Jaffrey's Kenneth Campbell reflects on his lifetime pursuit of the truth

Jul. 23—From Washington, D.C., to London to Boston, Kenneth Campbell spent decades as a journalist — shining a spotlight on political corruption and helping keep record of historic events — before taking high-profile public relations positions.

Though he has long since retired to Jaffrey, Campbell, 82, in an interview Tuesday retraced in detail his journey through the world of communications, which included years at the Washington Evening Star and The Boston Globe and as a spokesman for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"The news profession is important because it is a profession; it has professional standards," he said, seated on a bench at the Melville Academy Museum in Jaffrey. "You've got to have two sources. You've got to find the truth. You've got to be persistent."

Surrounded by local history at the museum, where he has spent years volunteering, Campbell remembered covering momentous events in American history during his first newspaper gig after graduating from Yale University in New Haven, Conn., in 1962.

In college, Campbell worked for the Yale Daily News, where he became a senior editor. There, he landed interviews with the likes of A. Philip Randolph, the labor organizer and civil rights activist who founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925 to improve working conditions for Black railroad porters.

Though Campbell hoped to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development, he said his asthma made him ineligible for that and also prevented him from joining the Army. But, he said, his work for the Yale Daily News drew the attention of Sidney Epstein, the city editor for the Washington Evening Star, who recruited him for a training program at the Washington, D.C., publication.

"It was an incredible opportunity," Campbell said. "I was very, very lucky to get recruited."

During the six-month training program at The Star, Campbell started as a copy boy and assisted with reporting. There he learned the trade under Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like Miriam Ottenberg; Haynes Johnson; Mary McGrory; and Mary Lou Werner, who would later be his state editor.

To cap the training program, Campbell wrote a major story on high school dropouts. The city had just recently become desegregated, he said, and he interviewed students at Dunbar High School, a principally Black school with a high dropout rate.

"It was an eye-opener," Campbell said, noting the insights that story gave him into racism in the public school system.

Already working at the paper when Campbell joined was Carl Bernstein — who would go on to become one of the most famous journalists in American history for his reporting on the Watergate scandal.

Bernstein, who was four years younger than Campbell, began working as a copy boy at The Star in high school. For two years, Campbell said he and Bernstein were roommates — along with three other young journalists — and lived in a house in Arlington, Va.

After the training program, Campbell joined The Star full time, assisting the police reporter as a deputy.

"That was also an experience in integration and anti-integration," he said, adding that many of the police in the city were openly racist.

After a few months on the police beat, Campbell was moved to the state desk, where he worked under Werner, covering politics, government and zoning in Prince George's County, Md., Fairfax County, Va., Arlington, Va., and Alexandria, Va.

During his time at The Star, Campbell covered major historical events: Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington — where King gave his famous "I have a Dream" speech — and the funeral of John F. Kennedy.

In 1964, Campbell proposed to his girlfriend, Suze Thurston. The two had met years earlier at a Christmas party in Katonah, N.Y., when Campbell was a freshman at Yale and Suze was a junior in high school.

"Ken is a very determined person," Suze Campbell said in a phone interview. "Tenacious. He gets a hold of an issue, and he follows it until it works out and lets people know all the pieces and parts of it. He's very good at thinking ahead and noticing what the consequences might be."

For their honeymoon, the Campbells moved to London for six months. As a reporter, Campbell said he drove a 1960 Volkswagen he had gotten from his sister and he was able to save $2,000 for the honeymoon on a $5,000 salary in two years. The car got 30 miles per gallon and gas cost about 30 cents a gallon, he said.

With that money, the couple found a flat off Finchley Road in London. Then, just as they were planning to head back to the U.S. at the end of six months, Campbell was offered a job with the wire service United Press International.

He and his wife ended up staying in the United Kingdom for another 2 1/2 years, moving into a house in London with some friends.

"There was a pub across the street, and life was delightful," Campbell said.

At UPI, Campbell worked in a room packed tight with reporters' and editors' desks and telegraph machines that clacked away as they worked. There, he had the opportunity to attend events such as the Queen's Tea Party at Buckingham Palace, which he described as "a hoot."

But after nearly three years abroad, the Campbells began to feel left out of the Vietnam protests and civil rights demonstrations happening back in the U.S. and decided it was time to return home.

The couple moved in with Suze's family in Katonah, N.Y., and Campbell briefly considered a reporting job at the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., before accepting a copy-editor position at The Boston Globe, with the promise that he'd be made a reporter when a position opened up.

Moving to Boston in 1968, the Campbells purchased a brick row house in the South End that required extensive plumbing work to make habitable. (Campbell recalled buying the plumber a case of beer to get him to stick around long enough to finish the kitchen.)

By 1969 — the same year the Campbells had their first child, Bhaird — Kenneth Campbell had been put on the state-house beat at The Globe, which came with a twice-weekly column.

Though at first, Campbell took little interest in a developer's proposal to construct five 500-foot towers along the Boston Common and Public Garden, the so-called Park Plaza project soon became a staple of his columns.

"I wasn't initially covering it," Campbell said, "... but we went sledding on the Common with my kids one December and about an hour too early, suddenly the sun went down."

He looked up. About a quarter-mile away, the 790-foot John Hancock Tower was blocking the sunlight.

"I thought, 'What are the 500-foot towers going to do to the Common and the garden?"

From that day on, Campbell became engrossed in the proposed Park Plaza project, making it a centerpiece of his column. That annoyed not only the project's developer and the mayor, who was for the plan, but also The Globe, he said, since the paper had endorsed the project.

Suze Campbell said she was glad to see her husband becoming more than just an observer.

"He's become more and more active throughout his life, having values about how things should be," she said. "Values about preserving the quality of life of the various areas where we've lived."

Eventually, though, The Globe took him off the beat. One of Campbell's last columns on the Park Plaza project highlighted an insurance executive's analysis of the developer's financial plan. Campbell described this as one of "the kisses of death" for the project, which was never built.

In 1972, The Globe made Campbell the State House Bureau Chief. After being removed from that role and assigned to obituaries in 1974, he left the newspaper in 1975.

Through connections he had with then-Mayor Kevin White's staff, Campbell landed a gig as the spokesman for the MBTA — the city's transit authority, which he described as "rife with old-boy network and corruption."

"I mean it was famous for it," Campbell said. "And I thought to myself, 'How did I go from being a reporter to this?' "

At the MBTA, Campbell instituted daily morning radio reports on the state of the transit system and advocated for limiting overtime hours after the 63-year-old driver of a subway car fell asleep going into Arlington station and crashed into another train. In 1979, shortly after Gov. Michael Dukakis lost his reelection campaign, Campbell was ousted from the MBTA.

For about three years, Campbell ran his own PR operation but eventually decided he preferred the dependability of a salary to the constant searching-out of new contracts. So, he took a job as the director of PR for the Unitarian Universalist Association.

At the UUA — a liberal religious association of Unitarian Universalists congregations — Campbell headed the Beacon Press, the organization's publishing division.

"It was a fascinating time when women's rights and women's views of God and views of God as a potential woman — a woman or a man, or as a woman — were being written about by the Beacon Press," he said.

After leaving that job in 1985, Campbell found a position as the director of the news office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Working for the university's PR division, he helped shape the school's messaging on a variety of topics — from issuing apologies after The Globe did an exposé on MIT professors' nutritional experiments on boys with autism to advocating for the release of a student taken captive in Sri Lanka, when that country's leader came to visit the university.

A year after retiring in 2003, he moved with his wife to Jaffrey. The couple had longtime friends in the area and wanted to remain within 75 miles of Boston.

Here, he became involved in a grassroots movement that opposed the construction of a housing development at the foot of Mount Monadnock and served for several years as the president of the Jaffrey Center Village Improvement Society, which oversees the Melville Academy Museum.

Reflecting on his decades in the communications business, Campbell said he's learned the importance of "the golden rule."

"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," he said. "We've got to have trust; we've got to have respect."

And in a country with deepening political divides and an increasing unwillingness listen to people with different viewpoints, Campbell said that rule is more important than ever.

"I think without it as a goal, we just dissolve into fractions and factions," he said. "With the developments that have been going on it's rather scary, our future."

Ryan Spencer can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1412, or rspencer@keenesentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter at @rspencerKS