Worthington, Peter, 1927- : Peter Worthington was born 16 February 1927 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the son of Major-General Frederic Frank Worthington and Clara Ellen Dignum. He enlisted in the Canadian Navy at the age of 17 and served in the Fleet Air Arm as a Telegraphist Air Gunner, flying in Swordfish aircraft. After the war, he attended the University of British Columbia where he was light heavyweight boxing champion for three years, but left to travel Europe without completing his studies. He worked in northern British Columbia, logging and surveying, before joining the Canadian Army on the outbreak of the Korean War. As a lieutenant in the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, he served in Korea as a platoon commander and battalion intelligence officer. He ended the war attached to the United States Air Force, marking ground targets for air attacks. Worthington left the army in 1954 and returned to UBC, where he wrote a sports column for the student newspaper and completed his Bachelor of Arts. After graduation, he worked for the Vancouver Province for a time and then went to Carleton University for his Bachelor of Journalism degree, winning two medals in journalism.
Worthington joined the Toronto Telegram in 1956 and for the next fifteen years covered the world's wars and crises as a roving foreign correspondent. He covered the Suez Crisis; the revolution in Iraq; the independence of Cyprus and the Turkish invasion; the Algerian war of independence from France; the liberation of the Congo and civil war; the Chinese invasion of India; the Indonesian invasion of Dutch New Guinea; the Vietnam war; the war between India and Pakistan; the Czechoslovakia crisis; the Biafra-Nigeria war; and other crises around the world. He also covered the Kennedy assassinations and trials and was the only Canadian journalist present when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Worthington opened the first Canadian newspaper bureau in Moscow for the Telegram in 1965. He returned to Toronto after assisting his interpreter, Olga Pharmakovsky, to defect in late 1966.
When Toronto Telegram owner John Bassett folded the paper in 1971 in response to a labour dispute, Worthington joined with Douglas Creighton and Don Hunt to found the Toronto Sun, a tabloid with a populist and conservative editorial policy. With Creighton as publisher, Worthington took the reins as editor-in-chief of the new tabloid, bringing several former Telegram staffers to the Sun. Pursuing a right-wing course, the Trudeau government charged him unsuccessfully with violating the Official Secrets Act in 1977 for publishing government documents. Worthington resigned as editor-in-chief and vice president of the Sun in 1984 over the Board of Directors' decision to sell the newspaper to Maclean-Hunter. He ran for election as a Member of Parliament in the Toronto riding of Broadview-Greenwood in 1982 and 1984, first as an independent and then as a Progressive Conservative, but was defeated both times by NDP candidate Lynn McDonald.
Worthington remained active in journalism doing freelance work after his departure from the Sun. He wrote columns for the Financial Post and Calgary Herald, wrote a best-selling memoir, Looking for Trouble, broadcast radio commentaries on CBC and CHFI, and wrote for Reader's Digest and various American publications. The Sun brought him back in 1988 as a columnist and the first editor of the Ottawa Sun, with the title "Founding Editor". A focus of his columns since 1990 has been the Canadian military and its operations in the Balkans, Somalia, and Afghanistan. His book Scapegoat, co-authored with Private Kyle Brown, tells the story of the beating death of a Somali prisoner in the hands of the Canadian Airborne Regiment and Brown's ensuing trial, arguing that he was a scapegoat for the murder. He has also written extensively on convicted serial killer Clifford Olson, including an unpublished but completed book manuscript. He has won four National Newspaper Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and was inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame in 1996.
Peter Worthington married in 1957 to Helen Parmelee, a fellow reporter at the Toronto Telegram. They had one son, Casey Vickers Worthington, born in 1964, but divorced in 1967. He married another fellow reporter at the Tely, Yvonne Crittenden, in 1970. She had two children, Guy and Danielle, from a previous marriage. Danielle Crittenden is also a journalist and is married to journalist and author David Frum.
