James R. Shepley

James Robinson Shepley (August 16, 1917 – November 2, 1988) was an American journalist and businessman who was president of Time Inc. from 1969 to 1980 and was CEO of The Washington Star from 1978 until the paper was shut down in 1981. He attended Camp Hill High School in the Harrisburg area, from where he was graduated in 1935.

Shepley also reported from the South West Pacific theatre of World War II, The prominence of his position, his wartime reporting, and his past association with Marshall, all combined to give Shepley unusual access to the U.S. defense and diplomatic establishments. Several Time-Life publications were involved in this and Shepley's role in orchestrating the anti-Oppenheimer effort was seen with dismay by at least one former Time Inc. executive. The resulting Shepley and Blair work, The Hydrogen Bomb: The Men, The Menace, The Mechanism (1954), provoked considerable controversy at the time with its charges that the U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb had been intentionally delayed by some scientists led by Oppenheimer and that the Los Alamos Laboratory had been infiltrated by Communists. While the book was positively reviewed across a large number of newspapers and magazines at the time of publication, several scientists who had worked at Los Alamos on the bomb's development soon issued statements refuting its narrative. Interviews conducted during the mid-to-late-1950s (but not published until many decades later) showed almost no scientists speaking well of the book, even those (including physicist Edward Teller) portrayed favorably within it. Subsequent scholarship has established that the Shepley and Blair account was largely inaccurate, and moreover, that it was guided by stark H-bomb proponent, and Oppenheimer antagonist, Lewis Strauss.

In 1956, Shepley interviewed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles for Life magazine, and Dulles told him that during the Eisenhower administration the United States had on three occasions been on the "brink" of war "and looked it in the face"

Shepley left the Washington bureau chief position in 1957 to run Times North American news service. They subsequently married. She had three daughters, from a previous marriage to World War II fighter ace Elbert Scott McCuskey, whom the Shepleys raised together under his last name. The couple also had a daughter of their own.

As the 1960 United States presidential election got underway, Shepley took a leave of absence in 1959 to act as an advisor to the campaign of Vice President Richard M. Nixon, One of Shepley's assignments during the summer of 1960 was to negotiate with the U.S. State Department to request alternative funding for Tom Mboya's plan to send Kenyan students to American universities. Shepley obtained a commitment, but those running the program followed their original plan of accepting money from the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation instead.

Publishing executive Following Nixon's defeat, Shepley returned to Time Inc., but this time to the business side of the publishing enterprise. which he was by 1967.

As an executive, he was known as "Brass Knuckles Shepley" for his blunt and aggressive management style. Well-known Time-Life political correspondent Hugh Sidey said that "Shepley was a great boss – tough, curt, no-nonsense but absolutely loyal. He put his faith in reporters and let them go." Time Inc. subsequently bought American Television and Communications in 1977, Shepley's successor as Time Inc. president, J. Richard Munro, has said, "Without any doubt, Jim was the father of HBO. He nurtured it and believed in it. The same was true in cable television, with American Television and Communications." serving as chair of the board's executive committee, until he retired in 1982.

Awards and honors Shepley received an honorary degree from, and gave a commencement address at, Dickinson College in 1959. He received an honorary degree from Clarkson College of Technology in 1966. And he received an honorary degree, and gave a commencement address, at the University of Florida in 1978.

In 1967, Shepley served as national chair for Dickinson College's fund-raising challenge program in association with the Ford Foundation.

The James R. Shepley HBO Communications Center in Hauppauge, New York, is where HBO program signals are sent up to a communications satellite.