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Thomas O'Toole

Thomas O'Toole was a science reporter and editor at The Washington Post from 1966 to 1987. His main subject was the space program, in particular the Apollo program to land men on the moon. He extensively covered Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program, the Grand Tour probes to Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, and the space shuttle program. O'Toole wrote many articles on energy, including the burgeoning nuclear power industry in America. He also covered significant espionage and crime stories, including Watergate and the hunt for Nazi figures hiding in America and elsewhere after World War 2.

Early Life and Career O'Toole was born in 1931 in Jersey City and he attended high school and college at St. Peter's Prep (Hoboken) and St. Peter's College (Jersey City). After doing military service in France, he got his graduate journalism degree from Boston University and then worked at the Cape Cod Standard Times in Hyannis, reporting on the Andrea Doria ocean liner sinking of 1956. O'Toole returned to New York City, finding work with the Wall St. Journal (1957-61), TIME magazine, and The New York Times (1965-66). He was a partner in the 1962 aerospace and culture magazine USA-1, which published five issues before folding. He married Vitaline O'Connell, of Hartford, in 1957 and they had four children.

Washington Post In the summer of 1966, Howard Simons and Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post hired Tom O'Toole as The Post expanded in many directions. He immediately began covering the Lunar Orbiter program out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. From there, his work covered every imaginable aspect of the space program. His articles were frequently featured on the front page of the paper, including the Sunday, July 21, 1969 edition, headlined: The Eagle Has Landed, Two Men Walk on the Moon, a news image that remains iconic. O'Toole was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and he was awarded the National Space Club Press Award in 1970. In his twenty years at The Post, O'Toole wrote several thousand news articles and was the Science Editor for many years.

Encounters With the Future Around 1980, O'Toole was invited to work with Marvin Cetron on Cetron's first book about the future, titled Encounters with the Future. Cetron's sweeping predictions, largely gained from his insider position at the Navy Advanced Research Laboratory, were put into context and prose by O'Toole, who brought his own working knowledge of science to the project. The book was published by McGraw-Hill in 1982 but was overshadowed by John Naisbitt's best-selling Megatrends, published almost simultaneously, which benefited from huge publicity by Warner Books. Cetron and O'Toole were both contributors to OMNI magazine, which collected some of the best science news and writing of the time.

Later career O'Toole continued to cover space and energy, among other subjects, for The Washington Post. He visited Three Mile Island during the 1979 crisis at the Pennsylvania nuclear facility. He detailed the space shuttle program from its infancy, although he was in Pasadena covering Voyager's encounter with Uranus when the shuttle Challenger blew up in January of 1986. O'Toole's failure to quickly report the cause of the shuttle explosion was the reason given when The Post dismissed him some months later, saying his leads within NASA were no longer assets.

O'Toole worked for several years at public relations firm Powell-Tate in Washington. He was also an early editor and contributor to space.com. He married a second time, to Mary-Kate Cranston of Washington. They had one child. Tom O'Toole died in 2003 from complications from diabetes.

Citations, bibliography etc. 1. Wall St. Journal, February 21, 1958. Soviets Challenge US Metallurgy Lead. 2. New York Times, February 16, 1966. Laser Beam Used to remove Tumor. 1. Orbiter Fails to Find Star, Locks on Moon. Washington Post, August 12, 1966. 2. Encounters with the Future (McGraw-Hill 1982). Marvin Cetron and Thomas O'Toole 3. Mystery Heavenly Body Discovered. December, 1983 Post article often cited by conspiracy theorists as proof of PlanetX. Article remains high on WaPo archives search list. 4. OMNI magazine, December 1984. NASA's Master Plan. 4. Space Disaster Probe Opens. WaP. Jan 30, 1986.