Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Jack White dies aged 63

Jack White, the reporter whose story on President Richard Nixon’s failure to pay income taxes prompted Nixon to utter the famous line, “I am not a crook,” died today. He was 63.

White died at his Cape Cod, Massachusetts, home, said WPRI-TV, a television station in Providence, where White worked as a reporter.

White’s 1973 report won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. He discovered Nixon failed to pay income taxes in 1970 and 1971 by working off a tip and tax documents while working for The Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin. Nixon was forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes.

“Whatever he did was right. It was accurate. It was fair,” said WJAR-TV reporter Jim Taricani, who said White took him under his wing when he was a young reporter.

Taricani turned to White when deciding whether to disclose the source of a secret FBI videotape that showed a Providence mayoral aide taking a bribe. White told him not to do it, and Taricani served four months of home confinement.

White’s scoop on Nixon almost didn’t happen. The night he was prepared to write the story the union representing reporters voted to strike. He later recalled rolling the story out of his typewriter and putting it in his wallet.

“I was dreading the information I had was going to get out there. Every day I was checking out-of-town newspapers,” he later told The Providence Journal.

The strike ended 12 days later, and the story ran on October 3, 1973. The following month, Nixon said: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”

White began his career in 1969 as a reporter for the Newport Daily News. He moved the following year to the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin, where he worked as a general assignment reporter, Newport bureau chief and head of the newspaper’s first permanent investigative team.

He later worked for WBZ-TV in Boston and was a reporter for the Cape Cod Times before joining WPRI in 1985 as chief investigative reporter. He won two Emmy Awards for his television reporting.