Los Angeles Times Veteran Jack Nelson Dead at 80
Longtime Washington Bureau Chief Received Pulitzer Prize for Work
Oct 22, 2009
Jack Nelson, a longtime Washington-based newspaperman who headed the Los Angeles Times bureau there for many years, died October 21, 2009 at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, from pancreatic cancer. Nelson, who was 80, also was widely known from his regular appearances as a panelist on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) program “Washington Week in Review.”
“While he would eventually become best-known for writing on Washington politics, the self-educated, Southern born-and-bred journalist first attracted attention in the early 1960s for his Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative work at the Atlanta Constitution,” Jonathan Martin wrote in the October 21, 2009 Politico in “Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Nelson dies. Among those who noticed Nelson were editors at the Los Angeles Times, which had no presence in the South as the civil rights movement was taking off, and its publisher, Otis Chandler, who wanted to begin competing with The New York Times.”
The Alabama native first worked at the Biloxi Daily Herald in Mississippi before going later to The Atlanta Constitution in the early 1950s. It was there in 1960 that he received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the dire conditions at a Georgia state mental institution.
Nelson opened Atlanta Bureau of the Los Angeles Times and Later Became Senior Bureau Chief
In 1965, Nelson joined the Los Angeles Times as an investigative reporter at its new Atlanta bureau. He devoted his attention to civil rights and eventually became the senior bureau chief.
As Elaine Woo noted in the October 22, 2009 Los Angeles Times obituary in “Jack Nelson dies at 80; Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter helped raise L.A. Times to national prominence”: “Nelson went on to break major stories on the civil rights movement for The Times, particularly in his coverage of the shooting of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo and the slaying of three black students in South Carolina in what is known as the Orangeburg Massacre."
While covering civil rights his background and appearance may have helped spare him from some of the physical assaults other reporters faced at the time. “That was perhaps because of his Southern accent, crew-cut hair and his habit of dressing in a business suit,” Patricia Sullivan wrote in the Washington Post of October 22, 2009 in “L.A. Times reporter was driven by his conscience.”
George Wallace and J. Edgar Hoover Among Strongest Critics of Nelson’s Reporting
Among the public officials highly critical of stories Nelson wrote were Alabama Gov. George Wallace and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who tried to have him fired and once termed Nelson “next to a skunk.”
In 1970, the Los Angeles Times sent Nelson to its Washington bureau. He uncovered activities of the Ku Klux Klan and FBI agents assigned to investigate the group. He later was able to use his law enforcement contacts during Watergate to interview Alfred Baldwin, a former FBI agent hired by the Nixon reelection campaign who had maintained wiretap records from that period and served as a lookout during the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in June 1972.
“His first-person account of the operation, told to Mr. Nelson and naming names, was an early breakthrough in the unraveling of the scandal,” Dennis Hevesi wrote in “Jack Nelson, Journalist, Dies at 80,” in the October 21, 2009 New York Times.
Nelson became the L.A. Times’ bureau chief in 1975 and remained in that position until late 1995. He continued as chief Washington correspondent until his 2001 retirement from the newspaper. While he primarily reported for the paper, on occasion he would write commentaries.
In 1970, Nelson helped co-found the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press as a conduit for information on the operation of the press and to provide legal assistance to reporters.
Nelson Became Party to Pending Class-Action Suit Against Tribune Owner Sam Zell
“He maintained that the main thing people want from newspapers is facts—facts they didn’t know before, and preferably facts that somebody didn’t want them to know,” Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, said of Nelson to the Associated Press. It was McManus, then the paper’s White House correspondent, who succeeded him in 1996 as Washington bureau chief.
In her Times obituary, Woo noted: “In a town consumed by politics, Nelson was a well-connected insider who held a coveted seat as a regular commentator on public television's 'Washington Week in Review.' He brought presidents, senators and members of the House and Cabinet to The Times’ offices for regular breakfast sessions with reporters that were broadcast on C-SPAN.”
“In 2008, seven years after he retired, Mr. Nelson joined a high-profile class-action federal lawsuit against Chicago billionaire real-estate speculator Sam Zell,” Sullivan wrote in the Washington Post obituary. “In 2007, Zell took control of the Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles paper, in a controversial deal that has mired the company in more than $13 billion of debt. Mr. Nelson and other Times alumni accused Zell of breaches of fiduciary duty, conflicts of interest and other violations of ERISA, the law that safeguards the proper handling of such retirement benefits as pensions and trusts. Zell called the charges frivolous and unfounded; the case is still pending.”
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