DONALD M. WILSON

WILSON-- Donald M. June 27, 1925 - November 29, 2011. Donald M. Wilson, 86, died Tuesday, November 29 at his home in Princeton, NJ, from a stroke following years of struggle with Alzheimer's Disease. Wilson was born in Montclair, NJ in 1925, and graduated from Deerfield Academy in 1943. He enlisted in the US Army Air Corps and was commissioned a second lieutenant as a B-17 navigator. After graduating from Yale in 1949, he started at Life Magazine as a reporter working in New York and Detroit, then became a foreign correspondent, covering the Korean War and French Indochina War. In 1956 he was named Life's Washington bureau chief. Wilson joined John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1960, and was appointed deputy director of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1961. He was the last surviving member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExCOMM), a specially-created policy group that advised President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Wilson advocated releasing reconnaissance photographs of Soviet missile sites being built in Cuba, secretly taken by an American U-2 spy plane. Publication of the classified photos was approved by ExCOMM and credited with turning the tide of British press opinion decisively in favor of the US. He left USIA in 1965 to became general manager of Time-Life International. In 1968, Wilson worked briefly on Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, and in 1970 was named Time Inc. Corporate Vice President for Public Affairs, from which he tired in 1989. In 1987, Wilson and former Time magazine business editor George Taber, launched NJBIZ, a paper covering business in New Jersey. NJBIZ was acquired in 2005 by Journal Publications Inc. of Harrisburg, PA. After Communism's collapse in the Soviet Union and its client countries, Wilson and James L. Greenfield co-founded the Independent Journalism Foundation in 1991, which operates training programs for journalists in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Wilson is survived by his wife of 54 years, the former Susan M. Neuberger, a son, Dwight M. Wilson of Berkeley, CA, two daughters, Katherine L. Wilson of Newton, MA, and Penelope Wilson of The Bronx, NY, and five grandchildren. A Service of Remembrance will be held on Saturday, January 28, 2012 at the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville in Lawrenceville, NJ. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Donald M. Wilson Fellowship, of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, in Washington, D.C.