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Edwin O. Guthman, 89; Pulitzer-winning journalist - Los Angeles Times Obituary

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Bob Feigel

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Sep 1, 2008, 7:18:31 PM9/1/08
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From the Los Angeles Times

OBITUARY

Edwin O. Guthman, 89; Pulitzer-winning journalist

Guthman, later a USC professor, was national editor at the Los Angeles
Times during the paper's rise to prominence. His pursuit of Watergate
stories earned him the No. 3 spot on Nixon's enemies list.

By Elaine Woo
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

3:13 PM PDT, September 1, 2008

Edwin O. Guthman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist
and editor whose aggressive pursuit of Watergate stories during the
1970s earned him the enmity of President Richard M. Nixon and the No.
3 spot on Nixon's infamous enemies list, has died. He was 89.

Guthman died Sunday at his home in Pacific Palisades, USC announced.
He had been dealing with complications of amyloidosis, a rare disorder
involving the abnormal buildup of proteins in organs or tissues.

Guthman, who was also a longtime USC professor and a founding member
of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, earned a Pulitzer early in
his career for proving the innocence of a victim of McCarthyism.
During a brief hiatus from journalism, he worked for Robert F. Kennedy
as a Justice Department spokesman and became a Kennedy confidant.

He went on to serve as national editor of the Los Angeles Times from
1965 to 1977, a crucial period during which the newspaper expanded its
journalistic mission and shed its parochial image. David Halberstam,
in "The Powers That Be," wrote that Guthman gave the paper "instant
prestige" and played an important role in its transformation under
Publisher Otis Chandler.

A decorated World War II veteran, Guthman was profiled in the
bestselling 1998 book "The Greatest Generation," by former NBC anchor
Tom Brokaw, who wrote: "In any accounting of the good guys of American
journalism, Ed Guthman is on the front page."

Guthman was born in Seattle on Aug. 11, 1919, the son of a grocery
chain executive. Guthman earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from
the University of Washington in 1941 and was drafted into the Army in
1942. He fought in Italy and North Africa during World War II, earned
a Purple Heart and a Silver Star and left the service with the rank of
captain.

When he was interviewed by Brokaw 50 years later, Guthman credited his
military experience for the disciplined approach he took to
documenting the newspaper stories he would later write and edit.

He joined the Seattle Times in 1947 after a brief stint at the
now-defunct Seattle Star. The Times assigned him to cover the
Washington state Committee on Un-American Activities, one of many
local bodies formed to root out Communists during the McCarthy era.

The committee had targeted a University of Washington philosophy
professor named Melvin Rader, who was alleged to have attended a
Communist training school in New York a decade earlier, in 1938. Rader
denied the charges but could not disprove them.

Guthman found that the committee had confiscated pages from a hotel
registry that could have corroborated Rader's contention that he had
not been in New York during the weeks in question. Guthman also found
receipts, library records and bank deposit slips that showed that
Rader had been in and around Seattle at the time.

The stories Guthman wrote about Rader's case saved the professor's
career, which had been in jeopardy. Guthman's labors paid off in 1950
when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished reporting on
national affairs.

In the next 10 years, Guthman turned his reporting talents to covering
corruption in the Teamsters union and the ethics of Seattle's Dave
Beck, who was president of the Teamsters from 1952 to 1957.

By 1956, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had
begun examining corruption in the labor movement and was intensely
interested in the high-living Beck. The committee counsel was future
U.S. Atty. Gen. Kennedy.

Later that year, Guthman received a call from Clark Mollenhoff, a
reporter for the Des Moines Register-Tribune (and later special
counsel to President Nixon), who had been investigating Beck's
counterpart in Detroit, Jimmy Hoffa. Mollenhoff told Guthman that a
Senate committee was about to launch a broad probe into unsavory
activities by top union officials and asked Guthman if he would meet
with Kennedy.

When informed that the committee attorney was the brother of then-Sen.
John F. Kennedy, Guthman was unimpressed and said, "That's fine,
Clark, but can you trust him?"

Despite his reservations, Guthman met Kennedy and they began to share
information. In 1957 Beck was called to appear before the committee
and was accused by Kennedy of illegally using $320,000 in union funds.
He ultimately was convicted of embezzlement, federal tax evasion and
filing a fraudulent tax return and was sent to prison.

Kennedy became attorney general in his brother's administration in
1961 and, in one of his first acts, hired Guthman as his press
secretary in the Justice Department. When Kennedy won election as U.S.
senator from New York in 1964, he again tapped Guthman to serve as
press secretary.

In "We Band of Brothers," Guthman's 1971 memoir of his years with
Kennedy, he made no effort to hide his affection for Kennedy,
portraying him as a stalwart friend, an impassioned advocate for civil
rights and a demanding boss, whose wry humor brought levity to many
grim moments.

Guthman recounted the time that he was in Oxford, Miss., with other
Justice Department officials in 1962 when rioting broke out on the eve
of James Meredith's enrollment as the first black student at the
University of Mississippi.

A hate-filled mob armed with rocks, chunks of concrete and guns was
attacking a force of about 300 federal marshals, who were under orders
not to fire their pistols at the crowd. The marshals sustained heavy
injuries while Guthman and the other Justice Department officials
watched in agony.

That night, Guthman called Kennedy in Washington to report on the
situation. "How's it going down there?" Kennedy asked, to which the
aide replied, "Pretty rough. It's getting like the Alamo." After a
pause, Kennedy quipped, "Well, you know what happened to those guys,
don't you?"

The president sent in the Army to disperse the mob, and Meredith
walked up the university steps the next morning.

The exchange between Guthman and Kennedy was repeated in many
published accounts of the conflict as a classic example of the
camaraderie between the attorney general and his staff.

"The way I look at it, we were beleaguered and blood-spattered and he
knew it and worried for our safety. And yet when I think of Oxford,"
Guthman wrote, "this is what I remember first: the light remark that
raised our morale and helped us through the night."

Guthman spent five years in Kennedy's service, leaving in 1965 after
accepting an offer from Los Angeles Times Publisher Chandler to
oversee the paper's national coverage.

Three years later, on the night of the 1968 California presidential
primary, Guthman spoke to Kennedy just before the candidate left his
room at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles to make his victory
speech; he was shot moments later by Sirhan Sirhan.

Guthman rushed to the hospital, and when he returned to The Times
early the next morning, he sadly suggested that an obituary be
prepared. Kennedy died the next night.

Because of his Pulitzer and his Kennedy connections, Guthman was,
according to Halberstam, "the most prestigious editor" The Times had
in the 1960s. He was known for his strong social conscience and his
belief that reporters should strive to expose corruption. Guthman also
was known as the paper's most relentless editor, always pushing his
reporters to make one more phone call to nail an important story.

This quality was crucial in the early 1970s when the Washington Post
broke the story of the Watergate break-in. In contrast to other top
editors at The Times, Guthman was, Halberstam wrote, "passionate on
Watergate from the start."

The Times was one of the few papers in the country doing any Watergate
stories, but it found itself always trailing the Post on reporting
developments in the unfolding scandal, which arose from the discovery
of a break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic National
Headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington. The Times'
fortunes changed in the fall of 1972, when Washington correspondent
Ronald J. Ostrow learned that there might have been an eyewitness to
the break-in.

One of Ostrow's colleagues at The Times, Jack Nelson, found the
witness, whose name was Alfred Baldwin, and secured an exclusive
interview. Although Times lawyers warned of the enormous legal risks
and the government was pressuring the paper to drop the story, Guthman
talked Times Editor in Chief Bill Thomas into running the piece. It
became one of the most important stories about the entire episode
because, in Halberstam's view, it "brought Watergate right to the
heart of the Nixon reelection campaign in a more dramatic way than any
other story so far."

In 1973, the public learned that President Nixon had kept a list of
political enemies. On a prime list of 20 enemies, Guthman was No. 3,
after a Democratic fundraiser and a high-ranking AFL-CIO official.

The list was released by former presidential counsel John W. Dean III,
who said it had originated in the office of former White House special
counsel Charles W. Colson. It described Guthman as "a highly
sophisticated hatchet man against us in '68." The memo went on to say
that it was time to "give him the message," apparently an allusion to
government harassment.

Guthman said that he never received any "message" and that Colson's
memo was rife with misstatements, including a reference to him as the
paper's managing editor. It also erred in saying that that he had been
involved in Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign.

Kenneth Reich, a former Times reporter who knew Guthman for many
years, said his former colleague "was very proud to have made the
enemies list."

But Guthman was also outraged to be on it. He said any law-abiding
American citizen would resent being targeted for retribution from his
government. "I resent it even more so because it was done by people
who seem to have had no respect for our Constitution or our laws," he
said in 1973. Reich died in June.

Guthman, who at one time was considered a strong contender for editor
of The Times, left the paper in 1977 after a dispute with other top
editors. He spent the next decade at the Philadelphia Inquirer as
editorial and Op-Ed editor. After retiring from the Inquirer in 1987,
he joined the faculty of USC's Annenberg School for Communication and
taught journalism for the next 20 years.

In 1993, Guthman was named to a federal panel reviewing the
government's role in the deadly raid on the Branch Davidian compound
in Waco, Texas, that claimed the lives of four government agents and
about 80 followers of cult leader David Koresh. The panel concluded
that top officials of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the
federal agency that conducted the initial action, had been negligent
in overseeing the operation.

From 1991 to 1998 Guthman served on Los Angeles' first Ethics
Commission, a watchdog agency formed after a conflict-of-interest
investigation of Mayor Tom Bradley.

Guthman was a strong backer of Benjamin Bycel, the controversial
founding executive director of the ethics panel who was abruptly fired
in 1996 after criticism that he had been too aggressive in his
enforcement of anti-corruption rules. Guthman, who served a term as
commission president, also helped draft new laws regulating lobbyists
and guided its probes of campaign money laundering in local elections.
One of the commission's investigations led to the conviction of a
former city councilman.

Bill Boyarsky, a former commission member and former Times political
writer and columnist, said Guthman "set a perfect example of what a
commissioner should do. . . . Ed believed in the political process. He
liked politicians. Working with the late City Council President John
Ferraro, he worked out rules and regulations that still govern the
commission. But even though Ed liked politicians, he did not hesitate
to crack down on them when they violated the law."

In late 2007, Guthman was honored by the Los Angeles City Council for
his wide-ranging achievements. He also retired from USC last year.

His wife, JoAnn, died in 1990.

Guthman is survived by sons Lester, Edwin H. and Gary; a daughter,
Diane; and five grandchildren.

Services will be held at 1 p.m. Friday at Hillside Memorial Park and
Mortuary, 6001 W. Centinela Blvd., Los Angeles.

Memorial donations may be made to the Edwin O. and JoAnn Guthman
Endowed Scholarship for Investigative Reporting at the USC Annenberg
School for Communication, 3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089.

--

"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen

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