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Denny Walsh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who was a consummate nuisance to mobsters, corrupt politicians and his editors — particularly at The New York Times, which fired him — died on March 29 at his house in Antelope, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento. He was 88.
His daughter, Colleen Bartow, confirmed the demise. She stated Mr. Walsh had been affected by a number of respiratory illnesses.
Mr. Walsh started his profession in 1961 at The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the place he hot-dogged across the newsroom smoking cigars and used the ground as his ashtray.
“Walsh had the tenacity of a pit bull and gave the impression to be growing among the facial options of the breed,” Pat Buchanan, the conservative commentator who was then an editorial author on the paper, wrote in his autobiography, “Right From the Beginning” (1988). “His chuckle was loud and uncontrolled and bordered on the malicious.”
Mr. Buchanan added, “When Walsh sank his tooth right into a politician, he often did critical injury, and he was at all times reluctant to let go.”
Investigative reporters are an idiosyncratic breed of journalist. Typically fearless, they’re typically a supply of angina to their editors. Mr. Walsh was no exception. He preferred to boast that he was sued a number of instances for libel however had by no means misplaced a case. He was typically at loggerheads together with his bosses.
In 1969, Mr. Walsh and Albert L. Delugach received the Pulitzer Prize for native investigative reporting for a collection of articles exposing fraud and corruption inside the St. Louis Steamfitters Union, Local 562.
The subsequent yr, Mr. Walsh wrote an article claiming that Alfonso J. Cervantes, the mayor of St. Louis, had ties to native underworld figures. G. Duncan Bauman, the newspaper’s writer, killed the article, later explaining that he had referred to as his personal sources, who he stated didn’t assume the article was correct.
Incensed, Mr. Walsh later publicly accused the writer of getting his personal unsavory neighborhood connections. He give up and joined Life journal, which had lately fashioned an investigative reporting unit. He expanded his reporting on Mayor Cervantes in a narrative that relied closely on unnamed federal regulation enforcement sources.
Mr. Cervantes sued Life and Mr. Walsh in federal courtroom for libel, arguing that the reporter had acted with malice and ought to be ordered to disclose his sources. A district judge dominated in favor of Life and Mr. Walsh.
The case finally landed within the United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, which upheld the decrease courtroom ruling in opposition to the mayor. Mr. Walsh had not acted with malice, the courtroom stated, and the mayor had not “produced a scintilla of proof supportive of a discovering that both defendant in actual fact entertained critical doubts in regards to the reality of a single sentence within the article.” The U.S. Supreme Court declined to listen to the case.
Mr. Walsh joined the Washington bureau of The Times in 1973, on the peak of the Watergate scandal — a narrative that the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had been dominating. The Times assigned Seymour Hersh, a reporter within the bureau who had received a Pulitzer for exposing the My Lai bloodbath throughout the Vietnam War, to assist the paper catch up.
“I’m scrambling round writing odds and ends, however Woodward and Bernstein have been up to now forward, and I didn’t actually know anybody within the White House,” Mr. Hersh stated in an interview. “And then Denny exhibits up, this massive husky man, at all times chewing on a cigar.”
Mr. Walsh wasn’t involved in Watergate; he wished to proceed reporting on the nexus between politicians and the felony underworld. He provided to attach Mr. Hersh to a supply who is likely to be of help on Watergate. “It was any person in the midst of every thing,” Mr. Hersh stated. “And I all of a sudden had what you want — any person inside.”
Mr. Walsh turned his consideration to Joseph Alioto, the mayor of San Francisco. Look journal had lately revealed a canopy article that accused him of getting a number of Mafia connections. Mr. Alioto sued the journal for libel and received. Mr. Walsh’s sources, nevertheless, instructed him one other model of occasions — that the mayor had lied throughout his testimony within the case.
After holing up in a San Francisco resort for 3 months to analyze, Mr. Walsh filed a prolonged story on the matter. A hullabaloo adopted.
A.M. Rosenthal, the highest editor of The Times, refused to publish the article. According to letters and memos in a group of his papers on the New York Public Library, he didn’t assume the piece materially superior what Look journal had revealed.
Mr. Walsh was apoplectic. So was Mr. Hersh. “After some dialogue in regards to the high quality of the piece and its publishability,” Mr. Walsh wrote in a letter to Mr. Rosenthal, “I requested Hersh if he had any solutions as to who is likely to be involved in it.”
Mr. Hersh instructed Rolling Stone, and Mr. Walsh offered a duplicate of the article to its editors. Not lengthy after, Mr. Rosenthal discovered that one other copy had been leaked to More, {a magazine} that lined the media.
Now Mr. Rosenthal was apoplectic. According to More, he ordered an investigation into how the journal obtained the article, which to today is unclear. (It by no means appeared in print wherever however is included with Mr. Rosenthal’s papers.)
He additionally fired Mr. Walsh.
“The hurt to The Times and journalism is that you just intentionally despatched this story to a different publication,” Mr. Rosenthal wrote in 1974 in his termination letter.
Brit Hume, the Fox News political analyst who was then the Washington editor of More, revealed an extended article in regards to the palace intrigue. He speculated that Mr. Rosenthal’s resolution to not publish Mr. Walsh’s article had been influenced by executives from Cowles Communications, which owned Look and was a serious shareholder in The Times.
Mr. Rosenthal made no point out of Cowles in his letter to Mr. Walsh or in a memo to The Times’s writer, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.
“I’ve determined to not print the piece,” he wrote to Mr. Sulzberger, “just because because it stands I don’t assume it’s a story that carries the Alioto affair additional sufficient journalistically.” He added, “Incidentally, I’m completely glad as to the accuracy of the statements within the story.”
Denny Jay Walsh was born on Nov. 23, 1935, in Omaha. His father, Gerald Walsh, was an auto mechanic. His mom, Muriel (Morton) Walsh, was a beautician.
Growing up in Kansas, Denny labored at a movie show operating the projector. One movie he confirmed was “The Turning Point” (1952), starring William Holden as a reporter who took on corrupt public officers. Denny noticed a future model of himself in that character.
He enrolled on the University of Missouri in 1954 however dropped out to affix the Marines. He returned to high school in 1958, majoring in journalism, and graduated in 1962.
After The Times fired him, Mr. Walsh ran an investigative reporting crew for the McClatchy newspaper chain. In 1983, at The Sacramento Bee, one of many firm’s papers, his investigation of a on line casino co-owned by Paul Laxalt, a former U.S. senator from Nevada, resulted in one other libel swimsuit. Mr. Laxalt later dropped the case.
Mr. Walsh married Angela Sharp in 1960. They divorced in 1964. He married Peggy Moore in 1966; she died in 2023. In addition to his daughter, he’s survived by a son, Sean, and 7 grandchildren.
Mr. Walsh wore down his editors in Sacramento, too.
“There I used to be in early 1991,” he stated at his retirement in 2016. “Fifty‐5 years previous, unable to afford retirement, and not wished at The Bee.”
He stated he had been deemed a “disruptive presence.” His editors assigned him to cowl the federal courtroom. He stayed on the beat for 25 years. He was a beloved determine across the courtroom, particularly amongst judges.
Chief U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller instructed The Bee, “I might have lunch with Denny periodically to seek out out what was actually occurring right here.”
