Tangled Bylines: A Father and Son Cover the Twentieth Century

This memoir of father and son journalists--both named Clyde Farnsworth--draws on the unfinished autobiography of the author's father. Largely biographical, this book can be read as a panoramic history of American newspaper journalism in the twentieth-century, covering Prohibition gangs, prison fires, and botched executions in the 1920s and 1930s, to global war, the shaping of postwar Europe and Asia, and America's emergence from the Cold War. Tangled Bylines includes off-beat encounters with Amelia Earhart, Douglas MacArthur, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, and Simon Wiesenthal.

Clyde H. Farnsworth is a former foreign correspondent who has written several books, including a novel, Shadow Wars. In 1968 he won the E. W. Fairchild Award of the Overseas Press Club of America for Best Business News Reporting from Abroad. In 1969 he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for articles on the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Full bio: Clyde H. Farnsworth, a newsman for four decades, is also the author of a novel, Shadow Wars (Viking, 1997), an Amazon Thriller of the Month, pitting the pristine powers of physics against global politics and greed. Other books include No Money Down (Macfadden, 1956), about razzle dazzle in the credit industry and Out of This Nettle (Times Books, 1971), a history of postwar Europe. Much of his material was from news forged in four decades at United Press, the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times.

For the Times, he reported from around the world. In 1968 he won the E. W. Fairchild Award of the Overseas Press Club of America for Best Business News Reporting from Abroad. In 1964 he covered hostilities in Cyprus, later filed from Paris as chief European economic correspondent. In 1969 he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, with Times colleagues Tad Szulc and Henry Kamm, for reporting during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. From 1977 to 1991, he covered economic news from Washington, and in his final years at the Times filed on issues as diverse as global warming, separatist tensions in French-speaking Canada and the population explosion of koalas in southern Australia.

A second generation newsman, he uses Tangled Bylines: A Father-son History of the 20th Century to portray the intersection of his career with his dad’s. Clyde A. Farnsworth, an Associated Press correspondent, born in Ashland, Ohio in 1908, covered World War II from the Middle East, China, Burma and India. For the Scripps Howard News Alliance, he later reported on the Chinese Civil War. As the newly elected president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China in Shanghai in 1949, he saved the lives of two British newsmen arrested for unwittingly defying Nationalist censorship when Mao Tse-tung launched his assault from the Yangtze against the then capital of Nanking. Farnsworth, the elder, later covered Juan Peron’s Argentina for Scripps-Howard, followed by reports on the Cold War from Vienna, mainly for the Chicago Tribune.

Farnsworth, the younger, born in Cleveland in 1931, graduated from Yale, joined the army, rose to staff sergeant, served in Korea on Heartbreak Ridge as a combat medic, and won a Bronze Star. Later, still in Korea’s central highlands, he produced a daily mimeographed newspaper for the division’s 179th Infantry Regiment. He and buddies from the 45th (Thunderbird) Division marched in a New York City ticker tape parade to mark the 1953 truce. Upon his army discharge, he barged into United Press headquarters on 42nd Street at 3rd Avenue and talked himself into his first civilian job as a reporter.