TIME investigative reporters Don Bartlett (left) & Jim Steele (right) leaning on stacked papers in their office. Mother Jones illustration; Mario Ruiz/Getty
For more on Don Barlett’s impact on journalism—and on our work—read “What’s Missing From Investigative Reporting” from our CEO, Monika Bauerlein.
I met Don Barlett, who died last week at 88, in early January 1980. I had recently joined The Philadelphia Inquirer as a general assignment reporter, and my first big assignment was to write about the infamous, bombastic, and larger-than-life mayor of Philadelphia Frank Rizzo’s final days in office. When I asked the editor why me, since I had just come to Philadelphia a few weeks before and knew very little about Rizzo, I was told: “We want a fresh eye. And besides he hasn’t talked to an Inquirer reporter in months and he hates our guts. Good luck getting to him.”
Well, I did get to Rizzo and the story was stripped across the Sunday paper on January 6. The next day a short, bald, gnome-like man introduced himself to me in the newsroom. I noticed his staring eyes, unblinking and expressionless framed by glasses. “Hello, I’m Don Barlett and I liked your Rizzo story.”
I was in awe. This was Barlett of Barlett and Steele, the famous and Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporting team. Astaire and Rogers, Ruth and Gehrig, Abbott and Costello, Woodward and Bernstein, Barlett and Steele were all up there in my realm of immortals.
He had a few questions. How many people had I interviewed? How did I get Rizzo to talk to me? How long did I work on the story?
I told him I had interviewed more than 30 people, that I’d reported the story for three weeks, that I’d asked everyone who knew Rizzo for advice on how to get to him and, finally, when he did a public event, I came and watched and listened to him.
He said thanks and walked away.
Over the next 17 years at the Inquirer, Don and Jim’s stature and work only grew. Many considered them the best investigative reporting partners in American journalism history.
I spent a great deal of time in their lair. They had their own office, stuffed with documents, papers, and books. Don had served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps and it showed. He had that perfect spy quality about him. He was opaque. Last week, Jim said to me, “Don could be standing on a corner and nobody could see him.”
A friend once asked me what Don was like and I said, “If somebody wanted to find out the worst things about you and they hired Barlett, you would be in trouble.”
When I became a high-ranking editor, Don would sidle up to me in the newsroom, always out of nowhere, and in a low, raspy voice tell me things that I should know or maybe should not know. He worked the newsroom well and his interests were always the best interests of the paper, and he had plenty of ideas about things we should be reporting on or investigating.
I relied on him and Jim for advice. When I joined The Center for Investigative Reporting in 2008, they would help me with story ideas and Don was always there if I had a question or was doing a reference check. This continued until illness and age made it harder for him.
In passing, Don and his family sent a final message to me. At the end of his obituary in the Inquirer his family asked that donations in his memory be made to The Center for Investigative Reporting. I was surprised and felt honored.
I asked Don’s wife, Eileen, how this happened.
“As for the note to support the Center for Investigative Reporting to remember Don, there wasn’t much thought in that decision,” Eileen wrote me in an email. “I accompanied Don to many of your seminars and programs. While there, a parade of young people would approach Don and Jim thanking them for the inspiration to take up the investigative reporter mantle. Don loved what he did. You and the Center support such work. No other place even came to mind.”
Jim reminded me this week that one of Don’s greatest attributes was patience. “There are so many dry holes in investigative reporting,” he said. “The string does not always move forward but you stay with it and keep pulling.”
Don was deeply motivated, Jim said, by something you couldn’t see but felt if you knew him.
“Running through him was a powerful streak, a belief,” Jim said, “that everyone deserves to be treated fairly.’”
A fitting legacy for a journalist who truly made a difference.