Jack Nelson did loom large in the vision of young and very green Atlanta Constitution reporters. I speak firsthand of that experience from my start there in 1969. Jack was already a legendary figure. He won the “pullet surprise” as his son Stevie told his elementary school teacher. His stories of the tumultuous events around the South for the Los Angeles Times were the talk of our newsroom.

We met in passing at a couple of functions in Atlanta; he never remembered that, but those occasions of course stayed fixed in my memory. Little did I know that our next encounter would be more memorable for him, and me. I had the misfortune to stand between Jack and a trusted source, which is a very dangerous place, and as often such Nelson sources were, his friend. It was one of Griffin Bell’s first days of rather volatile confirmation hearings at the Senate Judiciary Committee in early January 1977 as the President-elect’s Attorney General. I guess I sort of made Jack’s access to Judge Bell that day difficult. Jack, the boxer, had learned well how to thrust his punches. I was a young assistant to the new Attorney General nominee and soon received telephone calls from Bert Lance, the President’s friend and OMB Director-designate and Bob Lipshutz, the President’s Counsel-designate, that they had received calls from Jack complaining about the young whippersnapper doing Bell no favors. Bert told Jack that I was ok and that he had coached me in Little League baseball, and that I had been a reporter at The Constitution. I wasn’t sure what credential helped to carry the day, but Jack Nelson and I soon became close friends on our own. The friendships with him and Barbara and so many around them have only grown over the years, which has blessed me. Jack never had trouble again talking with Bell any time he wanted. Bell and Nelson were not new friends, but they had talked frequently in the sixties about the cases before the old U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that made so many judges “unlikely heros.” It wasn’t that Judge Bell was divulging court secrets, but the two were sharing with each other a perspective of the very momentous events in which both were involved, and influencing. Jack, the reporter of the South about the South, and these Southern federal judges like Bell were critical ingredients in the dynamic that changed the region and America forever.

There are so many elements to Jack’s life that characterization is difficult. As John Fox Sullivan observed recently, Jack was a major figure in the principal events of the last five decades. There are a few things though that I think should bear emphasis. I often saw the fruits and elements of his passionate mentoring of young reporters. His promotion of the even quite veteran reporters within the Los Angeles Times Bureau he headed had no boundaries. One of course, who really did not need promoting, was Ron Ostrow, but if there was any day that Tony Marro, David Ignatius, Chuck Babcock, Nina Totenberg, Fred Graham, or Carl Stern broke a Justice story based on an interview with Bell, I heard from Jack who wanted to know why Ron did not do that interview.

Jack made the Los Angeles Times Bureau one of the most significant in Washington. One infamous device was the famous breakfasts interviewing a major Washington figure. Hubert Humphrey early on complained about the fact there were only bagels, and soon it became a full hot breakfast of eggs, grits and bacon in a special dining room. Jack was relentless in getting guests. Brian Lamb soon spotted the occasions as a good opportunity for C-SPAN, and that made the occasions even more momentous. His friends joked that the most feared words in Washington was Jack’s approaching someone at any social gathering, “Mr. Secretary, you should come have breakfast at the Bureau.” At one social event with the Attorney General and Chief Justice, Jack cajoled Judge Bell to tell Chief Justice Burger, who had not done press events at all, to come have breakfast at the Los Angeles Times Bureau, which he did, and enjoyed.

Jack enjoyed Gridiron and was proud when he was president. He could not understand this year how President Obama, who he loved and thought transformed politics in America, could be so ill-advised to not attend Gridiron. The other major passion was the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, which he co-founded, and served to the end. Jack was genuinely touched when the Committee’s Lucy Dalglish brought him a a large 80th birthday card featuring original cartoons of J. Edgar Hoover in a tutu and other figures from Jack’s life and signed by many from the previous days’ fundraiser, Barbecue with a View.

Jack most especially loved Barbara, and I can’t think of greater evenings that started in the Carter years when groups of Southerners or Southern want-to-bes would gather in the Nelson-Matusow back yard on Van Ness for their famous Memorial Day Barbecue. We all brought our potluck dishes, and Marian Burros, of Connecticut, chose to write up for the Washington Post Food Section Jack Nelson’s Barbecue Chicken (he may have carried the tray Barbara prepared) and Terry Adamson’s Mountain Porkchops. Jack and I probably started glowing from the libations. But Jack’s stimulus was much more basic: he would swell, glow, and smile with pride whenever Barbara and the rest of the Heavenly Chorus would join behind Homer, Georgia’s Phil Gailey and his autoharp (the playing of which was itself seen as a kind of sexual act) in the hymns so familiar to us from most of the churches in our small towns in the South. Jody Powell frequently was reciting the stanzas in the deep gravely voice that played General Stonewall Jackson in Ken Burn’s Civil War series. Barbara, whose voice is angelic, was from Philadelphia, but knew and loved the songs. Those songfests continued long after Carter left office. They were magical evenings always.

Ede and I loved to take trips with the Nelsons. Ede especially remembers all the people who recognized Jack from his Washington Week in Review appearances, coming up to him in restaurants anywhere in the world and saying they knew him. She said he was a rock star. There was the one lady who brought Bill Moyer’s latest book to him to autograph, thinking that Jack was that other Southerner. Jack and I always joked our role was “eatin,’ drinkin, and smilin’ on such occasions.

Jack and I loved to square off on the tennis court and did it frequently for years. His tennis, like his reporting, was relentlessly competitive. As his pace slowed, he developed the junkiest game of deadly slices and lobs ever invented. It was fun earlier this year when he persuaded Dr. Hugh Trout and I to take on his grandson, Casey, a Hollywood stud, while Jack sat on the bench enjoying Hugh’s and my aged struggles to stay with this young athlete.

Jack uplifted those of us intending to uplift him regularly during his final weeks. Jody Powell’s sudden death shocked and saddened him, and one of his last memories was watching on Tuesday night a DVD of Jody’s memorial service in Richmond. He relished President Carter’s wit and humor in that service. Bill Kovach told Jack that he had spoken with Carter after the service and asked the former president why he did not use his humor more as president. Carter replied that many of his aides had wanted him to be more humorous, but he felt that the media would rip him up for it. Jack replied to Kovach that Carter was probably right.

Jack said he had often thought about death and its certainty that lay ahead, and whether a sudden or more prolonged departure would be better. He had some difficult and painful times of course, but he told many of us in those last weeks that he got such a sense of himself from those who visited or called during that final time. He said he recommended that exit strategy for others.

Jack Nelson was a major figure of our times.
I love to listen to others talking about him. I love the impressions he left, the kindnesses, the gruff, the history he made, the integrity, the convictions he showed, the guile of this man born in Talladega, Alabama. I loved him, and I’m so very glad that I had the opportunity to tell him that near the end.

My colleague, Jack Nelson, believed in old-fashioned virtues: Get your facts straight. Check them, and check them again. Don’t be afraid to cross swords with the powerful. Above all, break news whenever you can.

Jack, who died Wednesday at 80, played various roles during his 54-year career. He was a political analyst, a television pundit, a manager who led The Times’ Washington bureau when it had more than 40 journalists. But he described himself first as a reporter, and that was the job he saw as most important to both the newspaper and the public it served.

Whenever one of his reporters asked what he should be working on, Jack usually had the same Delphic answer: “Go out and break some news.” After decades of experience, he usually had a specific story in mind, and sources to share as well. But he didn’t object if a reporter chose a different subject — as long as he or she broke some news.

Jack maintained that the main thing people want from newspapers is facts — facts they didn’t know before, especially facts somebody didn’t want them to know. Jack was tolerant of opinion writers, he respected analysis writers, and he even admired a feature writer or two. But at bottom, he believed the only compelling reason to be a reporter was to reveal hidden facts.

That’s how he first made his name at the Biloxi Daily Herald on Mississippi’s then-untamed Gulf Coast. A cub reporter straight out of high school, he was hired to write about sports; instead, at 19, he began exposing illicit gambling operations. In one story, he reported running into Biloxi’s mayor and chief of police at an Elks lodge full of illegal slot machines; off-the-books gambling was so commonplace at the time that the officials were stunned to find their names in the newspaper.

Breaking news was also how Jack won his Pulitzer Prize at the Atlanta Constitution in 1960, revealing that a Georgia state mental hospital was allowing nurses to perform major surgery on inmates when doctors were absent. And it was how he made a mark when he joined The Times to report on the South. When police opened fire on student protesters at predominantly black Orangeburg (S.C.) State College in 1968, officials said they had fired in self-defense — but Jack persuaded emergency room doctors to show him medical records showing that several of the students had been shot in the back, and some in the soles of their feet.

It was much the same when he moved to the Washington bureau of The Times in 1970, first with his own reporting on the Watergate scandal and abuses of power by the FBI, then by building the bureau into an investigative powerhouse.

Jack grew up poor in the Deep South and was proud of it. I once heard him debate an old friend, Atlanta Constitution columnist Lee May, on whose childhood had been more deprived — a comically heated argument about who had endured the leakiest tin roof and the longest time without shoes. “We were poor but we didn’t know it,” Jack said.

Paradoxically or not, his hardscrabble background — plus his experience unearthing official corruption — made him fearless in Washington. He knew that inside a senator’s tailored suit and expensive haircut was often a former county commissioner who might have cut a corner or two.

That outsider attitude suited his role as Washington bureau chief of The Times, a newspaper that, no matter how big and successful it became, was unlikely to be a Washington politician’s first choice for leaks — if only because most of its readers were 3,000 miles away. Jack turned that apparent handicap into a virtue: If politicians weren’t doing favors for us, we’d be less likely to feel obligated to do any for them. If The Times broke news, he reasoned, it wouldn’t matter that its printing presses were 3,000 miles away; people in Washington would have to pay attention. That calculation turned out to be right.

Jack’s interviewing style was unshorn, direct and — when he talked to politicians — about an inch short of bullying. He asked tough questions without apology and made it clear that he expected direct answers. As a technique, amazingly, it often worked. He often persuaded subjects to disclose facts that weren’t always in their own interest.

An example was his biggest scoop during Watergate. Agents working for the reelection campaign of President Nixon had broken into the offices of the Democratic National Committee to plant eavesdropping devices connected to tape recorders. Jack persuaded the man in charge of monitoring the tapes and delivering them to the Nixon campaign to give him an on-the-record interview. It was the first newspaper story with a non-anonymous source that tied the Watergate burglary directly to the president’s campaign.

Jack was a Washington bureau chief in a mold that is increasingly rare: An investigative reporter who didn’t want to be a pundit or an editor, much less an executive. His greatest joy was the pursuit of a good story.

He was contemptuous of pundits who didn’t do their own reporting, commentators who didn’t check their facts and news organizations that valued empty commentary over investigative reporting.

In 1998, after website impresario Matt Drudge aired a blizzard of unverified allegations (some true, some not) against President Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair, Jack confronted Drudge on CNN.

Drudge, casting himself as champion of a new journalistic generation, said: “The problem with you, Mr. Nelson, is that you just don’t like the Internet.”

Jack’s response was instant and brutal. “I like the Internet just fine, Matt,” he said. “It’s you I don’t like.”

I visited Jack a few weeks ago as he lay dying of cancer. He faced death with the same cool, unflinching eye he once cast on national politics.

“I used to think that if I had to die, I’d want to drop dead of a heart attack — boom, like that,” he said. “But this is better. I can say goodbye to people.

“I’ve been very lucky all my life,” he said — and he meant it.

He asked about my Op-Ed columns in The Times and offered a bit of advice. “Go out and break some news,” he said.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Jack Nelson, the great reporter at the Los Angeles Times who died last week at 80, made signal contributions to American life in multiple phases of his career. As a young man, he was part of a generation of brave, mostly Southern-born journalists who exposed the crimes and evils of segregation to the scrutiny of the nation and thereby prodded Congress to pass the civil rights legislation that has transformed the country. Nelson was among the last survivors of that generation of reporters who had to conceal their notebooks in their pockets to avoid angry mobs when they visited the scenes of anti-civil rights demonstrations.

Then, for two decades starting in the 1970s, backed by publisher Otis Chandler, Nelson built the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau into the rival of any in the city — an achievement that was part of what looks increasingly to have been the golden age of Washington journalism.

Now, as financial resources and professional commitment ebb in news organizations across the country, it is the example of the fierce competitiveness that Nelson and his contemporaries displayed in such abundance that sustains those who are still trying to live up to his standards against all the forces weakening journalism today.

davidbroder@washpost.com

Jack Nelson, who died this week at the age of 80, was a friend and colleague for more than 20 years. Like the late David Halberstam, who so admired Nelson, Jack was one of those exemplary journalists whose passion for truth and decency was forged covering the civil rights movement. He carried the lessons of that experience with him to Washington, where he was this paper’s bureau chief from 1975 to 1995. During those two decades, the number of reporters and editors employed in The Times Washington bureau more than doubled, and on any given day, it was the best news organization in the capital. For many who recall his regular appearances on radio talk shows and PBS’ “Washington Week in Review,” he was the paper’s public face — an informed voice that always expressed itself in reasoned tones. To his colleagues, he was one of the journalists who set the standards we all aspired to match.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

Journalists should never lie to sources. But calling a source’s bluff is a different story; that is, if an important matter is at hand.

And a very important matter was at hand back around 1975 when Alabama Attorney General William Joseph (Bill) Baxley was having dinner one night in Washington with journalist Jack Nelson, chief of the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times.

The dinner took place four years after Baxley took office in January 1971 after defeating the incumbent attorney general, MacDonald Gallion, in November 1970. After taking office, Baxley, a native of Dothan, Ala., which sits on the Alabama-Georgia border, announced that he was going to reopen some old civil rights cases.

The first of those cases that the University of Alabama Law School graduate wanted to focus on was the September 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The early morning dynamite blast took the lives of four young black girls, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, all 11.

At the time Baxley took office, there had been no convictions in the case. And when he started investigating who was behind the blast, Baxley could not get access to all the investigative files he needed. Even the FBI refused to cooperate.

That was not until after Baxley had dinner that 1975 night in Washington with Jack Nelson, who had grown up in Talladega, Ala., and had become friends with Baxley while investigating some civil rights cases himself, cases such as the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march as well as the murder of Viola Liuzzo, a white homemaker from Detroit who had gone to Alabama in 1965 to help civil rights workers.

While eating dinner, Baxley told Nelson of the lack of cooperation he was getting from the FBI in the Birmingham bombing case. Asked by Nelson if he wanted his help, Baxley replied that he did.

The next day or so, Nelson went to the U.S. attorney general’s office and told officials that if they did not cooperate with Baxley’s office, the Los Angeles Times was going to write a “blockbuster” series of articles about its failure to cooperate in an effort to bring about justice.

Furthermore, he said his newspaper would bring family members of the four little girls to Washington and take their pictures on the steps of the Justice Department.

“I was afraid we were going to have to give up on the investigation,” Baxley told me over the telephone Thursday afternoon as we talked about Nelson, who died Wednesday at his home in Bethesda, Md., at age 80 of pancreatic cancer.

While the FBI cooperated some with Baxley’s office after Nelson’s bluff, it did not totally open up its files in the bombing case.

The files that were released after Baxley mentioned them to the FBI helped lead to the 1977 conviction of Ku Klux Klan member Robert Chambliss.

“Chambliss was the ringleader, but others were involved in the bombing,” Baxley told me when I first interviewed him in December 1997. “There were four people in the car that Saturday night who planted the bomb. And at least a dozen others had a part in either helping to make it or knowing about it.”

Baxley’s term as Alabama’s attorney general ended in early 1978 before he and his staff could get other convictions in the case. In July 1997, the Justice Department announced that it was re-opening the investigation, and during our 1997 meeting, Baxley told me that at least two of the people who were involved in the bombing were still alive. He said one lived in Birmingham and the other lived in Texas.

In 2001, ex-Klansman Thomas Blanton Jr. was convicted of first-degree murder in the bombing case and on May 22, 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted.

After being asked why Nelson cared about what happened in civil rights cases, Baxley told me, “He never told me, but I guess he was like me. Growing up in Alabama you see things that you know are wrong and you’re not getting any answers. Then, you realize that something right needs to be done about that.”

“He was one of a kind,” Baxley said of Jack Nelson. “He had a deep interest in all civil rights cases.”

Thank God for Jack Nelson, and thank God for Bill Baxley, too.

Ironically, Jack Nelson died in the week that a documentary depicting the history of the Los Angeles Times began making the rounds in theaters across the country. The film is about the Chandler family and how one newspaper had an impact on greater Los Angeles. It also is the story of how one Chandler named Otis was determined to make the Times one of the best newspapers in the country. The nation was caught up by the civil rights movement, but the Times had virtually ignored the story until Nelson was hired to run the southern bureau in Atlanta and increase its coverage dramatically.

On March 7, 1965, Jack and I met for the first time, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, Alabama, he reporting for the Times and I for CBS News.

State troopers on horseback, camouflaged with gas masks and armed with clubs and tear gas were determined to halt civil rights marchers from walking from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery some 50 miles away. Nelson and I were shoulder to shoulder, watching the cops beat down, almost kill, civil rights workers like John Lewis, who later would become and still is one of the most distinguished members of the U.S. Congress. After the dramatic march was attempted again a few weeks later, this time with the protection of National Guardsmen activated by President Johnson, we reached Montgomery safely. Shortly thereafter I learned of the Ku Klux Klan’s murder of a volunteer worker from Detroit named Viola Liuzzo. I doubled back down the highway to find her bullet-ridden car. Her body had been removed before a number of reporters, including Nelson and I could catch up to the story. At the Selma City Hall, we waited for a statement by the FBI and the Selma sheriff, a redneck named Jimmy Clark. We found his explanation of Liuzzo’s slaying to be outrageous when he declared, “the niggahs did it.” Clark’s reaction was found to be even more offensive to reporters from the south, like Nelson.

We could not imagine then that what happened in Selma and on a lonely highway leading to it would set the stage for passage of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Soon after, Otis Chandler sensed the quality of Jack Nelson’s reporting and had him transferred to Washington where he eventually was named to run the revitalized bureau of the Times. Its numbers were doubled along with its budget, and before long, quality journalists flocked to the Times’ doorstep. Nelson’s own investigative skills, his tenacity and determination to dig up the facts led to his discovery of major aspects of what would become known as the Watergate scandal.

Nelson and I did not see each other for several years when I returned to Southeast Asia, covering the Vietnam war and other stories in the region. In December 1968, I transferred back to the United States to cover the anti-war movement and the Conspiracy Trial in Chicago. It also was a time when the Nixon Administration pursued the press with a vengeance. It attacked journalists for their critical coverage of events that eventually would lead to the Watergate scandal, significantly reported by Nelson. Moreover, the Justice Department under Attorney General John Mitchell hinted that it would pursue steps which hitherto were unprecedented. It would require reporters to divulge their confidential sources, provide notes from their notebooks and outtakes of the film recorded by network cameramen and even testify in court.

As one of the CBS News correspondents based in Chicago, I found the Nixon Administration’s actions to be outrageous and unconstitutional. I proposed to Anthony Lukas, the New York Times correspondent, also based in Chicago, that we organize reporters across the country to seek legal counsel and oppose any attempt to infringe on our First Amendment rights. We gathered 30 reporters, including Jack Nelson, to join us in the struggle. On numerous occasions, supported by pro bono lawyers, Jack and I met privately with judges across the country to defend individual reporters threatened with legal action by overzealous prosecutors and both federal, state and local officials.

With great respect and affection I always will remember Nelson was one of our strongest advocates in forming The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press based in Washington that will be in its 50th year next March. He was one of the great figures in the history of journalism. Most of all, I always will remember him as a friend.

fromson@usc.edu

HEADLINE: Reporters Committee mourns the loss of co-founder Jack Nelson

Jack Nelson, retired Washington Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times and a co-founder in 1970 of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, died early this morning of pancreatic cancer. He celebrated his 80th birthday on Oct. 11.

Nelson was one of 13 Washington and New York journalists who met in March 1970 at Georgetown University’s law library out of concern about a federal grand jury subpoena served on New York Times reporter Earl Caldwell. After the three-hour meeting, Nelson and two New York Times reporters, Fred Graham and the late J. Anthony Lukas, went to the New York Times’ Washington Bureau, where they coined the organization’s name. Lukas wrote a press release expressing the group’s concern over subpoenas served on reporters. Nelson and Graham phoned the release to the wire services and the committee was in business.

“Jack had the kind of scrappy good judgment that made him a natural leader among reporters,” said Graham, now senior editor for In Session (formerly Court TV). “He was fearless, but careful and respectful toward the subjects of his reporting. That gave him respect among journalists and the public, which was crucial when he took the lead in the creation of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.”

Over the past 40 years, the Reporters Committee has become a national clearinghouse for information and legal help for reporters all over the country. “Jack has been a guiding force and an inspiration for the Reporters Committee from the very start,” said Reporters Committee Chairman and Legal Times correspondent Tony Mauro. “He knew and cherished the importance of a strong and fearless press, and helped the Reporters Committee become strong as well.”

In 1974, Nelson authored “Captive Voices,” a book published by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial about state of high school journalism. His work led to the creation of a special affiliated project of the Reporters Committee to aid student journalists called the Student Press Law Center. Now an independent group that shares office space with the Reporters Committee, the Student Press Law Center helps thousands of high school and college journalists each year.

Nelson served on the Reporters Committee’s steering committee for 25 years. His resignation from the committee in 1995 coincided with his retirement as the Times’ Bureau chief. In 1997, the Reporters Committee embarked on a capital fund raising campaign and created an endowed fellowship in his honor. The Jack Nelson Freedom of Information Fellowship goes each year to an aspiring media lawyer. To date, 12 newly minted lawyers have each spent a year at the Reporters Committee helping reporters across the country with federal, state and local open meeting and open records problems.

“Although Jack’s formal relationship with the Reporters Committee ended in 1995, he stayed involved,” said Executive Director Lucy Dalglish. “He was always available for advice, to make a phone call on our behalf, or to take our young lawyers out to lunch. He showed us what it meant to be a leader.”

Nelson was an Alabama native. As a young reporter, he worked for the Biloxi (Miss.) Daily Herald from 1947-51 and for the Atlanta Constitution from 1952-65. His stories in the Constitution about Georgia’s Milledgeville State Hospital, then the world’s largest mental institution, earned him a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 1960, as well as the Sigma Delta Chi award for public service. In 1965, he joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times as its Atlanta Bureau chief and spent several years covering the civil rights movement. The Times sent him to Washington, D.C., in 1970 and he became Washington Bureau Chief in 1975.

Nelson graduated from Georgia State University and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1961-62.

The Reporters Committee sends condolences to his wife, journalist Barbara Matusow, who has attended countless fund raisers and planning meetings, and graciously supported Jack’s love of the Reporters Committee for more than 35 years.