Jules Witcover, a titan of American political journalism whose career spanned more than six decades and whose byline became synonymous with the cut and thrust of Washington’s power games, died on Saturday, August 16, 2025, at the age of 98. His death was confirmed by his children, Amy Witcover-Sandford and Paul Witcover, though additional details were not immediately available. For generations of readers and fellow reporters, Witcover’s name evoked not just the relentless pursuit of a story, but a deep-seated curiosity about the people and processes that shaped the nation’s politics.
Witcover’s journey began in Union City, New Jersey, where he was born on July 16, 1927, to a Jewish father who ran an auto-body shop and a Catholic mother who raised him in her faith. He showed an early knack for storytelling, producing a family newspaper as a child and later, almost by accident, applying to Columbia University at the urging of a high school basketball teammate. After a stint in the Navy, Witcover returned to Columbia on the G.I. Bill, graduating in 1949 and earning a master’s degree from its journalism school.
He started his career as a sportswriter at the Providence Journal but soon found himself drawn to the political arena, which he once described as the “big top” compared to the “sideshow” of municipal reporting. By 1954, he was in Washington, D.C., writing for the Newhouse publishing chain. Over the next sixty-plus years, Witcover covered almost every major political event and figure of his era, from the Cold War and civil rights movement to the rise and fall of presidents.
Witcover’s reporting style was legendary for its tenacity and its reliance on shoe-leather reporting. According to The Baltimore Sun, he preferred gathering facts on the campaign trail and in the backrooms of power rather than relying on the telephone. He interviewed civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, as well as controversial figures such as George Wallace. He stood at the Berlin Wall soon after its construction and was present at the 1960 Democratic nomination of John F. Kennedy.
But perhaps nothing shaped his legacy more than his proximity to tragedy. Witcover was on the scene in 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot at a Los Angeles hotel after winning the California primary. He later wrote of the haunting memory of hearing gunshots and seeing Kennedy bleeding on the floor, an experience that would inform his book, 85 Days, about RFK’s brief presidential campaign. As he later recounted, “The sound of the shots rang in my ears long afterward, and the sight of the senator bleeding on the floor just after winning the California primary would haunt me for decades.”
Witcover’s rise through the ranks of American journalism was marked by a series of high-profile assignments. He powered the Los Angeles Times bureau in Washington as a political reporter and assistant news editor from 1969 to 1973, before joining The Washington Post as a specialist in executive branch politics. But his most enduring contribution came in 1977, when he teamed up with Jack Germond to launch the syndicated column “Politics Today” at the Washington Star. The column moved to The Baltimore Sun after the Star folded in 1981, and at its peak, it ran five times a week in about 140 newspapers nationwide.
“Politics Today” became a major brand in political journalism, known for its candid analysis, sports metaphors, and deep dives into the backroom dealings of party leaders and candidates. Witcover and Germond’s partnership was as much about camaraderie as it was about competition. Witcover once wrote in The Sun after Germond’s death, “We often played the good cop/bad cop routine, each of us able to blame the other guy when a column one of us wrote caused a politician to complain. But sometimes, too, one of us would take the bullet for the other when it unjustly came our way. That was the nature of playing duet pianos in the house of ill repute called political writing.”
The pair’s influence extended beyond their column. They authored several well-received books chronicling presidential campaigns, including Blue Smoke and Mirrors: How Reagan Won and Why Carter Lost the Election of 1980, Wake Us When It’s Over: Presidential Politics of 1984, Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency 1988, and Mad as Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992. Their work was praised for its anecdotal richness and sharp insights into the American political process. As The Christian Science Monitor noted, their 1981 volume was “a delightful repast of amusing and often telling anecdotes.”
Witcover’s reputation was that of a meticulous and empirical observer, a “species that seems more and more endangered” in the digital age, as one Sun colleague put it. Sidney Blumenthal, writing in The New York Times, described him as “old-fashioned in the sense of being possessed of an empirical eye.” Witcover himself was self-deprecating about his profile, beginning his memoir with the wry observation: “Unless you’re an old political junkie who knows the difference between H.L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann, you’ve probably never heard of me.”
After Germond retired in 2001, Witcover continued “Politics Today” solo for five more years at The Sun. During this period, his columns became more caustic and opinionated, particularly regarding the Iraq War and President George W. Bush. He described the Iraq conflict as “the most wrong-headed foreign policy in my lifetime and the most dangerous,” and labeled Bush “the worst and most dangerous president in my lifetime.” In a piece for the Poynter Institute’s blog, he wrote, “The war was a colossal mistake from the start and has disintegrated into a calamity, damaging not only the people of Iraq but the international reputation of this country, not to mention the terrible cost in American lives and treasure.”
Despite his forthrightness, Witcover did not attribute the end of his column at The Sun to his anti-war stance, noting that the paper itself opposed the war, albeit less forcefully. After being dropped in 2005, he was syndicated by the Tribune Content Agency and continued to write books and columns well into his nineties. At age 92, he updated his 2010 biography, Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, with material on the 2020 presidential campaign.
Witcover’s personal life was marked by two marriages: first to Marian Laverty, with whom he had three children and which ended in divorce after nearly forty years, and then to Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, a biographer of H.L. Mencken, whom he married in 1997. He also had a son, Peter Young, from another relationship. He lived in Washington, D.C., and was known for his tireless work ethic. As Walter Mears, former chief political writer for the Associated Press, remarked, “Jules was the hardest working newsman I ever knew. On the road, you could hear him banging the typewriter before dawn, working on one of his books. He never stopped writing columns and political histories long after most of us had retired.”
In the end, Jules Witcover’s legacy is that of a relentless chronicler of American politics, a reporter who bore witness to history and never lost his appetite for the chase. His work not only informed but helped shape the way Americans understood the political dramas of their time.
