Adam Clymer was born in New York City on April 27, 1937. While at Harvard University he was the president of the student newspaper The Crimson and covered college games as a part-time correspondent for The New York Times. He graduated in 1958. After returning from a fellowship at the University of Cape Town, he covered police news for The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Virginia and served in the Army.
He was hired by The Baltimore Sun in 1963. After a brief stint at The Daily News in New York, he joined The New York Times in 1977 and worked there until his retirement in 2003. He covered Congress, eight presidential campaigns, and the downfall of both Nikita S. Khrushchev and Richard M. Nixon. Clymer received the National Press Foundation's Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for distinguished congressional reporting in 1993 and the American Political Science Association's Carey McWilliams Award for political reporting in 2003.
After his retirement, he was political director of the National Annenberg Election Survey and taught journalism at George Washington University. He wrote several books Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography, Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right, and the novel Escape From 9/11. He died from pancreatic cancer on September 10, 2018 at the age of 81.
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