Alan Reid (journalist)

Alan Douglas Joseph Reid (19 December 1914 – 1 September 1987), nicknamed the Red Fox, was an Australian political journalist, who worked in the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery from 1937 to 1985. He is noted for his role in the Australian Labor Party split of 1955 and his coinage of the term "36 faceless men" to describe the members of the Australian Labor Party's Federal Conference.

Reid was born on 19 December 1914 in Liverpool, England, and grew up in poverty. At the age of 11, his father, a New Zealand-born sea captain, had an accident that ended his career, and emigrated with Reid to Australia; they lived in the Sydney suburb of Paddington. After leaving school, he did several odd jobs in the outback regions of New South Wales and Queensland, until he was hired as a copy boy for The Sun, Sydney's afternoon newspaper, by Robert Clyde Packer.

Reid became interested in politics after being inspired by the speeches of the state Labor Party leader Jack Lang. In 1937, he was posted to Canberra as a political reporter for The Sydney Sun. After initially being unimpressed with prime minister John Curtin, in private calling him "a namby-pamby", he commented favourably on Curtin's decisiveness after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and developed a close relationship with both Curtin and the Labor prime minister Ben Chifley. In 1949 Robert Menzies, the founder of the Liberal Party of Australia, became prime minister in a coalition with the Country Party. Reid initially resented his efforts to limit media access to sensitive information, and in 1954 he published an article claiming that the announcement of the Petrov Affair was orchestrated to coincide with Labor leader H. V. Evatt's absence from Canberra. In September 1954, Reid published an exposé in The Sydney Sun of B. A. Santamaria, writing,

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