Jack Nelson descending the steps of the Georgia Capitol circa 1960, the same year he won a Pulitzer.
Nelson with Paul Duke (center), of Washington Week in Review, and Charlie McDowell, like Jack, a regular on the show.
Nelson in China, on a trip with Ronald Reagan in 1984.
*Photos courtesy of Barbara Matusow
***
Do I have a scoop for you.
The memoirs of tenacious investigative reporter and Washington correspondent, Jack Nelson, who died in 2009 from pancreatic cancer are recounted in an enlightening book released in December , 2012: ``Scoop: The Evolution of a Southern Reporter,’’ published by University Press of Mississippi.
Mr. Nelson’s memoirs, which chronicles his reporting, beginning as a cub reporter in Biloxi, Mississippi, to earning a Pulitzer Prize at the Atlanta Constitution, to his aggressive and insightful reporting for The Los Angeles Times, covering civil rights to butting heads with the corrupt FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover- has met with a number of flattering reviews, including from investigative journalist and best-selling author Bob Woodward, describing it as ``a terrific memoir by one of American's toughest and greatest reporters."
Nelson died two years before his memoirs were completed; so his wife, Barbara Matusow, a veteran writer and television producer, and a contributing editor with Washingtonian magazine decided to conduct some of her own research to fill in the missing pieces and publish the book posthumously.
Nelson was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for a series of articles which exposed the unspeakable practices at a mental hospital in Milledgeville, Ga., which, among other shocking revelations, documented the use of experimental drugs on patients without their permission and surgeries performed by nurses when doctors were absent.
Two notable civil rights stories covered by Nelson included reporting on civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old white woman from Detroit who was shot and killed by Klan members after the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama; as well as chronicling three South Carolina State College students (all black) who were killed on Feb. 8, 1968, after state troopers opened fire on protesters upset about a segregated local bowling alley in what became infamously known as the Orangeburg Massacre.
Though Woodward and Carl Bernstein were largely responsible for uncovering the Watergate scandal, Nelson landed a scoop of his own in the midst of the highly publicized affair.
In his exclusive interview on June 17, 1972 with an F.B.I. agent who had been working for President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign, Alfred Baldwin admitted to Nelson he had installed listening devices at a Howard Johnson hotel across from the Watergate weeks before the celebrated break-in.
Nelson skillfully elicited specific names from Baldwin and it soon became a crucial first-person account of the operation in helping authorities unravel the scandal.
One of the more spicier slices of Nelson’s memoir is arguably his ongoing war with the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As reported by The Los Angeles Times, Hoover was convinced that Nelson was preparing to report that the FBI director was a homosexual. Hoover labeled the Times’ star reporter a drunk, tried to get him fired, another time attempted unsuccessfully to kill a page one story of Nelson’s and even went so far as to put him on the bureau's list of "untouchables," , that is, reporters who were to receive no cooperation.
The Talladega, Alabama native who began reporting for the L. A. Times in 1964, was named its Washington Bureau Chief in 1975, and remained in that position through 1995. He continued at the bureau as its chief Washington correspondent until his retirement in 2001. As a ringing endorsement of his brilliant journalism career, many credit Nelson with having catapulted the Times into national prominence as one of the most influential dailies in the country.
Away from the newsroom, he was for many years a fixture on the ``Washington Week in Review” on PBS.
In addition to being awarded a Pulitzer, Nelson was the recipient of the Drew Pearson Award for Investigative Reporting in 1975 and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999.
-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
February 10, 2013
