Jack Nelson, reporter hailed for rights, Watergate stories

“Jack finally slipped away a couple of hours ago,’’ his wife, journalist Barbara Matusow, said in an e-mail to friends.

Mr. Nelson was recruited from the Atlanta Constitution in 1965 as part of publisher Otis Chandler’s effort to transform the Times into one of the country’s foremost dailies. An aggressive reporter who had exposed abuses at Georgia’s biggest mental health institution, Mr. 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 massacre of black students at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg.

As the Watergate scandal unfolded during President Nixon’s reelection campaign, Mr. Nelson got an exclusive interview with Alfred C. Baldwin III, a former FBI agent hired by White House operatives, who witnessed the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972. The stories resulting from Mr. Nelson’s interview with Baldwin were the first to link the burglary “right to the heart of the Nixon reelection campaign,’’ David Halberstam wrote in his 1979 book “The Powers That Be.’’

Named in 1975 to lead the paper’s Washington bureau, Mr. Nelson oversaw its evolution over the next 21 years into what Gene Roberts Jr., former managing editor of The New York Times and a onetime rival of Mr. Nelson’s on the civil rights beat, called “arguably one of the finest bureaus ever in Washington.’’

“Just his work at the Constitution would be a distinguished career for most journalists,’’ Roberts said. “Then add that he was one of the most effective reporters in the civil rights era, all before you even get to him being bureau chief in Washington.

“All in all, I would say he was one of the most important journalists of the 20th century.’’

A slender man with a Southerner’s easy manner, Mr. Nelson was born Oct. 11, 1929, in Talladega, Ala., where his father ran a fruit store during the Depression. The younger Nelson drew Talladega’s citizens into the shop with vaudevillian humor (“Lady, you dropped your handkerchief,’’ pause, “in St. Louis yesterday’’), displaying a talent for connecting with people that would bolster his later success as a reporter.

“He said sometimes being a reporter is a lot like being a good salesman,’’ said Richard T. Cooper, a longtime friend and Washington bureau editor for the Tribune Co., which owns the Times. “You had to be able to sell yourself to people, convince them that they should answer your question or show you the records’’ or buy a bag of fruit from your father’s store.

Mr. Nelson and his family moved to Georgia and eventually to Biloxi, Miss., where he graduated from Notre Dame High School in 1947. Without stopping for college (he later studied briefly at Georgia State College), the teenager launched his journalism career after answering an ad for a job at the Biloxi Daily Herald. Soon he earned the nickname Scoop for aggressive reporting on corrupt officials and gambling payoffs.

In 1952, after a stint writing press releases for the US Army, he joined the staff of the Atlanta Constitution. In a series of articles on Georgia’s Milledgeville Central State Hospital for the mentally ill, he exposed an array of abuses, including experimental treatments of patients without consent, alcohol and drug abuse by on-duty doctors, and nurses who were allowed to perform major surgery. As a result of his reporting, the hospital was overhauled and Mr. Nelson won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 1960.

When he joined the Los Angeles Times five years later, the civil rights movement had been underway for a decade, but the Times had only minimally covered it.

“We were doing terribly covering the South,’’ recalled former managing editor George Cotliar, the paper’s national news editor in the 1960s. The paper hired Mr. Nelson to close the gap.

He opened the Times’s Atlanta bureau and immediately began covering the voting rights demonstrations in Selma, Ala., where on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, state troopers and local police officers clubbed and tear-gassed 600 civil rights marchers en route to Montgomery.

“He just annihilated every other paper; he was ahead of everyone on everything,’’ said Cotliar, who called Mr. Nelson “the toughest, hardest-charging, finest reporter I’ve known in my 40 years in the business.’’

Governor George Wallace of Alabama was outraged by Mr. Nelson’s stories, which quoted sources critical of Wallace’s failure to protect the marchers.

According to Bill Kovach, who covered the protests for the Nashville Tennessean and later was Washington bureau chief for The New York Times and the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the governor singled out Mr. Nelson for ridicule, pointing out to white audiences “outsiders like Jack Nelson there of the L.A. Times - that one there with the burr haircut - trying to tell us Alabamians how to run our state.’’

In 1970 Mr. Nelson experienced the wrath of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The reporter, after conducting an eight-month investigation, wrote a story about how the agency and police in Meridian, Miss., shot two Ku Klux Klan members in a sting operation bankrolled by the local Jewish community. One of the Klan members, a woman, died in the ambush.

Hoover attempted to suppress the story by smearing Mr. Nelson as a drunk, which he was not. (“What they didn’t realize,’’ the reporter later quipped to Hoover biographer Curt Gentry, “is that you can’t ruin a newspaperman by branding him a drunk.’’) Although by defying Hoover he lost his FBI sources, Mr. Nelson wrote the story, which ran on the Times’s front page.

Twenty years later, Mr. Nelson dusted off his notes from the KKK story and wrote “Terror in the Night’’ (1993), a book that described the shooting in the context of the Klan’s shift from battling blacks to targeting Jews, whom it regarded as the leaders of the civil rights movement.

“He was a good reporter, because he was always prepared and plain didn’t take no for an answer,’’ said William F. Thomas, editor of The Times from 1971 to 1989.

Mr. Nelson became the paper’s Washington bureau chief in 1975, when it had 15 reporters and three editors. By 1980, the bureau was described by Time magazine as “one of the two or three best’’ in Washington. By 1996, when Mr. Nelson turned the job over to White House correspondent Doyle McManus, it was one of the biggest, as well, with 36 reporters and seven editors.

In a town consumed by politics, Mr. Nelson was a well-connected insider who held a coveted seat as a regular commentator on public television’s “Washington Week in Review.’’ As bureau chief he brought presidents, senators, congressmen, Cabinet members, and other Washington power-brokers to the Times offices for regular breakfast sessions with reporters that were broadcast on C-SPAN. “That raised our profile tremendously,’’ Cooper said. “We all got our calls returned faster.’’