Background
Clark R. Mollenhoff was born on March 2, 1991, in Burnside, Iowa, United States.
In 1958 Clark R. Mollenhoff won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, for a series exposing racketeering and fraud in the Teamsters Union.
Clark R. Mollenhoff was born on March 2, 1991, in Burnside, Iowa, United States.
Clark Mollenhoff attended schools in Lohrville and Algona before graduating from Webster City High School and Junior College. He began working for The Des Moines Register in 1942 while attending Drake University law school, from which he graduated in 1944.
In 1946 Clark Mollenhoff returned to the Register staff to cover the courts. The newspaper in 1950 assigned him to the Cowles Washington Bureau directed by Richard Wilson. Early on, Wilson recognized the new man’s wide interest in law, his high energy, and his zeal for rooting out what he considered corruption
Clark Mollenhoff then served two years in the United States Navy before returning to the Register. His work led to a successful crackdown on corruption within the Teamsters. Eisenhower Fellowships selected Mollenhoff as a United States of America Eisenhower Fellow in 1960.
In 1965, Clark Mollenhoff published Despoilers of Democracy, which provided details of corruption associated with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson (before he became president), in particular, the Billie Sol Estes swindles and the TFX scandal of 1963, an investigation into which was suspended after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
In the mid-1960s Clark Mollenhoff, as chair of the Freedom of Information Committee of Sigma Delta Chi (now the Society of Professional Journalists), directed some of his abundant energy to a media industry campaign that led to the enactment of the Freedom of Information Act requiring the federal government to make more of its records public. The legislation was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 4, 1966.
Clark Mollenhoff turned more conservative and frustrated with what he considered the lack of fervor and catering to the government by his press colleagues. His reputation was irretrievably damaged by his attacks on colleagues and by his startling decision in 1969 to accept an invitation to enter the White House as counsel to President Richard M. Nixon. He was flattered to be asked to be ombudsman, warning the administration of ethical failures within the government. To his chagrin, however, Clark Mollenhoff was soon lending his credibility to the White House by defending some of its actions in public. He lost his temper on national television debating the merits of one of Nixon’s controversial nominees for the Supreme Court, Clement F. Haynsworth, who was rejected by the Senate, as was Harrold Carswell.
In 1969 Clark Mollenhoff served for a year as Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon, after which he became the Register's Washington bureau chief In 1977 he became a professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia while continuing to write a column for the Register. In 1988 he wrote a biography of John Vincent Atanasoff, the Iowa State College professor who invented the first electronic digital computer in 1939. Mollenhoff's book gives the Atanasoff perspective of the 1973 federal court decision of Honeywell. Sperry Rand that ruled the ENIAC computer patent invalid, and increased attention to Atanasoff's work.
Clark Mollenhoff died in 1991 at age 69.