Over the course of a long career he rose through the ranks to become, among other things, a White House correspondent, publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and national editor and Washington D.C. bureau chief for Hearst Newspapers.

He also worked as John F. Kennedy's press secretary in the late 1950s, quitting just prior to the then-Senator's presidential campaign.

Fresh out of high school, he joined the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor and was stationed in the South Pacific until the end of the war.

He once came under fire when a Japanese Mitsubishi G4M attacked Canton Island where his crew had stopped to refuel on their way to Guadalcanal and watched from a short distance as a direct hit completely destroyed his PBY-5A.

The two would form a friendship months later during the McClellan Committee hearings into labor racketeering, on which Kennedy served as counsel and which Thompson covered for INS.

In 1962 he joined the Los Angeles Times and that same year, only days before the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he published the first biography ever written about the President's brother, the budding United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, entitled Robert F. Kennedy: The Brother Within.

[3] Thompson did not to travel to Dallas with President Kennedy and the White House press corps in late November 1963, but when news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy broke, he left Washington almost immediately on a special plane chartered specifically for members of the press, where he met up with Miami Herald reporter and fellow Indiana University alumnus Gene Miller.

Bob Thompson spent the next two days mostly inside Dallas Police Headquarters gathering information and interviewing people such as the Dallas Chief of Police Jesse Curry, the President's suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and even Oswald's mother and wife.

[4] As Miller had predicted, though wrongly about where, Jack Ruby stepped out in front of the reporters gathered around Oswald and fatally shot him.

[5] He served as bureau chief through the end of the Johnson administration, during the height of the Vietnam War as the Capital convulsed in turmoil from protests and anger.

In 1978 he moved the family back to Washington, D.C. and reclaimed his former position as bureau chief for Hearst, which he held until 1989.

One day following a seating chart, President Ronald Reagan called upon Thompson at a White House press conference.

Without missing a beat when he heard his name, Thompson dutifully stood and raised his glass toward Reagan's TV image in salute.

In many instances he would find similarities between current issues and past events, and explore the cause and effect relationship between them.