This is the grave of Anthony Leviero.

Born in 1905 in Brooklyn, Leviero seems to have grown up in at least OK circumstances, as he was able to attend Columbia. He also went to City College for a time. I don’t think he graduated from either. He got a job as an auditor for the insurance industry, working on shipping. Not very exciting. So he decided to work for the papers. He got a copyboy job at the New York American in 1926. This was the lowest job in the newspaper industry but it sure beat working in insurance. Not a lot of insurance workers in the grave series, put it that way, no real wonder I don’t go to Hartford much, a city that manages to combine the boredom of an insurance town with the living conditions of The Wire. Anyway, someone took a liking to the kid and he was promoted to covering the police at night in The Bronx. That became a job with The Bronx Home News in 1928.

In 1929, Leviero got picked up by the big time. The New York Times hired him as a reporter and he would stay until he joined the military in World War II. He was already in the reserves, so I think he was called up before Pearl Harbor. He was already writing about military preparedness before this. He was in military intelligence in the war.

In 1946, Leviero returned to the Times. He was assigned to cover Harry Truman. He was basically the Times‘ personal Truman correspondent, covering not always the biggest news but what Harry Truman was doing. As he later stated, he was covering Truman “on a ski lift, train, airplane, seaplane, tender, destroyer, crash boat, bus, jeep, ferry, and by foot.” This of course did mean working on a lot of big news stories. I mean the Truman years were more than a little busy, what with the rise of the Cold War. Leviero provided front line reporting on all sorts of major global events, such as Truman saying in 1949 that the nation may well use the atomic bomb in combat again, the creation of the peacetime draft, the Marshall Plan, all sorts of things. He was in the White House when the Puerto Rican nationalists tried to assassinate Truman.

Leviero was also a promoter of the relationship between the White House and the media pool. Today, what with the fascist sicko with an old man sexual fetish Karoline Leavitt as Press Secretary (not only with Trump, though I’m sure she’d do whatever he wanted personally; her husband is 32 years old than she, get this girl some help and maybe some deprogramming), it’s hard to find much value in the daily press conferences. But Leviero talked about this as the greatest thing in the world and, you know, in a different world, like a world in which the media takes even the slightest responsibility for its bad reporting and the party in charge has even a basic respect for democracy, it kind of is a great thing. Like, power has to answer questions from reporters every single day without controlling the narrative. In theory, not bad. And maybe in the Truman years it was pretty good, though I don’t have enough knowledge to really evaluate such claims. But in any case, Leviero stated it had become “a factor in our checks-and-balances system of government. Nothing anywhere else in the world compares with it.” And again, in theory, I suppose that’s true and maybe truly in fact back then. Not today.

One of my favorite bits about Leviero is in 1948. Although he never published it, J. Edgar Hoover found out that Leviero might be working on a story for The American Mercury that Hoover was gay. The FBI started pressuring him. Leviero’s response when an FBI agent told him not to smear Hoover was that no story on Hoover’s sexuality could be a smear. But whether Leviero was actually working on such a story or not, it never appeared.

In 1952, Leviero won the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting on the meeting between Truman and Douglas MacArthur where the general made insane claims about being about to win the war. He filed the story much later in 1951, after further investigation. Leviero evidently hated MacArthur and was happy to file stories to tell the public that their hero was a terrible blowhard who wasn’t that good at running American forces in Korea.

In 1956, Leviero had a massive heart attack and died. He was 50 years old. He got full military honors, the entire media and political establishment showed up to the funeral. Eisenhower did not attend but sent several high ranking officials to represent him.

Anthony Leviero is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Richard Wilson, who won the 1954 Pulitzer, is in Washington, D.C., and Tony Lewis, who won in 1955, is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archivedhere and here.

This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar