Fox Butterfield
Encyclopedia
Fox Butterfield is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 journalist who spent much of his 30-year career reporting for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

.

Butterfield served as Times bureau chief in Saigon, Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...

, Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...

, Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...

, and Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

 and as a correspondent in Washington
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 and New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

. During that time, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...

 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) about the child criminal Willie Bosket
Willie Bosket
Willie James Bosket is a convicted murderer, whose crimes, committed while he was still a minor, led to a change in New York state law, so that juveniles as young as 13 could be tried as an adult for murder and would face the same penalties...

.

In 1990, he wrote an article on the election of the first African-American for the Harvard Law Review
Harvard Law Review
The Harvard Law Review is a journal of legal scholarship published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School.-Overview:According to the 2008 Journal Citation Reports, the Review is the most cited law review and has the second-highest impact factor in the category "law" after the...

, future president of the United States Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

.

Personal

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.
Williamsburg, Virginia
Williamsburg is an independent city located on the Virginia Peninsula in the Hampton Roads metropolitan area of Virginia, USA. As of the 2010 Census, the city had an estimated population of 14,068. It is bordered by James City County and York County, and is an independent city...

 The Canadian industrialist Cyrus S. Eaton
Cyrus S. Eaton
Cyrus Stephen Eaton was a Canadian-born investment banker, businessman and philanthropist in the United States, with a career that spanned seventy years....

 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
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

.

In 1988, Butterfield married Elizabeth Mehren, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times. He has two children, Ethan and Sarah, from a previous marriage and a son, Sam, with Mehren. Michael Moriarty
Michael Moriarty
Michael Moriarty is an American-Canadian actor of stage and screen, and a jazz musician. He played Benjamin Stone for four seasons on the TV series Law & Order.-Early life:...

 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
Pamela Reed
Pamela Reed is an American actress. She is known for playing Ruth Powers in various episodes of TV's The Simpsons, as Arnold Schwarzenegger's hypoglycemic partner in the 1990 movie Kindergarten Cop and as the matriarch Gail Green in Jericho...

. The couple live in Hingham, Massachusetts
Hingham, Massachusetts
Hingham is a town in northern Plymouth County on the South Shore of the U.S. state of Massachusetts and suburb in Greater Boston. The United States Census Bureau 2008 estimated population was 22,561...

, about which Butterfield has sometimes written in The Times.

Criticism

Butterfield has been criticized for writing a sequence of articles 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.
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