A foreign correspondent with the Toronto Telegram newspaper from 1956, Worthington was an eyewitness to the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, and can be seen in photographs of the event.
Worthington left the university before completing his degree and joined Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry as a Lieutenant in 1950.
[6] In the Korean War he was a platoon commander, then battalion intelligence officer in the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) in Korea, and ended the war with the U.S. Air Force, 6147 Mosquito Squadron, directing air strikes at enemy targets.
From that beginning, he would go on to interview King Hussein of Jordan in 1958, Thomas Anthony Dooley III in 1959, and Albert Schweitzer in 1960.
On assignment for the Telegram, Worthington was in Dallas on November 25, 1963, where he was an eyewitness to the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald.
He succeeded in becoming the official Progressive Conservative nominee for the riding in the 1984 general election, but was again defeated by McDonald.
Son-in-law and political analyst David Frum credits Worthington's 1982 nomination battle and his subsequent battle with the Tory leadership as "set[ting] in motion the train of events that brought down Conservative Party leader Joe Clark and opened the way for Brian Mulroney to win the landslide Conservative victory of 1984.
In the mid-1980s, he collaborated with Craig Williamson, a former South African Police officer responsible for bombing anti-apartheid activists, to produce a propaganda film The ANC method - violence which was distributed by the far-right group Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform throughout Canada in 1988.
[6] Worthington was accused by the Ottawa Citizen of being an informant for the American Federal Bureau of Investigation about the suspected political sympathies of a number of his friends, including June Callwood.
[11][12] Worthington filed a complaint against the Ottawa Citizen with the Ontario Press Council and won an apology for its error.