JACK NELSON, 80
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter
Jack Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who covered the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal for the Los Angeles Times and was the paper's Washington bureau chief for 20 years, died Wednesday.
Mr. Nelson, who had pancreatic cancer, died at his home in Bethesda, said Richard Cooper, a family friend and longtime Times associate.
Mr. Nelson spent more than 35 years with the Los Angeles Times, stepping down as its chief Washington correspondent in 2001. In 1970, Mr. Nelson began working in the newspaper's Washington bureau. He was bureau chief from 1975 to the end of 1995.
As a reporter with The Atlanta Constitution in 1960, he won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for exposing problems at a state mental hospital.
Mr. Nelson began focusing on civil rights issues when he opened the Times' Atlanta bureau in 1965.
Two of Mr. Nelson's five books stemmed from his civil rights reporting: "The Orangeburg Massacre" (1970), co-written with Jack Bass, which chronicled the 1968 incident in which police fired into a crowd of young protesters at South Carolina State College, killing three; and "Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews" (1993).
Mr. Nelson covered presidential administrations from Richard M. Nixon to Bill Clinton. During the Watergate scandal, he scored an exclusive interview with a security guard for the Nixon re-election campaign who had been involved in the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
