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Chapter 11. Dead Men Voting
- University Press of Mississippi
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69 DEAD MEN VOTING the milledgeville series was a turning point in my career. Not only could I take pride in the bettering of treatment for thousands of mental patients; I also won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting under deadline pressure. While I was proud of the award, I learned later how lucky I was to win it. The Medical Association of Georgia had nominated me for the prize in the reporting category, but Bill Fields got the Georgia Press Association to nominate the newspaper for a Pulitzer for public service. Many years later, while going through the Pulitzer Prize archives at Columbia University in connection with a story I was writing, I came upon a letter from Fields to the Pulitzer Advisory Committee saying that at the committee’s request he was forwarding several doctors’ letters supporting me for the Pulitzer. But he emphasized that he still thought the award should go to the Constitution rather than me. Benjamin McKelway, a member of the committee, later told me that in the initial voting for the Gold Medal for Public Service, the Constitution was tied, five to five, with the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper I would join five years later. The Times had published a powerful series on drug smuggling from Mexico. To break the deadlock between the Constitution and the Times, McKelway had suggested the committee give the Gold Medal for Public Service to the Times and award the Pulitzer for local reporting to me because I had done all the reporting on the Milledgeville series. And that is what happened. McKelway said the fact that I had been a finalist for the Pulitzer the two preceding years—for the series on a police-protected Atlanta lottery ring and stories on corruption in the Griffin administration—also figured in the advisory committee ’s decision. Getting the Pulitzer was heady stuff. Besides the personal satisfaction of helping to right wrongs, I was being recognized nationally Chapter 11 70 dead men voting for my work. (A few people were not bowled over. When MawMaw, my grandmother, heard I’d received the Pulitzer, she said, “That’s nice. Maybe next time he’ll win the Nobel.”) I was even a guest on I’ve Got a Secret, then a very popular show. During rehearsals, I was surprised to learn that the show was completely rehearsed, and the panelists knew the identity of the guests before they went on the air. After I got back home, I wrote a lighthearted exposé, but I’ll bet Garry Moore and the producers were not amused. The Pulitzer would have a dramatic impact on my life, but that would come a bit later. For the time being, I was deeply immersed in my investigations . And truth to tell, I was enjoying the hell out of my role as a kind of journalistic avenger, striking fear into the heart of crooked officials . I even got another nickname. When locals in various places heard I was sniffing around, they used to say, “Uh-oh. The booger man is back in town.” Not long after wrapping up my Milledgeville coverage, I zeroed in on Telfair County in south Georgia. Home of the politically powerful Talmadges —Gene and his son Herman—the county was notorious over the years for vote fraud. George Goodwin, an Atlanta Journal reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for exposing widespread fraud that included casting ballots in the names of people long dead whose names had remained on the rolls of registered voters. Thereafter, opponents of the Talmadges’ political machine continued to complain of vote fraud. In 1960, with former governor Herman Talmadge by then serving in the U.S. Senate, I was tipped off that once again officials were planning to stuff the ballot boxes to keep the courthouse gang in power. The tipster was a man named Pete Yawn, a political opponent of the gang. At my request, Yawn arranged for me to meet with a group of his friends before the election, and they agreed that they would, as discreetly as possible, keep an accurate count of the number of persons who voted in Milan, a key precinct. Yawn stood outside the polling place in Milan on election day with a counting device in his pocket, clicking it every time a voter came out of the building. At various times during the day, Yawn noted his own count and asked political friends who showed up to...