Writer, Envoy John Bartlow Martin Dies : Self-Described ‘Ultra-Liberal’ Served Presidents, Contenders

John Bartlow Martin, reformer, writer, diplomat and confidant of Presidents, has died of throat cancer, it was reported Monday.

Martin, 71, was a successful novelist and journalist who served as this country’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic at a critical juncture in relations between the two nations.

He died Saturday at a hospital in Highland Park, Ill., the city in which he had lived for many years.

Martin, a self-described “ultra-liberal,” enjoyed a professional career that took him through presidential campaigns, into the nation’s prisons and on to the byways of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ‘60s.

He crafted speeches for Presidents and public figures and was a staff writer for the Saturday Evening Post, as well as a biographer and a diplomat.

He spent his life observing, then writing about events and personalities surrounding him. He produced 16 books.

A prodigious writer, he was forced by his editors to trim his two-volume biography of presidential contender Adlai E. Stevenson from 10,000 to 2,000 manuscript pages. That translated to 800 published pages.

An article he did for Harper’s magazine about a mine explosion that killed 100 people ran to 18,500 words, then the longest in the magazine’s history. The piece was credited with spurring new federal legislation regulating mine safety.

Martin began writing as a police reporter for the Indianapolis Times in 1937. He moved to Chicago, where he wrote for a variety of publications, including Harper’s and the Saturday Evening Post.

His work has been seen by many critics and writers as predating the non-fiction genre of novels later popularized by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer.

His books include his memoirs, “It Seems Like Only Yesterday,” “My Life in Crime,” and “Overtaken by Events,” which told of his experiences in the Dominican Republic after U.S.-supported revolutionaries tried to return Juan Bosch to power. Bosch had been the nation’s first freely elected president.

Other of his works include “Break Down the Walls,” an examination of the nation’s prison system, and “Pane of Glass,” a study of schizophrenia.

In 1961, Martin served under President John F. Kennedy as ambassador to the Dominican Republic, resigning after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. He returned there in 1965 at the urging of President Lyndon B. Johnson to help quell a crisis. Earlier, he had been a speech writer for both Presidents and had also worked on the presidential campaigns of Sens. Hubert H. Humphrey and Robert F. Kennedy.

Most recently he had been emeritus professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.