Walter Haskell Pincus (born December 24, 1932) is an American national security journalist. He reported for The Washington Post until the end of 2015. He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, and shared a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with five other Washington Post reporters, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy. Since 2003, he has taught at Stanford University's Stanford in Washington program.
Biography
Pincus was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish parents Jonas Pincus and Clare Glassman. He attended South Side High School, Rockville Centre, New York and graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in 1954. Before being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955, where he served in the Counterintelligence Corps in Washington, D.C. from 1955–1957, he worked as a copy-boy for The New York Times. Pincus also attended Georgetown University Law Center, graduating in 2001 with a Juris Doctor degree.
In September 1954 he married Betty Meskin, with whom he has a son. In May 1965, he married his second wife Ann Witsell Terry, who is from Little Rock, Arkansas, with whom he has one daughter and two sons.
Career
After his discharge from the Army, Pincus worked at the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal's Washington edition, leaving in 1959 to become Washington correspondent for three North Carolina newspapers. In an 18-month sabbatical he took in 1962, he directed his first of two investigations for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under J. William Fulbright. The investigations into foreign government lobbying led to a revision of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In 1963, he joined the Washington Star, and in 1966 he moved to The Washington Post, where he worked till 1969. In 1969 till 1970 he directed another investigation for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, looking into U.S. military and security commitments abroad and their effect on U.S. foreign policy, which eventually led to the McGovern-Hatfield amendment to end the Vietnam War.
In 1973 Pincus tried to establish a newspaper, aiming at university towns with bad local newspapers, but without success. Believing that he would later buy the magazine, he had become executive editor of The New Republic in 1972, where he covered the Watergate Senate hearings, the House impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon and the Watergate trial. In 1975, after he was fired from the New Republic, he went to work as consultant to NBC News and later CBS News, developing, writing or producing television segments for network evening news, magazine shows and hour documentaries, and joined The Washington Post the same year.
At The Washington Post, Pincus reports on intelligence, defense and foreign policy. He has written about a variety of news subjects ranging from nuclear weapons and arms control to political campaigns to the American hostages in Iran to investigations of Congress and the Executive Branch. For six years he covered the Iran-contra affair. He covered the intelligence community and its problems arising out of the case of confessed spy Aldrich Ames, allegations of Chinese espionage at the nuclear weapons laboratories.
Pincus attended Georgetown Law School part-time beginning in 1995 and graduated in 2001, at the age of sixty-eight. He has been a visiting lecturer at Yale University and since 2002 has taught a seminar at Stanford University's Stanford-in-Washington program.
Involvement in the Plame affair
In October 2003, Pincus cowrote a story for The Washington Post which described a July 12, 2003 conversation between an unnamed administration official and an unnamed Washington Post reporter. The official told the reporter that Iraq war critic Joe Wilson's wife Valerie Plame worked for the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) nonproliferation division, and suggested that Plame had recommended her husband to investigate reports that Iraq's government had tried to buy uranium in Niger.