Jules Witcover, reporter best known for 'Politics Today' column, dies at 98

WASHINGTON -- Jules Witcover, who cowrote one of the nation’s leading political columns for nearly three decades, died Saturday at the age of 98, his daughter Amy Witcover-Sandford said.

Witcover's widely syndicated daily column, written jointly for 24 years with the late Jack Germond, gave him an outlet to register strong opinions, leaving little doubt which politicians he admired or despised. “Politics Today” began at The Washington Star and then moved to The Baltimore Sun, and he continued writing it solo for another five years at The Sun after his partner retired in 2001.

Witcover also covered the political beat for the Newhouse News Service, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, in books and in several magazines, including The New Republic, Saturday Review and The Nation.

Through his long career, Witcover had a remarkable front seat to history, some of it tragic. He watched Robert F. Kennedy steady first lady Jackie at President John F. Kennedy's grave in 1963. Five years later, in 1968, he pushed his way through a crowded hotel kitchen in Los Angeles after hearing shots and saw Robert F. Kennedy bleeding on the floor. He would later write of RFK's brief presidential campaign in the book “85 Days.”

Witcover described himself and the curmudgeonly Germond as “friendly rivals laboring for obscure newspaper chains” who enjoyed long, booze-soaked dinners on the campaign trail, a culture that was chronicled in Timothy Crouse’s classic account of reporters covering the 1972 presidential election, “Boys on the Bus.”

When Witcover and Germond began co-writing their column in 1977, “we often played the good cop/bad cop routine, each of us able to blame the other guy when a column one of us wrote caused a politician to complain. But sometimes, too, one of us would take the bullet for the other when it unjustly came our way. That was the nature of playing duet pianos in the house of ill repute called political writing,” Witcover wrote in The Sun after Germond’s death in 2013.

At its peak, the syndicated column ran five times a week and appeared in about 140 newspapers.

In his final years as a columnist, Witcover relentlessly hammered President George W. Bush over the Iraq war, calling it “the most wrong-headed foreign policy in my lifetime and the most dangerous.” But he did not blame that view for The Sun’s dropping his column. Editorially, the newspaper also opposed the war, although less vigorously.

“The war was a colossal mistake from the start and has disintegrated into a calamity, damaging not only the people of Iraq but the international reputation of this country, not to mention the terrible cost in American lives and treasure,” he wrote for the Poynter Institute’s blog.

Witcover was born in Union City, New Jersey, to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. He was raised Catholic and showed an early interest in writing. He wrote in his memoirs that he and a cousin produced a one-page family newspaper on Thanksgiving that they sold for a nickel.

A classmate on his high school basketball team persuaded him to apply to Columbia, which he attended for a semester before joining the Navy. He then re-enrolled in the college after the war ended and obtained a master's degree at Columbia's graduate school of journalism.

Years later, he told a reporter that he thought his ship had come in when a newspaper in the Boston area offered him a starting job covering the Boston Braves in spring training. Before he could get started the team decided to move its franchise to Milwaukee and the opportunity died.

By 1962, 11 years after graduation, he had become a senior correspondent and the chief political writer for the Newhouse News Service.

Witcover lived in Washington with his second wife, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, a biographer of the journalist H.L. Mencken. His first marriage, of nearly four decades, to Marian Laverty, ended in divorce.

"Jules was the hardest working newsman I ever knew," said Walter Mears, who as the chief political writer for The Associated Press traveled extensively with Witcover. "On the road, you could hear him banging the typewriter before dawn, working on one of his books. He never stopped writing columns and political histories long after most of us had retired."