WASHINGTON — Jules Witcover, who cowrote one of many nation’s main political columns for practically three many years, died Saturday on the age of 98, his daughter Amy Witcover-Sandford mentioned.
Witcover’s broadly syndicated day by day column, written collectively for twenty-four years with the late Jack Germond, gave him an outlet to register sturdy opinions, leaving little doubt which politicians he admired or despised. “Politics At the moment” started at The Washington Star after which moved to The Baltimore Solar, and he continued writing it solo for one more 5 years at The Solar after his accomplice retired in 2001.
Witcover additionally coated the political beat for the Newhouse Information Service, The Los Angeles Instances and The Washington Publish, in books and in a number of magazines, together with The New Republic, Saturday Overview and The Nation.
By way of his lengthy profession, Witcover had a outstanding entrance seat to historical past, a few of it tragic. He watched Robert F. Kennedy regular first woman Jackie at President John F. Kennedy’s grave in 1963. 5 years later, in 1968, he pushed his method by means of a crowded resort kitchen in Los Angeles after listening to photographs and noticed Robert F. Kennedy bleeding on the ground. He would later write of RFK’s transient presidential marketing campaign within the guide “85 Days.”
Witcover described himself and the curmudgeonly Germond as “pleasant rivals laboring for obscure newspaper chains” who loved lengthy, booze-soaked dinners on the marketing campaign path, a tradition that was chronicled in Timothy Crouse’s traditional account of reporters overlaying the 1972 presidential election, “Boys on the Bus.”
When Witcover and Germond started co-writing their column in 1977, “we frequently performed the great cop/unhealthy cop routine, every of us capable of blame the opposite man when a column one in every of us wrote triggered a politician to complain. However generally, too, one in every of us would take the bullet for the opposite when it unjustly got here our method. That was the character of taking part in duet pianos in the home of ailing reputation referred to as political writing,” Witcover wrote in The Solar after Germond’s demise in 2013.
At its peak, the syndicated column ran 5 instances per week and appeared in about 140 newspapers.
In his last years as a columnist, Witcover relentlessly hammered President George W. Bush over the Iraq struggle, calling it “probably the most wrong-headed international coverage in my lifetime and probably the most harmful.” However he didn’t blame that view for The Solar’s dropping his column. Editorially, the newspaper additionally opposed the struggle, though much less vigorously.
“The struggle was a colossal mistake from the beginning and has disintegrated right into a calamity, damaging not solely the folks of Iraq however the worldwide fame of this nation, to not point out the horrible price in American lives and treasure,” he wrote for the Poynter Institute’s weblog.
Witcover was born in Union Metropolis, New Jersey, to a Jewish father and Catholic mom. He was raised Catholic and confirmed an early curiosity in writing. He wrote in his memoirs that he and a cousin produced a one-page household newspaper on Thanksgiving that they offered for a nickel.
A classmate on his highschool basketball workforce persuaded him to use to Columbia, which he attended for a semester earlier than becoming a member of the Navy. He then re-enrolled within the faculty after the struggle ended and obtained a grasp’s diploma at Columbia’s graduate faculty of journalism.
Years later, he instructed a reporter that he thought his ship had are available when a newspaper within the Boston space supplied him a beginning job overlaying the Boston Braves in spring coaching. Earlier than he might get began the workforce determined to maneuver its franchise to Milwaukee and the chance died.
By 1962, 11 years after commencement, he had change into a senior correspondent and the chief political author for the Newhouse Information Service.
Witcover lived in Washington along with his second spouse, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, a biographer of the journalist H.L. Mencken. His first marriage, of practically 4 many years, to Marian Laverty, resulted in divorce.
“Jules was the toughest working newsman I ever knew,” mentioned Walter Mears, who because the chief political author for The Related Press traveled extensively with Witcover. “On the highway, you would hear him banging the typewriter earlier than daybreak, engaged on one in every of his books. He by no means stopped writing columns and political histories lengthy after most of us had retired.”
