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New York Times
27-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
Ronnie Dugger, Crusading Texas Journalist, Dies at 95
Ronnie Dugger, the crusading editor of a small but influential Texas journal who challenged presidents, corporations and America's privileged classes to face their responsibility for racism, poverty and the perils of nuclear war, died on Tuesday at an assisted living facility in Austin, Texas. He was 95. His daughter, Celia Dugger, the health and science editor of The New York Times, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease. Inspired by Thomas Paine's treatises on independence and human rights, Mr. Dugger was the founding editor, the publisher and an owner of The Texas Observer, a widely respected publication, based in Austin, that with few resources and a tiny staff took on powerful interests, exposed injustices with investigative reports and offered an urbane mix of political dissent, narrative storytelling and cultural criticism. In an anthology, 'Fifty Years of The Texas Observer' (2004), Mr. Dugger recalled that in 1954, when his weekly began, a gentlemen's agreement of silence on sensitive matters pervaded public discourse in the deeply conservative Lone Star State. 'We were as racist, segregated and anti-union as the Deep South from which most of our Anglo pioneers had emerged,' Mr. Dugger wrote, adding: 'Mexican Americans were a hopeless underclass concentrated in South Texas. Women could vote and did the dog work in the political campaigns, but they were also ladies to be protected, above all from power. Gays and lesbians were as objectionable as Communists. And the daily newspapers were as reactionary and dishonest a cynical gang as the First Amendment ever took the rap for.' In Mr. Dugger's 40-year tenure, The Observer set its sights not on objectivity but on accuracy, 'fairness' and 'moral seriousness.' It laced commentary into its reportage and addressed issues ignored by state newspapers, like the lynching and shooting of Black people in East Texas. It denounced anti-Communist witch hunts, opposed the Vietnam War and championed labor, civil rights and the environment. Investigative articles exposed corporate greed, political chicanery and government corruption. Many were picked up and expanded upon by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other mainstream publications. Some Observer disclosures led to government hearings, judicial reviews and legislative reforms, and won awards from press and legal groups. In 1955, Mr. Dugger wrote of two nightriders who stormed through a Black town in East Texas, spraying bullets into a school bus, houses and a cafe, where John Reese, a Black 16-year-old, was killed. Two white youths were arrested, but only one, who signed a confession, was tried, in 1957. Mr. Dugger covered the trial, which lasted one day. At the end, he reported, a defense lawyer told the jury, which was all white, 'This boy wanted to scare somebody and keep the niggers and the whites from going to school together — now that's the truth about it.' The jury ruled that the defendant had fired the fatal shot 'without malice' and recommended a suspended sentence. The judge agreed. With anemic circulation and advertising revenues, The Observer relied on donations and barely survived from year to year. But it became a home for outstanding writers like Molly Ivins, Willie Morris, Jim Hightower, Billy Lee Brammer and Kaye Northcott. Mr. Dugger covered many of the big stories, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. He rode in a press bus in the presidential motorcade and wrote an impressionist 7,000-word piece. 'Come now on the last voyage of Mr. Kennedy,' the article began. Then, in meticulous detail, Mr. Dugger told of the president's final day and his last moments as gunshots cracked across Dealey Plaza, Secret Service men scrambled and the president's car sped away to Parkland Memorial Hospital. 'Inside the hospital all was in chaos,' he related. Rumors flew. 'I first believed and comprehended that he was dead when I heard Doug Kiker of The New York Herald Tribune swearing bitterly and passionately, 'Goddamn the sonsabitches!'' Later, after doctors gave way to a priest for the last rites, a White House press secretary confirmed that the president was dead. Forrest Wilder, a former editor of The Observer and now a senior writer at Texas Monthly, said in an interview for this obituary in 2018 that Mr. Dugger was 'a man ahead of his time by 50 years, a Southerner who spoke up for gay rights and addressed nuclear annihilation long before those ideas were commonly discussed in Texas.' Mr. Dugger also wrote biographies of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan and a book on the pilot of a weather reconnaissance plane who gave the all-clear for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He contributed articles to The Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and other publications. Mr. Dugger taught at the Universities of Illinois and Virginia and at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. He lectured widely, advocating national health insurance, public funding of election campaigns, curbs on corporate power and stronger civil rights protections for racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants and the L.G.B.T.Q. community. But his most passionate theme was nuclear perils. Bill Moyers, in a blog post marking The Observer's 50th anniversary, suggested that Mr. Dugger's stewardship — as editor from 1954 to 1965, then as publisher until 1994, when he turned ownership over to the nonprofit Texas Democracy Foundation — would be his most lasting legacy. 'Not a day passes that I don't wish we could clone The Texas Observer, plant it smack dab in the center of the nation's capital and loose the spirit of Thomas Paine,' Mr. Moyers wrote. 'Paine was the journalist of the American Revolution whose pen shook the powerful and propertied, challenged the pretensions of the pious and privileged and exposed the sunshine patriots who turned against the revolutionary ideals of freedom, equality and justice. That spirit permeates The Texas Observer.' Ronald Edward Dugger was born in Chicago on April 16, 1930, to William and Mary (King) Dugger. His father was a bookkeeper. The family moved to San Antonio, where Ronnie and his brother, Roy, attended public schools. Fascinated with journalism, Ronnie began working at 13 as a sportswriter for The San Antonio Express-News. After graduating from Brackenridge High School in San Antonio in 1946, he attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in government and economics, edited the student newspaper and earned a bachelor's degree with high honors in 1950. He then studied politics and economics at the University of Oxford in England for a year. His marriage in 1951 to Jean Williams, a teacher, ended in divorce. In 1982, he married Patricia Blake, a Time magazine editor. She died in 2010. In addition to his daughter, Celia, from his first marriage, Mr. Dugger is survived by a son, Gary, also from his first marriage, and six grandchildren. On Mr. Dugger's watch, The Observer's circulation remained small, between 6,000 and 12,000, but its readers included congressmen, legislators, and community and business leaders. It morphed from a tabloid weekly into a biweekly in 1962, and later into a bimonthly magazine, but it kept its crusading character. Mr. Dugger ran for the United States Senate twice — in 1966 in Texas as an independent (he dropped out before the balloting) and in 2000 in New York, where he narrowly lost a race for the Green Party nomination. His book 'Dark Star: Hiroshima Reconsidered in the Life of Claude Eatherly' (1967) profiled the B-29 reconnaissance plane pilot who reported clear skies over Hiroshima before the Enola Gay dropped the bomb that destroyed the city in 1945. Mr. Eatherly's avowed feelings of guilt after the war were disputed by many who supported use of the bomb to end the conflict, but they were accepted by antinuclear groups and by Mr. Dugger. The New York Times Book Review called 'Dark Star' a carefully reported 'moral and personal statement.' In 'The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson' (1982), Mr. Dugger folded essays about Texas, Vietnam and nuclear weapons into a biography that ended with Johnson's years as the Senate majority leader. Mr. Dugger's 'On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency' (1983) used excerpts from 500 Reagan radio commentaries in the late 1970s to bolster his argument that his subject was a 'dogged right-wing ideologue.' Writing in The Times Book Review, David E. Rosenbaum said, 'Researchers may want to concentrate on particular chapters, for nowhere else is so much documented derogatory information about the 40th president of the United States presented in such well-organized fashion.' In 1996, Mr. Dugger was a founder of the Alliance for Democracy, a grass-roots organization that aimed to 'end corporate domination of politics, economics and the media' and 'create a true democracy.' Mr. Dugger, who lived in Austin, was inducted into the Daily Texan Hall of Fame in 2015. In 2012, when he received Long Island University's George Polk Award for lifetime achievement in journalism, he used his acceptance speech to ask a few questions: 'Why are nuclear weapons called 'weapons of mass destruction' when morally they are weapons of mass murder? President Obama calls for a nuclear-free world, but says it's not likely in our lifetimes. Why not? And what is the political and ethical responsibility of the American citizen for our H-bombs?'
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
'Hew to the truth': Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of Texas Observer, has died at age 95.
Ronnie Dugger, a titan of Texas journalism and founding editor of the Texas Observer, died this morning in Austin following a history of Alzheimer's disease. He had recently turned 95. "Ronnie was a man who towered over his colleagues in Texas journalism for decades," said Ben Sargent, retired Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist for the American-Statesman who now contributes to the Texas Observer. "His career, his passion for the Texas Observer and its mission, and his powerful and fearless body of work were always directed toward the noblest things about the American democracy, toward the good of the people, and most of all toward the truth. We can only hope that Ronnie will serve as an inspiration and example to the journalists who need to take up those causes going forward." In 1954, at a time when the conservative wing of the Democratic Party dominated politics in the state, Dugger, who had studied journalism at University of Texas before attending Oxford University, agreed to lead the progressive Texas Observer newspaper. He wrote this statement for the paper's masthead: "We will serve no group or party but will hew to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it." More: Tom Spencer, civic leader and Austin PBS talent, dies at age 68 While editor of the UT Daily Texan newspaper (1950-1951), Dugger became known to a group of leaders who organized the Texas Observer to give the state's liberals a voice. "Ronnie had been a liberal crusader during his tenure at the Daily Texan, whose public denunciations of the demagogic U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare had attracted the attention of progressive Democrats in Texas," said Don Carleton, founding director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. "He accepted their offer after they agreed to give him exclusive editorial control of the journal." As, at various times, a writer, editor and publisher at the newspaper over the course of some 40 years, Dugger attracted and guided some of the leading literary and journalistic talents of the day, including Billy Lee Brammer, Molly Ivins, Willie Morris, Kay Northcott and Jim Hightower. Among the newspaper's other distinguished staff and contributors — some of whom arrived after Dugger's tenure there, but share in the tradition he molded — were the first woman to serve as Texas Secretary of State, Minnie Fisher Cunningham; folklorist and author J. Frank Dobie; humorist and First Amendment defender John Henry Faulk; economist James K. Galbraith; writer and editor Dagoberto Gilb; investigative reporter Jake Bernstein; novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry; and photographer Alan Pogue. In his classic 1967 memoir, "North Toward Home," Morris described Dugger as "not only one of the great reporters of our time in America; more than that, he had imbued an entire group of young and inexperienced colleagues with a feel for Texas, for 'commitment' in the most human sense, and for writing." Early on, Dugger tangled with conservative Democratic Gov. Allan Shivers, who ran for office on a racist platform and supported Dwight D. Eisenhower for president. "Dugger dug his talons into Gov. Allan Shivers," journalist and author Larry L. King wrote in his book "In Search of Willie Morris." King listed other Dugger targets: "conservative state legislators, uncaring corporations, fat-cat lobbyists, the reactionary Dallas Morning News, LBJ, and any person or institution who failed his high standards of honesty and caring." Dugger took particular aim at the most powerful Texan, future President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who unsuccessfully tried to enlist the journalist as a confidant. "Lyndon Johnson loathed what Ronnie wrote about him because it was so on target," said Bill Moyers, journalist and White House Press Secretary during the LBJ administration. Dugger "constantly tried to figure him out so he could either convert him or compromise him — he failed." More: Late Lee Kelly, former Austin American-Statesman society columnist, influenced civic life During an interview conducted in the White House dining room while LBJ was president, Dugger asked bluntly: "Mr. President, you've told us in the first half-hour of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia, 400 million people will die. Now: What should a journalist like me tell the people out there about that?" "Johnson told me a joke, then got mad at me for asking the question," Dugger told the American-Statesman in 2012. "While he was cursing me for being a liberal that didn't understand the problem, Johnson says, 'I'm the one who has to mash the button. I'm the one.'" "Dugger's editorials were fearless and often deeply contrary to the political views of even his financial backers," Carleton said. "For example, his editorials attacked the federal oil depletion tax deduction that benefitted the oil and gas industry, despite the discomfort of one of his strongest supporters, wealthy oilman J. R. Parten. Other editorials strongly criticized the insurance industry, despite the critical financial backing he received from insurance company executive Bernard Rapoport. In later years, when Rapoport was asked to make a comment about Dugger, he said that Dugger's strength was 'in his total commitment' to his causes. 'A sense of outrage at injustice flows from his pen onto a piece of paper. That is his outstanding characteristic to me.'' Lou Dubose, who landed a job at the Texas Observer in the 1980s and served as political editor of the Austin Chronicle before becoming editor of the Washington Spectator, an independent political publication, admired Dugger's principles. "Ronnie was a quixotic liberal who never gave up on the ideal that by speaking truth to power, journalism could play a role in creating a just and equitable society, which seems like a quaint notion today," Dubose said. "When he hired me in 1984, he urged me to find my way into the homes of people who are left behind and ignored and write 'with Dickensian detail about the cracks in their walls and their broken lives.'" Through editorials and investigative journalism, Dugger tried mightily to improve society, but he remained unconvinced that people would end up doing the right thing. "I think there are two subjects that really ought to worry us," Dugger told the American-Statesman. "That is: The future of our own country, as citizens. And the extinction of the human race, by ourselves." Dugger was born April 16, 1930, in Chicago. In 2012, American-Statesman journalist Brad Buchholz wrote a long, admiring profile of Dugger as a "free man" at age 81. In one of the best descriptions of Dugger's independence and moral dedication, Buchholz described an incident when a 21-year-old Dugger reflected on life and its choices after his car broke down on a cold road west of Austin during the early 1950s. "While I was out there, the thought came into my mind that I was not going to do anybody else's work," Dugger told Buchholz. "I decided what I had to do with my life was sort of like the scout on Western caravans who went ahead and looked for the ambushes and big rivers, and came back and talked to the people who had to turn the wagons. "That's the way I see my life. ... It's kind of a lonely self-image. ... I tell people I'm closest to that I've always been lonely; I don't know why ... but the operative idea that night was that I'd rather disappear into total oblivion than to give my life over to anything but my own work." More: Austin WWII internment camp survivor Isamu Taniguchi built Japanese Garden in Zilker Park He married twice, first to Jean Williams and then to Patricia Blake, both deceased. He and his first wife had two children, Gary Dugger and Celia Dugger, health and science editor for The New York Times. Dugger left Texas in the 1980s after he married writer and editor Patricia Blake. He spent almost 20 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he inspired the populist movement Alliance for Democracy. After Blake died in 2010, Dugger came back to Austin. In 2011, Dugger won recognition for his cumulative career at the annual George Polk Awards, given by Long Island University for "intrepid, bold and influential work of the reporters themselves, placing a premium on investigative work that is original, resourceful and thought-provoking." "Ronnie was an outstanding example of an important American historical type: the muckraker," the Briscoe Center's Carleton said. "Although he never held office, his political opinions and reports were widely noted, if not well acknowledged. His work has shed much-needed light on public corruption, social injustice, the critical need to protect a liberal education and economic inequality." Dugger wrote books as well as articles for national magazines, and helped found progressive nonprofits. Yet his enduring legacy was the Texas Observer. "When I visited Ronnie at his home two years ago, Ronnie's grasp of the world around him was slipping away," Dubose said. "But he was making plans to start a movement like the Alliance for Democracy, the quixotic national progressive group he cofounded in the mid-nineties. We would publish a call to action in the Observer and begin a nonviolent progressive revolution." In March 2023, the board of directors of nonprofit Texas Democracy Foundation, which owns the Observer, announced that the newspaper would close down because of financial difficulties. Yet soon after, the staff led a fundraising campaign that kept it going. "I still think of Ronnie driving to Mayflower, Texas, a year after creating the Observer in 1954," Dubose said. "A subscriber had tipped him off about the murder of a Black teenager, treated as spot news by the local media. Ronnie was a white reporter from a liberal newspaper, walking into a Jim Crow town. He worked local sources to identify the murderer, walked up to his house to question him, and then asked the local sheriff if the shooter was on his list of suspects. "That work defined what Ronnie Dugger stood for as a journalist." This is a developing story. Check back for additional material. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas Observer founding editor Ronnie Dugger has died at age 95
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
This Texas ICE Attorney Allegedly Tweeted 'America is a White Country,' and That's Not All
An attorney who worked for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been accused of disturbing online behavior. James Rodden, who worked as the agency's assistant chief counsel, allegedly operated a 'racist, bigoted, xenophobic, hateful, harassing and dishonest' X account, according to a legal complaint filed against him. The complaint was made by J. Whitfield Larrabee, a Massachusetts-based attorney. Last week, the Texas Observer reported that Rodden was behind the X account of user @GlomarResponder. The publication made this determination due to the 'overwhelming number of biographical details matched through publicly available documents, other social media activity, and courtroom observation.' It extensively reviewed posts by the account since 2012 and deduced that it was Rodden by connecting those to federal court records and background interviews. CBS News stated that Larrabee used the the Texas Observer's article in the complaint and it seemingly serves as the crux for his legal filing. The account, which boasts over 17,000 followers, contained tweetsincluding, 'America is a white country, founded by whites,' and 'Migrants' are all criminals.' The complaint says the posts correlate to Rodden's role as he works with immigrants, political asylum applicants and refugees. As an assistant chief legal counsel, the document also labels his voice as a powerful one in court. 'When the representative of the United States in our immigration courts is motivated by bigotry, racism, xenophobia, anti-immigrant bias and hatred of immigrants, this seriously interferes with the administration of justice and undermines the integrity of our legal system,' the complaint explains. The document was filed with the Office of Disciplinary Counsel in Washington, D.C. Larrabee stated it's also the city where Rodden was licensed to practice. The complaint ultimately calls for an investigation as well as for Rodden to be suspended from practicing law. 'U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will not comment on the substance of this article pending further investigation, to include whether the owner of the referenced 'X' account is a current employee,' an ICE spokesperson said in a statement to the Texas Observer. The spokesperson also shared that ICE takes allegations of inappropriate conduct by its employees seriously. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
