William Boyd Dickinson

William Boyd Dickinson, Jr. (born May 18, 1908 Kansas City, Missouri; died September 12, 1978, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was United States war correspondent for United Press International during World War II. He was born into a family with a tradition of writing and public service. His father, William B. Dickinson, Sr. was an attorney and his mother, Alice Hillman Dickinson, in 1927 became the first woman elected to a school board in the state of Missouri. His uncle was the noted Pittsburgh physician and medical author Breese M. Dickinson and another uncle, Cedric Dickinson, was a Canadian journalist.

Dickinson began his journalistic career as a reporter at the Kansas City Star after graduation from the University of Kansas in 1929. In 1930 he joined UPI in Kansas City. He was sent to London in 1940 to cover the blitz and remained there as news editor until early 1944 when he was assigned to the Southwest Pacific. He reported from Australia, the Pacific Islands and Japan until 1946.

Dickinson was the first to report many wartime events and the only reporter to land on Leyte from the same landing barge as Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He flew with MacArthur from Okinawa to Tokyo to witness the surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri in 1945.

From 1949, he was successively news editor, managing editor and executive editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin until his retirement in 1973, by which time the newspaper had reached the then highest circulation in its history. Under his editorial management the newspaper won Pulitzer Prizes in 1964 and 1965. Dickinson was well known for his opposition to attempts by courts to limit reporting of pretrial news. In 1963 he risked a contempt sentence and jail for refusing to divulge a reporter's news sources.

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