Robert Sherrill, a provocative journalist and author who rose to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s for his sharp assessments of gun culture, military justice, Lyndon B. Johnson and other complicated topics, died on Tuesday in Tallahassee, Fla. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Celia Dugger.
Mr. Sherrill was not much for measured persuasion or gentle phrasing, and while his positions usually leaned left — particularly in articles he wrote for The Nation, where he was a correspondent for many years — he pointed his skewer all around. The titles of some of his books convey his approach.
In 1967, he published “The Accidental President,” a critical portrait of Johnson. “Military Justice Is to Justice as Military Music Is to Music” was published in 1970. Three years later came “The Saturday Night Special: And Other Guns With Which Americans Won the West, Protected Bootleg Franchises, Slew Wildlife, Robbed Countless Banks, Shot Husbands Purposely and by Mistake, and Killed Presidents — Together With the Debate Over Continuing Same.”
In “The Saturday Night Special,” Mr. Sherrill argued for strengthening gun laws but also said that many victims of gun crimes were the “refuse” of “trashy” American society. He had little patience with gun-control advocates, many of whom he said “clobbered the senses with distorted statistics hysterically interpreted,” or with hunters, whom he described as “a swinish lot.”
Reviewing the book in The New York Times in 1973, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said Mr. Sherrill “generalizes with almost malicious abandon.” But he nonetheless praised the book as “an emetic, an enema, a bloodletting (without bullets)” that “cleanses one of illusions, clears the air and seems to make room for new beginnings.”
In addition to writing books, Mr. Sherrill wrote for The Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, Penthouse, Playboy, Esquire and other publications. He wrote more than two dozen articles for The New York Times Magazine, including a long one in 1974 about Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s behavior surrounding the night he drove a car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts, an accident that killed his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. That article led to a highly praised book on the subject, “The Last Kennedy.”
Mr. Sherrill did most of his writing for The Nation, where his titles included White House correspondent, Washington correspondent and corporations correspondent. He left the magazine in 1982, several years after the death of one of its most noted editors, Carey McWilliams.
“Victor Navasky is a New York liberal,” Mr. Sherrill said in a 1984 interview with Atlanta Weekly, speaking of The Nation’s editor at the time. “I just don’t see eye to eye with most New York liberals. McWilliams was a Western radical — he grew up on a cattle ranch in Colorado — and he was my kind of guy.”
Robert Glenn Sherrill was born on Dec. 24, 1924, in Frogtown, Ga., and moved frequently as a child. His father, Henry, was a newspaper reporter who held a string of jobs and taught his son how to catch moving freight trains during the Depression. His mother, the former Susan Olive McGinley, was later an administrator at Pepperdine University in California, where Mr. Sherrill received a bachelor’s degree after serving as a merchant mariner.
He later earned master’s degrees in English, from the University of Texas in 1956, and in library science, from the University of Minnesota in 1960. He juggled his studies with jobs teaching English and working as a reporter and editor at papers in Arizona, California, Texas and Tennessee. In the 1960s, he worked at The Texas Observer and The Miami Herald. He joined The Nation in 1965.
In addition to Ms. Dugger, an editor at The Times, his survivors include his wife, Jean; a stepson, Gary Dugger; and six step-grandchildren. His first wife, Mary, who helped him research many of his books, died in the early 1990s.
Mr. Sherrill ruffled feathers of various colors. In 1982, gays criticized him when he wrote a review in The New Republic of the book “God’s Bullies,” by Perry Deane Young, in which he called Mr. Young “queer.” He explained later that he did not like that the word “gay” had come to mean homosexual instead of happy. Years earlier, he was pleased to be on President Richard M. Nixon’s so-called enemies list.
He was denied a White House press pass for several years while working for The Nation. The American Civil Liberties Union went to court on his behalf and won.
“The fun thing about this was that when I was finally going to get a press pass, I never applied,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “I didn’t want to be in the White House. I had been in Washington long enough to realize that was the last place to waste your time sitting around.”
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