JACK Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and former Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, dug below the daily coverage of the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal.
Nelson, who for years was a familiar face on US t
elevision news programmes, joined the LA Times in 1964 as a reporter in Atlanta and ran its Washington bureau from 1975 to 1996, directing more than 40 reporters and editors through five administrations. He was credited by the newspaper with helping to establish its national reputation.
He remained the paper's chief Washington correspondent until retiring in 2001.
In his 55 years as a newspaperman, Nelson had a reputation for riling public officials. "His interviewing style was blunt, direct and, when he talked to politicians, about an inch short of bullying," Doyle McManus, his successor as bureau chief, said recently. J Edgar Hoover, the FBI's founding director, considered Nelson an enemy.
In 1960, while a reporter at the Atlanta Constitution, Nelson won a Pulitzer for a series of articles that revealed inhumane practices at a psychiatric hospital, including the use of experimental drugs on patients without their permission and surgeries performed by nurses when doctors were absent.
"There were about 12,500 patients and 48 doctors, not one a psychiatrist," Nelson said. "They had beds so close you could ride a bicycle over them, no question. And the black patients' wards were even worse."
In 1964, Nelson was recruited by LA Times publisher Otis Chandler to open a bureau in Atlanta. The New York Times was then the only newspaper based outside the US South to have a Southern bureau.
The next year Nelson went to Selma, Alabama, when Sheriff Jim Clark's deputies and state troopers arrested more than 3,000 demonstrators, beating many of them, as they demanded that blacks be allowed to register to vote.
Nelson covered the Selma-to-Montgomery freedom marches, including Bloody Sunday, on 7 March, 1965, when 600 marchers were attacked with billy clubs and tear gas.
Then came a scoop. On 25 March, Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Detroit, was killed by gunfire from a passing car as she and another civil rights worker were driving from Selma to Montgomery. The next day four Ku Klux Klan members were arrested.
"Nelson sensed immediately that there was an untold story in how the FBI had cracked the case so speedily," Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in their book The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation" (2006).
"Within days, he supplied readers of the Los Angeles Times with the answer: one of the four men in the Klan car when the shots were fired was an undercover FBI informant. It was a remarkable exclusive."
Another exclusive came in February 1968, when three black students were fatally shot and 27 others wounded by state troopers at South Carolina State College, a black college in Orangeburg. The troopers claimed that the students had charged them, hurling bottles and bricks.
Nelson went to the local hospital, introduced himself as "Nelson, with the Atlanta bureau" – he did not say "FBI" – and asked to see the victims' medical records.
What he revealed became known as the Orangeburg massacre. "It was eye-popping; they were shot in the soles of their feet, in the back of the head," Nelson said.
In 1970, Nelson learned that the FBI, in a sting operation, had given two Ku Klux Klansmen $36,500 to enrol Kathy Ainsworth, a sympathiser, pretending it was for a plot to dynamite the home of a Jewish businessman in Meridian, Missouri. When she and another Klansman arrived with the dynamite, a gun battle broke out and Ainsworth was killed.
"Nelson's story of entrapment and the use of agents provocateurs raised more moral and legal questions than the FBI was prepared to answer," Time magazine wrote in October 1970. "Ever since, Nelson has been on the FBI's list of untouchable people."
Two years later, Nelson and Ronald Ostrow, reported on the FBI's use of an agent provocateur in its investigation of the Rev Philip Berrigan and other anti-Vietnam war activists known as the Harrisburg Seven – further angering Hoover.
Four months after the Watergate break-in on 17 June, 1972, Nelson, by now an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau, persuaded former FBI agent Alfred Baldwin to give an interview. He had been working for president Richard Nixon's re-election campaign.
The 17 June break-in was the second time Nixon operatives had entered the Democratic headquarters. Weeks earlier, they had installed listening devices, and Baldwin had monitored phone calls from a room at a Howard Johnson hotel across from the Watergate. His first-person account of the operation, told to Nelson and naming names, was an early breakthrough in the unravelling of the scandal.
His colleagues say that for all the power and prestige the title of bureau chief brought him, Nelson was never quite comfortable being the boss of other reporters, that he remained a reporter at heart.
Nelson said did not disagree, saying recently that he took the job "because it paid a hell of a lot more money and I could get a lot more reporters to give the politicians a hard time."
