Conrad Black on Peter Worthington: A fearless newsman with unshakeable integrity

Peter Worthington was one of the great characters and professional newsmen of Canadian media history and was an authentic expert on many subjects, and a beloved and profoundly admired and liked person across a great swath of Canadian life.

He had a uniquely diverse and accomplished career. Though an unconventional swashbuckler, he had a quiet but not reticent personality, and was in many ways almost an archetypal Canadian: without a hint of self-importance or aggression, but thorough, competent, contrarian, and piercingly witty.

He was a journalist of the old school, who believed in going to the site of a story, often before the story occurred, and he reported on wars and conflicts from the Middle East, Nigeria, Algeria, Angola, New Guinea, the Himalayas and elsewhere, and on the Soviet suppression of the Czech reform movement from Prague in 1968. He relentlessly sought out famous and unusual characters for in-depth interviews, including Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Dr. Thomas A. Dooley, and the democratic leader of Russia between the Romanovs and the Bolsheviks, Alexander Kerensky. He was present at the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of president John F. Kennedy, and covered the trial of Oswald's murderer, Jack Ruby.

Peter Worthington was the son of a general and had the extraordinary distinction of enlisting in the Royal Canadian Navy at age 17 in 1944 and in the Canadian army in 1950, and then in the United States Air Force. He was in combat in the Second World War in Europe and in Korea, and became a junior officer in all three services spanning two countries and two wars.

Having been one of the most prominent and professionally respected journalists of the Toronto Telegram for many years, when that newspaper closed in 1971, he was a co-founder with the late J. Douglas Creighton and others of the Toronto Sun, which published its first edition the day after the last edition of the Telegram.

A rollicking tabloid newspaper of colourful crusades on behalf of good and often unusual causes, built on thorough and spectacularly presented journalism and the comment of a rich variety of flamboyant writers and personalities, the Sun enjoyed a great and almost instant success.