Walter Pincus Leaves the Post We Regret to Announce That Walter

Walter Pincus leaves The Post We regret to announce that Walter Pincus will leave The Washington Post at the end of the year, beginning a new chapter in a multifaceted and distinguished career in which he has become one of the country’s leading national security reporters. Outside of newspapering, Walter has managed to hold down a host of other jobs: intelligence analyst, Congressional investigator, magazine editor, television consultant, law student, university lecturer. A key member of the cadre of reporters who led The Post to greatness under Ben Bradlee, Walter’s investigations have ranged from foreign lobbying to nuclear weapons to the Iran-Contra affair; he has traveled far and wide across the landscape of national security and politics. His honors are many, including the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, shared with Post colleagues; a Page One award; a George Polk award; an Emmy and the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross award. Some reporters aspire to provoke Congress to act – Walter’s approach is more direct. He has twice taken what he calls “sabbaticals from journalism” to lead investigations for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The first, in 1962-63, probed foreign government lobbying; the second, in 1969-70, investigated U.S. defense commitments abroad and their effect on U.S. policy. Both efforts resulted in legislation. Following his graduation from Yale in 1954, the first phase of Walter’s career included a stint as a copyboy at the New York Times, two years in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, and several other jobs in journalism. He joined The Post in 1966 but left three years later, and in 1972 became executive editor of The New Republic. Martin Peretz’s acquisition of the magazine in 1974 led to Walter’s return to The Post in 1975. He has been with us more or less ever since. His time at the paper has been punctuated by numerous television projects, including work on Watergate, the Kennedy assassination and the George W. Bush administration’s handling of intelligence leading up to the 2003 Iraq war. Scores of students at Yale and in the Stanford-in-Washington program have been the beneficiaries of his seminar on government oversight. In his spare time, he began training to become a lawyer in 1995 and received his J.D. in 2001 from Georgetown law school, which then honored him with a doctorate in 2013. In recent years Walter has used his “Fine Print” column to read between the lines of policy and official rhetoric. He tells us he’ll move the column to a new home in the new year. Walter has mentored and befriended many of his colleagues and given generations of Post reporters someone to look up to. He is endlessly curious about what the government is really doing, and especially what it attempts to do in secret. That urge to know will remain an inspiration to many of us. Walter has become what we in Washington sometimes call an institution. By cultivating sources and earning their trust, and often by getting his hands on the kind of documents that can speak the truth, Walter has been able to expose the perfidies and missteps of government in a way that few other reporters can match. Knowledgeable but also deeply skeptical, Walter was one of the few journalists whose pre-war reporting challenged the Bush administration’s contention that Saddam Hussein had acquired weapons of mass destruction. In the end, of course, Walter was right. .

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