Denny Walsh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who was especially a nuisance to fired mobsters, corrupt politicians, and editors at the New York Times, was arrested on March 29 at his home outside Antelope, California. He died in of Sacramento. He was 88 years old.
His daughter, Colleen Bartow, confirmed his death. She said he had some respiratory illnesses.
Mr. Walsh began his career at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1961, smoking cigars in the newsroom and using the floor as an ashtray.
“Walsh had the tenacity of a pit bull and seemed to have developed some of the facial features of this breed,” said Pat Buchanan, a conservative commentator who was an editorial writer for the newspaper at the time. In his autobiography he writes: (1988). “His laughter was loud and uncontrollable, almost malicious.”
Buchanan added: “When Mr. Walsh sank his teeth into a politician, he usually did serious damage and was always reluctant to let them go.”
Investigative reporters are a unique type of journalist. They are usually fearless, which can often be a source of angina for editors. Mr. Walsh was no exception. Although he was sued for defamation many times, he liked to boast that he had never lost a case. He was often at odds with his superiors.
In 1969, Mr. Walsh and Albert L. Delgach won the Pulitzer Prize for local investigative reporting for a series of articles exposing fraud and corruption within the St. Louis Steamfitters Union, Local 562.
The following year, Mr. Walsh wrote an article alleging that St. Louis Mayor Alfonso J. Cervantes had ties to local underworld figures. The newspaper's publisher, G. Duncan Bauman, removed the article and later said he called his own sources, who said he did not believe the article was accurate.
This enraged Mr. Walsh, who later publicly accused the publisher of having ties to his own unsavory community. He quit to join Life magazine, which had recently established an investigative reporting department. He expanded on his coverage of Mayor Cervantes in an article that relied heavily on anonymous federal law enforcement sources.
Mr. Cervantes sued Mr. Reiff and Mr. Walsh in federal court for defamation, arguing that the reporters acted with malice and should be ordered to reveal their sources. A district judge ruled in favor of the journalists.
The case ultimately reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which upheld the lower court's decision against the mayor. The court found that Mr. Walsh had not acted with malice and that the mayor “produced no evidence to support a finding that either defendant actually had serious doubts about the truth of any sentence in the article.” ” he said. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Mr. Walsh joined the Times' Washington bureau in 1973 at the height of the Watergate scandal. The Watergate scandal was dominated by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The Times has appointed Seymour Hersh, a former reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, to help the paper catch up.
Hirsch said in an interview, “I'm busy writing articles on odds and ends, but Woodward and Bernstein were so far ahead of me that I didn't really know anyone in the White House.'' ” he said. “And then Denny showed up, a big, husky guy who was always chewing on a cigar.” (Smoking was prohibited in newsrooms by that time.)
Mr. Walsh had no interest in Watergate. He wanted to continue reporting on the relationship between politicians and the underworld. He offered to connect Mr. Hirsch with sources who might be able to help regarding Watergate. “He was the person in the middle of everything,” Hirsch said. “And suddenly I have what you need. There's someone inside.”
Mr. Walsh focused on San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto. Look magazine recently published a cover story accusing him of having ties to multiple mafias. Alioto sued the magazine for defamation and won. But Mr. Walsh's sources told Mr. Walsh about another incident: that the mayor lied while testifying in the case.
Mr. Walsh submitted a lengthy article on the issue after spending three months in a San Francisco hotel researching it. A fuss ensued.
The Times' editor-in-chief, AM Rosenthal, declined to publish the article. According to letters and notes in his papers collection at the New York Public Library, he did not believe the work would materially advance Look's story.
Mr. Walsh had suffered a stroke. So was Mr. Hirsch. “After discussing the quality and publishability of the work, I asked Mr. Hirsch if he had any suggestions for who might be interested,” Mr. Walsh wrote in a letter to Mr. Rosenthal. .
Mr. Hirsch recommended Rolling Stone magazine, and Mr. Walsh provided the editor with a copy of the article. Shortly thereafter, Rosenthal learned that another copy had been leaked to More magazine, which covers the media.
Now, Mr. Rosenthal had suffered a stroke. According to More, he ordered an investigation into how the magazine obtained the article, the contents of which have not been revealed to this day. (This has never been printed anywhere, but is included in Mr. Rosenthal's paper.)
Mr. Walsh was also fired.
“The harm to the Times and its journalism is that you intentionally sent this article to another publication,” Rosenthal wrote in his 1974 termination letter.
Britt Hume, a political analyst for Fox News and then the Washington editor of More, published a lengthy article on the palace intrigue. He speculated that Mr. Rosenthal's decision not to publish Mr. Walsh's article may have been influenced by executives at Cowles Communications, which owns Look and is a major shareholder in the Times.
Mr. Rosenthal made no mention of Cowles in his letter to Mr. Walsh or in his memo to Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.
“I have decided not to publish this article,” he wrote to Sulzberger, “because I do not believe that, as it currently stands, it is an adequate journalistic account of the Alioto incident.” He added: “By the way, I am completely satisfied with the accuracy of this article.”
Denny Jay Walsh was born in Omaha on November 23, 1935. His father, Gerald Walsh, was an auto mechanic. His mother, Muriel (Morton) Walsh, was a hairdresser.
Growing up in Kansas, Denny worked in a movie theater that used projectors. One of the films he screened was The Turning Point (1952), starring William Holden as a reporter dealing with a corrupt official, in whom Denny saw his future self. I did.
He enrolled at the University of Missouri in 1954, but dropped out to join the Marines. He returned to school in his 1958 year, majored in journalism, and graduated in 1962.
Mr. Walsh led the McClatchy newspaper chain's investigative reporting team after the Times fired him. In 1983, his investigation in one of the company's newspapers, the Sacramento Bee, about a casino he co-owned with Paul Laxalt, a former U.S. senator from Nevada, led to another defamation suit. Laxalt later dropped the lawsuit.
Mr. Walsh married Angela Sharp in 1960. They divorced in 1964. He married Peggy Moore in 1966 and she died in 2023. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a son, Sean, and seven grandchildren.
Mr. Walsh also exhausted the Sacramento editors.
“I was there in early 1991,” he said upon his retirement in 2016. “At 55 years old and unable to pay for retirement, I was no longer wanted by The Bee.''
He said he was considered a “subversive figure.” His editor assigned him to cover federal courts. He kept the beat going for 25 years. He was a beloved figure around the courtroom, especially among the judges.
“I used to have lunch with Denny regularly to find out what was really going on here,” Chief U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller told The Bee.