Robert H. Phelps of Lincoln, MA, at 97, on May 10, 2017. Mr. Phelps was a retired newspaper editor who hobbled around a patch of grass behind his home, trying to raise a few apples, peaches, plums, and blueberries. His wife Elizabeth, who died in 2003, said they would have starved if he had been a farmer. A specialist on political and international news , journalism ethics and libel, Mr. Phelps worked for nearly 20 years at the New York Times, occasionally as a reporter but most of the time as an editor. In 1974, he left the Times Washington bureau, where he had been news editor for nine years, to become assistant managing editor for metropolitan news at the Boston Globe and direct the Globes coverage of Bostons school desegregation, for which the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. He was later promoted to managing editor and eventually was named executive editor. Mr. Phelpss first job was as a reporter on the now-defunct Ambridge (PS) Citizen in 1941. A year later, he became a reporter in the Harrisburg bureau of the United Press, leaving there in 1943 for the Navy, where he was an enlisted combat correspondent on ships in the Pacific theater. His first desk job was as a copyreader at the Providence Journal in 1952. He worked there for two years before joining the New York Times as a copy editor in 1954. Subsequently, he became as assistant national editor and an assistant metropolitan editor and then news editor at the Washington Bureau. On retiring from the Globe in 1985 after an unsuccessful stint at helping to start up an electronic newspaper process called Viewtron, Mr. Phelps spent three years attempting to become a professional actor, with little success. He then joined the Nieman Foundation at Harvard as an editor of its quarterly journalism review, Nieman Reports, a job he held for more than 10 years. Mr. Phelps was co-author, with E. Douglas Hamilton of Libel: Rights, Risks, and Responsibilities, a handbook for journalists. In his early 90s, he wrote and published a deeply personal autobiography that he entitled God and the Editor. He was the editor of Witness to History, the memoir of Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen, the Russian expert who was President Franklin D. Roosevelts interpreter at World War II conferences, and of two volumes of New York Times profiles. Mr. Phelps, the son of Vernon and Ruth (Fox) Phelps, was born on July 19, 1919, in Erie, PA, and attended local schools there. He received a BA from the University of Michigan and a masters from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He and Elizabeth King were married in 1947. Mr. Phelps leaves no children, but he was blessed, he said, by the close company of his nieces and nephews. There will be no funeral services. Burial will be private.