Washington — Walter R. Mears, who for 45 years fluidly and speedily wrote the news about presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and won a Pulitzer PrizeHe was 87 years old. He was 87.
“I could produce a story as fast as I could type,” Mears once acknowledged — and he was a fast typist. He became the AP’s Washington bureau chief and the wire service’s executive editor and vice president, but he always returned to the keyboard and to covering politics.
Mears passed away Thursday in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He had been diagnosed with multiple types of cancer eight days earlier. Mears was accompanied by his daughters Susan Mears (Boulder, Colorado) and Stephanie Mears (Austin, Texas).
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According to them, he was visited by a minister on his final night. He discussed Alf Landon (the losing Republican presidential candidate in 1936), a year after his birth.
Mears’ ability to find the essence of a story while it was still going on and to get it to the wire — and to newspapers and broadcasters around the world — became legend among peers. Timothy Crouse featured Mears on his 1972 show. “The Boys on the Bus,”A book that chronicles the antics and efforts of journalists covering the presidential campaign in 2008.
Crouse recalled that, just after a debate on politics, a reporter from The Boston Globe called him from AP. “Walter, what’s our lead? What’s the lead, Walter?” The question became a catchphrase among political reporters to describe the search for the most newsworthy aspect of an event — the lead. “Made me moderately famous,”In 2005, Mears cracks.
It was an easy question. Mears needed to create stories about campaign discussions while they were still being debated. Before their reporters could file their stories, newspaper editors would see Mears’ lead on the wire. It was therefore defensive for other members of the press bus to question Mears’ motives and to ask him.
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He was first assigned to update the 1962 congressional election. The bureau chief asked a senior colleague for an assessment of Mears’ performance under pressure. “Mears writes faster than most people think,”The evaluator said, “Tongue in cheek,” “and sometimes faster than he thinks.”
“Walter’s impact at the AP, and in the journalism industry as a whole, is hard to overstate,”Julie Pace, senior vice president and executive editor at AP, said the following: “He was a champion for a free and fair press, a dogged reporter, an elegant chronicler of history and an inspiration to countless journalists, including myself.”
Kathleen Carroll, a former AP executive director, said he had taught generations of journalists. “how to watch and listen and ask and explain.”
“Walter was also a wonderful human being,”She spoke. “He loved his family — being a grandfather was one of the great joys of his life. He loved golf and the Red Sox, in that order. He loved politics and he loved the AP.”
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Mears did not seem to mind being known for his pacesetter status. “I came away with a slogan not of my making, but one that stuck for the rest of my career,”In his 2003 memoir, he recalls these events. “Deadlines Past.”Over the course of four decades Mears covered eleven presidential campaigns from Kennedy-Nixon’s 1960 campaign to Bush-Gore’s 2000 campaign. He also covered the political conventions and debates as well as the elections, campaigns, and finally the pomp and grandeur of the inaugurations.
Jules Witcover of Baltimore’s Central Recorder covered politics as a tribute. Jules Witcover said that Mears was a combination of speed and accuracy combined with an eye for the subtle details.
“His uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any story and relate it in spare, lively prose showed the way for a generation of wire service disciples, and he did so with a zest for the nomad’s life on the campaign trail,”Witcover spoke.
Mears was also the Washington bureau chief and the primary news executive for the wire service. He also served as the executive editor in New York. But he was still interested in writing and returned to it.
He left once to be Washington bureau chief for The Detroit News, but returned to AP nine months later. “I couldn’t take the pace,”He stated. “It was too slow.”
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He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 because of his coverage of the election where Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald R. Ford. Ford had inherited Carter’s office by the resignation in disgrace Richard M. Nixon.
Mears was most proud of the Pulitzer and not the Crouse catchphrase. He answered a later group of Pulitzer winners that they wouldn’t need to ask what the first words would say in their obituaries. “Pulitzer-prize winning.”
Mears stated that he won his Pulitzer. “the sweetest moment in a career that is like no other line of work.”
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Mears’ lead paragraphs capture the essence of the events, not just their words, but also the music.
—When the 1968 Democrats, in a convention held in the midst of antiwar rioting on the streets of Chicago, finally chose their nominee, he wrote: “Hubert H. Humphrey, apostle of the politics of joy, won the Democratic presidential nomination tonight under armed guard.”
—When, earlier that year, a gunman slew John Kennedy’s brother: “Robert F. Kennedy died of gunshot wounds early today, prey like his president brother to the savagery of an assassin.”
—And, in 1976, when former peanut farmer Carter took the presidency from its accidental occupant: “In the end, the improbable Democrat beat the unelected Republican.”
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Terry Hunt, former AP White House correspondent, was also the deputy chief of Washington’s bureau. “You can’t talk about Walter without using the word legendary. He was a brilliant writer, astonishingly fast, colorful and compelling.”
Agreed David Espo is a former special correspondent and assistant Washington Bureau chief. “No one ever wrote faster or with more clarity, nor worked harder and made it look easier than Walter did.” And: “He took care to mentor those less talented than he, in other words, all of us.”
Mears was a son of a chemical industry executive and was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. In 1956, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa at Middlebury College in Vermont and joined the AP in Boston in a matter of days.
In those days, news was transmitted via teletypes and written on typewriters. “They were slow and they clattered,”Mears wrote once, “but the din was music to me.”
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His first assignment was far more difficult than expected. He was the sole reporter for the Vermont Legislature. “It was fun covering a citizen legislature with a representative from every hamlet in the state” — 276 of them, he recalled years later, including one elected by his townspeople to keep the fellow from being eligible for welfare.
Mears was there to cover John F. Kennedy’s campaign in New England in 1960. He also covered Barry Goldwater’s disastrous race against Lyndon Johnson four year later. Even after his retirement in 2001, he was still involved in the presidential election coverage.
On election night 2008, he wrote an analysis of Barack Obama’s victory, and the challenge before him.
“Obama is the future,”He wrote, “and it begins now, in troubled times, for a president-elect with a costly agenda of promises that would be difficult to deliver in far better economic circumstances.”
Mears did not cheerlead. He was not a believer in journalists expressing their political opinions, and he kept his thoughts to himself. He was able to get to know the candidates that he covered and shared drinks after work with them. He also played golf with them. However, he addressed them all by their names.
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He believed that a separation between newspersons and journalists was appropriate. He once explained: “I can’t really say I ever felt close to any of them, maybe because I always felt that there’s a line there, there’s sort of a reserve that I think needs to be maintained because you’re not covering a friend. You’re covering somebody who’s trying to convince the American people to give him the most important job they’ve got at their command.”
After retiring, Mears taught journalism for a time at the University of North Carolina and made his home there in Chapel Hill.
Frances, his wife, died in January 2019. In 1962, his first wife and the two children he had with her died in a fire at their home.
