WASHINGTON — Jack Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who covered the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal for the Los Angeles Times and was the paper's Washington bureau chief for 20 years, died Wednesday. He was 80.
Nelson, who had pancreatic cancer, died at his home in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md., said Richard Cooper a family friend and longtime Times associate.
Nelson spent more than 35 years with the Los Angeles Times, stepping down as its chief Washington correspondent in 2001. He joined the Times in 1965 and in 1970 began working in its Washington bureau. He was bureau chief from 1975 to the end of 1995.
As a reporter with The Atlanta Constitution in 1960, he won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for exposing malpractice and other problems at the 12,000-patient state mental hospital in Milledgeville, Ga.
Nelson began focusing on civil rights issues when he opened the Los Angeles Times bureau in Atlanta in 1965.
Nelson covered presidential administrations from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. During the Watergate scandal, he scored an exclusive interview with a security guard for the Nixon re-election campaign who had been involved in the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.