Background
Wardlaw was born in McComb in Pike County in southwestern Mississippi.
Wardlaw was born in McComb in Pike County in southwestern Mississippi.
He graduated with bachelor"s and master"s degrees from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
He was briefly the municipal government reporter at the Meridian Star in Meridian in eastern Mississippi and a police reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago. In March 1961, he joined the staff in New Orleans of the since defunct afternoon daily, The States-Item, for which he was over time a copy editor, assistant city editor, and political and judicial reporter. Wardlaw reported on the construction of the Louisiana Superdome and the sensational trial of Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman who was acquitted in what Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison had alleged to have been a conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Wardlaw and fellow journalist Rosemary James, a native of South Carolina, co-authored Plot or Politics, a 1967 book which takes issue with the Garrison investigation.
Wardlaw was named States-Item capital bureau chief in 1979. In 1980, he assumed the same position for The Times-Picayune, a position which he held for the next twenty-two years.
Wardlaw investigated all four terms of Governor Edwin West. Edwards. The Edwards brothers were acquitted in a second trial after a hung jury occurred in the first case.
Though Edwards had often cited "that lyin" Jack Wardlaw" for Wardlaw"s coverage and critical columns, upon Wardlaw"s death, Edwards said, "He was a gentleman.
As a journalist, he was very effective and very fair. He called things like he saw them." Wardlaw also covered the 1973 Louisiana Constitutional Convention and the other governors of the era, Republicans David C. Treen, Buddy Roemer, and Murphy J. Foster, Junior.
He had been retired for nearly a decade. Walter James "Jim" Amoss (born 1947), the editor of The Times-Picayune in 2012, described Wardlaw as having "set the standard for political reporting in Louisiana.
In our smoke-filled rooms, he had perfect journalistic vision. readers were the beneficiaries of his cogent analysis and clear writing.
So were the many newspeople he mentored."
He was a former president of the Capital Correspondents Association, which stages the annual Gridiron Show in Baton Rouge, of which he was a cast member.