Jack Nelson | Investigative reporter, 80

Jack Nelson, 80, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who covered the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal for the Los Angeles Times and was the paper's Washington bureau chief for 20 years, died yesterday.

Mr. Nelson, who had pancreatic cancer, died at his home in Bethesda, Md., said Richard Cooper, a family friend and longtime Times associate.

Mr. Nelson spent more than 35 years with the Times, stepping down as its chief Washington correspondent in 2001. He joined the paper in 1965 and in 1970 began working in its Washington bureau. He was bureau chief from 1975 to 1995.

As a reporter with the Atlanta Constitution in 1960, he won the Pulitzer for local reporting for exposing malpractice and other problems at the 12,000-patient state mental hospital in Milledgeville, Ga.

"Jack was a reporter's reporter," said Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Times. "He maintained that the main thing people want from newspapers is facts - facts they didn't know before, and preferably facts that somebody didn't want them to know."

Mr. Nelson covered presidential administrations from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. During the Watergate scandal, he scored an exclusive interview with a security guard for the Nixon reelection campaign who had been involved in the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

- AP