Fox Butterfield

Who is Fox Butterfield?

Fox Butterfield is an American journalist who spent much of his 30-year career 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 won a 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction for China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. He also wrote All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence about the child criminal Willie Bosket.

In 1990, Butterfield wrote an article on the election of the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, future president of the United States Barack Obama.

Butterfield is the eponym for "The Butterfield Effect", used to refer to a person who "makes a statement that is ludicrous on its face, yet it reveals what the speaker truly believes," especially if expressing a supposed paradox when a causal relationship should be obvious. The particular article that sparked this was titled "More Inmates, Despite Drop In Crime" by Butterfield in the New York Times on Nov. 8, 2004.