Thomas O'Toole was a science reporter and editor at '' The Washington Post'' from 1966 to 1987. His main subject was the space program, in particular the Apollo program to land men on the moon. He extensively covered Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the Voyager program to Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, and the Space Shuttle program. O'Toole wrote many articles on energy, including the burgeoning nuclear power industry in America. He also covered significant espionage stories, from Cold War subjects to
Watergate
The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal in the United States involving the administration of President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 that led to Nixon's resignation. The scandal stemmed from the Nixon administration's continual ...
and the hunt for Nazi figures hiding in America and elsewhere after World War 2.
Early life
O'Toole was born in 1931 in
Jersey City
Jersey City is the second-most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey, after Newark.St. Peter's University, Jersey City). After military service in France, he earned a graduate journalism degree from Boston University and then worked at ''The Cape Cod Standard Times'' (now ''The Cape Cod Times'') in Hyannis, reporting on the Andrea Doria ocean liner sinking of 1956. O'Toole returned to New York City, finding work with '' The Wall Street Journal'' (1957–1961), '' TIME'' magazine, and '' The New York Times'' (1965–66). He was a partner in the 1962 aerospace and culture magazine ''USA1'', which published five issues before folding. He married Vitaline O'Connell, of Hartford, in 1958 and they had four children.
Newspaper career
In the summer of 1966,
Howard Simons
Howard Simons (June 3, 1929 – June 13, 1989) was the managing editor of ''The Washington Post'' at the time of the Watergate scandal, and later curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Early life and education
Si ...
and Ben Bradlee of ''The Washington Post'' hired Tom O'Toole, as ''The Post'' was growing into a paper of national prominence. O'Toole immediately began covering the Lunar Orbiter program from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. From there, his work covered aspects of the space program. His articles were frequently featured on the front page of the paper. O'Toole was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding th ...
"The Chroniclers: Tom O'Toole" Retrieved on July 19, 2013. and he was awarded the National Space Club Press Award in 1970.
Around 1980, O'Toole was invited to work with Marvin Cetron on Cetron's first book about the future, ''Encounters with the Future''. Cetron and O'Toole were both contributors to '' Omni'', which collected some of the best science news and writing of the time. Cetron's sweeping predictions, largely gained from his insider position at the Navy Advanced Research Laboratory, were put into context and prose by O'Toole, who brought his own working knowledge of science to the project. The book was published by McGraw-Hill in 1982.
O'Toole continued to cover space and energy, among other subjects, for ''The Washington Post''. He visited
Three Mile Island
3 is a number, numeral, and glyph.
3, three, or III may also refer to:
* AD 3, the third year of the AD era
* 3 BC, the third year before the AD era
* March, the third month
Books
* ''Three of Them'' (Russian: ', literally, "three"), a 1901 ...
during the 1979 crisis at the Pennsylvania nuclear facility.At Three Mile Island, by Peter Sandman and Mary Paden, Columbia Journalism Review 1979; http://www.psandman.com/articles/3-mile.htm He detailed the space shuttle program from its infancy, although he was in Pasadena covering deep space probe Voyager's encounter with Uranus when the shuttle Challenger blew up in January 1986. ''The Washington Post'' published a book later that year called ''Challengers: The Inspiring Life Stories of the Seven Brave Astronauts of Shuttle Mission 51-L'', with 12 ''Post'' reporters contributing. O'Toole wrote Chapter One.
On December 30, 1983, he wrote the article "Possibly as Large as Jupiter" in the ''Washington Post'', which brought to the mainstream, the idea that another planet or object in our Solar System is to be discovered, and that we are in a complex and still mysterious Solar System.
Later life and career
O'Toole worked for several years at public relations firm Powell-Tate in Washington. He was also an early editor and contributor to space.com. He married a second time, to Mary Kate Cranston of Washington. They had one child. Tom O'Toole died in 2003 from complications from diabetes.