Clark Raymond Mollenhoff was born Apr. 16, 1921 to Raymond Eldon and Margaret Pearl Clark Mollenhoff. He died Mar. 2, 1991 and is buried in Saint Joseph Cemetery, Lohrville, IA.
Ensign Mollenhoff served in the U.S. Navy in World War II aboard the attack transport USS Broadwater (APA-139) in the Pacific, carrying men and materials to Hawaii, the Philippines, Palaus, Marianas, Carolinas and Dutch New Guinea.
Daily Freeman Journal, Webster City, IA - Mar. 4, 1991
Mollenhoff, Famed Journalist, WC grad, Dies of cancer at 69
by BOB STEENSON
Clark Mollenhoff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Webster City resident and favorite son, died Saturday in a Lexington, Va., hospital. He was 69.
During Mollenhoff’s long career as a journalist, he became one of the nation’s original and most honored investigative reporters. He won the Pulitzer, journalism’s highest honor, in 1958 for his national reporting on labor racketeering and Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa. He also won dozens of other journalism awards and honorary degrees.
Mollenhoff was born in Burnside, and attended school in Lohrville, Algona and Webster City. He graduated from Webster City Junior College and took a job with The Des Moines Register in 1941.
He received a law degree from Drake University in 1944 and played on the Drake football team as a lineman. He was named captain one year.
He served in the Navy from 1944-46, then returned to the Register. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1949, then joined the Register’s parent company, Cowles, as Washington correspondent.
Mollenhoff was deputy counsel and special counsel to President Nixon from 1969-70, then returned to the Register as Washington bureau chief and syndicated columnist. He became one of Nixon’s harshest critics during the Watergate years.
Mollenhoff’s awards included two Sigma Delta Chi awards in 1952 and 1954 for Washington correspondence; the Raymond Clapper and Heywood Broun Memorial awards in 1955; the National Headliner award for magazine writing for pieces in Atlantic Magazine in 1960; being listed as one of the 10 best investigative reporters in Washington in 1975 by Washingtonian magazine; elected Fellow of the Society of Professional Journalist in 1980; and the University of Missouri Honor Medal and Award for lifetime contributions to journalism.
He was inducted into the Society for Professional Journalists’ Washington correspondents’ Hall of Fame in 1979.
From 1976, Mollenhoff had been a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.
Mollenhoff had battled cancer for many years, but he continued to teach a full course load through the 1990 fall semester.
For the past year or so, after his right eye was removed because of cancer, he wore a patch that made him look quite a bit like Rooster Coburn, the character John Wayne played in the movie, “True Grit,” friends said.
“We’d call him ‘Rooster’ sometimes, and he’d chuckle,” said Ronald MacDonald, a colleague at Washington & Lee. “He was a real character, one of a kind.”
Students said Mollenhoff pushed them to look beyond the obvious and to be skeptical of government. Reporters also were the occasional target of Mollenhoff’s scorn. He argued that journalists sometimes abuse the Freedom of Information Act by making broad, unnecessary requests of government agencies. And he complained that reporters too often allow anonymous sources to make irresponsible charges in stories.
Mollenhoff also wrote poetry, a book of which is to be published this fall by Iowa State University Press.
He authored 11 other books, including critiques of the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and a history of labor racketeering investigations.
Newsday reporter Bob Greene once wrote that Mollenhoff’s book “Investigative Reporting” was “in a sense, the autobiography of the finest investigative reporter of our time.”
Throughout his life, Mollenhoff has kept strong his ties with Webster City, visiting here frequently and becoming involved in several local projects.
The plaza in West Twin Park is named for Mollenhoff and Webster City’s other Pulitzer Prize-winning favorite son, MacKinlay Kantor.
Mollenhoff and Kantor also had Webster City streets named for them.
In 1988, Mollenhoff became involved in efforts to honor Webster City resident Edwin Lemke for his heroic World War II exploits, and led an as-yet unsuccessful drive to have Lemke awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He composed the “Ballad to Private Edwin Lemke” that was set to music. Lemke died in September 1989.
Most recently, Mollenhoff donated copies of his 11 books to Iowa Central Community College, along with $1,000 to establish an alumni association scholarship-fund and to install a display case paying tribute to Kantor. He has also supported the Kendall Young Library and other community organizations.
He is survived by his wife, Jane; two children: Sue Mollenhoff Montgomery and C. Raymond Mollenhoff Jr.; and four stepchildren.
Burial will be Thursday in Lohrville. A memorial service was held today in Lexington.
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Amblin’
By Max Maxon
Recalling Memories of City’s Famous Son
The death of Clark Mollenhoff Saturday took from America one of the greatest investigative journalists of all time.
Down through the years, I followed his career with interest, and many times talked on the phone with him or in person at the Freeman-Journal office during his frequent visits back to Webster City.
Like MacKinlay Kantor, this community’s other Pulitzer award winner, Clark never forgot this city and the folks who knew him, first as a high school student, then as a junior college student and later as a standout athlete and a graduate of the Drake University law school.
My first memories of Clark dated back to 1938 after he had graduated from Lincoln High. When I was working as a clerk at good old Diamond Brothers grocery store, I’d frequently be outside late Saturday night, washing the big front window, cleaning off the sale specials painted on the glass. It was a job I hated, but had to do.
Every now and then, however, Clark would show up and chat with me, while waiting for his girl friend, who was a Saturday clerk and a very efficient one.
I halfway lost track of Clark, because I wasn’t paying much attention to sports at that time when he was becoming one of the top scorers for the junior college Indians and later won a scholarship to Drake.
When I took over as sports editor at the Freeman-Journal in 1942, one of my jobs was calling in the Lynx and Indian scores to the Register. I was amazed when, on many occasions, Clark answered the call and was vitally interested in how his high school and junior college teams were doing.
We chatted now and then and he would comment how he was getting along, working 40 hours for the Register and also doing other activities such as washing dishes or other tasks, just to make ends meet.
I read with great interest some of his first stories as a reporter for the Register, and saw his climb up the journalistic ladder of success, much of it due to his tenacity to get all the facts and his fearlessness in going out to get those facts.
I recall what great pride the late Ethel Swanson, Clark’s journalism teacher at Lincoln High School, had in the success of her student.
She must have been on Cloud 9 when he consented to come back to Webster City to be the featured speaker for the annual Quill and Scroll banquet, always held in the dining room of Hotel Willson.
Clark later went to Washington, D C, and was nationally recognized for his reporting as a member, and later director, of the Register’s Washington bureau. His investigative reporting which led to the downfall of Jimmy Hoffa, won him the Pulitzer prize, but he went on to acquire still more honors, almost too numerous to mention.
He became a well-recognized writer and soon was turning out some excellently documented books. Usually, he would give us a call or drop a letter about a new book which I would collect and peruse.
Like Mack Kantor, he recalled the help he had gotten in his early years at Kendall Young Library, and just recently sent the library some of his papers, early drafts of books and even a two-hour-log casette which is filled with memories about his early life in his home town of Lohrville, about his family, his sports activities at Lohrville, then Algona, on to Webster City and from there to Drake.
His easy going style in the tape, which was evidently made at Thanksgiving time, has many humorous incidents in which he tells how he tried to thwart his Mother’s whipping with a yardstick by sliding a book down the back of his pants; (It did work once but brought harder punishment) and the time he had read how a daredevil had gone over Niagara Falls, then tucked his baby sister in a small, well-padded barrel, and rolled her down the stairs. Fortunately, she wasn’t injured but he must have been paddled quite heartily.
In the latter parts of the tape, he recalled his associations with presidents ranging from Truman, down through Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush. He had little respect for Johnson and we recall how Johnson was frequently at odds with Clark’s persistent proddings for the truth during that administration.
We recall that Time magazine once reported that Johnson got so upset at Clark that he called him “that Mollenhoff Cocktail,” an Americanized version of that explosive Russian device that caused a lot of destruction.
He recalls with pleasure how he always loved music and how his father and mother helped develop that love.
He had a good baritone voice and participated in school musical activities and competitions. At one time, he admitted, he thought about a musical career, but later turned to journalist and law.
When asked on the tape what one thing he thought had attributed most to his career’s success, he thought it was the belief that truth would ultimately win out, no matter how long it took.
He contrasted journalism in the past to that of the present, saying that it used to be that reporters would never write a story until certain that all the facts could be substantiated. Now, too much writing is done without checking all the facts and then seeing if the story was correct later.
Well, I’d say that Clark Mollenhoff will live on in the journalism history of America as one reporter who got the facts correct before writing. And that’s a fact.
Sources: ancestry.com
