Martin Tolchin, a former reporter for The New York Times who defeated Congress with a keen knowledge of the twisting ways and power plays and who later served as the founding publisher and editor of The Hill, a successful newspaper devoted to events on Capitol Hill, died at Thursday at his home in Alexandria, Virginia. He was 93.
His partner, Barbara Rosenfeld, said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Tolchin left The Times in 1994 to head up The Hill, which was launched as a weekly to provide comprehensive coverage of Congress. It immediately went head-to-head with an existing newspaper, Roll Call, which had been reporting on Capitol Hill twice a week since the 1950s.
Mr. Tolchin was 65 when he took over the reins of The Hill, hired by the newspaper’s owner, News Communications Inc., a New York City company with more than 20 local newspapers in Manhattan, Queens, and the city’s suburbs. Its chairman was politically powerful publisher and real estate developer Jerry Finkelstein, father of Andrew J. Stein, a former New York City Councilwoman.
Some Washington insiders were skeptical that there was a market for two Capitol Hill publications, but Mr. Tolchin told The Washington Post, “Don’t think Roll Call does.” Roll Call’s editors said they weren’t worried.
In fact, backed by lucrative advertising revenue, both papers did well, and when Mr Tolchin retired from The Hill in 2003, each had a circulation of about 20,000, with most copies distributed for free. Ten years later, both published on most days of the convention, and the online versions attracted many additional readers.
Under Mr Tolchin, there was nothing too “inside” for The Hill to report, including news that a lawmaker had been reassigned or that a group representing potato growers had hired a lobbyist.
But The Hill also broke stories that were picked up by larger publications. For example, in 1997 there was the report of a failed uprising by a group of House Republicans against their belligerent leader, Chairman Newt Gingrich. The report was the first indication that Mr. Gingrich’s time as a speaker was drawing to a close. (In fact, Mr. Gingrich announced in November 1998 that he would be stepping down as speaker and leaving Congress.)
Mr Tolchin came out of retirement in 2006 to help launch Politico, the website about politics.
He was also the author or co-author of nine books. Most were on politics and government, written with his wife, Susan J. Tolchin, a political scientist who taught at George Mason University in Virginia. She died in 2016 at the age of 75.
Mr. Tolchin reported from Washington for The Times from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. As a congressional correspondent, he wrote major battles on taxes and volatile issues such as abortion.
He was adept at summarizing the legislative tactics he reported on. Speaking of a protracted budget dispute, in which the House Democrats said they would abstain from offering proposals and simply watch Republicans fight among themselves, he wrote that their stance “reflected the Congressional Democrats’ new strategy — dynamic immobility.”
Referring to a new generation of members in 1981, Mr. Tolchin portrayed “a convention full of blow-dried young men who were more versed in computer printouts and media consultants than in the old-fashioned, personal politics of the Speaker.”
He wrote of Howard H. Baker Jr., then one of the most powerful figures on Capitol Hill as the Senate Republican-majority leader: “Shortly, shuffling, his shoulders in a sort of semi-permanent shrug, he gives the appearance of a man he’s lost his way and wandered on the Senate floor.”
Mr. Tolchin received the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress in 1982, named after the Republican Senate minority leader in the 1960s.
Martin Tolchin was born in Brooklyn on September 20, 1928. He attended the University of Utah, received a law degree from New York Law School, and served in the United States Army during the Korean War.
The Times hired him as a copyboy in 1954, and his first reporting job was for what was then known as the Women’s Page. At the metropolitan bureau in later years, his reporting on problems in New York City’s hospital system led to investigations and several criminal convictions, and he handled local politics and served as city hall bureau chief.
Mr. Tolchin was transferred to the Washington bureau in 1973. For more than two decades in the capital, he covered, among other things, President Jimmy Carter’s White House.
The books he and his wife wrote, beginning in the 1970s, include “To the Victor: Political Patronage From the Clubhouse to the White House” (1971), “Dismantling America: The Rush to Deregulate” (1983), and “Glass Houses: Congressional Ethics and the Politics of Venom” (2001).
In 2019 the memoir ‘Politics, Journalism and the Way Things Were: My Life at The Times, The Hill and Politico’ was published.
In addition to Ms. Rosenfeld, Mr. Tolchin has a daughter, Kay Rex Tolchin, and a grandson. A son, Charlie, died of cystic fibrosis in 2003 at the age of 34.
Mr. Tolchin distinguished himself as one of the few reporters considered the source of an urban legend. He was a young member of The Times’ metropolitan staff when in 1966, exactly nine months after the major Northeast power outage of November 1965, he began calling the maternity wards of New York City hospitals, several of which said they were sudden increase in the number of births. †
Mr Tolchin wrote a front page article suggesting the spike could be linked to the blackout. He quoted a sociologist as saying, “The lights went out and people were able to communicate with each other.”
Demographers have since debunked the theory, but never quite succeeded in erasing it from urban lore. That is, it is also Mr. Tolchin survives.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
