Sam Day, 1926-2001.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editorial - Obituary

The world is a lesser place this month.

Sam Day has died.

A massive stroke on January 26 did to him what no prison could, what no bully could, what no police officer or repressive government could do.

It stopped him, finally, from pursuing peace and justice. He was seventy-four.

Whether it was behind a desk or in front of a demonstration, with a pen or with a megaphone or with a silent act of civil disobedience, Sam put himself on the line for peace.

He was a traitor to his class. Born into privilege, the son of a U.S. diplomat, Sam went to Phillips Exeter Academy, but he quickly dropped every trace of the preppie.

Sam began his journalism career as a copy boy with the Washington Evening Star, and then he joined the A.P. in Idaho, moving from there to the Lewiston Morning Tribune, and on to the Intermountain Observer, a crusading paper that championed civil rights, the environment, and an end to the Vietnam War.

"When Sam Day got knocked off his establishment horse, he never got back on," recalls Perry Swisher, who worked with Sam at the Intermountain Observer in Idaho in the 1960s and early 1970s.

When that closed down, Sam moved to Chicago to edit The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. And in 1978, he became Managing Editor of The Progressive, where he shepherded the magazine's most controversial story: "The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It--Why We're Telling It," by Howard Morland.

Without Sam, there would have been no story. He assigned it, and he worked with Morland on draft after draft, composing the crucial introduction and conclusion.

These are Sam's words from the conclusion: "The secret of how a hydrogen bomb is made protects a more fundamental `secret': the mechanism by which the resources of the most powerful nation on Earth have been marshaled for global catastrophe. Knowing how may be the key to asking why."

Look at the last sentence again and admire the cleanliness of the language: nine words--seven of them one syllable--to crystallize a complicated story. That was one of Sam's gifts. He "wrote like an angel," former Progressive Editor Morris Rubin once said.

The U.S. government issued an unprecedented prior restraint order against The Progressive, forcing the magazine to keep the story under wraps for six months. But eventually the government folded, and the magazine published the article in November 1979.

Less than a year later, Sam left The Progressive.

"The ending of the H-bomb case left me with a sense of unfulfillment with...