Jack White

Jack White (1942 – October 12, 2005) was an American journalist. He won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for his coverage of President Richard Nixon's underpayment of income taxes. White's investigative article prompted Nixon to utter his famous line, "I am not a crook" to White's colleague Joseph Ungaro at a newspaper editors' conference in Florida. White also won Emmy Awards for his reporting on fugitive banker Joe Mollicone and Providence tax officials who violated the city's residency requirement. On his death, the Cape Cod Times called him "the dean of Rhode Island journalism." Newspaper career White began his career at the Newport Daily News in 1969, and joined the Providence Journal-Evening Bulletin a year later. At the Journal, he was Newport Bureau chief and head of the newspaper's first permanent investigative team. Nixon scandal As manager of the Providence Journal-Bulletin's bureau in Newport, Rhode Island, in the early 1970s, White cultivated trusted sources among Newport's elite. One source passed on to White evidence that President Richard Nixon had paid taxes amounting to $792.81 in 1970 and $878.03 in 1971, despite earning more than $400,000. White revealed that Nixon had illegally back-dated the donation of his papers to the National Archives, in order to avoid a new law which made such donations ineligible for tax deductions. White's Pulitzer-winning scoop almost didn't happen. The night he was prepared to write the story, in September 1973, the union representing reporters at the newspaper voted to go on strike. White would later recall rolling the story out of his typewriter, folding it up and putting it in his wallet. He said he never thought about giving the story to management, even though he risked missing the story. "I was dreading the information I had was going to get out there. Every day I was checking out-of-town newspapers," he later told The Providence Journal. Twelve days later, the strike ended, and the story ran on October 3, 1973.