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56 LITTLE ROCK as the constitution’s investigative reporter, a role I carved out for myself at a time when there were few investigative reporters anywhere in the South, I became well known as a muckraker throughout Georgia in the 1950s and early 1960s. In those days, muckraking was still looked down on in many quarters after flourishing briefly at the turn of the century , in the Progressive era. (It was Theodore Roosevelt who first applied the term to the press, quoting a line from The Pilgrim’s Progress about a man with a muckrake in his hand who rejected salvation to concentrate on filth.) Despite such criticism, my enthusiasm for muckraking or, if you prefer , investigative reporting, has never wavered. I still think it’s the greatest service a free press can perform and—I hope this doesn’t sound pompous—I believe it is indispensable to the well-being of society. While others may shy away from it, I was in my element, perhaps because of some quirks in my nature. Where the average person sees grey, I tend to see black and white. Not being terribly introspective may help too. My stories would often cause anguish to others, but it’s not in my nature to dwell on the consequences. I focus all of my attention on the job I think needs to be done and leave the hand-wringing to others. I also have a low tolerance for official malfeasance. It’s been said of me, and I guess it’s true, that I get personally offended by wrongdoing. In my view, the police and government officials are supposed to do the right thing, and whenever I’ve found them engaging in shenanigans, I’ve never hesitated to report it. While working at the Constitution, I didn’t have to look far. Corruption in Georgia was so ingrained and so brazen, it offered an embarrassment of riches for someone of my bent. Over the next dozen years, I wrote about speed traps in Ludowici, gambling parlors in Savannah, Chapter 9 little rock 57 police-protected whorehouses in Athens, criminally negligent conditions at Milledgeville State Hospital, election fraud in Telfair County, truck stop brothels in Rome, marriage mills on the Georgia-Florida border , state payroll padding, embezzlement of tax funds, use of convict labor for private work, and on and on. Sometimes the corruption was positively laughable, like the purchasing scandal I covered in which the state was purchasing boats with no bottoms for lakes with no water. Another time, I turned up a missing road scraper belonging to the state that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had been trying to find for two years. The Constitution helpfully published a map showing the GBI where the scraper was located. The next day, a sheepish GBI retrieved it and fined the contractor who’d been using it several thousand dollars for “borrowing” state property. The Constitution played the hell out of my stories and they ran fullpage house ads with my photo, listing the prizes I had won. I don’t think I realized it then, but it now seems clear that the editors were using my prominence to promote the paper—an early exercise in what’s now known as branding. It was also a way of snatching bragging rights from the Journal, which had its own crackerjack investigative reporter, namely John Pennington. (It was Pennington who set Carter on the road to the presidency by uncovering the massive vote fraud that led to him losing a primary election for state senator in 1962. Carter sued and was ultimately declared the victor and went on to win the general election.) All of the publicity was turning me into something of a personality in the state—a rarity for a newspaper reporter in those days before TV began minting celebrity journalists by the dozen. I enjoyed the attention, but there was a bigger payoff. The more well known I became, the more it made people eager to cooperate with me. Some of my best stories started with phone calls from people who’d read my exposés and were upset about corruption of one kind or another. They knew there was not much point in going to the authorities, because so many officials were corrupt themselves. That was why Brigadier General Mayo, whose complaints about the vice surrounding Camp Stewart were ignored by the authorities , turned to me. I got so many...

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