After his discharge, he applied for a job at The Times and was hired largely on the basis of an essay he submitted outlining his hopes for a journalistic career. After a year of administrative work, he wrote radio news bulletins for WQXR, The Times’ AM and FM stations, then covered police and general assignments.
His marriage to Kathleen Conniff in 1960 ended in divorce in the early 1990s. He married Mrs. Mitchell, when she was the City Hall headquarters for The Times, and the two met when she was the Moscow bureau chief for Newsday.
Besides Mrs. Mitchell, he leaves behind his first wife; four children from his first marriage, John, Kevin, Michael and Laura Clines; and a sister, Eileen Lawrence. Another sister† Peggy Meehan Simon, passed away.
There are many ways to reduce pomposity, which is one of the reasons why Mr. Clines liked to deal with the state legislature in Albany. As well as thumping new laws and proposed taxes, he dissected the mores of less-familiar lawmakers with a Celtic sense of the absurd: their exaggerated rhetoric about public service, their crude eating habits during debates, their losing bouts with the native language — all were honest. game and duly reported.
“I think he was the greatest newspaper writer of our time,” Charles Kaiser, a former Times reporter, said in a recent email. “Its success said more about the paper’s dedication to beautiful writing than anything else could.”
Mr. Clines once wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine about Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, which was perhaps a kind of self-disclosure, saying, “He fights to keep things basic, to remind himself of the simple wisdom of Finn MacCool, Ireland’s mythical national hero, that the best music in the world is the music of what happens.In his “Elegy,” dedicated to Lowell, Heaney reminded himself:
‘The way we live,
Timorous or daring,
Must have been our life.’”