birth_date: 1929-05-09 00:00:00
avg_rating: 4
name: Gene   Smith
about: Eugene Owen Smith was born in Manhattan on May 9, 1929, to Sara and Julius Smith. His father was a lawyer. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in history, he attended law school (at his father’s insistence) for six months.After dropping out, he was drafted into the Army and served in Germany in the early 1950s. Returning to New York, Mr. Smith got a job as a clerk at Newsweek and by 1956 was a reporter at The Newark Star-Ledger.He joined The New York Post a year later and left in 1960 to write his first book, “The Life and Death of Serge Rubinstein” (1962), about the still-unsolved 1955 murder of an unscrupulous Wall Street millionaire.Among Mr. Smith’s other books are “When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years o Eugene Owen Smith was born in Manhattan on May 9, 1929, to Sara and Julius Smith. His father was a lawyer. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in history, he attended law school (at his father’s insistence) for six months.After dropping out, he was drafted into the Army and served in Germany in the early 1950s. Returning to New York, Mr. Smith got a job as a clerk at Newsweek and by 1956 was a reporter at The Newark Star-Ledger.He joined The New York Post a year later and left in 1960 to write his first book, “The Life and Death of Serge Rubinstein” (1962), about the still-unsolved 1955 murder of an unscrupulous Wall Street millionaire.Among Mr. Smith’s other books are “When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson,” (1964); “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson” (1977); “Lee and Grant: A Dual Biography” (1984); and “Until the Last Trumpet Sounds: The Life of General of the Armies John J. Pershing” (1998), a study of the commander of the American Expeditionary Force of World War I. Shortly before his death, Mr. Smith wrote a brief obituary of himself, in third-person singular. It says, “He used to muse that if there was an afterlife — granted a long shot, he said — he’d love it for the opportunities offered to interview people he studied in life.”Mr. Smith died from bone cancer; he was eighty-three at the time of his death. ...more
death_date: 2012-07-25 00:00:00