Richard L. Wilson (journalist)

The journalist Richard Lawson Wilson was born September 3, 1905, in Galesburg, Illinois, and was raised in Newton, Iowa. He was son of Frank Wilson (1860-1925) and Emily McCord Wilson (1862-1931), and was the youngest of nine children.

Related Topics:
Galesburg, Illinois - Newton, Iowa

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He attended the University of Iowa, at Iowa City, Iowa. There he met and later married Katherine Young Macy (1906-1989), a graduate of the University of Iowa and the Columbia University school of journalism.

Related Topics:
University of Iowa - Iowa City, Iowa

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After receiving his B.A. in 1926, he began his reporting career at the Des Moines Register in Des Moines, Iowa. After a year at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1928, he returned to Des Moines as City Editor and then to Washington, D.C., in 1933 to set up the Washington bureau of the Register, at that time owned by the Cowles family, who owned newspapers in the midwest and published the now-defunct Look magazine. He became chief of the Washington bureau for all Cowles publications in 1950, and occupied that post until his retirement in 1970. Mr. Wilson was elected President of the National Press Club for the year 1940. He was also very active in the Gridiron Club.

Related Topics:
Des Moines Register - Des Moines, Iowa - St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Look - National Press Club

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During World War II, Mr. Wilson travelled extensively abroad as a war correspondent. In 1954, Mr. Wilson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, "or his exclusive publication of the FBI Report to the White House in the Harry Dexter White case before it was laid before the Senate by J. Edgar Hoover."

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Mr. Wilson retired from active newspaper reporting in 1970, and wrote a nationally-syndicated column until 1976. He died on January 18, 1981, in Washington, DC, of complications from Mycosis Fungoides, a skin lymphoma. He is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington.

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He received Sigma Delta Chi's annual award for Washington reporting and was a member of the University of Iowa's Journalism-Mass Communications Hall of Fame.http://www.uiowa.edu/~journal/alumni/halloffame.html

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His wife, Katherine Wilson, was a reporter in her own right but rarely published, being more interested in supporting her husband's career and raising her two daughters. Susan Madge Wilson (1930-2003) attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts and married journalist Arthur Hallock (Hal) Seymour (living), son of Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Forrest Seymour. They had three children. Mr. Wilson's younger daughter, Katherine Macy Wilson (1933-1981) attended Radcliffe college as well, and married attorney Maurice F. Lesses (living), and had three children. Katherine M. Wilson died of pneumonia in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 20, 1989. She had been suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. She is buried next to her husband in Rock Creek Cemetery.

Related Topics:
Forrest Seymour - Alzheimer's Disease

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Mr. Wilson's professional papers are at Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa. http://www.ecommcode2.com/hoover/research/historicalmaterials/other/wilson_r.htm He is among many people whose conversation was captured on President Nixon's "secret tapes."

Related Topics:
Herbert Hoover Presidential Library - West Branch, Iowa - Nixon

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