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A journalist of the old school, he covered presidential races and political affairs for several newspapers and in many books, as well as in a long-running column, “Politics Today.”
Aug. 18, 2025, 2:32 p.m. ET
Jules Witcover, a storied shoe-leather political reporter and syndicated columnist who became a Washington institution covering presidential races and political affairs for more than 68 years in The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post and other newspapers and in a shelf of books, died on Saturday at his home in Washington. He was 98.
The death was confirmed by his daughter Amy Witcover-Sandford.
From the days of manual typewriters to the age of laptop computers, Mr. Witcover interpreted America’s political scene as an analyst and eyewitness to history. He swapped tales with presidents; covered presidential campaigns, beginning in 1960; recorded the rise and fall of Richard M. Nixon; and was steps away when a gunman killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel in 1968.
Mr. Witcover’s column, “Politics Today,” written five days a week for years with Jack Germond, appeared in The Washington Star from 1977 to 1981, when The Star folded. It then ran in The Baltimore Sun and up to 140 other papers from 1981 to 2005, when it was terminated in a cutback, and was later syndicated three times a week by Tribune Media Services. Mr. Germond died in 2013, but Mr. Witcover continued writing it until he retired in 2022.
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Colleagues and critics called Mr. Witcover one of the nation’s best political reporters — rivaling R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times and David Broder of The Washington Post — and an insider whose depth went beyond the current crop of public officials and candidates into the history and ethics of politics, and to speechwriters, publicists, lobbyists and others in behind-the-scenes supporting casts.
He was featured in “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse’s 1973 book about pack campaign journalism, the old road show of poker games, pounding typewriters and all-night boozing. He fit right in, but he was one of the heavyweights.
“Witcover was deadly serious about his craft,” Mr. Crouse wrote. “He had given a great deal of thought to his own role as a political journalist, and was extraordinarily sensitive to the role that the whole press corps played, to its problems and failings.”
Mr. Witcover wrote more than a dozen books on politics and politicians, and five on other subjects. With “Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976” (1977), his definitive chronicle of the 1976 presidential campaign, he assumed the mantle of Theodore H. White, whose “Making of the President” books turned the elections of 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1980 into thrillers with full-blooded characters and suspense.
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In addition to covering Jimmy Carter’s campaign to defeat President Gerald R. Ford, “Marathon” was a running commentary on America, Godfrey Hodgson wrote in The Times Book Review, detailing “a story about the individuals who struggled, lost and won in the course of the campaign, but also about what those struggles, victories and defeats have to tell us about the state of the country.”
With Mr. Germond, Mr. Witcover wrote four books on succeeding campaigns: “Blue Smoke & Mirrors: How Reagan Won and Why Carter Lost the Election of 1980,” “Wake Us When It’s Over: Presidential Politics of 1984,” “Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency 1988” and “Mad as Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box 1992.”
Fascinated with the mechanics of political power, Mr. Witcover later wrote “No Way to Pick a President: How Money and Hired Guns Have Debased American Elections” (1999); “Party of the People: A History of the Democrats” (2003); books on the vice presidency, including a history of the office and biographies of Vice Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. (updated in 2019 to include his successful campaign for the presidency), and Spiro T. Agnew; and books on political consultants, lobbyists, fund-raising and campaign finance reform.
Mr. Witcover’s prodigious output also included a political novel, “The Main Chance” (1979), about covering a corrupt presidential candidate; “Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany’s Secret War in America, 1914-1917” (1989); and a memoir, “The Making of an Ink-Stained Wretch: Half a Century Pounding the Political Beat” (2005).
“I’m not complaining, because for the last 50 years and more I’ve had a lively time being a fly on the wall at some of the great and small scenes of contemporary American history and politics,” he reflected in his memoir. “I’ve spent thousands of hours sitting, drinking, singing, writing and only occasionally sleeping on whistle-stop trains, press buses and planes from New Hampshire to California.”
Jules Joseph Witcover was born in Union City, N.J., on July 16, 1927, to Samuel and Sarah (Carpenter) Witcover. His father owned an auto repair shop. Jules and his older sister, Marilyn, were raised in their mother’s Roman Catholic faith.
He graduated from Union City High School in 1945, attended Columbia College for a semester and then joined the Navy. After serving a one-year postwar enlistment, he re-enrolled at Columbia on the G.I. Bill, covered sports for The Columbia Spectator and worked part time for The Daily News of New York. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Columbia in 1949, worked for a year at The Hackensack Star-Telegram in New Jersey and received a master’s from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1951.
After a year as a reporter for The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, Mr. Witcover joined The Star-Ledger in Newark, a unit of the S.I. Newhouse chain. His plan to be a sports reporter morphed into political reporting; the combative nature of both fields, he later said, made politics just as much fun.
In 1952, Mr. Witcover married Marian Laverty. They had four children and were divorced in 1990. In 1997, he married Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, an author who wrote “The American Iconoclast” (2005), about the journalist H.L. Mencken.
In addition to his daughter, Amy, Mr. Witcover is a survived by his wife; two sons, Paul Witcover and Peter Young; another daughter, Julie Witcover; and three grandchildren.
In 1954, Mr. Witcover was promoted to the Washington bureau of Newhouse Newspapers as a political correspondent. Over the next eight years, his reports in publications like The Long Island Press tracked local congressmen and provincial political activities. His first crack at national stories came when he reported on hearings by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee into allegations of Communist infiltration.
He covered John F. Kennedy’s victory over Nixon in 1960 and became chief political writer for the Newhouse publications in 1962. He covered major events, including the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy’s assassination and the civil rights movement. He interviewed both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in 1963.
In 1968, Mr. Witcover covered Robert Kennedy’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and was given access to his closed-door strategy talks. He was with the candidate when, shortly after he won the California primary, Mr. Kennedy was fatally shot. It was, he wrote, “another hour of mindless tragedy in a nation that cannot or will not keep weapons of death from the hands of madmen who walk its streets.”
In 1969, he published his first book, “85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy,” and in 1970 he joined the Washington bureau of The Los Angeles Times. After Nixon’s 1972 re-election, Mr. Witcover joined The Washington Post, where he reported on Nixon’s fall in the Watergate scandal, the presidency of Gerald R. Ford and the election of Jimmy Carter as president in 1976.
He also wrote for Esquire, The Nation, The New Republic, Saturday Review and other publications.
Over the years, Mr. Witcover — a throwback to the days when Adlai Stevenson wore holes in his shoes and national party conventions were exciting — made concessions to technology, giving up his typewriter for a computer and then a laptop. He carried a cellphone, but he refused to take incoming calls, even from editors.
“Technology has impinged on reporting,” he told The Times in 2004. He recalled the days when candidates schmoozed with a few trusted reporters on a plane. Now, he said, a candidate who walks back to the press section is engulfed by a swarm of reporters, some with boom microphones and tiny recorders and cellphones that can secretly snap pictures and transmit them instantly.
“Rather than take a chance, they don’t do it,” Mr. Witcover said of the savvy modern politicos. “It has eroded the relationship that you could build up with a candidate.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.
