WRITING FROM WASHINGTON — 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.
