Fox Butterfield (born 1939 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania[1]) is an American journalist who spent much of his 30-year career[2] reporting for The New York Times.
Butterfield served as Times bureau chief in Saigon, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Boston and as a correspondent in Washington and New York. During that time, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize as a member of The New York Times team that published the Pentagon Papers, the Pentagon's secret history of the Vietnam War, in 1971.
Butterfield's books include China: Alive in the Bitter Sea (1982) and All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (1995)[3] about the child criminal Willie Bosket.
In 1990, he wrote an article on the election of the first African-American for the Harvard Law Review, future president of the United States Barack Obama.[4]
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Butterfield is the son of Lyman Henry Butterfield, a historian and a director of the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Va.[5] The Canadian industrialist Cyrus S. Eaton was one of Fox Butterfield's grandfathers.
Butterfield received a bachelor's degree summa cum laude, master's degree, and doctorate of philosophy in Chinese history from Harvard University.
In 1988, Butterfield married Elizabeth Mehren, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times.[5] He has two children, Ethan and Sarah, from a previous marriage and a son, Sam, with Mehren.[6] Michael Moriarty played Fox Butterfield in the 1993 television movie Born Too Soon, based on Mehren's book about their daughter Emily, who was born prematurely in the late 1980s. Mehren was played by Pamela Reed. The couple live in Hingham, Massachusetts, about which Butterfield has sometimes written in The Times.
Butterfield has been criticized for writing a sequence of articles [7] discussing the "paradox" of crime rates falling while the prison population grew due to tougher sentencing guidelines, without weighing the possibility that the tougher sentencing guidelines may have had a deterrent effect on crime, or that sequestering criminals prevented further criminal behavior on their part.