Clark R. Mollenhoff is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist best known for his investigations of government secrecy and mismanagement, conflicts of interest, labor racketeering, and organized crime. A veteran reporter with the Cowles publications (1941-1976), Mollenhoff has spent most of his career in Washington, D. C., reporting for the Des Moines Register and Tribune. His stories have also appeared in such Cowles publications as the Minneapolis Star and Tribune and Look magazine. He has written for a variety of other periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Human Events, Quill, and Reader's Digest, and has published eight books.
Born on April 16, 1921, in Burnside, Iowa, Mollenhoff graduated from Webster City Junior College in 1941 and Drake University law school in 1944. While a student, he worked as a reporter for the Des Moines Register and Tribune; after service with the Navy in the South Pacific, 1944-1946, he returned to cover local and state politics. In recognition of his part in exposing government mismanagement and corruption, Mollenhoff was chosen to attend Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow, 1949-1950. In 1950 he moved to the Washington bureau of the Register and Tribune. Since that time he has traveled as an Eisenhower Exchange Fellow, 1960-1961; served as a Kennedy appointee to the United States Advisory Commission on Information, 1962-1965; been active on the Freedom of Information Committee of Sigma Delta Chi since 1956, serving as chairman, 1966-1970; and acted as a special counsel to President Nixon, in the capacity of an Ombudsman, to report on wrongdoing in the administration, 1969-1970. Mollenhoff became Washington bureau chief of the Register and Tribune in 1970, began his own syndicated column entitled “Watch on Washington” shortly thereafter, and served as the Register and Tribune's national correspondent in 1976. Since 1977 Mollenhoff has been a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia.
Mollenhoff has won almost every journalism award available. His investigations have covered all aspects of government operations. Upon his arrival in Washington, Mollenhoff took an active part in exposing the tax scandals of the Truman administration, gaining special notice (Sigma Delta Chi Award for Washington Correspondence, 1952) for his work on the Alcohol Tax Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. He also pointed up the Iowa connections of organized crime brought out during the Kefauver committee hearings of 1951. Impartial to the political affiliations of wrongdoers, Mollenhoff played a leading role in exposing the conflicts of interest and misuse of “executive privilege” in the Eisenhower administration regarding the Dixon-Yates controversy, the Wolf Ladejinsky security case (handled exclusively by Mollenhoff), and the relationship between presidential advisor Sherman Adams and industrialist Bernard Goldfine. In noteworthy confrontations with President Eisenhower and his spokesmen, Mollenhoff pressed the administration to justify what he considered its novel interpretation of “executive privilege” in forbidding public officials to disclose information on government activities and decisions. National prominence came to Mollenhoff in 1958 after five years of covering labor racketeering. He received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Public Service. By convincing Robert F. Kennedy (then counsel for the Senate Permanent Investigating Subcommittee) of the magnitude of Teamster corruption, Mollenhoff was credited as the prime mover in launching the Senate McClellan Committee Hearings on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, 1956-1960. (The committee hearings led to exposure of criminal activities on the part of Teamsters officials.) Mollenhoff provided commentary for DuMont Television Network's coverage of the Senate hearings in 1956 and received the 1957 Sylvania Award for this work. He later closely followed the jury tampering trial which led to James R. (Jimmy) Hoffa's 1964 conviction.
During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Mollenhoff was a persistent critic of government mismanagement, secrecy, and conflicts of interest. He played a key role in uncovering the TFX warplane contract scandal in the Defense Department and the corrupt financial dealings of Billie Sol Estes and Robert G. (Bobby) Baker. He also revealed unfair and arbitrary action taken against government employees such as Otto Otepka, a State Department security officer. As a member of the Nixon administration, Mollenhoff exposed several instances of wrongdoing, including the involvement of Major General Carl Turner, a newly appointed Chief U. S. Marshal, in a military club scandal. Since leaving the administration in 1970, Mollenhoff has covered a number of important stories, both on his own and as a part of a reporting team. Perhaps the most significant ones concerned irregularities in commodity trading and led to Congressional passage of the Commodities Futures Trading Act of 1974.
Inspired by the example of Lincoln Steffens, Mollenhoff has pursued corruption and mismanagement with widely recognized energy and persistence. Mollenhoff has never been content to simply report a story -- he must get action on it. He coined the phrase “follow the dollar” as a technique in tracking down official corruption. Rather than rely upon privileged sources of information, he ties together evidence through the use of such public records as transcripts of hearings and court proceedings, probate records, government reports, and the records of investigations by regulatory agencies. In 1973 he received the Drew Pearson Foundation Award for sustained and significant contribution to investigative reporting.
In addition to his reporting for the Cowles publications and other periodicals, Mollenhoff has lectured widely and appeared on numerous radio and television programs. He has also published eight books: Washington Cover-Up (1962), Tentacles of Power: The Story of Jimmy Hoffa (1965), Despoilers of Democracy (1965), The Pentagon (1967), George Romney: Mormon in Politics (1968), Strike Force: Organized Crime and the Government (1972), Game Plan for Disaster: An Ombudsman's Report on the Nixon Years (1976), and The Man Who Pardoned Richard Nixon (1976). Mollenhoff was married on October 13, 1939, to Georgia Giles Osmundson; they have three children.
Further information on Mollenhoff's career and investigative techniques can be found in James H. Dygert, The Investigative Reporter: Folk Heroes of a New Era (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976) and John C. Behrens, The Typewriter Guerrillas: Closeups of Twenty Top Investigative Reporters (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977). These books, as well as those written by Mollenhoff, are located in the Society Library.
