituary

JONATHAN DANIELS IS DEAD AT 79; EDITOR AND AN AIDE TO 2 PRESIDENTS

By Les LedbetterNov. 7, 1981

• Credit...The New York Times Archives

See the article in its original context from
November 7, 1981, Section 2, Page 31

About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Jonathan Daniels, the former editor of The Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer who served as press secretary to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was an adviser to President Truman, died yesterday in Hilton Head Island, S.C., after a long illness. He was 79 years old.

Mr. Daniels was also a prolific author, a consummate politician, a historian, a gourmet and a gadfly. It was he who disclosed that President Roosevelt had a love affair with his wife's former social secretary, Lucy Page Murcer. Mr. Daniels wrote briefly about the affair in 1954 in his book The End of Innocence. And he gave the details of the relationship in his 1966 book The Time Between the Wars.

Born in a rambling manor in Raleigh on April 26, 1902, Jonathan Worth Daniels was the son of a famous Southerner, Josephus Daniels, who was Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, Ambassador to Mexico for nine years under Roosevelt and editor and publisher of The News and Observer in the early part of the 20th century. Famous Father and Son

Although he was born in the shadow of his famous father - Josephus Daniels gave President Roosevelt his first national exposure by hiring him as Assistant Secretary of the Navy - Jonathan Daniels went on to become famous in his own right, first as a reporter and writer, then as a public servant, a Tarheel politician with national connections and as a nationally respected newspaper editor.

Mr. Daniels grew up in Washington, D.C., in the hectic days before and during World War I. He returned to North Carolina after World War I to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a classmate of Thomas Wolfe.

In 1921, Mr. Daniels got a B.A. degree. A year later he was awarded an M.A. at Chapel Hill. In 1922-23, he attended law school at Columbia University.

On Sept. 5, 1923, the young lawyer, who never practiced although he was admitted to the North Carolina bar, married Elizabeth Bridgers, of Raleigh.

After several months as a reporter for The Louisville Times, Mr. Daniels returned to Raleigh to work for his father. Started as a Police Reporter

He started as a police reporter but was made the paper's Washington correspondent in 1925, a job he left in 1928 to write his first novel, Clash of Angels, which he described as an allegorical fantasy concerning Jehovah and Lucifer.

In 1931, Mr. Daniels, whose wife died in 1929, leaving him with a daughter, joined Fortune magazine. He also won a Guggenheim fellowship for his novel and used that money to live in France and Italy while working on another novel that was never published.

In 1932, he married Lucy Cathcart, who died in 1979. Raleigh beckoned him once more in 1932, and he joined the News and Observer as associate editor. He became the editor a year later, when his father was appointed Ambassador to Mexico.

He remained editor until 1942, when President Roosevelt persuaded him to join the war effort in Washington as assistant director of the Office of Civil Defense.

A year later, the President appointed Mr. Daniels as his administrative assistant, and in 1945 the writer became the President's press secretary. After Roosevelt's death that year, he became a close adviser to President Truman.

Mr. Danels had a reputation in the South as a liberal, having spoken out against discrimination in that region for decades. He returned to Raleigh in 1947 to become executive editor of The News and Observer and the Democratic National Committeeman for North Carolina. Helped Truman in Campaign

But in 1948 President Truman called the editor back to Washington to help him run for re-election, and Mr. Daniels took the post of editor emeritus of his favorite newspaper.

Mr. Daniels retired from The News and Observer in 1970, but laterfounded The Island Packet newspaper on Hilton Head and started to write urbane, anecdotal and ironic columns for it.

Mr. Daniels is survived by four daughters, Elizabeth Squire of Weaverville, N.C.; Dr. Lucy Inman of Raleigh; Adelaide Key of Franklin, N.C., and Cleves Weber of New York City; a brother, Frank A. of Raleigh, chairman of the board of The News and Observer Publishing Company, 11 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.

Funeral services will be held at 11 A.M. Monday at St. Luke's Episcopal Church at Hilton Head.

Books

Daniels, Jonathan Worth
Personal Information

• Born in 1902, in Raleigh, NC.
• Died in 1981.

Included Titles By Daniels, Jonathan Worth

• Southerner Discovers New England, A (1940)
• Southerner Discovers the South, A (1938)
• Tar Heels: A Portrait of North Carolina (1941)

Here are some other books by the author:

Fiction

• Clash of Angels, Brewer & Warren, 1930

Non-Fiction

• Frontier on the Potomac, Macmillan, 1946
• The Man of Independence, Lippincott, 1950 (Mayflower Award recipient)
• The End of Innocence, Lippincott, 1954
• Three Presidents and Their Books: The Readings of Jefferson, Lincoln, and F. D. Roosevelt, University of Illinois Press, 1955
• The Forest Is the Future, International Paper Co., 1957
• Prince of the Carpetbaggers, Lippincott, 1959
• Stonewall Jackson, Random House, 1959 (American Association of University Women Award recipient)
• Mosby, Gray Ghost of the Confederacy, Lippincott, 1959
• Robert E. Lee, Houghton, 1960
• October Recollections, Bostick & Thornley, 1961
• The Devil's Backbone, McGraw, 1962
• They Will Be Heard, McGraw, 1965
• The Time between the Wars, Doubleday, 1966
• Washington Quadrille, Doubleday, 1967
• Ordeal of Ambition: Jefferson, Hamilton, and Burr, Doubleday, 1970 (Mayflower Award recipient)
• The Randolphs of Virginia, Doubleday, 1972
• The Gentlemanly Serpent and Other Columns from a Newspaperman in Paradise, University of South Carolina Press, 1974
• White House Witness, Doubleday, 1975

N.C. Locations Associated with Daniels, Jonathan Worth

Studied at:

• University of North Carolina -Chapel Hill Manuscript Location:
• University of North Carolina -Chapel Hill

Awards

• Mayflower Award
• Mayflower Award for Southerner Discovers the South, A
• N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame
• North Carolina Award
• North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Worth_Daniels#Books

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US Politician. Served as a Member of the Democratic National Committee from North Carolina.

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