David Nyhan

Retired Globe columnist David Nyhan, 64, collapses and dies

David Nyhan, whose fiercely liberal columns for The Boston Globe made him a force in local and national politics even as his generous nature won him a legion of friends, died early yesterday at his home in Brookline, apparently of a heart attack. He was 64.

Mr. Nyhan was stricken yesterday after coming in from shoveling snow and was rushed by his wife, Olivia, to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where he was pronounced dead.

Mr. Nyhan retired from the Globe in 2001 after 32 years, but he continued to write a twice-weekly column for four daily newspapers owned by the Eagle-Tribune Co. north of Boston. He was scheduled to leave this week for a month-long trip to Sri Lanka to accompany and write about a group of about 50 nurses and doctors taking part in tsunami relief efforts.

"In his long career at the Globe, David Nyhan made many important contributions," said Alfred S. Larkin Jr., spokesman for The Globe. "Perhaps most visibly, he was in the forefront of a generation of reporters and columnists who built the Globe's reputation for top-notch political coverage and commentary. He was a fun-loving, gregarious man who seemed to know virtually everyone in politics, whether it was at City Hall, the State House, or in our nation's capital."

"He was a giant in more ways than one," said Martin F. Nolan, a friend and Globe colleague for many years, referring to Mr. Nyhan's athletic 6-foot, 4-inch frame. "In a business that was so fierce and competitive, I never met anyone who was more generous," said Nolan, who was chief of the Globe's Washington bureau when Mr. Nyhan arrived there in 1974 and promptly began breaking stories about the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment proceedings against President Richard M. Nixon.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whom Mr. Nyhan admired but needled from time to time, said in a statement issued by his office: "A Nyhan column over breakfast was a perfect way to start the day, even if it caused a little sudden indigestion."

Mr. Nyhan, Kennedy said, "could get to the heart of the matter faster than anyone I have known ... with a sharp wit and a unique style."

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino called Mr. Nyhan "big in stature, but gentle in voice. When he spoke, he spoke the voice of reason."

After retiring from the Globe, Mr. Nyhan straddled the worlds of journalism and politics. He had helped Menino with speech-writing and with the city's proposal that brought last year's Democratic National Convention to Boston.

In his columns, Mr. Nyhan's expansive prose generally reflected his liberal, populist political views. But as a reporter, he was known for an accurate and seemingly effortless style on deadline.

Stan Grossfeld, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer at The Globe, recalled their 1981 trip to Northern Ireland, covering the hunger strikers of the Irish Republican Army at Maze Prison.

"In those days, you had to dictate the stories over the phone into a tape recorder in Boston," recalled Grossfeld, who would read Mr. Nyhan's copy as he typed the next page. "As fast as I could read the story, Dave would finish another page, perfectly written."

Mr. Nyhan was inventive in pursuit of the story on the death of Bobby Sands, one of the hunger strikers. At one point, Mr. Nyhan decoyed guards outside the prison while Grossfeld surreptitiously snapped photos. At another point, he paid someone to open a darkroom at 5 a.m., so Grossfeld could develop his film, Grossfeld recalled.

Though generally pro-Democrat in his outlook and deeply held beliefs, Mr. Nyhan periodically adopted and promoted the cause of Republican candidates, particularly for president.

He especially admired Senator John McCain of Arizona. Another GOP favorite was Lamar Alexander, the former governor and current senator from Tennessee. As often happened with Mr. Nyhan's candidates, they ultimately lost.

In each case, though, he informed them his support had limits. "I'm with you until the Democratic convention," he told them.

There was rarely middle ground in Mr. Nyhan's columns. "If you're going to help someone, really help them," was one of his credos.

Mr. Nyhan's forthrightness was not restricted to his column. A disciple of former Globe editor Thomas Winship, Mr. Nyhan showed willingness at a 1986 management think tank to give voice to widespread editorial dissatisfaction with Winship's successor, Michael C. Janeway. His remarks were seen by many to have precipitated Janeway's resignation.

Such candor could make Mr. Nyhan suspect in senior circles both inside and outside the paper -- Cardinal Bernard F. Law accused him of slander in 1989. It was a mark of his populist credentials.

Mr. Nyhan always had more time for the paper's custodians and phone operators than for editors. His outsider sympathies more than matched insider credentials, such as those that earned him a spot as a pallbearer at the 1994 funeral of former US House speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr.

Mr. Nyhan's freewheeling style created a small uproar in 1993 when a teasing remark directed at a male colleague employed a crude term for excessive deference to women. It was overheard by a female colleague and led to the Globe's then-editor Matthew V. Storin fining Mr. Nyhan for the remark. The punishment was later waived.

As much as he loved to talk about politics, Mr. Nyhan enjoyed talking more about his three children. At their father's 60th birthday party, they gathered around the piano and sang their own version of Cole Porter's "You're the Top."

And while many will remember him for his life on the public stage, Mr. Nyhan's friends recall his extraordinary generosity. A loan, advice, the name of a top-notch medical specialist? He always had time. "He had a great appetite for life, and with his big heart, he was always quick with a five, or these days, a 50-dollar bill," said one of his three siblings, Christopher D., of South Portland, Maine.

Mr. Nyhan and his wife spent as much time as possible at their second home on Chebeague Island in Casco Bay, just north of Portland. Mr. Nyhan's idea of a great afternoon was talking to the island's lobstermen at the local boat yard, where he had a 25-foot sailboat and a speedy Grady White pleasure craft.

He was born Charles David Nyhan Jr. in Boston and grew up in Brookline's Whiskey Point section. His father was a construction inspector for the Metropolitan District Commission. His mother, Margaret (McCormick) Nyhan, was a homemaker.

Mr. Nyhan graduated from Brookline High School in 1958. He majored in English at Harvard and played on the varsity lacrosse and football teams. In the 1961 Harvard-Yale game, Mr. Nyhan scored a touchdown with a fumble recovery in the Yale end zone.

He wrote about the triumph in a 1985 Globe column, but in his self-effacing way, most of the column was about the ignominy of his own errant snap to the punter earlier in the season, which cost Harvard the game against Lehigh.

Before joining the Globe as State House bureau chief in 1969, Mr. Nyhan served in the Air Force, then worked as a reporter for The Salem Evening News and in the Springfield and Boston bureaus of the Associated Press.

Mr. Nyhan quickly rose at the Globe. He covered the 1972 presidential campaign, served briefly as labor editor, and joined the paper's Washington bureau in 1974. He became the bureau's news editor in 1975. He later served as White House correspondent, assistant managing editor for local news, and national correspondent. He began writing his op-ed column in 1985 and was named a Globe associate editor in 1987.

The author of a 1988 biography of Michael Dukakis, "The Duke," Mr. Nyhan was a Reuters Foundation Fellow at Oxford University in 1995 and a fellow in 2001 at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy.

In his last column as a member of the Globe staff, Mr. Nyhan wrote in June 2001: "the thing I'll miss most is the chance to shine a little flashlight on a dark corner, where a wrong was done to a powerless peon, where a scarred politician maybe deserved a better fate, where the process went awry, or the mob needed to be calmed down and herded in another direction."

Besides his wife and brother, Mr. Nyhan leaves two daughters, Veronica Jones of Washington, D.C., and Kate of Brookline; a son, Nicholas of New York City; a sister, Margaret R. Lockwood of Brookline; another brother, F. John of Chappaqua, N.Y., and two grandchildren. Funeral arrangements by Bell-O'Dea Funeral Home in Brookline were incomplete last night.