THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Peggy Simpson

“I started a beat on the women’s political movement.”

Peggy Simpson reported 17 years for the Associated Press starting in 1962 in Dallas, where she covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, including being an eyewitness in the Dallas jail to the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. She transferred to the Washington AP bureau in 1968, covering Congress, and invented an AP beat on the emerging women’s political movement. In 1975, Simpson covered the United Nations Conference on Women in Mexico City. She was a plaintiff in the gender and racial discrimination lawsuit against the AP. She won a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and left the AP in 1979 to cover national politics for the Boston Herald and, later, national economic issues for Hearst Newspapers for five years. She opened a Washington bureau for Ms. Magazine to cover politics and economics. In 1990, she moved to Indiana University as an adjunct professor and then as a journalist in residence. As a freelancer during the 1990s, she reported on Eastern Europe’s transition from communism to a Democratic market economy.  Founded Dupont Circle Village. National board of the Village to Village Network. 

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, July 2021

Photo 1. Peggy part of the press corps at the Dallas jail after the John F. Kennedy assassination,1963. Photo 2. Left to right, Peggy Simpson, Shirley Christian, Janice Goodman, Justice Ginsburg, Ginny Sherlock, Maureen Connolly, and Rachelle Cohen, October 2019.