AUSTIN H. KIPLINGER

AUSTIN H. KIPLINGER 9/19/1918 ~ 11/20/2015
Austin H. Kiplinger, a journalist and financial publisher who was a leader in the civic and cultural life of Washington and Montgomery County for more than seven decades, died November 20, 2015 at Montgomery Hospice's Casey House in Rockville, MD, after a brief illness under hospice care at his home in Bethesda. He was 97.
Kiplinger's journalism career spanned more than a half-century, with work on newspapers from 1936 through 1941, local and network radio and television news in the 1950s, and newsletters, books and magazines in the 1960s through '80s.
For almost 30 years he headed the publishing company founded in 1920 by his father, journalist W. M. Kiplinger (1891-1967). Today Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc.-the last major Washington publisher still owned and managed by its founding family-produces The Kiplinger Letter, Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, The Kiplinger Tax Letter, Kiplinger.com and other publications on personal finance and business forecasting.
Civic leadership
Kiplinger served in governance leadership at Cornell University, the National Symphony Orchestra, Historical Society of Washington, Federal City Council, WETA, National Press Foundation, Tudor Place, and Washington International Horse Show.
He was the longtime president of The Kiplinger Foundation, a charitable trust established and funded by his father and replenished for many years with annual donations from the closely held Kiplinger publishing company. He and his fellow trustees, who included his sons Todd and Knight Kiplinger, have made grants totaling many millions of dollars to nonprofits in education, the performing arts, history and mid-career journalism training.
Kiplinger was an 80-year resident of Montgomery County. While in his twenties in 1947 and 1948, he served as communications director for the county's charter campaign, which established its self-rule under an elected council and executive. A lifelong supporter of civil rights, he worked on committees to end discrimination in the county's housing market in the early 1960s, marching with the county's fair-housing delegation in the 1963 March on Washington on the National Mall.
Among his notable civic achievements in Washington was spearheading, with co-chair and former D.C. mayor Walter Washington, the 2000 capital campaign that restored the District of Columbia's historic Carnegie Library on Mount Vernon Square to be the new home of the Historical Society of Washington.
In 2012 Austin and Knight Kiplinger donated to the Historical Society 4,000 rare historical prints, maps, photos and paintings from the Kiplinger Washington Collection, which W. M. Kiplinger started for office décor in the 1920s and grew into the largest collection of such historical materials in private hands. An additional 1,000 or so print portraits from the collection were donated that year to George Washington University, the National Portrait Gallery, Mount Vernon and the Lincoln Cottage at Soldiers Home.
Serving the NSO
Kiplinger's relationship with the National Symphony Orchestra spanned its entire existence--from his attending at 13 the first children's concert of the NSO's inaugural 1931 season (in a D.C. high school auditorium) to his service as a trustee, board president and, finally, emeritus trustee until his death. As a young man he studied piano and sang in the Cornell Glee Club.
In 1977 he teamed with National Symphony president David Lloyd Kreeger to recruit the renowned Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich to become conductor of the NSO. The following year, when Rostropovich joined his striking musicians on a picket line--illegally set up on federal property (in front of the Kennedy Center)--NSO president Kiplinger helped convince the U.S. Park Police (through a call he and Kennedy Center director Martin Feinstein made to the police's boss, Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus) not to arrest the celebrated conductor and his fellow picketers.
This averted what would have been an international embarrassment to the U.S.-the arrest on American soil of a famous human rights activist at a time when the Carter administration was criticizing the Soviet Union for violating the free speech of its dissidents. Kiplinger defused the tension by luring his friend Rostropovich off the picket line, inviting him to spend the weekend at the Kiplinger farm in Seneca, MD.
Supporting higher education
Kiplinger was a trustee of Cornell University for more than 50 years, as well as a trustee of its Lab of Ornithology. As university board chair from 1985-'89, he helped it navigate an era of growth, increased racial diversity, and campus turmoil, including student and faculty demands for divesture of the university's endowment assets in American companies doing business in segregated South Africa.
In 1972 he conceived the idea for the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio State University, founded in memory of his late father, journalist and publisher W. M. Kiplinger, who was among the first two journalism graduates of Ohio State in 1912.
Washington roots
Born in Washington, DC on September 19, 1918, Austin Huntington Kiplinger was reared in D.C. and Arlington, VA, graduating from Western High School in Georgetown in 1935. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell in 1939, as a government major and member of Telluride Association and Delta Upsilon fraternity. He studied economics at Harvard the following year.
His professional reporting was first published when he was 18 and the Cornell campus stringer for the daily Ithaca (NY) Journal. Several of his stories about the 1936 presidential campaign were picked up by the Associated Press. Kiplinger became a general-assignment reporter on the San Francisco Chronicle in 1940.
Navy service
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in Navy aviation. He piloted TBF torpedo bombers off carriers in the South Pacific on many bombing runs against Japanese air fields, surviving anti-aircraft damage to his plane and earning the Air Medal. In 1944 he and his squadron mates provided air cover for a daring PT boat rescue-under heavy enemy fire from the nearby shoreline--of a downed Navy pilot in the waters of Wasile Bay, between Morotai and Halmahera. The PT boat skipper, A. Murray Preston, was awarded the Medal of Honor; years later, he and Kiplinger became acquainted in Washington business and social circles, but this shared experience was not known to either of them until after Preston's death in 1968.
In 1944, he married Mary Louise (Gogo) Cobb, of Winnetka, Ill., whom he had met the year before in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, where she was vacationing with her parents and he was scouting young ladies to invite to an Officers Club party at the Naval Air Station.
Back to journalism…
and broadcast news
After the war, he worked with his father to launch Kiplinger Magazine (today's Kiplinger's Personal Finance), which in 1947 was the first publication devoted to personal financial advice for American families.
Kiplinger moved to Chicago in 1948, becoming the front-page daily business columnist of the Chicago Journal of Commerce. While still at the Journal in 1950, he began hosting a 15-minute evening news program on WGN-TV, possibly the first TV program in America to emphasize business and economic news. The following year he left the Journal of Commerce and, while continuing the 6 p.m. business news show on WGN-TV, began anchoring the 10 p.m. national news program of the ABC radio network. Soon he was tapped by ABC News to be the evening news anchor for its Chicago television affiliate, WBKB-TV.
When both political parties held their national presidential conventions in Chicago in 1952, Kiplinger covered them as part of a small but aggressive ABC News team that included future broadcast stars Martin Agronsky and Pauline Frederick.
During his time with ABC in Chicago, Kiplinger co-developed (in partnership with the Chicago Daily News) and anchored an innovative TV show called Impact, which presented dramatic, ""reality"" feature stories, shot live on location around the city. It is considered today to have been a forerunner of the television ""news magazine"" format made popular by CBS's 60 Minutes a decade later.
In 1955 Kiplinger moved to the NBC-TV affiliate in Chicago, WMAQ, anchoring its evening news and covering the 1956 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. A 1955 profile of him in Newsweek magazine was titled ""The Cool Young Voice.""
Returning to Washington
But that fall, after turning down a feeler from NBC to join its network news team in New York, Kiplinger returned to Washington, rejoining the Kiplinger publishing organization he had left eight years before. In 1961 he succeeded his father as editor in chief of The Kiplinger Letters and the monthly Kiplinger personal-finance magazine, then called Changing Times.
He became board chair of the parent publishing company, Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc., when his father died in 1967, serving until his gradual retirement in the 1990s, when he was succeeded by his son Knight. Under his leadership the company maintained the progressive employee relations started by its founder, including broad profit sharing, employee stock ownership and generous benefits, including free vacations at the company's resort in Stuart, FL.
Kiplinger co-authored several books, including the 1942 bestseller Washington is Like That (with W. M. Kiplinger), Washington Now (1975, with Knight Kiplinger), America in the Global '90s (1989, with Knight Kiplinger), and self-published memoires, The ""How Not To"" Book of Country Living (1973) and Letter from Washington, Part I (2011) and Part II (2014).
Equestrian life
An avid foxhunter for 30 years with the Potomac Hunt in Montgomery County, in the early 1980s he offered the hunt a site for its steeplechase course at Montevideo, his historic farm in Seneca, MD, where the races are still held in May. He was a co-founder in 1961 of the Seneca Valley Pony Club, which is still centered at Montevideo. A supporter of Montgomery County's Agricultural Reserve, Kiplinger was among the first landowners to sell the development rights from his farm to the county's new easement program in 1989.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as president of the Washington International Horse Show, then held at the D.C. Armory, he helped elevate it to the top tier of indoor shows, attracting the finest open-jumping horses and riders as well as international equestrian teams.
Friends and Family
Kiplinger was a longtime member of the National Press Club, Society of Professional Journalists, Metropolitan Club, Alfalfa Club, Alibi Club, Chevy Chase Club and Potomac Hunt.
His wife of 63 years, Gogo Kiplinger, died in 2007, and his older son, Todd, died the following year. He was predeceased by a sister, Jane Ann Kiplinger Wilson; a half-brother, Peter Kiplinger Langham; and a half-sister, Bonnie Kiplinger Watts McNamara.
He is survived by his son Knight and daughter-in-law Ann Miller Kiplinger, of Washington, DC; daughter-in-law Dana Stifel Watkins Kiplinger, of Weston, CT.; six grandchildren (Brigham C. Kiplinger, of Washington; Sutton E. Kiplinger, of Boston; Daphne L. Kiplinger, of Washington; Tyler Watkins Taylor Constanda, Rawleigh Watkins Morse, and Cameron Todd Kiplinger, all of Weston, CT); seven great-grandchildren; and his companion of eight years, Bonnie Barker Nicholson, of Bethesda, MD.
Interment will be private. A celebration of the life of Austin Kiplinger will be held at a time and place to be announced later.
Contributions in his memory may be made to the Historical Society of Washington, 801 K St., N.W., Washington, DC 20001; the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd. Ithaca, NY 14850; or the National Symphony Orchestra, Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. N.W., Washington, DC 20566.