Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 12, 1993 TAG: 9307120030
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: INDEPENDENCE LENGTH: Long
As a writer and editor for Reader's Digest and director of the Voice of America, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson has been all over the world.
But he seems to take great satisfaction in coming home occasionally to his native Grayson County, as he did during the July 4 weekend to be grand marshal in the county's bicentennial parade.
Tomlinson found it fitting that the county's 200th birthday and Independence Day were being celebrated together in Independence.
As editor-in-chief since the end of 1990 at Reader's Digest, which circulates in 17 languages and in practically every nation in the world, Tomlinson said he considers himself blessed to have been able to practice a profession he came to love.
"But among the blessings I cherish most is the good fortune of having grown up in Grayson County," he said in his guest-of-honor speech.
A fascination with politics and a love of mountain music also are part of his heritage.
During his visit with his wife, Rebecca, he spotted a painting of the late musician Wade Ward on display in the bicentennial art show. As a teen-ager, Tomlinson used to go to auctions where Ward was playing, just to hear him. Years later, as a newspaper reporter in Richmond, he happened onto a performance by Ward on the steps of the Capitol.
In June, Tomlinson ran afoul of former Marine officer Oliver North over an article headlined, "Does Oliver North Tell the Truth?"
Retired U.S. Army Gen. John Singlaub, who like North was a supporter of Nicaragua's anti-Communist Contras, is quoted as saying North "told lies and got away with it." The widow of CIA director William Casey denies suggesting that North attend Casey's wake, as North has written. Elliott Abrams, former assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, calls North's mixing of personal and Contra funds "just wrong."
"I'm disappointed that the Reader's Digest has now joined the pack of media jackals that has hounded us for so long," North said in a mailing to backers. He also announced he was canceling his subscription.
Tomlinson said North had not subscribed to the magazine in the first place. "Someone in Texas had given it to him," Tomlinson said.
"The job of the magazine is to cast light, right and wrong," he said. Because North may well be the Virginia Republican Party's U.S. Senate candidate, he and others at the magazine felt it worth a story on "a lot of people talking about North the operator."
Rachel Wildavsky, the magazine's senior Washington bureau editor, talked to former Republican administration officials and former White House officials and came back with the feeling that "there's something there." Further interviews followed, and the story came out in the June issue.
Tomlinson said a lot of those interviewed wondered why no one had asked them about North before. "You're the first reporter who asked," some of them said.
If people in Grayson County could save their 1908 courthouse from demolition and save the New River from being dammed for a hydroelectric project, Tomlinson said, they can do anything.
He gave his talk at the restored courthouse, not far from where the river still is flowing freely through the county where he grew up.
Tomlinson was only 5 years old when his father died in a mill accident. His mother still lives in Galax. Some of her relatives were active in local politics, and he grew to love it, too.
"I wanted to come back here and practice law and be a public servant. I very much wanted to follow in my mother's family's tradition," he said.
He got sidetracked into journalism, though, first as a correspondent for the Galax Gazette. "I wrote sports for 8 cents an inch."
While attending Randolph-Macon College, he became an intern at the Richmond News-Leader, which led to a full-time job at the Richmond Times-Dispatch his senior year. He was able to follow the congressional campaigns of Harry Byrd Jr., A. Willis Robertson and William Spong in the mid-1960s, but he made more of a mark covering local politics.
Once he was excluded from a closed joint session of the Hanover County Board of Supervisors and School Board. He listened through a window and learned that the governmental leaders wanted to ban Harper Lee's acclaimed anti-bigotry novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," from schools.
He wrote nothing about how he got his information. "I covered the meeting as if I'd been there," he said. "They landed in the Times-Dispatch the next day and wanted me fired."
In 1968, he joined the Washington bureau of Reader's Digest. Between then and 1981, he covered stories all over the world - Europe, Africa, the Middle East - and spent two years working on "P.O.W.," a book about prisoners of war in Vietnam.
In September 1982, at age 37, Tomlinson was appointed director of the Voice of America. He had misgivings about whether its broadcasts were as good as they could be journalistically. He opted for accuracy over propaganda.
Although staunchly conservative, he said, "I was a journalist at heart, and I believed you had to report the news straight."
But, he added, "when the Communists did wrong, nobody was a bigger basher than I was."
Tomlinson loved that job. "I didn't want to leave at all." But the offer to return to Reader's Digest as managing editor in 1984 was one he could hardly refuse, since it put him in line to head the whole publication.
By mid-1991, the world had changed so much that even the conservative Reader's Digest could publish an edition in the Soviet Union.
"To be able to go to Moscow to open the magazine was just an incredible thrill," Tomlinson said. He thought people there might be angry over some of those broadcasts that had bashed communism. "Instead, when they found out I'd been director of the Voice of America, I was a hero."
Tomlinson has found the magazine's jokes and humor columns to be among its most popular features. "I spend time on these things myself because they're the most important thing in the magazine," he said.
"The great thing the Reader's Digest has going for it is we're a publication that makes people want to read," he said. "We celebrate ordinary people doing extraordinary things."
by CNB