Tom Fox's path from Vietnam to NCR

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 21, 2005 by Arthur Jones

Tom Fox didn't have to be in Vietnam. He had volunteered as a civilian to work with war-displaced refugees. He had survived Vietcong shelling during the Tet offensive by lying low on a hotel roof in Tuy Hoa, provincial capital of Phuyen on the central coast of Vietnam. Now, in 1985 in a Washington hotel, he was under fire of a different sort--from a board member who wanted him ousted as editor of the National Catholic Reporter.

The controversy centered on the newspaper's bold, front-page stories warning of a mounting crisis from clerical pedophilia in the United States. One board member, Jesuit Fr. Joseph Fichter, a prominent sociologist, was so incensed by the articles, which he regarded as ill-researched and anticlerical, he'd called for a vote of no confidence in Fox's editorship.

Whatever was said in that board meeting, its inaction spoke louder than words. Fichter could not get a second to his motion. Fox survived; the Jesuit quit the board in disgust.

Twenty years later, Fox, now 61, has relinquished the post of NCR publisher, in which he served for eight years after 17 years as the paper's longest serving editor.

What follows is an account of what went into creating Fox the editor, for his imprint on NCR is second only to that of founding editor Robert Hoyt, who ran Fox's byline with a Vietnam dateline.

Fox epitomizes the aspirations of the U.S. Catholic church in the late 20th century. All three of them--the newspaper, the Catholic church of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and Fox--matured together. He turned 21 the year the council ended.

Thomas Charles Fox was born in Milwaukee, the third in a large Catholic family. At Marquette University High School, he played football as a halfback and baseball as a pitcher and outfielder. He might have had a career in either sport. He was an All State and All American football player who had scholarship offers from 20 schools including Stanford, the Naval Academy and Notre Dame.

In baseball, his senior year team won the state championship, and he was wooed by two major league teams to join their minor systems. He took the football scholarship, he said, because he wanted to go to college.

Fox's father, Clement, was a neuroanatomist, later head of the anatomy department at Wayne State University, Detroit. He was a Commonweal-reading Catholic, a man of strong opinions, and, Tom describes him as "pretty eccentric"--someone who, with the admonition, "If you lose your faith, you never had one," wanted his children to avoid Catholic schools and go to the best colleges they could. Tom said, "My mother, Alice, was pious, the soul of the family. We had a strong, well-knit Catholic identity."

There were six children: Jim, now an anthropologist living in Australia and working periodically in Indonesia; Betty, a real estate agent in Virginia; Tom. Then Mary, a housewife married to a former professional football player; Bob, a letter carrier in Milwaukee; and Ginnie, who has special needs and lives in a Minnesota group home.

Older brother Jim went to Harvard and was a Rhodes scholar. "I was coming up in my brother's shadow as an athlete and trying to find my own identity," Tom said.

He decided on Stanford, in part because of the climate and setting, but also because Stanford did not hallow football above academic excellence. Indeed, it encouraged all its freshman football players to apply for academic scholarships--though they didn't all receive them.

At Stanford he found him self immediately drawn to the teachings of Dwight Clark, dean of freshman, a Quaker and a pacifist. "At that time I was a Catholic who believed, I thought, in just war." He learned about nonviolence, started reading Thomas Merton, and listened to the songs of a young guitarist, Joan Baez, who would stop by the dorm to play and sing. She and Fox's classmate David Harris eventually wed.

In the break after his freshman year, Fox was one of 20 students Dwight Clark invited to visit Asia as volunteers. Fox went to his football coach to ask if he could go. The coach said no, he'd be too out of condition to play football when he returned. The sophomore-to-be went anyway, ending his football career. Before summer ended, however, he had received an academic scholarship.

The 19-year-old toured several Japanese cities, went to Taiwan and then Hong Kong, where he worked laying cement for a tuberculosis sanatorium in Kowloon. "That was very, very physical work," he said. In his spare time he taught English to young Chinese refugees.

"That was probably the bug that started to get me interested in Asia," he said.

Back at school he concentrated on his course work. He was also active in Stanford's Newman Club, the gathering place for young Catholics and was president of the group in his senior year. He was becoming more and aware of and "more outraged by the events of the times."

In the break between sophomore and junior years he wanted to go to Selma, Ala., and join in the civil rights protests and voter registration drives. "My parents were just so frightened," he said, "and because they knew I was planning a junior year in France, they proposed my going to Quebec to study French as an alternative."