Jack Nelson

Jack Nelson, former Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, has been a journalist for more than 50 years. He served in the Times‘s Washington bureau from 1970 through 2001, including 22 years as Washington bureau chief and four years as chief Washington correspondent. He covered the six presidents and every presidential campaign from 1968 through 1996. Since retiring in December 2001, he has continued as a visiting professor of the University of Southern California’s School of Journalism. He began his career at age 18 as a reporter with the Biloxi Daily Herald. Later he served 12 years as a reporter with The Atlanta Constitution where his investigative reporting exposing state and local corruption resulted in numerous investigations and indictments, as well as several state and national journalism awards. He won a 1960 Pulitzer Prize for exposing conditions at Milledgeville State Hospital, then the world’s largest mental institution. While a Constitution reporter, Nelson attended Georgia State College for several years, then studied at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow in 1961–62. At Harvard, he co-wrote Censors and the School with Gene Roberts Jr., a Nieman classmate. From 1965 to 1970, as the Los Angeles Times’s Atlanta bureau chief, he covered the civil rights movement, which led to two books. He wrote Terror in the Night — The Klan’s Campaign Against the Jews and co-authored The Orangeburg Massacre with Jack Bass. Nelson also co-authored The FBI and the Berrigans — The Making of a Conspiracy with Ronald J. Ostrow, a Times colleague. Nelson wrote Captive Voices — High School Journalism in America, and was one of several co-authors of Beyond Reagan — The Politics of Upheaval. He is the recipient of the Drew Pearson Award for Investigative Reporting, the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism and was named a fellow by the National Society of Journalists. Mr. Nelson will be writing about the increasing secrecy in the U.S. government.