The individuals honored in this exhibit represent the alumni and faculty members of The University of Texas at Austin who have won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Pulitzer is a highly competitive annual award honoring excellence in journalism and the arts. It was created by Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), the influential publisher who helped pioneer mass circulation newspapers.

Started in 1917 and administered by Columbia University, the Pulitzer recognizes individuals, groups of individuals and staffs of entire newspapers in categories such as news coverage, the literary arts, music and photography.

In total, UT claims over 25 Pulitzer winners, several of whom have won it multiple times. They include writers, photographers, editors, critics and historians who have graduated from UT and faculty members who have taught here.

Additionally, countless other UT alumni and faculty members not featured here have been recognized as finalists for the prize.

These award-winners have borne witness to the most pivotal events of our time — including civil wars, scientific breakthroughs, natural disasters, genocides and conflicts between nations — as well as the events central to Texas communities.

In the process, they have given voice to the voiceless and shaped how we perceive and experience the world.

For one university to claim so many Pulitzer winners is a great source of pride, a way of encouraging today’s students that they, too, can make lasting contributions to journalism and the arts.


Jean-Marc Bouju

Feature Photography
1995

French native Jean-Marc Bouju chose the UT School of Journalism to study photojournalism as a master’s student and shot for the Daily Texan in the early 1990s before joining the Associated Press in 1993. In addition to receiving two Pulitzers, Bouju has photographed conflicts around the world and won the 2004 World Press Photo of the Year award for a photo of a hooded Iraqi prisoner holding his young son. A judge for the awards said Bouju’s shot brought “a new element, that of hope.”

On April 6, 1994, a missile brought down the airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana as it approached Kigali Airport. Rival ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, blamed each other for the murder of the president, a Hutu. The killer or killers were never found, but the incident ignited one of the great humanitarian disasters of the 20th century: the Rwandan genocide. The genocide began almost immediately after the assassination, with Hutus killing an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The Associated Press sent Jean-Marc Bouju to Rwanda two days after the president died. “It was nearly impossible to work,” he recalled. “Every hundred yards, there were roadblocks manned by militias who were drunk and blaring music from boom boxes. They were butchering people left, right and center.”

One of Bouju’s most startling images is of Rwandan children sobbing at a checkpoint as they are denied passage into Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, to flee the chaos.

“An enormous amount of people were trying to flee into Zaire,” Bouju said. “There was a bridge they had to cross into Zaire, but the government wouldn’t let them in. There was a mass of 50,000 people stuck at this border crossing, and these kids were stuck. It was extremely sad.”

Bouju and the AP team won the Pulitzer for feature photography for their efforts to chronicle the horror and devastation in Rwanda.

Spot News Photography
1999

On Aug. 7, 1998, terrorists simultaneously bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring more than 4,000. These were the first high-profile attacks by al-Qaida, the Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden.

At the time of the attacks, Bouju was an AP photographer based in Nairobi, working on the border with Zaire. He raced back to Nairobi to oversee an AP team of 11 photographers assigned to the bombings. Among the other photographers was fellow UT alumnus John McConnico, who had rushed to Nairobi from New Delhi, where he was based.

Bouju and McConnico had worked together at the Daily Texan when they covered the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco. “John and I were in Waco for a week, but we were kept away like everyone else by the FBI,” Bouju said. “We camped out there in a car.”

Photographs by Bouju, McConnico and the other members of the AP team won a Pulitzer, and the committee praised the images for illustrating the horror and the humanity surrounding the event.


Berkeley Breathed

Editorial Cartooning
1987

Berkeley Breathed graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He began his cartooning career at the Daily Texan with the comic strip, The Academia Waltz, which caught the eye of editors at the Washington Post, who recruited him to do a nationally syndicated strip. Bloom County made its debut on Dec. 8, 1980, and would eventually run in more than 1,200 newspapers around the world.

Breathed has written seven children’s books, and collections of his syndicated cartoons have produced 11 best sellers. Disney turned his book Mars Needs Moms into a full-length feature film. He lives in California with his family.

What happens when you mix a Vietnam veteran, defense attorney, journalist, child prodigy, bigoted groundhog, reflective 10-year-old, brain-damaged cat, politically conservative rabbit, young scientist and, most importantly, a talking penguin? You get the irreverent, thought-provoking, always-hilarious Bloom County.

The strip featured some of the characters Breathed had used in The Academia Waltz, including former frat-boy Steve Dallas and paraplegic Vietnam War veteran Cutter John.

The story lines from Bloom County that won the Pulitzer Prize satirized both the political world and popular culture. Opus the Penguin accidentally receives billions of dollars from the U.S. government to develop a “Star Trek Strategic Defense Project,” a parody of President Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense project. Bill the Cat is caught selling the secret ingredients from Coca-Cola to the Soviet Union. Even music is not spared, as Steve Dallas creates “Deathtöngue,” a heavy metal glam band.

Breathed retired Bloom County in 1989 and produced a Sunday-only strip featuring some of its characters until 1995.

In a 2001 interview with the Onion’s A.V. Club, Breathed said he moved from journalism to cartooning at UT after being caught fabricating an article about a student releasing hundreds of baby alligators into Lake Travis. “Some wise sage finally suggested that the cartooning desk might be where I belonged, as I could let my little imagination soar wherever it wanted, and federal agents wouldn’t be needed,” he said.

Visit berkeleybreathed.com


Gail Caldwell

Critcism
2001

A native of Amarillo, Gail Caldwell received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in American studies from The University of Texas at Austin, and was an instructor at UT from 1980 to ’81. In 1985 she joined the Boston Globe, where she spent 24 years as a staff writer, book editor and chief book critic. She is the author of two memoirs: A Strong West Wind and Let’s Take the Long Way Home, which was awarded the 2010 New England Book Award and named one of Time Magazine’s top 10 nonfiction books of 2010.

“Like a lot of young would-be writers, I had wanted to be a poet for a brief, melancholic period when I was a teenager. By the time I went back to graduate school in my mid-20s, I’d spent years reading mid-century critics such as Mary McCarthy and Alfred Kazin. It seemed a wonderful way to devote one’s life to reading, and to critical dialogue, and maybe even get paid for it.”

Gail Caldwell won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism for “her insightful observations on contemporary life and literature” in eight book reviews and two columns for the Boston Globe. She said writing reviews differed widely from writing for academia.

“(Literary criticism) elevates the state of public consciousness in a very real sense. And it used to matter a great deal more than it does now. We’ve atomized the information age, so that the old reliance on a few critical voices has been splintered or decimated altogether.”

How does writing criticism for a newspaper differ from other types of scholarship?
"I used to say that I was caught between two worlds — the egghead section in the newsroom and the lightweight section in academe. I wrote reviews on deadline, once a week, for 20-something years. That kind of pressure makes you lean and mean, or ought to. Academics are usually writing about works in their field, either for peer review or for critical studies, and the time factor is entirely different. As far as what should go into critical thought, I would hope the demands are similar.”

What inspired your transition from literary critic to memoirist?
“I knew I had a couple of books inside me, and I didn’t quite know how to get there, so with my first book, A Strong West Wind, I tricked myself — I thought I would write a book about how literature had shaped my life. In the end it became a much more personal book.”

Where were you when you learned you won the Pulitzer Prize?
“Journalism is a notorious rumor mill, so there were rumblings. When I got news of the possibility, I went for a row on the Charles River. Then I went into the newsroom and watched the newsfeed from Columbia University come over the wire, just like in the movies.”

What did the award mean for you and your career?
“It was gratifying on some deep level. I had spent years doing something I loved and now here was this wonderful recognition of it. For my career — I was already launched, so I suppose it allowed me a little more freedom. But I think it’s probably good not to let it change your life.”

What was the most valuable lesson you learned at UT?
“How to think on my feet and stand up to a bunch of guys (professors) from Harvard and Yale.”

How does it feel to have your accomplishments honored by your alma mater?
“Lovely. I had several majors as an undergraduate until I located a home in American studies. It was a good place for a rebel girl who wanted to write.”

What advice would you give the next generation of journalists and writers?
“I hope there IS a next generation. Don’t let Facebook or Twitter affect your writing style. Read everything — especially the greats. Try to figure out how they do it. Then find your own voice, and use it. Be ruthless as your own editor. I think to be a good writer in any field you have to write from your deepest, most honest place, and have a rather bloodless super-ego with a blue pencil in hand. Endure!”


Carolyn Cole

Breaking News Photography
1998

Carolyn Cole graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 1983 with a bachelor’s in photojournalism. Before joining the Los Angeles Times in 1994, she worked for the Sacramento Bee, the San Francisco Examiner and the El Paso Herald-Post. Cole has won the George Polk Award, the Robert Capa Gold Medal and (twice) won the National Press Photographers Association’s Photographer of the Year award, plus the University of Missouri Pictures of the Year International Newspaper Photographer Award.

On the morning of Feb. 28, 1997, two men wearing full body armor and carrying automatic weapons entered the North Hollywood branch of Bank of America on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Los Angeles and opened fire. Police officers saw the men enter the bank, created a barricade behind their squad cars and called for backup. When the robbers exited the bank, they began firing at the police.

The “shots fired” announcement over the police scanners sent dozens of officers to the scene, along with reporters who also heard the announcement. The robbers attempted to flee, with one driving and the other walking next to the car, still shooting at police.

One of the robbers was killed and the other badly wounded with 29 gunshot wounds. By the time the ambulance arrived, he too was dead. A total of 11 police officers and seven civilians also were injured from the estimated 1,600 rounds shot by police and gunmen.

Cole captured an image of the wounded robber at the scene as he lay among the shell casings after officers placed him under arrest.

“The police were still trying to capture the shooters, so I don’t think they had time to worry about me,” Cole said. “I ended up on the street, where both of the robbers exited the bank and had been shot by police. One was already dead, while the other had fallen to the ground behind a car a few hundred feet away… He was shot in the leg and bleeding, but all I could see was the back of his head. I kept my eye and camera pointed at him for over 10 minutes, until finally he lifted his head and stared directly at me. That was the only picture I got of his face before he died.”

The Pulitzer committee cited the LA Times “for its comprehensive coverage of a botched bank robbery and subsequent police shoot-out in North Hollywood.”

Feature Photography
2004

“When I was young, my father took lots of photographs and home movies. He set up studio lights on special occasions to take our family portrait. All of the pictures went into numerous photo albums — I know that my father had an influence on me.”

Carolyn Cole won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in feature photography “for her cohesive, behind-the-scenes look at the effects of civil war in Liberia” and her “special attention to innocent citizens caught in the conflict.” She said her parents gave her a camera for her high school graduation and she took it on a summer trip to Europe.

“When I got home, I pored over my pictures and the details of their faces. I also loved to look at National Geographic and other travel magazines. Having grown up in suburbia, those magazines were an introduction to a larger world that I wanted to experience.”

What is the most important thing you learned studying at UT?
“I learned that to be good at something takes time and patience. I had several exceptional teachers. One of them was photojournalist Larry Price, who would spend hours in the field and then many more in the darkroom perfecting his prints. He taught me that to be a good photojournalist, you have to be fully dedicated.”

What was it like entering an active war zone in Liberia?
“I had never been to Africa, nor photographed street fighting before going to cover the civil conflict in Liberia in 2003. I got to Monrovia 10 days before the fighting reached the city, so I had time to familiarize myself with the town and people. Once the rebels reached Monrovia and the fighting and shelling increased, I joined with fellow photographers so that I would feel safer going to the front line. I always try to take precautions, like wearing a helmet and flak jacket, but there is always risk involved. It is my belief in the power and purpose of photojournalism that keeps me going in those situations.”

When documenting an environment of suffering, how do you balance being both a person and a photographer?
“I have always had a strong sense of purpose as a photojournalist. It is my job to witness and document what is happening. I channel all of my energy into making pictures that accurately represent the tragedy and suffering I am seeing. I want those who see the photographs to not only be informed, but also moved emotionally.

“If I encounter a situation where someone needs help, and there is no one else able, then I will do what I can to assist that person. Sometimes it can be giving someone a ride to the hospital, or helping to buy a bit of food for a hungry family.”

What was it like to win your second Pulitzer Prize?
“I had been working as a photojournalist nearly 20 years before I won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 2004. I try to make pictures that are powerful enough to be remembered, and by winning the Pulitzer, it is a guarantee that the photographs will be a part of the historical record.”

What advice would you offer the next generation of journalists?
“I worked at four small newspapers before joining the Los Angeles Times. I am glad I had that opportunity before going off to cover the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia and so many other countries. Without those early assignments covering local and national news on deadline, I would not have had the experience necessary to successfully cover international news stories.”

How do you feel to have your accomplishments honored at UT?
“I am very proud to be a UT graduate and to be honored in this way. UT started me on a journey that has taken me further than I ever imagined.”


Ron Cortes

Explanatory Journalism
1997

Ron Cortes didn’t follow the usual path to journalism’s highest heights. Instead, he took the mathematical approach — he graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s in mathematics in 1966. The San Antonio native spent 10 years teaching in Texas, California and Iran, before finding his passion for journalism. He returned to UT in 1978 to do postgraduate work in photojournalism.

Cortes began his second career three years later at the News Journal in Wilmington, Del. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer. For the Inquirer, he covered stories all over the globe including Cuba, Bosnia, Ethiopia and Haiti. Not only did Cortes win a Pulitzer, he was also a finalist for the prize in 1991 for a series on a senior citizen who returned to school for a high school diploma.

There’s nothing more emotional than the final days of someone’s life. Ron Cortes, working with a team at the Philadelphia Inquirer, captured the pain, fear, hope, love and finality of those last hours with “Seeking a Good Death.” The series won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, and opened the conversation in America surrounding the impossible choices facing critically ill patients.

The articles and photos ran from Nov. 17, 1996, to Nov. 21, 1996. Together with April Saul, Cortes provided photography for articles written by Michael Vitez. The series explored the ways in which patients sought to die with dignity. Cortes was a last-minute addition to the project that would ultimately win the prize.

“The photographer who had been assigned to work on the series was on vacation, and the reporter felt this person could die any minute,” Cortes recalled. “They needed somebody who was sensitive enough to step in without any kind of relationship with the family and get permission to photograph this gentleman. It was really tough.”

He entered the project under difficult circumstances. But despite having no relationship with the family, he relied on the greatest lesson he learned while a graduate student at UT.

“The most important thing I learned was ethics: being considerate of whom you are photographing,” he said. “I never wanted to take advantage of anyone, regardless, even if it meant not getting the photographs I needed.”

He explained the project to the man’s wife and asked for her permission to photograph his passing. The woman agreed, but that wasn’t good enough for Cortes.

“I told her that I would feel more comfortable if her husband was OK with it, but he was very ill,” Cortes said. “She asked him, and he whispered in her ear that it was okay. I was fortunate because they were a very religious family, and they welcomed me completely into their lives.”

Cortes was later asked by family members to photograph the funeral, and when he accepted his Pulitzer Prize, all of them were there.

“What was really neat was that we brought the wife and her family to the award ceremony and got to celebrate together,” Cortes said.


Judy Walgren DeHaas

International Reporting
1994

Judy Walgren DeHaas graduated in 1988 from The University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s in journalism. She worked for the Dallas Morning News from 1987 to 1999. Her book, Lost Boys of Natinga: A School for Sudan’s Young Refugees, about children and war in Southern Sudan, was published by Houghton Mifflin in September 1998. She has worked as a photographer for the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post and director of photography for the San Francisco Chronicle.

In June of 1993, the United Nations held the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna — its first conference devoted to human rights in more than 25 years. Three journalists who learned and sharpened their craft at UT were part of the Dallas Morning News team that received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for a series examining an epidemic of violence against women in many nations.

For many years, advocates of women’s rights worldwide had urged the U.N. to officially recognize violence against women as a human rights issue. This designation would bring international attention to the issue as well as enable the U.N. to help protect the rights of women.

In anticipation of the conference, the Dallas Morning News published a series of articles examining the topic, called “Violence Against Women: A Question of Human Rights.” Consisting of 14 stories published from March to June 1993, the series showed that women in all nations and all economic circumstances were vulnerable to abuse, through law, tradition or individual cruelty. The topics of the articles ranged from the selling of brides in China to accusations of sexual abuse by Dallas police officers.

Among the 30 reporters, photographers, editors and graphic artists involved were UT graduates Judy Walgren DeHaas, Victoria Loe-Hicks and Gayle Reaves.

DeHaas contributed photography for an article on female genital mutilation and became the first person to photograph one of these ceremonies in Somalia. Loe-Hicks wrote an article on rape and physical abuse that included memories of her own struggle to cope with the aftermath of an assault. Reaves wrote articles examining forced prostitution in Thailand and the accusations of abuse by police officers in Dallas. The articles received great acclaim, eventually receiving the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.

During the World Conference on Human Rights that summer, the U.N. went on to adopt a resolution calling for the protection of women against violence.

“Did our series have an effect on that?” Reaves said. “I don’t know if there is any way to really know. I can tell you that for women in Dallas, I think that this series… made them feel that the Dallas Morning News understood their lives and cared about them and was willing to spend resources on news that they found important.”


Mark Dooley

Public Service
1997

Mark Dooley graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s in journalism in 1982. He shared his prize for public service with a team from the New Orleans Times-Picayune for a series analyzing conditions that threaten the world’s supply of fish. Dooley was copy editor for the project. He also has worked at the San Antonio Express-News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

Fishing is a way of life for generations of hard-working communities along the sprawling Gulf Coast. The commercial and sport fishing industries serve as both the enduring cultural lifeblood and the economic heartbeat for the region.

In March 1996, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a series of articles examining the state of the fishing industry in the Gulf Coast and beyond. The far-reaching, eight-day series, “Oceans of Trouble,” reported on fisheries around the world — including ones in Alaska, Florida, Ecuador and Thailand.

UT graduate Mark Dooley was part of a team that pinpointed threats to the industry — including overfishing, lower-priced import markets and habitat destruction of coastal wetlands. The poignant articles challenged commercial and sport fishers and the managers, scientists and politicians to finally come together for long-term conservation of fish populations.

The Times-Picayune was awarded the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in public service for the series. According to the citation, the team was honored “for its comprehensive series analyzing the conditions that threaten the world’s supply of fish.”

As copy editor for “Oceans of Trouble,” Dooley diligently worked with the reporters, photographers and graphic artists to fine-tune all the ingredients.

“I worked with talented journalists, and the writing and pictures were excellent,” Dooley said. “My job was to approach each piece of copy as a reader, tie the stories and photos together, and to some extent keep things grounded,” he said. “Is it accurate? Compelling? Does the reader understand this word, this line of thinking, this paragraph? And does it all make sense?”

Dooley remains proud to be part of the effort.

“You hope it contributed to early conversation about sick oceans and the fish we depend on,” he said. “Obviously we didn’t solve the problem. But we put the issue on more people’s radar.”


Glenn Frankel

International Reporting
1989

Glenn Frankel graduated from Columbia University in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in American history. After working for several smaller papers, he joined the Metro staff of the Washington Post in 1979 as bureau chief in Richmond, Va. He later joined the foreign desk, serving as bureau chief in Southern Africa, Jerusalem and London, covering uprisings in South Africa and Israel, famine in Africa, the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and two Gulf wars.

After returning from overseas, Frankel served as deputy national news editor and editor of the Sunday magazine before leaving the Post in 2006 to become a visiting professor of journalism at Stanford University. In August 2010 he became the director of the School of Journalism and G.B. Dealey Regents Professor in Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.

Frankel is author of two books: Beyond the Promised Land: Jews and Arabs on the Hard Road to a New Israel, which won the National Jewish Book Award; and Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa, finalist for the Alan Paton Award, South Africa’s most distinguished literary prize.

The spontaneous outburst of protest, rage and civil unrest known as the Palestinian intifada began in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in early December 1987 and soon spread to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Young Palestinians lashed out against their Israeli military occupiers as well as the docility of their own parents and political leaders, and the Israeli Army responded with harsh, improvised tactics in a protracted war of populations that lasted several years.

Glenn Frankel, who was Jerusalem bureau chief for the Washington Post, covered the conflict from its earliest days and traveled throughout the region writing news stories, features and enterprise pieces seeking to find the causes and measure the impact of events on Palestinians and Israelis.

“At first we had no idea we were covering a watershed moment in the conflict,” he recalled. “But over time it became clear that this was something new that would change the region and everyone who lived in it.

“The most important reporting I did was to go from village to village and city to city, interviewing ordinary people whose lives were affected by the conflict — young Palestinians in the vanguard of the unrest, their anxious parents, Arab shopkeepers who were often caught in the middle, and young Israeli soldiers who had been sent to put down the revolt.

“As a journalist, I could be in the West Bank city of Nablus one day talking to the father of a young man killed by Israeli soldiers, then in Tel Aviv the next day interviewing Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin. These two would never meet or speak with each other, yet each had enormous impact on the other’s lives. It was a great responsibility, and a privilege, to be able to interview them and report on their lives.”

Frankel’s experiences as a foreign correspondent have shaped his values and vision as director of UT’s School of Journalism. He says the next generation of journalists need to be literate in the amazing new tools and platforms of the digital age, yet also firmly grounded in the values of independent, accurate and evenhanded reporting, and critical thinking.

“This is a very exciting time to become a journalist,” Frankel said. “Our students are the ones who will recreate and reimagine journalism for a new age. There are a wonderful set of possibilities, yet at the same time journalism at its heart will still be about telling stories, and providing information so that people can make the most important decisions about the way we want to live.”


William H. Goetzmann

History
1967

William H. Goetzmann was born in Washington, D.C., in 1930 and grew up in Minnesota and Houston, Texas. He received his doctorate in history from Yale University in 1957 and began teaching at The University of Texas at Austin in 1964, where he was the head of the American Studies program until 1980. One of the greatest historians of the 20th century, Goetzmann published 11 books during his storied career. He died on Sept. 7, 2010, at the age of 80.

William H. Goetzmann had an enduring fascination with the American West. His many definitive, groundbreaking books on its exploration and settlement, art and intellectual history were major contributions to America’s understanding of itself. His interest in what would become his life’s work was sparked while a student at Yale University. His doctoral dissertation, an authoritative examination of the U.S. Army’s role in the development of the “the Great American Desert,” was published as Army Exploration in the American West, 1803 – 1863 by Yale University Press.

Both the precision and scope of that work quickly caught the attention of publisher Alfred Knopf, who approached Goetzmann about producing the ultimate historical account of exploration in the American West.

The masterwork that emerged was Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West — one of those rare books that changed the way historians thought about the evolution of the United States.

The tome is divided into three sections, each chronicling a period of westward expansion. The first section details how Lewis and Clark sought to collect scientific data on their journey into the American heartland, but also

endeavored to map natural resources and native settlements. The second section highlights U.S. investment west of the Mississippi and the phenomenon of Manifest Destiny. The third section explores the welling scientific interest in the West as a “frontier laboratory” — as well as the brisk political discourse about the region’s future.

This trailblazing volume won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for history, as well as the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians.

Kay Sloan, professor of English at Miami University and a former student of Goetzmann’s, explained what made the book revolutionary. “Bill Goetzmann conducted his research in a manner analogous to that of the explorers and scientists of whom he wrote,” she said. “He was drawn to the drama of his scholarly subjects in the same way early explorers might have confronted the unknown frontiers that lay before them. With a passionate zeal, he embraced vast subjects and researched them with meticulous attention to factual detail.”


Oscar Griffin Jr.

Local Reporting
1963

Oscar Griffin Jr. graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. In addition to working as editor of the Pecos Independent and Enterprise, Griffin worked for the Houston Chronicle from 1962 to 1969 as a reporter and White House correspondent. From 1969 to 1974, he served as an assistant director of public affairs for the U.S. Department of Transportation. Griffin then returned to Texas and managed his family’s oil company in El Campo.

The Billie Sol Estes scandal involved a theft of more than $34 million, the financial ruin of hundreds of unsuspecting farmers in the West Texas town of Pecos, and a federal fraud investigation.

Estes moved to Pecos and amassed a fortune buying and selling land, cotton and fertilizer contracts. His clout in the city was based on money, contacts and legend. Estes cultivated this image by showing off his wealth and touting relationships with Vice President Johnson and President Kennedy. Although many in the town were enamored by Estes and the perceived credibility he brought to Pecos, many had been burned by Estes’ business practices, which centered on price cutting and threats to rival businesses.

Oscar Griffin Jr. moved to Pecos in the summer of 1960 to become editor of the Pecos Independent and Enterprise. Before he moved, a friend had warned him about life in Pecos: “If you want to get along in Pecos, you’ll have to go along with Billie Sol Estes.”

Griffin first met Estes at the entrepreneur’s home, a West Texas palace with 10 bedrooms, two tennis courts and a swimming pool. Griffin heard gossip about Estes’

questionable business dealings and began investigating claims of mysterious “tank deals,” in which Estes used the credit of West Texas farmers to buy fertilizer tanks. A detailed examination of 10 West Texas counties showed that 33,500 fertilizer tanks had been mortgaged for $34.5 million. This was shocking, because farmers could borrow at no cost as many tanks as they needed from fertilizer distributors, and because there were no tanks to be found.

Griffin and the Independent published a series of articles on Estes, and soon Pecos was crowded with investigators from financial institutions and the federal government. Estes was charged with crimes associated with counterfeit mortgages on nonexistent fertilizer tanks, and was eventually convicted on a variety of fraud charges. Griffin won the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for exposing the scandal. He died on Nov. 23, 2011, at the age of 78.


Erin "Skeeter" Hagler

Feature Photography
1980

Erwin “Skeeter” Hagler graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 1971 with a bachelor’s in architecture. From 1972–1974, he was a photographer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in his hometown of Fort Worth before joining the Dallas Times Herald, where he worked until 1988. Hagler also was honored by the National Press Photographers Association as regional photographer of the year in 1972 and in 1974. He currently lives on a ranch in Cat Spring, Texas, where he works as a freelance photographer.

“(I got into photojournalism) pretty much by accident. I got my degree in architecture, needed a few electives to graduate, and took some photojournalism courses and worked for the Daily Texan my last year. I got the journalism bug and went out looking for a newspaper photographer job and found one at the Waco News-Tribune.”

Erwin Hagler won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in feature photography as a photojournalist at the Dallas Times Herald for his series documenting the western cowboy. He said UT taught him some simple but compelling rules.

“I learned that hard work and following your passion for what you truly love can come to pass.”

What inspired you to photograph cowboys?
“While working for the Dallas Times Herald’s Sunday magazine, I came up with my own cover story ideas. A good strong look at the life of the American cowboy had not been done before by a newspaper. I took on the job of documenting the lifestyle of the American cowboy.”Arguably, the most popular image in the series is the one of the cowboy in the helicopter.

What makes that image so special?
“Viewers like that picture because it combines two elements, the old throwback of the Texas cowboy with the modern element of the helicopter. The photo just has a good feel to it. The old boot photo is a favorite also. It says a lot about the lifestyle of the Texas cowboy in a very simple way.”

Where were you when you learned you had won the Pulitzer Prize?
“After I entered the Cowboy series in the [Pulitzer Prize] contest, I never gave it another thought. It was just a normal work day that April when the awards were announced. The winners came across the AP wire. I was called into the newsroom for some fake reason and everyone was

gathered around. The editor made the announcement that I had won. Everyone applauded and the champagne came out. It was the biggest shock of my life (and) with no pre-warning.”

What did that level of recognition mean to you?
“The [Pulitzer Prize] is the highest honor in journalism and for me very humbling to win. I did a year or more of speaking engagements (but) very little real newspaper work. I was representing the best in journalism for that year and it was a lot of responsibility.”

What advice would you offer the next generation of journalists?
“Stay current on the changes in the journalism business. Don’t get left behind in the old ways. Be smart enough to see which direction things are going. Follow your passion.”

How do you feel to have your accomplishments honored at UT? “Very honored to be grouped with fellow UT alums in the exhibit. I hope to meet them all one day. I look forward for my children to see the exhibit. I hope it will inspire current UT students.”


Karen Elliott House

International Reporting
1984

Karen Elliott House graduated in 1970 with a bachelor’s in journalism from The University of Texas at Austin, where she worked at the Daily Texan. She began her career as a reporter with the Dallas Morning News. In 1974 she went to work at the Wall Street Journal, where she held a variety of positions including diplomatic correspondent and foreign editor, eventually becoming president of the Dow Jones International Group in 1995. In 2002 House became publisher of the Journal, a position she held until her retirement in 2006.

Besides the Pulitzer Prize, House was the recipient of the Overseas Press Club’s Bob Considine Award for best daily newspaper interpretation of foreign affairs, Georgetown University’s Edward Weintal Award for distinguished coverage of American foreign policy and the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Excellence in Diplomatic Reporting.

President Ronald Reagan, raising the prospect of “the dawning of new hope for the people of the troubled Middle East,” announced a framework for a broad peace agreement between Israel and the Arab states in 1982. The following year, UT graduate Karen Elliott House traveled to the Middle East on a journalistic mission to realistically assess the plan’s chances for success.

As an established reporter for the Wall Street Journal, House received an invitation to accompany King Hussein of Jordan to a summit in New Delhi where the king was to meet with Arab leaders involved in the peace plan negotiations.

House flew on King Hussein’s plane and was the only reporter who stayed in the same hotel as the leaders. The first evening of the summit, King Hussein showed House a letter from President Reagan imploring the king to participate in the negotiations.

House wanted to understand the peace process from the perspective of the Arab leaders. “Why don’t you tell me what is really going on?” House asked Hussein. “I won’t write anything until you make a decision about joining the talks and I will explain why you said yes or no.”

The king agreed to this proposal and briefed her between meetings with his fellow heads of state during the next three days. During the next month in Jordan, she continued to talk with him and with Arab leaders and U.S. diplomats who came and went seeking to influence his decision on participating in Reagan’s peace initiative.

These exclusive interviews were eventually published in the Wall Street Journal and went on to win the 1984.

Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. According to the Pulitzer citation, “Her extraordinary series of interviews with Jordan’s King Hussein correctly anticipated the problems that would confront the Reagan administration’s Middle East peace plan.”

“Winning the award was obviously a big thrill,” House recalled. “I remember that I got a call from Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post, and she said, ‘There are two things you need to know. First, you won’t get any money. And second, it will be the first line in your obituary.’”

House spent almost her entire career with the Wall Street Journal as a reporter, editor and executive. She said she is grateful for the opportunity the newspaper gave her to do quality journalism.

“The Wall Street Journal allowed me to do what I call ‘lighthouse journalism,’ where you ask a question of importance and you try to light people’s way forward, as opposed to ‘streetlamp journalism,’ which simply lights your feet but not your way. Sadly, most journalism these days is the latter, focusing only on what happened yesterday.”


Victoria Loe-Hicks

International Reporting
1994

Victoria Loe-Hicks earned a bachelor’s in English from Stanford University in 1975 and did graduate work in journalism at UT. She has worked for the Dallas Morning News as a reporter and editor for the political, national, lifestyles, state and metro sections. She also has worked for Texas Monthly magazine and the San Jose Mercury News.

In June of 1993, the United Nations held the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna — its first conference devoted to human rights in more than 25 years. Three journalists who learned and sharpened their craft at UT were part of the Dallas Morning News team that received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for a series examining an epidemic of violence against women in many nations.

For many years, advocates of women’s rights worldwide had urged the U.N. to officially recognize violence against women as a human rights issue. This designation would bring international attention to the issue as well as enable the U.N. to help protect the rights of women.

In anticipation of the conference, the Dallas Morning News published a series of articles examining the topic, called “Violence Against Women: A Question of Human Rights.” Consisting of 14 stories published from March to June 1993, the series showed that women in all nations and all economic circumstances were vulnerable to abuse, through law, tradition or individual cruelty. The topics of the articles ranged from the selling of brides in China to accusations of sexual abuse by Dallas police officers.

Among the 30 reporters, photographers, editors and graphic artists involved were UT graduates Judy Walgren DeHaas, Victoria Loe-Hicks and Gayle Reaves.

DeHaas contributed photography for an article on female genital mutilation and became the first person to photograph one of these ceremonies in Somalia. Loe-Hicks wrote an article on rape and physical abuse that included memories of her own struggle to cope with the aftermath of an assault. Reaves wrote articles examining forced prostitution in Thailand and the accusations of abuse by police officers in Dallas. The articles received great acclaim, eventually receiving the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.

During the World Conference on Human Rights that summer, the U.N. went on to adopt a resolution calling for the protection of women against violence.

“Did our series have an effect on that?” Reaves said. “I don’t know if there is any way to really know. I can tell you that for women in Dallas, I think that this series… made them feel that the Dallas Morning News understood their lives and cared about them and was willing to spend resources on news that they found important.”


J. Lynn Lunsford

Breaking News Reporting
2002

J. Lynn Lunsford, son of a Fort Worth Star-Telegram printer, knew he wanted to be a journalist from the time he was four after visiting the newsroom with his father. He graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s in journalism from The University of Texas at Austin, where he worked for several semesters on the staff of the Daily Texan. He has covered aviation and aviation safety for the Star-Telegram and the Dallas Morning News. In April 2001 he joined the Wall Street Journal, eventually becoming aerospace editor and handling the Journal’s overall coverage of aerospace and defense companies.

In his 25-year journalism career, Lunsford covered many high-profile disaster stories, including the crashes of the space shuttle Columbia, TWA Flight 800 and ValuJet Flight 592. His work covering the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995 was included in the book Best Newspaper Writing 1996, published by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Lunsford won several state and national awards for writing and reporting, including the 2004 Gerald Loeb award for coverage of an ethics scandal at Boeing that led to the conviction and imprisonment of two company officials.

In June 2009 he became the mid-states manager of communications for the Federal Aviation Administration, where he is responsible for FAA communications in 17 states. Lunsford spends his spare time flying his vintage 1938 Piper Cub.

When two planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, reporters from the Wall Street Journal found themselves at the heart of the chaos inflicted by the terrorist attacks.

Their offices — located in lower Manhattan across the street from the World Trade Center — were damaged in the attacks, forcing Journal staff to evacuate amid the collapsing buildings and confusion.

Despite becoming engulfed in the horrific events of that day, Journal staff members never stopped covering the story. Reporters relocated to apartments throughout the city and offices in New Jersey. Editors began coordinating their efforts and enlisting reporters at the bureau offices to help report on the developing story.

One of the reporters central to the effort was UT graduate J. Lynn Lunsford. Stationed at the Journal’s Los Angeles bureau, he received a call at 6:15 a.m. from his editor, asking him to turn on the TV because a small plane had just struck the World Trade Center.

“I immediately flipped on to CNN, and there was a picture of a hole in the building,” Lunsford said. “I looked at that hole, and I said that’s not a small plane— a small plane wouldn’t have done that to one of those buildings.”

With his specialization in aviation and aerospace reporting, Lunsford began making calls to contacts in the airline industry to piece together what had happened. He said he and other reporters did their best to approach the assignment as a normal story despite the extraordinary circumstances.

“For us, it was a straightforward exercise in getting the information,” he said. “Find out what’s going on, get the best information we can, put it in context, drawing on what we know about the situation. In the heat of the battle, you just do your job and compartmentalize. And while you can recognize and realize that it’s horrible… you still do the story, you still do your job.”

Lunsford’s airline-industry expertise provided remarkable insights for a first-day story. He and a small team of Journal reporters detailed the security conditions at airports and on planes that allowed the terrorists to carry out the attacks. They detailed long-standing concerns about lax airport security and predicted how it would forever change.

The Wall Street Journal was awarded the Pulitzer for breaking news reporting for articles published on Sept. 12, 2001. According to the citation from the committee, the Journal won “for its comprehensive and insightful coverage, executed under the most difficult circumstances, of the terrorist attack on New York City, which recounted the day’s events and their implications for the future.”

“We were pleased that we got the recognition,” Lunsford recalled¸ “but were acutely aware that it was for covering something that had also inflicted a great amount of trauma and cost the lives of thousands of people.”



View September 11 prize information.


Dan Malone

Investigative Reporting
1992

Dan Malone graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s in journalism in 1978. He capped his student journalism career as editor-in-chief of the Daily Texan, and served as an intern for the Harte-Hanks Austin bureau after graduation.

Malone has been a reporter for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Weekly. He is currently on the faculty of Tarleton State and has also taught at the University of North Texas.

He was awarded first place in two other contests the same year he won the Pulitzer: the freedom of information category by the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors, and the investigative reporting category by the Institute for Southern Studies.

By the late 1980s, Dan Malone had covered nearly every beat imaginable as a reporter and reported on national political conventions and natural disasters for newspapers across Texas. However, he was becoming disillusioned with journalism, frustrated at the lack of change resulting from his work. “I did these stories and they appeared and nothing ever changed,” Malone said. “I was seriously considering leaving journalism.”

Malone expressed his frustrations to Howard Swindle, projects editor at the Dallas Morning News. Swindle suggested Malone team up with another reporter, Lorraine Adams, on a long-term project. Adams had written several articles about police shootings in Dallas with discrepancies between police accounts and forensic evidence. She wanted to expand her inquiry into police misconduct to the entire state.

Adams and Malone spent the next two-and-a-half years obtaining and scrutinizing vast amounts of state documents for a series of articles, “Abuse of Authority: When Citizens Complain about Police.” The stories revealed Texas police officers were the most frequently investigated in the nation, and uncovered six cases in which officers wrongfully killed or acted negligently in the deaths of Texas citizens.

Malone points to another story he did at the time of his Pulitzer as being particularly gratifying. A letter arrived from a Texas prison inmate who claimed that his cellmate, Luan Van Hoang, a juvenile Vietnamese immigrant, had been wrongfully convicted of burglary. Adams and Malone were asked to run down the tip; several months of reporting resulted in a retrial for Hoang.

“That was the first time for me as a reporter where my words provoked such dramatic results,” Malone said.


John McConnico

Spot News Photography
1999

John McConnico earned two degrees in journalism from The University of Texas at Austin: a bachelor’s in 1987 and a master’s in 1994. He spent nine years as a photographer and editor for the Associated Press, leaving in 2002 to become a freelancer based in Moldova. McConnico has worked in more than 75 countries and now pursues in-depth projects in Europe, Africa and Asia. He speaks English, French and Spanish.

On Aug. 7, 1998, terrorists simultaneously bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring more than 4,000. These were the first high-profile attacks by al-Qaida, the Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden.

At the time of the attacks, Bouju was an AP photographer based in Nairobi, working on the border with Zaire. He raced back to Nairobi to oversee an AP team of 11 photographers assigned to the bombings. Among the other photographers was fellow UT alumnus John McConnico, who had rushed to Nairobi from New Delhi, where he was based.

Bouju and McConnico had worked together at the Daily Texan when they covered the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco. “John and I were in Waco for a week, but we were kept away like everyone else by the FBI,” Bouju said. “We camped out there in a car.”

Photographs by Bouju, McConnico and the other members of the AP team won a Pulitzer, and the committee praised the images for illustrating the horror and the humanity surrounding the event.


William McKenzie

Editorial Writing
2010

William McKenzie graduated in 1976 from The University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s in business administration and quickly began weaving a communications career that meshed with his love of ideas. He served as deputy research director of John Anderson’s 1980 presidential campaign and, from 1981 to 1991, he edited The Ripon Forum, a progressive Republican journal of opinion. In 1988 he edited A Newer World, a collection of political essays. After spending 12 years in Washington, McKenzie joined the Dallas Morning News editorial staff in July 1991 to write editorials and a weekly column.

The Dallas Morning News in 2007 began publishing a series of editorials that throughout several years would highlight disparities between crime, economics and education in North and South Dallas. Every month, the editorial staff illuminated specific areas needing improvement in forsaken South Dallas and pressured city officials for revitalization.

One editorial titled “Bleak House” compared the squalor of several South Dallas homes with the opulence in which their absentee owners lived. Distant landlords described being frightened to return to mow lawns where drug addicts and thieves had ravaged plumbing and wiring.

Another essay, “Two Months to Go,” reflected the newspaper’s push to get the Texas Legislature to help remedy the problems facing South Dallas. The piece was one of several editorials that the newspaper published between January and June during the 2009 Legislature. The editorial campaign persuaded legislators to meet half of the News’ priorities for South Dallas.

The sustained focus of more than 200 pieces earned the three-person editorial team covering South Dallas the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing and accomplished a chief task of journalism: to hold government accountable.

According to the citation by the selection committee, the writers were awarded the prize “for their relentless editorials deploring the stark social and economic disparity between the city’s better-off northern half and distressed southern half.”

The editorial staff of the Morning News did not stop prodding city officials about the troubles of South Dallas after receiving the profession’s most prestigious recognition.

“There’s a real satisfaction on focusing on a part of town that has been neglected for so long,” McKenzie said in an interview with the Morning News when the award was announced. “But if you’re looking at this in the long term, three years isn’t much time in terms of decades of neglect. The challenging part, since we’re just at year three, is you can’t let up. You have to keep going after it.”


John Moore

Breaking News Photography
2005

John Moore graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 1990, earning a bachelor’s in radio-television-film while serving as photo editor at the Daily Texan. He joined the Associated Press the following year as a photojournalist based in Nicaragua, then moved to India, South Africa, Mexico and Egypt, all for the AP. He joined Getty Images in 2005, roaming South Asia, Africa and the Middle East before returning to the United States in 2008. He has covered combat zones throughout the world and extensively photographed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Through the years he has won virtually every major photojournalism award, including Photographer of the Year from the National Press Photographers Association. His photos of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan in 2007 won top awards from Word Press Photo and the Robert Capa Gold Medal for courage in photojournalism from the Overseas Press Club.

The swift and stunning American military conquest of Iraq unraveled in 2004. A growing insurgency killed nearly a thousand American troops and thousands more Iraqi civilians, photographs from Abu Ghraib prison revealed widespread torture and abuses of Iraqi prisoners, while popular support for the war in the United States began to crumble.

Moore chronicled this chaotic period as a photographer for the Associated Press, sharing the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography with a team of AP photojournalists.

“I was very proud to be part of the AP team that was given that honor,” Moore said in a 2008 interview with the Digital Journalist. “The other members of that team were outstanding, and I was especially happy for our local Iraqi staff, who work in unbelievably dangerous conditions and in many ways are heroes in this profession.”

The harrowing images captured by Moore and fellow AP photographers show the human toll of the war. They include images of a detainee locked inside a cage, the

blood-soaked body of a dying soldier on a cart being wheeled away and two displaced children waiting to return to their home in Fallujah.

“I feel strongly that we should cover the events that shape our world,” Moore said. “In this point in history, the United States is fighting two wars, which is very rare. Regardless of how noble or disgraceful these national endeavors may be, I feel I should do my share as part of a rather small but dedicated group of journalists who continue covering these conflicts.”

Although he is known for photographing conflicts, Moore does not consider himself to be a war photographer.

“I enjoy doing stories that challenge me. Wars are by their very nature very challenging environments, physically, emotionally, photographically, so there is a natural attraction there for me, I suppose,” Moore said.


Lucian Perkins

Explanatory Journalism
1995

Lucian Perkins graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 1977 with a bachelor’s in biology. In 1979 he was hired as an intern with the Washington Post, where he remained for 27 years as a staff photographer. Perkins began covering international events in 1988. In addition to his two Pulitzers, he has won the Newspaper Photographer of the Year award from the National Press Photographer’s Association and the World Press Photo of the Year award. He shared the 1995 Pulitzer with writer Leon Dash for their profile of a Washington, D.C. family’s struggle with destructive cycles of poverty, illiteracy, crime and drug abuse. Currently, he is an independent photographer and videographer concentrating on multimedia projects and documentaries, while still pursuing his love for the still image.

“I had read in an interview with Robert Gilka, then the chief of photography for National Geographic… He said, ‘We’re up to our armpits in great photographers, but up to our ankles in good ideas.’ I took that to heart…”

What motivated you to become a photojournalist?
“My becoming a photojournalist involved a bit of luck. I was a biology major at UT when I took a beginning photography class as an elective in the photojournalism department. One of the teaching assistants in the class liked my work and encouraged me to apply for a photography opening at the Daily Texan and the Cactus yearbook. I did and was hired. While working on the Daily Texan, I applied to nearly 30 newspapers for a summer internship.

“The Washington Post hired me. My goal during that internship was to persuade them to hire me full time…(I) decided to come up with my own stories, even if that meant shooting them on my own time after work. One of those story ideas not only ran on the front page of the Post but was also picked up by nearly every news organization around the world. The Post extended my internship for six months, and then hired me full time. I ended up working there for 27 years.”

What is the most important thing you learned while a student at UT?
“At its best, a university offers us different pathways to expand our knowledge and helps us discover who we are. In my case, I started out as a science major at UT and left a photojournalist, a profession I would have, otherwise, never dreamed of.”

What inspired your team to document the struggles of urban Washington?
“Leon Dash, a reporter for the Washington Post, came up with the idea to follow several generations of a family in urban D.C. in an effort to understand better how poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse, recidivism and racism move from generation to generation. The Washington Post asked me to work with him to document the story. This eight-part series touched off one of the largest community responses of any story the paper ever published.”

What were some of the challenges of photographing this family?
“Following Rosa Lee Cunningham and her family took an emotional toll on both Leon Dash and me. Witnessing the chaos and uncertainty in their lives was difficult and profound. For example, we watched Rosa Lee slowly succumb to HIV/AIDS and die soon after we had won the Pulitzer. Some of her children were in and out of jail, and would also eventually die of HIV/AIDS. We went from one tragedy to the next as we followed her life. Take one of her grandchildren, whom I first met when he was 11 years old. Reco was a sweet and loving kid like any other child you might encounter in this country. Four years later he was involved in a gang shoot-out and killed. I often thought that in another environment that child might have had an opportunity to blossom and become a valuable member of society.”

What did that level of recognition mean to you and your career?
Winning the Pulitzer bestows a professional validation that is understood inside and outside of the journalism community. But what is most important about the Pulitzer is that it gives added life to the winning stories and photographs, thereby providing an opportunity for them to have a broader impact on society.”

What advice would you offer to the next generation of UT journalists?
“Please learn a foreign language. I wish I had taken better advantage of that while at UT. I often think of the tremendous benefits speaking different languages offers anybody, especially a journalist.”

How does it feel to have your accomplishments permanently enshrined at your alma mater?
“I have very fond memories of UT and continue to appreciate what I took away from my experience. To be honored here is something I will always treasure.”

Feature Photography
2000

In the late 1990s tensions between Serbians and Albanians in the Kosovo region of Yugoslavia escalated into civil war. President Slobodan Milosevic’s regime killed thousands of Kosovar Albanians and forced thousands more to abandon their homes under the threat of violence — resulting in a refugee crisis, and a moment of truth for the United States and its European allies.

Contending the Serbians were committing ethnic cleansing, the Albanian-led Kosovo Liberation Army fought for independence, while Serbians fought to retain Kosovo as part of Yugoslavia. NATO and the West used both diplomatic and military means to quell the violence, including a two-month bombing campaign against the Milosevic government. The bombing eventually forced the government to submit and helped lead to Milosevic’s downfall, but not before an estimated 1.1 million people were forced to flee their homes from advancing Serb forces.

UT graduate Lucian Perkins was one of three Washington Post photographers sent to cover the refugee crisis. “When I arrived on the Macedonia and Kosovo border on April 5, 1999, 50,000 Kosovar Albanian refugees had been trapped for almost a week after being

forcibly evicted from their homes by Serb paramilitary forces,” Perkins said in an interview with the World Press Photo Foundation. “Not allowed to cross into Macedonia, they were stuck in a no man’s land called Blace, with no shelter from the cold, rain and oppressive daytime heat and little access to food and water.”

Perkins and the rest of the Post’s team were awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for their intimate and poignant images depicting the plight of the refugees. The three photographers captured the despair, fear and determination in the faces of their subjects in a collection of searing images that brought home the human element to readers and viewers in the United States.

“I hope that, by looking at my photographs, people will develop a better understanding of the world around them and more empathy with the people in it,” Perkins said.


John Pope

Public Service and Breaking News Reporting
2006

John Pope earned two degrees from The University of Texas at Austin, a bachelor’s in mathematics in 1970 and a master’s in history in 1972. He also minored in journalism and worked as an investigative reporter for the Daily Texan. After graduating, Pope became a copy editor and general assignment reporter for the States-Item in New Orleans before it merged with the Times-Picayune in 1980. Since then, he has covered medical and health issues, higher education and general assignments, and has written obituaries.

Less than two hours after daybreak on Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast with devastating force, killing more than 1,800 people in the region and leaving hundreds of thousands of others displaced. The Category 3 storm made landfall with 125-mile-an-hour winds, and New Orleans was among the hardest hit.

As the storm struck the city, UT graduate John Pope and his colleagues at the Times-Picayune stood their ground. They stayed when others left because New Orleans was both their beat and their home.

“I like to think that the Katrina experience made us tougher and more aggressive reporters, because we were writing about conditions affecting our city and our homes,” Pope said during his address at the College of Communication’s December 2010 commencement.

The Times-Picayune was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes in 2006 for its coverage. The judges bestowed the prize for public service on the paper “for its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper’s resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant.” They gave the paper the prize for breaking news reporting “for its courageous and aggressive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, overcoming desperate conditions facing the city and the newspaper.”

“We were like war reporters,” Pope told the 2010 graduates, “except that our war had come to us.”

The day after the levees were breached, Pope awoke to discover that the newspaper building had become an island. Nearly 200 Times-Picayune employees and family

members were evacuated to Baton Rouge in delivery trucks as water lapped at the headlights. As other evacuees snapped up apartments in Baton Rouge, the UT graduate who had left New Orleans with only an umbrella, a gym bag and a few clothes became resourceful.

“We needed a place to stay, and I wound up buying a house for myself and my colleagues,” Pope said. “It became a crash pad that I dubbed the ‘Pope Home for Vagabond Journalists.’”

On any given night, eight or nine journalists slept in Pope’s home and others were scattered throughout Baton Rouge. For six weeks, the staff worked from a former shopping mall, where they made calls on cell phones, wrote stories on laptops and bonded as tightly as soldiers in combat.

The following spring, the city still in shambles, the staff of the Times-Picayune received news of the awards.

“We knew [the Pulitzer committee members] were going to announce the prize winners that day,” Pope said. “Everyone huddled around various computer terminals, repeatedly clicking the refresh button. When we saw the results everyone began sobbing. It was such a release. The thing I am most proud of is to have shared that award with those people. We had come through so much together.”


Larry Price

Spot News Photography
1981

Larry C. Price received a bachelor’s in journalism from The University of Texas at Austin in 1977.Throughout the course of a distinguished career, he has worked as a photojournalist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baltimore Sun, the Denver Post, National Geographic and the Dayton Daily News. He resigned his post as photo editor of the Daily News in 2011 rather than fire half his staff due to budget cuts.

Price has been honored by many organizations for his work, including the Overseas Press Club, National Press Photographers Association, World Press Photo Awards, the Pan American Press Association, the Society for News Design andthe Associated Press. He also has participated in 13 Day in the Life projects, including the acclaimed Day in the Life of America and Dayin the Life of Africa.

At dawn on April 12, 1980, a small band of non-commissioned army officers and national guardsmen stormed into the executive mansion in the Liberian capital of Monrovia and gunned down the unarmed president, William R. Tolbert Jr. Led by an obscure 28-year-old master sergeant named Samuel K. Doe, the rebels proceeded to conduct a reign of terror against officials of the deposed government.

UT graduate Larry Price was working as a photojournalist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the time and volunteered to travel to Liberia to report on the coup.

Fort Worth is home to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest in the world. Many students were involved in exchange programs in Liberia, and as news of the coup trickled out, their family members were desperate for information.

“Back in those days there was no Internet, and you couldn’t get a hold of anyone on the telephone, and parents were panicking,” Price recalled. “About a week later the government executed 15 or 20 junior-level officials, and we decided we would go and answer the question: ‘What is the state of the situation in relation to the people from Fort Worth?’”

The assignment would be Price’s first trip outside the United States.

After a series of travel complications — including obtaining a rushed passport for Price — a team of Star-Telegram journalists arrived in Liberia. A few days into the project, Price and his team attended Doe’s first press conference, during which the government announced it would execute a group of former cabinet members on the beach.

Price followed the crowd and watched as soldiers dug poles into the sand and tied the officials to the stakes. Within 15 minutes Doe’s soldiers executed the victims in a barrage of automatic gunfire. Price photographed every moment.

“As the situation progressed I became more afraid of the ramifications of not getting these pictures out,” Price said. “There was nothing I could do to stop this from happening, and I kept telling myself to do my job, which was to observe.”

After returning to their hotel, the team from the Star-Telegram realized that they had some of the only pictures of the executions — and rushed to get the film out of the country immediately.

The photos published in the Star-Telegram helped bring the events in Liberia to international attention and won Price the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography in 1981.

Feature Photography
1985

“I didn’t really wake up one day and say, ‘I want to be a combat photographer.’ By the time I was thrust into the Liberia story, I had worked for two newspapers covering general news, features and sports. I was well-equipped to handle the stress and disciplined enough to be tenacious about getting to the right places to photograph.”

What was the most important thing you learned at UT?
“I was fortunate to study with three brilliant professors at UT. J.B. Colson taught me discipline, the importance of empathy and to not shy away from constructive criticism. Larry Schaaf helped me develop great technique and emphasized the critical importance of photographic history. Garry Winogrand taught me the importance of developing a personal photographic style and stressed the need to pursue ongoing projects.”

You were awarded the Pulitzer in 1985 in feature photography for your work covering conflicts in Angola and El Salvador and their effect on civilians. How did the assignments differ?
“The El Salvador piece was a long essay published in the (Philadelphia) Inquirer’s Sunday magazine. It focused on the struggles of the Salvadoran people. The Angola story was an exploration and backgrounder on a long-standing guerrilla conflict fueled by interests in South Africa, Cuba and the U.S. I photographed the story during a six-week trip with Angolan rebels operating from bases in the bush of southern Angola. It was an intense trip that involved 2,200 miles of travel in military vehicles through some very remote country. I lost 20 pounds on that trip.

“My experiences in El Salvador had a profound effect on my perception of how everyday citizens cope in the face of war or other circumstances they can’t control. This aspect was what I’ve always tried to emphasize when covering these types of stories.”

What was the most dangerous situation you encountered?
“The most danger I encountered in Angola was going two days without water. We had to travel only at night

to avoid being detected by the Angolan air force, but the constant rigors of living out in the open were very difficult. In El Salvador I had two near-misses — I was photographing a small convoy of Salvadoran rebels when we were surprised by a helicopter gunship. We were pinned down for about 10 minutes while the helicopter circled and fired at our vehicles. I crawled into a drainage culvert for safety.”

What did winning a second Pulitzer Prize mean to you personally and professionally?
“The Pulitzer to me was validation that hard work and a dedication to communicate at a high level can pay off. Professionally, winning two Pulitzers has undoubtedly presented some opportunities. My theory is that it’s more important to be consistent. A Pulitzer might open doors, but you still have to walk the walk.”

What advice would you offer the next generation of UT journalists?
“I firmly believe every story you do will effect change in some way. Do the best you can with each and every story you undertake — make this approach part of your DNA. Be patient — there’s no shortcut to developing craft. You’ll make lots of mistakes, which is fine. Failing to learn from your mistakes isn’t.”

How do you feel to have your accomplishments permanently enshrined at your alma mater?
“I’m very proud to be a UT alumnus. There’s no doubt that the training and inspiration I received at UT was the firm foundation that allowed me to be successful. UT has an amazing legacy of graduating world-class communicators. I’m happy my contributions in journalism reflect well on the university.”


Gayle Reaves

International Reporting
1994

Gayle Reaves graduated from UT with a bachelor’s in journalism and a bachelor’s of arts in 1974. In addition to the Dallas Morning News, she has worked for the Paris (Texas) News, the Austin Citizen, the Austin American-Statesman and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 2001 she became editor of Fort Worth Weekly.

In June of 1993, the United Nations held the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna — its first conference devoted to human rights in more than 25 years. Three journalists who learned and sharpened their craft at UT were part of the Dallas Morning News team that received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for a series examining an epidemic of violence against women in many nations.

For many years, advocates of women’s rights worldwide had urged the U.N. to officially recognize violence against women as a human rights issue. This designation would bring international attention to the issue as well as enable the U.N. to help protect the rights of women.

In anticipation of the conference, the Dallas Morning News published a series of articles examining the topic, called “Violence Against Women: A Question of Human Rights.” Consisting of 14 stories published from March to June 1993, the series showed that women in all nations and all economic circumstances were vulnerable to abuse, through law, tradition or individual cruelty. The topics of the articles ranged from the selling of brides in China to accusations of sexual abuse by Dallas police officers.

Among the 30 reporters, photographers, editors and graphic artists involved were UT graduates Judy Walgren DeHaas, Victoria Loe-Hicks and Gayle Reaves.

DeHaas contributed photography for an article on female genital mutilation and became the first person to photograph one of these ceremonies in Somalia. Loe-Hicks wrote an article on rape and physical abuse that included memories of her own struggle to cope with the aftermath of an assault. Reaves wrote articles examining forced prostitution in Thailand and the accusations of abuse by police officers in Dallas. The articles received great acclaim, eventually receiving the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.

During the World Conference on Human Rights that summer, the U.N. went on to adopt a resolution calling for the protection of women against violence.

“Did our series have an effect on that?” Reaves said. “I don’t know if there is any way to really know. I can tell you that for women in Dallas, I think that this series… made them feel that the Dallas Morning News understood their lives and cared about them and was willing to spend resources on news that they found important.”


Ben Sargent

Editorial Cartooning
1982

Ben Sargent graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s in journalism in 1970. A sixth-generation Texan who grew up in a newspaper family in Amarillo, Sargent worked as a reporter with the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the Long News Service and United Press International, before coming to the Austin American- Statesman in 1974. He spent 35 years there as an editorial cartoonist, creating an estimated 8,000 cartoons during his distinguished career.

Sargent has published Texas Statehouse Blues (1980) and Big Brother Blues: The Editorial Cartoons of Ben Sargent (1984). He illustrated Arthur’s Austin ABC (Arturo en Austin: un abecedario), a bilingual children’s book (1980), Murphy’s Rules and Other Strange Stuff from Space Gamer (1980), and How the Critters Created Texas (1982).

Inspiration strikes. A cartoonist locates a pencil and paper and draws a huge man sitting next to a pair of boxing gloves, eating a piece of chocolate cake. Surrounding him are empty pizza boxes, moon pie wrappers and buckets of chicken. The word “Defense” is written across his belly. Behind him is a U.S. general, shouting: “SLIM DOWN?! Why, he’d never be able to fight again!”

This is the task of the editorial cartoonist — to use visual metaphors to distill events, politicians or popular culture down to their basic elements. Ben Sargent wielded his cartoonist pen with wit, style and a gleeful instinct for the jugular.

“Ben Sargent is a giant of editorial cartooning,” UT historian H. W. Brands told the Briscoe Center for American History in an interview. “Sargent developed a visual style that was instantly recognizable. His stock characters — the bloated banker, the jaded bureaucrat, the waif representing the public — appropriately ooze greed, insensitivity and pathos.”

Sargent was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for editorial cartooning. He treats it with characteristic modesty.

“I was glad to win the award,” Sargent said. “It is neat to be able to show your kids your name in the World Almanac.”

Sargent said it’s remarkable how little politics has changed during his career. Budget fights, U.S. military intervention and social issues are just as divisive now as they were in 1982. Despite this, Sargent is able to keep his cartoons and his angle on current events fresh.

“A lot of the same issues do recur, and you think that you would run out of stuff,” Sargent said. “But the people in Washington and certainly the Texas Legislature come up with new stuff all the time. The stuff they give you is amazing. Politics is wonderful that way.”

As newspapers struggle to adapt to new technologies, Sargent is encouraged by the next generation of journalists.

“When I go on a college campus, despite the upheaval in the newspaper business, I am encouraged by the massive enrollment in journalism,” Sargent said. “These kids don’t know where it’s headed, but they want to help shape it. I would encourage them to remember that however the information gets out, the journalism still needs to get done. A source of reliable, dependable and objective information is crucial if we want to continue to have a free democracy.”


Eileen Welsome

National Reporting
1994

Eileen Welsome graduated in 1980 from The University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s in journalism. She then worked as a reporter for the Beaumont Enterprise, the San Antonio Light and the San Antonio Express-News before joining the staff of the Albuquerque Tribune in 1987.

Welsome has received more than a dozen awards for her writing and reporting, including the George Polk Award for National Reporting, and has been honored by the National Headliners Association and the Associated Press. In 1991 she spent a year at Stanford University on a John S. Knight Fellowship. She is author of The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War

For almost three decades following World War II, scientists working for the U.S. government conducted a series of experiments to assess the effect of radioactivity on the human body. Hundreds of people, all of them poor, powerless and sick, were exposed to plutonium. None of them were told what was being done or gave informed consent. The project, conducted by doctors associated with the Manhattan Project, remained a secret for 50 years until UT graduate Eileen Welsome uncovered one of the experiments. Just six months into her job as a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune, Welsome discovered evidence of the experiment while researching a story at a local Air Force base. “It was about 5 on Friday,” she recalled. “I was eager to go home, but I felt like I had gone to this trouble to get these documents, and I had to make my time look good. So I kept flipping through the reports and my eye fell on a footnote (which) mentioned something about 18 humans who had been injected with plutonium.”

Welsome faced a daunting problem — the 18 people were identified only by code names such as Chi-2, HP-9 and Cal-3. “That became my biggest task — to find them, to put names to them, to learn who they were and what happened to them,” she said. “But these people were injected with plutonium 30, 40 years ago. So I knew it was a nearly impossible task.” It would take her six years — much of it on her own time — to piece together enough information to publish a series of articles; one turning point came when she found mention of a man from Italy, Texas, who had received one of the plutonium injections.

“I knew he was an African-American man who would have been 80 years old, who had his left leg amputated three days after he was injected with plutonium,” she said. “So given those few clues and that this person might have lived in Italy, Texas, I was determined to go there and knock on every door until I found this man.” The mystery man turned out to be Elmer Allen, who worked as a former railroad porter during the 1940s. After injuring his leg, he visited doctors involved with the project, who gave him an injection of plutonium in his leg before amputating it.

“Elmer was not only used in 1947, when he was injected with this radioactive isotope,” Welsome said, “but he continued to be used as a guinea pig for the rest of his life.” The impact of Eileen Welsome’s stories was felt nationally and President Clinton created an advisory committee, which eventually acknowledged the government’s role in the experiments. She won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting “for stories that related the experiences of Americans who had been used unknowingly in government radiation experiments nearly 50 years ago.”


William S. White

Letters
1955

William S. White graduated from the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin in 1929. He began his career working for what would become the Austin American-Statesman before becoming a reporter for the Associated Press and then the New York Times. After working as the Times’s chief congressional correspondent, he left in 1958 to write a syndicated column that appeared in 200 newspapers nationwide. In addition to the prize-winning The Taft Story, White wrote The Citadel, based on his experience covering the Senate, and his memoirs, The Making of a Journalist. He died April 30, 1994, in Louisville, Ky., at age 88.

Robert A. Taft was one of the most powerful and skilled legislators in the history of the U.S. Senate. Son of President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, he was elected to the Senate in 1938 and served until his death in 1953. Known as “Mr. Republican,” Taft opposed New Deal social programs and advocated a foreign policy of non-interventionism. He unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for president three times. Despite his key roles in politics and government, at the time of his death Taft was largely unknown outside the halls of Congress. White — who after covering the Senate for more than a decade was familiar with its procedures and personalities (and friends with some of its most powerful members, including Taft and Democratic leader Lyndon B. Johnson) — decided to write a book to bring Taft’s career to life. In 1954, White published The Taft Story, a personal account of the senator that focused on the last dozen or so years of Taft’s life when he was in a position of political power. The book also shed light on the inner workings of the Senate.

“In the mid-1950s, debate over important legislation, including the first civil rights act since Reconstruction, fueled the public’s curiosity about the mysterious ways and sometimes baffling rules of the Senate,” said Betty K. Koed, associate historian for the U.S. Senate. “Consequently, The Taft Story was an instant hit.” Popular both with audiences and critics, The Taft Story won the Pulitzer Prize for letters in 1955. The book remains important today. “More than 50 years after its publication, The Taft Story remains essential reading for all students of the Senate,” Koed said, “and particularly for those interested in how ‘Mr. Republican’ influenced that institution, because it skillfully captures the personality of the man and the characteristics of an era.”

 

 

 

 

 

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