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78 HARVARD MAN my milledgeville series continued to attract favorable attention. In 1960, Sigma Delta Chi, the Society of Professional Journalists, selected the Constitution for its prestigious public service award. The award ceremony was to be held in Washington, and Bill Fields assigned me to accompany Ralph McGill to Washington for the presentation. McGill was seated at the head table, but when it came time to accept the award, he motioned to me and said, “You come up and get it, Jack, you did all the work.” It was a magnanimous gesture that turned out to have a considerable impact on my career. I went up to the head table to accept the award, and, when I returned to my table, Clark Mollenhoff, a great investigative reporter for Look magazine and the Des Moines Register and Tribune, jumped up from his seat, grabbed me by the arm and said, “Jack, strike while the iron’s hot. Apply for a Nieman. I’m sure you’ll get it. I’ll write you a letter of recommendation.” I was an admirer of Clark’s work and had helped him with some sources in Georgia for a story he had written on the Ku Klux Klan. But I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. “A Nieman,” I said, “what the hell is a Nieman?” He explained that it was a fellowship for promising young journalists that entitled them to an academic year’s study at Harvard University. Clark had been a Nieman Fellow and he was sold on the program as a way for reporters to broaden their interests and contacts and advance their careers. You could study anything you chose, and he painted an inviting picture of special dinners and cheese-and-cracker seminars where Neiman Fellows were treated to lectures and discussions with Harvard professors and leading political personalities. The program was established in 1938 with funds provided by Agnes Wahl Nieman, widow of the founder of the Milwaukee Journal. The Chapter 13 harvard man 79 bequest, she stipulated, was “to promote and elevate standards of journalism and educate persons deemed especially qualified. . . .” Every year a committee composed of leading journalists and Harvard professors selects about a dozen young journalists for the program. In addition to providing the opportunity for them to attend classes, the Nieman Foundation pays fellows a modest stipend for living expenses. Some of the nation’s leading reporters and editors have studied at Harvard under Nieman Fellowships. Despite my not knowing anything about the program, the idea of studying at Harvard, as well as Clark’s enthusiasm for the program, appealed to me, especially since I had never actually finished college. During much of the previous seven years, while working full time at the Constitution, I had been going to school at night. But my investigative reporting had become so all-consuming that I had stopped going to classes while still a couple of quarters shy of a degree in economics. I thought maybe an academic year at Harvard would compensate to some extent for my lack of a degree. I applied for the Nieman in 1961, a year in which the selection committee was apparently hoping to elevate the educational level of southern journalists. Of the eleven reporters selected, six of us were from the South. While all of us became friends, Gene Roberts Jr., then at the Raleigh News and Observer, and I established an especially close friendship that continues to this day. He, of course, became one of the twentieth century’s greatest editors, serving as executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years, during which the paper won nineteen Pulitzer Prizes, and later serving as managing editor of the New York Times. Gene himself, along with another outstanding journalist, former Atlanta Constitution editor Hank Klibanoff, won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 2007 for their seminal book on news coverage of civil rights, Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. Uprooting the family from our house in suburban Decatur was not easy. Virginia was not eager to go north, and the kids had been told to expect the worst from those perfidious Yankees. I remember how hot it was the summer we arrived, how stifling it was in the little apartment we found in suburban Belmont. I sometimes had to take the car, so once again, Virginia found herself stuck for transportation. The kids didn’t like...

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