James Robinson Shepley (August 16, 1917 – November 2, 1988) was an American journalist and businessman who was president of Time Inc. from 1969 to 1980 and was CEO of The Washington Star from 1978 until the paper was shut down in 1981.
[1][8] Following his time in Pittsburgh, he got a job working for United Press Associations, first covering the Pennsylvania General Assembly in Harrisburg from 1937 to 1940.
[1] In January 1944 he and several other reporters went to Deogarh, Madhya Pradesh, to meet with Brigadier General Frank Merrill, who was showcasing a new U.S. Army long-range penetration special operations jungle warfare unit that had been training in India.
[10] The prominence of his position, his wartime reporting, and his past association with Marshall, all combined to give Shepley unusual access to the U.S. defense and diplomatic establishments.
[10] This work then grew into a book that Shepley wrote together with a former submariner who was a reporter on his staff, Clay Blair Jr.[13] The resulting Shepley and Blair work, The Hydrogen Bomb: The Men, The Menace, The Mechanism (1954), provoked considerable controversy at the time with its charges that the U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb had been intentionally delayed by some scientists led by Oppenheimer and that the Los Alamos Laboratory had been infiltrated by Communists.
[7][14] While the book was positively reviewed across a large number of newspapers and magazines at the time of publication,[15] several scientists who had worked at Los Alamos on the bomb's development soon issued statements refuting its narrative.
[16] Interviews conducted during the mid-to-late-1950s (but not published until many decades later) showed almost no scientists speaking well of the book, even those (including physicist Edward Teller) portrayed favorably within it.
[17] Subsequent scholarship has established that the Shepley and Blair account was largely inaccurate,[18][19] and moreover, that it was guided by stark H-bomb proponent, and Oppenheimer antagonist, Lewis Strauss.
[20][21] In 1956, Shepley interviewed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles for Life magazine,[22] and Dulles told him that during the Eisenhower administration the United States had on three occasions been on the "brink" of war "and looked it in the face"[2] (the instances were in Korea during the armistice talks in June 1953, Indochina in April 1954, and the Formosa Straits in late 1954–early 1955).
[1][23] Shepley left the Washington bureau chief position in 1957 to run Time's North American news service.
[25] She had three daughters, from a previous marriage to World War II fighter ace Elbert Scott McCuskey,[26] whom the Shepleys raised together under his last name.
[29] One of Shepley's assignments during the summer of 1960 was to negotiate with the U.S. State Department to request alternative funding for Tom Mboya's plan to send Kenyan students to American universities.
[30] Shepley obtained a commitment, but those running the program followed their original plan of accepting money from the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation instead.
[32] Well-known Time-Life political correspondent Hugh Sidey said that "Shepley was a great boss – tough, curt, no-nonsense but absolutely loyal.
"[7] During his time as president, Shepley worked closely with chairman of the board Andrew Heiskell and editor-in-chief Hedley Donovan.
[2] Shepley publicly proclaimed what he saw as the potential of HBO back when it was first a small regional service in Wilkes-Barre and a couple of similar towns in eastern Pennsylvania, saying in early 1973, "Time Inc. has long been intrigued with this method of communication.
[1] Despite the paper's labor unions agreeing to work concessions that Shepley demanded, the acquisition failed, as the Star lost a further $85 million before the board shut it down in 1981.