The Justice Integrity Project is committed to safeguarding your privacy. Contact us at if you have any questions or problems regarding the use of your Personal Data and we will gladly assist you. By using this site or/and our services, you consent to the Processing of your Personal Data as described in this Privacy Policy.

Table of Contents

1. Definitions used in this Policy
2. Data protection principles we follow
3. What rights do you have regarding your Personal Data
4. What Personal Data we gather about you
5. How we use your Personal Data
6. Who else has access to your Personal Data
7. How we secure your data
8. Information about cookies
9. Contact information

Definitions

Personal Data – any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. Processing – any operation or set of operations which is performed on Personal Data or on sets of Personal Data. Data subject - a natural person whose Personal Data is being Processed. Child - a natural person under 16 years of age. We/us (either capitalized or not) –

Data Protection Principles

We promise to follow the following data protection principles:

• Processing is lawful, fair, transparent. Our Processing activities have lawful grounds. We always consider your rights before Processing Personal Data. We will provide you information regarding Processing upon request.
• Processing is limited to the purpose. Our Processing activities fit the purpose for which Personal Data was gathered.
• Processing is done with minimal data. We only gather and Process the minimal amount of Personal Data required for any purpose.
• Processing is limited with a time period. We will not store your personal data for longer than needed.
• We will do our best to ensure the accuracy of data.
• We will do our best to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of data.

Data Subject's rights

The Data Subject has the following rights:

1. Right to information – meaning you have to right to know whether your Personal Data is being processed; what data is gathered, from where it is obtained and why and by whom it is processed.
2. Right to access – meaning you have the right to access the data collected from/about you. This includes your right to request and obtain a copy of your Personal Data gathered.
3. Right to rectification – meaning you have the right to request rectification or erasure of your Personal Data that is inaccurate or incomplete.
4. Right to erasure – meaning in certain circumstances you can request for your Personal Data to be erased from our records.
5. Right to restrict processing – meaning where certain conditions apply, you have the right to restrict the Processing of your Personal Data.
6. Right to object to processing – meaning in certain cases you have the right to object to Processing of your Personal Data, for example in the case of direct marketing.
7. Right to object to automated Processing – meaning you have the right to object to automated Processing, including profiling; and not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated Processing. This right you can exercise whenever there is an outcome of the profiling that produces legal effects concerning or significantly affecting you.
8. Right to data portability – you have the right to obtain your Personal Data in a machine-readable format or if it is feasible, as a direct transfer from one Processor to another.
9. Right to lodge a complaint – in the event that we refuse your request under the Rights of Access, we will provide you with a reason as to why. If you are not satisfied with the way your request has been handled please contact us.
10. Right for the help of supervisory authority – meaning you have the right for the help of a supervisory authority and the right for other legal remedies such as claiming damages.
11. Right to withdraw consent – you have the right withdraw any given consent for Processing of your Personal Data.

Data we gather

Information you have provided us with This might be your e-mail address, name – mainly information that is necessary for delivering you a product/service or to enhance your customer experience with us. We save the information you provide us with in order for you to comment or perform other activities on the website. This information includes, for example, your name and e-mail address. The Newsfeed signup is administered by Google Feedburner, you can go to our Contact page and request to be removed from the Feedbuner email posts, please include your email address. Information automatically collected about you This includes information that is automatically stored by cookies and other session tools. For example, your IP address. This information is used to improve your customer experience. When you use our services or look at the contents of our website, your activities may be logged. Information from our partners We gather information from our trusted partners with confirmation that they have legal grounds to share that information with us. This is either information you have provided them directly with or that they have gathered about you on other legal grounds. See the list of our partners below Publicly available information We might gather information about you that is publicly available.

How we use your Personal Data

We use your Personal Data in order to:

• provide our service to you. This includes communicating and interacting with you; and notifying you of changes to any services.
• enhance your customer experience;
• fulfil an obligation under law or contract;
• send newsletters you have signed up for

We use your Personal Data on legitimate grounds and/or with your Consent. On the grounds of entering into a contract or fulfilling contractual obligations, we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:

• to identify you;
• to provide you a service or to send/offer you a product;
• to communicate
• to send newsletters

On the ground of legitimate interest, we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:

• to send you newsletters that you have signed up for;
• to review analytics in google analytics;

As long as you have not informed us otherwise, we consider offering you products/services that are similar or same to your purchasing history/browsing behaviour to be our legitimate interest. With your consent we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:

• to send you newsletters

We Process your Personal Data in order to fulfill obligation rising from law and/or use your Personal Data for options provided by law. We reserve the right to anonymise Personal Data gathered and to use any such data. We will use data outside the scope of this Policy only when it is anonymised. We might process your Personal Data for additional purposes that are not mentioned here, but are compatible with the original purpose for which the data was gathered. To do this, we will ensure that:

• the link between purposes, context and nature of Personal Data is suitable for further Processing;
• the further Processing would not harm your interests and
• there would be appropriate safeguard for Processing.

We will inform you of any further Processing and purposes.

Who else can access your Personal Data

We do not share your Personal Data with strangers. Personal Data about you is in some cases provided to our trusted partners in order to either make providing the service to you possible or to enhance your customer experience. We share your data with: Our processing partners:

• Google Analytics, Google Feedburner

Connected third parties: We only work with Processing partners who are able to ensure adequate level of protection to your Personal Data. We disclose your Personal Data to third parties or public officials when we are legally obliged to do so. We might disclose your Personal Data to third parties if you have consented to it or if there are other legal grounds for it.

How we secure your data

We do our best to keep your Personal Data safe. We use safe protocols for communication and transferring data (such as HTTPS). We use anonymising and pseudonymising where suitable. We monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks. Even though we try our best we can not guarantee the security of information. However, we promise to notify suitable authorities of data breaches. We will also notify you if there is a threat to your rights or interests. We will do everything we reasonably can to prevent security breaches and to assist authorities should any breaches occur. If you have an account with us, note that you have to keep your username and password secret.

Children

We do not intend to collect or knowingly collect information from children. We do not target children with our services.

Cookies and other technologies we use

We use cookies and/or similar technologies to analyze customer behaviour, administer the website, track users' movements, and to collect information about users. This is done in order to personalise and enhance your experience with us. A cookie is a tiny text file stored on your computer. Cookies store information that is used to help make sites work. Only we can access the cookies created by our website. You can control your cookies at the browser level. Choosing to disable cookies may hinder your use of certain functions. We use cookies for the following purposes:

• Necessary cookies – these cookies are required for you to be able to use some important features on our website, such as logging in. These cookies don't collect any personal information.
• Functionality cookies – these cookies provide functionality that makes using our service more convenient and makes providing more personalised features possible. For example, they might remember your name and e-mail in comment forms so you don't have to re-enter this information next time when commenting.
• Analytics cookies - these cookies are used to track the use and performance of our website and services

You can remove cookies stored in your computer via your browser settings. Alternatively, you can control some 3rd party cookies by using a privacy enhancement platform such as optout.aboutads.info or youronlinechoices.com. For more information about cookies, visit allaboutcookies.org. We use Google Analytics to measure traffic on our website. Google has their own Privacy Policy which you can review here. If you'd like to opt out of tracking by Google Analytics, visit the Google Analytics opt-out page.

Contact Information

Contact Page

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to make change to this Privacy Policy. Last modification was made 05/27/2018.

Mission

The Justice Integrity Project reports misconduct, primarily in the justice and political systems, that harms individuals, communities and democratic values. The project is non-partisan and supported by advertising revenue and paid subscriptions.

Coverage began in February 2010 to expose irregularities in the federal court system in high-profile political prosecutions. Since then coverage has expanded to include revelations on intelligence, surveillance, Wall Street, health care, the media and foreign policy. The project operates with editorial independence from any political, government or commercial special interest. Its editorial policy seeks common ground to expose corruption and injustice.

History

The project was founded with a primary focus on alleged abuses in the United States legal system. At first, its primary focus was upon political and other arbitrary prosecutions as well as official corruption cases targeting malefactors whose actions hurt many people.

Since then its oversight has expanded to include related topics in all branches of government and the news media, as well as global issues illustrating gross injustice. The expansion was because many of the most serious irregularities in the court system not receiving news coverage had roots in political and financial intrigues, some of which involved media opinion leaders.

The project's research focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on U.S. domestic federal investigations. Sample areas include warrantless surveillance, intimidation of families and witnesses, suppression of evidence, appearance of judicial bias, and irregular financial incentives. Also, the project has examined oversight by higher courts, Congress, and the news media that permit abuses that, in the aggregate, threaten the foundations of democracy.

What People Are Saying

"This is brilliant — morally, ethically, socially, legally. I can't wait to learn more about the organization you have created. For one thing, it relieves me of the pressure to begin such an organization myself. Now I can help support yours! Onward!

"You join a small but ardent band of warriors for justice and for the transparency that stands a chance of restoring justice. It does not matter who the president is, nor the attorney general. The culture of the DOJ survives administrations. It happens that the current administration started out with more promise than most, and so the disappointment is palpable. But Obama is too prone to please and to protect himself against being perceived as soft and weak, and Holder is in fact too weak to take on the old boys network (and, indeed, he was part of the problem when he was a federal prosecutor). It is very exasperating.

"But it's very good that we have exposure and criticism coming now from all ends of the political spectrum. You are doing an enormously important public service."

-- Harvey A. Silverglate, longtime defense litigator, adjunct Harvard Law School adjunct professor, Cato Institute Fellow, co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and author of Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent

"The flagrant, unbridled abuse of governmental power by the DOJ and FBI in attempting to destroy an individual (financially, professionally, socially, and sometimes physically) for personal and political reasons, and to an extent that is grossly disproportionate to any alleged act of criminality, is the hallmark of a totalitarian government."

"All decent, fair-minded American citizens -- liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans -- need to let their voices be heard in denouncing, castigating, and rejecting such deplorable, dangerous tactics."

--Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D., a famed forensic pathologist, consultant, medical school professor, author and civic leader. The former Allegheny County coroner in Pennsylvania for 20 years made many medical findings challenging other official accounts by law enforcers, and later was targeted in notorious political prosecution later dropped by federal authorities. He is author of more than 550 professional articles, eight books for the general public and author, co-author or editorial board member for nearly 50 other books for professional or technical audiences

"Watch out Department of Justice and judges. There is a new watchdog in Washington that is providing oversight of your criminal wrongdoing. The Justice Integrity Project (JIP) strives to 'promote effective oversight of federal prosecution and judicial misconduct.' JIP's goals are to 'educate the public and its opinion-leaders . . . and [work] with legal officials, organizations, and voters to increase awareness of how federal injustice harms the country.'"

-- Washington commentator and author Wayne Madsen, editor of The Wayne Madsen Report, author of 14 books, and a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Navy and National Security Agency

"Without the Justice Integrity Project, I don't think I could have persevered this long. God Bless you for your efforts on behalf of every one of the poor souls that your organization is there for. Every generation needs our Paul Reveres: Someone willing to run with a lamp and tell us the truth."

-- Louis M. Manzo, author, New Jersey former legislator and defendant in the historic and controversial Bid Rig III prosecution that led to Chris Christie's election as governor

 The Justice Integrity Project was founded in February, 2010. All of the original five founding directors are listed below.

James Ronald Fisher is an honors graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and retired Navy Captain. Also, he is Founder and Executive Director of WeThePeopleNow.org, an engineer, businessman, church and community leader, and civil rights advocate. Fisher’s 30 years of military service includes 15 nuclear submarine patrols during the Cold and Vietnam Wars. Also, he managed the overhaul and repair of nuclear submarines and inspections of almost every major naval command as the Assistant Naval Inspector General for Logistics on the staff of the Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations.His Navy work also included collateral duties as a prosecutor, defense counsel and summary court martial officer. His Navy awards include the Legion of Merit. As a civilian, he worked at two engineering services firms.  He founded and led the Defense Fire Protection Association to improve the safety and survivability of U.S. military forces. Also, he founded and led the Veterans Sales and Services Corporation (VetSS), which specialized in hiring disabled veterans. His web site has, among other things, plans to end US wars and occupation, put more Americans to work and reform financial systems.  In politics, he was chairman of the Northern Virginia Presidential primary campaign for his classmate John McCain in 2000, and held the same post in 2008 for Dennis Kucinich.  He was first in his class in Submarine, Nuclear Power and Basic Engineering Duty Officer Schools and is the author of numerous research papers.

Andrew Kreig is Justice Integrity Project Executive Director and co-founder. Andrew Kreig has two decades experience as an attorney and non-profit executive in Washington, DC. An author and longtime investigative reporter, his primary focus since 2008 has been exploring allegations of official corruption and other misconduct in the federal government. Also, he has been a consultant and volunteer leader in advising several non-profit groups fostering cutting-edge applications within the communications industries. Between 2008 and 2016, he was an affiliated research fellow with the Information Economy Project at George Mason University School of Law. From 2009 to 2012, he was also a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. He is a member of the District of Columbia Bar and a half dozen journalism societies, including the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Press Club and the Overseas Press Club of America.

As president and CEO of the Wireless Communications Association International (WCA) from 1996 until 2008, Kreig led its worldwide advocacy that helped create the broadband wireless industry. He has lectured about communications on five continents, and co-keynoted the annual Futures Summit of the National Association of Broadcasters. Previously, he was WCA vice president and general counsel, an associate at Latham & Watkins, law clerk to a federal judge, author of the book Spiked about the newspaper business, and a longtime reporter for the Hartford Courant.

He holds excellent ratings from the lawyer-rating services Avvo and Martindale-Hubbell. Listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World from the mid-1990s and currently, he holds law degrees from the University of Chicago School of Law and from Yale Law School. Reared in New York City, his undergraduate degree in history is from Cornell University, where he was a student newspaper editor, rowing team member, and a Golden Gloves heavyweight regional finalist.

Dr. William (Bill) F. Pepper, right, who serves as both a director and counsel of the Justice Integrity Project, is an international civil and human rights attorney best known for representing Martin Luther King’s accused assassin, James Earl Ray.

In 1967, Dr. King had reached out to Dr. Pepper regarding an essay he had written for Ramparts magazine concerning Vietnamese victims of American napalm missions. Pepper was present at King’s famous Riverside Church speech and they worked closely together before King's death in such efforts as speaking from the headtable at the National Conference for New Politics on Labor Day in 1967 (as shown together in a photo at left) and in a projected 1968 presi+dential campaign by King, cut short by his assassination in Memphis. The assassination was ascribed to Ray, who initially accepted responsibility but spent the rest of his life in prison denying guilt.

The King family approached Pepper to reinvestigate the case, which he did by undertaking extensive detective work in the region surrounding Memphis and re-examining relevant witnesses and documents and reavedling new ones. These resulted in a symbolic victory in a 1999 civil court trial in Memphis on behalf of the King family, and three books by Pepper about the case, the first of which was An Act of State (Verso, 2003, below right).

Previously, Pepper was the citizens chairman for Robert F. Kennedy’s run for the Senate in Westchester Country and also a counsel for Robert Kennedy’s accused assassin Sirhan Sirhan, beginning in 2007. In that work, Pepper has argued with others that Sirhan deserves parole and also has been falsely accused and convicted of killing Robert Kennedy. Pepper and others have argued that Sirhan fired shots toward Kennedy but that it was physically impossible for his shots to have killed the presidential contender in a pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, as alleged.

Pepper has stated that he never would have undertaken the pro bono defense of either Ray or Sirhan unless he thought they were actually innocent of the deaths, not simply "not guilty" for technical legal reasons.

Pepper received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Columbia University, a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts, a Juris Doctoral degree from Boston College and also studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His most recent book — The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., published by Sky Horse Publishing — is the result of 39 years of research and gathering of documentation and sworn testimonies on new confirmed information that will revise the history behind the assassination of Dr. King.

Introduction: The Overseas Press Club of America (OPC) published this column about the late John Kelly, a co-founder and director of the Justice Integrity Project and longtime member of the OPC. The press club's membership also includes this editor.

John Kelly, below left, a longtime OPC member who combined an eventful career in broadcast network news with government service and a lifelong passion for journalism, died early this year at age 85 in Connecticut.

His career included work as a news editor and correspondent on the national staff of NBC News and CBS News. He was the last surviving reporter to have covered the 1960 Election Night victory party in Hyannis, Massachusetts of Democratic Presidential nominee John Kennedy, shown below right in a poster with Republican rival Richard Nixon.

Kelly went on to cover civil rights stories, early 1960s operations in Laos, the FBI and the Watergate scandal. In doing so, he worked with such iconic anchors as Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at NBC Nightly News and Walter Cronkite at CBS News.

In one career interlude in the late 1960s, he worked for the CIA in Indochina during the Vietnam War. He later served during the 1970s in the administration of New York Gov. Hugh Carey as deputy commissioner and director of the State Office of Taxation and Finance, where he helped to unravel and expose to Congress corruption schemes that were hurting taxpayers.

In appreciation for John’s impressive career and inspiring personal qualities, Wayne Madsen and this editor collaborated last year in creating a 30-minute video homage, “Mr. Kelly Goes To Washington,” chronicling career highlights that recall the James Stewart film, with scenes from the movie shown below.

The Kelly video was viewable only privately until now. But we make the video public on YouTube for this column, particularly for OPC colleagues whom he so much admired. The link is

The video portrays the long-ago news events that Kelly covered and not his own role. That’s because his work habits encouraged him to focus constantly on his next story or civic project, and not collect an archive of personal clips and other memorabilia.

A CIA Career Interlude

Kelly, a tall, slender man similar in build to Hollywood's Stewart, interrupted his reporting career, leaving his post as an editor at NBC News at its Rockefeller Center headquarters in New York, to become a CIA covert action officer serving in Indochina, among other duties. Later, he returned to reporting. Then in the Carey administration, he was intimately involved in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. One was an $85 million suit against the State of New Jersey for discrimination against New Yorkers working in New Jersey. The other was defending New York against a suit by Vermont, which sought to prevent New York from auditing the books of Vermont vendors selling in New York.

As a dinner speaker at the National Press Club in Washington, he called for investigations about weapons containing depleted uranium and Agent Orange being used by the U.S. military in Vietnam that have caused some 400,000 deaths, with others being disfigured. He has raised similar concerns about cancerous conditions in veterans in the 1991 Iraq-Kuwait War.

“As was the case with the cover-up of the effects of Agent Orange on GIs after the Viet Nam War, the Pentagon and its entities, including Walter Reed Army Medical Center, are in denial while Western Europe allies have prohibited the use of such weapons,” he commented. He has spoken about unauthorized and unlawful telephone eavesdropping on American citizens in the U.S. by the National Security Agency and has participated in panel discussions with former federal agent and intelligence officer whistleblowers. Also, he has criticized the editorial control of broadcast news organizations by their corporate owners in ways contributing to the demise of public confidence in the American news media.

He died on Jan. 9 in the hospice unit of St. Mary’s Hospital in Waterbury following a COVID-19 illness that compounded several pre-existing conditions, according to survivors, who include two brothers and their families.

I serve as director of the Justice Integrity Project in Washington, DC, which I co-founded with Kelly in 2010 as a non-partisan project to report on complex legal-political stories exposing global corruption and other sensitive issues.

Our organization benefited from John Kelly’s continuing interest in providing story tips and sage counsel. We rented a van last fall to move Kelly from his longtime home from Washington’s suburbs to join relatives near where he had begun his career as a reporter in the late 1950s. During the course of the move, I obtained new insights about my friend’s early career, his passion for journalism as a vital component of public service, and his admiration for the OPC.

John, a loyal friend, was also a complex and generous man of seeming contradictions – such as his advocating for aggressive, in-depth coverage of news while remaining personally in the background.

The following details of Kelly’s life draw heavily from the account that has been posted since 2010 on the website of the Washington, DC-based Justice Integrity Project, on whose board Kelly served until his death.

Early Years

A native of Massachusetts whose family moved to Connecticut, Kelly’s career began as a high-school copyboy for the New York Journal-American in the 1950s.

While participating in a training program and riding with a reporter and photographer team, one night he met the newspaper's famed columnist Walter Winchell sitting in a street. Winchell, a pioneering columnist and radio reporter beginning in the Roaring Twenties, was cradling in his lap the bloodied head of a car accident victim, who was gushing, "Walter! Walter!" in happiness over his brush with tabliod fame.

After a stint with a New Haven newspaper and television station Kelly returned to New York to report for United Press Movietone Television News on national assignments while also attending Columbia University. His coverage of the John F. Kennedy 1960 campaign included responsibilities as the pool reporter on Election Night.

His stories included cutting-edge reports on the historic 1961 integration of University of Georgia at Athens and flying to Washington to witness the Kennedy inauguration and, from a nearby camera platform, hearing Kennedy’s words, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

In 1962 on the 50th anniversary of the Titanic disaster, Kelly interviewed three survivors of the tragedy. He then reported at sea on the U.S. Navy’s interception of Soviet vessels during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also that year, he flew with federal hurricane hunters based in Jacksonville, Florida into the eye of a storm.

He reported exclusives about Albert “The Boston Strangler” DeSalvo, Cuban militants planning Castro’s overthrow, Soviet espionage, Mafia crime, and Watergate.

More specifically, Kelly’s other work in the 1960s included first-hand reports of astronaut John Glenn’s lift-off. As a correspondent accredited at the United Nations, he also covered Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s iconic speech banging his shoe on a UN desktop for emphasis. Kelly was covering the UN Security Council when U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge removed a secret microphone from artwork installed in the Moscow embassy. Soviets had given the embassy a decorative U.S. seal, but with a microphone in the eagle’s beak.

As a foreign correspondent at UP Movietone in London, Kelly covered Parliament, served in Paris and covered intrigues involving Berlin Wall escapes and reprisals. Besides assignments in Hong Kong, Thailand and Japan, he covered the so-called Secret War in Laos. He lived in the mountains with anti-communist Montagnard tribes and flew on Air America drops of rice and paratroopers. While posing as a student and traveling by train between Munich and Berlin through East Germany during annual Warsaw Pact Maneuvers, he was once taken into custody by the East Germany State Police and Stasi, the East German secret police. Similarly, he was taken into custody by agents of the Communist Pathet Lao and held at their headquarters in Vientiane before release.

In February 1965, he obtained an exclusive interview for NBC with Malcom X, right, in which the black leader correctly predicted that he would not make it through the weekend without assassination.

Kelly’s assignments included living on the secret bases of the militant anti-Castro organizations Alpha 66 and Brigade 2506 as they planned commando raids on the Cuban mainland from camps in the Florida Everglades. The FBI’s Hoover authorized Kelly to meet with former Soviet GRU intelligence agent Kaarlo Toumi, who was being hunted by the Soviet KGB and on its hit list, in safe houses in New York after the Finnish-born Russian switched sides to become a double-agent for the U.S. For years, Soviets failed to detect the agent’s switch.

As night editor at NBC’s headquarters news desk at NBC's 30 Rockefeller Center headquarters portayed by photographer David Shankbone at left, Kelly obtained permission from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for exclusive news film footage of the arrest of 18 Ku Klux Klan members for the infamous “Mississippi Burning” murders of three civil rights activists whose bodies were dumped in a swamp.

Later, as a reporter at CBS News, Kelly covered Watergate coverups in Washington, Miami and California. Among his exclusives were the Army’s use of the University of Minnesota campus police for surveillance and photographing students during rallies and campus activities. Also, Kelly broke stories showing that Army instructors rigged tests measuring Army reactions to potential missile attacks.

Kelly served as a CIA covert action officer beginning in the 1960s but resigned after calling for a congressional investigation into Vietnam War corruption by local officials and coverups by U.S. officials who failed to provide oversight. “The two most abused things in Vietnam,” Kelly was quoted in media reports as saying, “are the American G.I. and the U.S. taxpayer’s dollar.”

In the administration of New York’s governor, Kelly’s responsibilities included mustering congressional support for passage of anti-organized crime legislation aimed at ending interstate cigarette bootlegging. The smuggling was siphoning $90 million of state tax revenue, with the money going into the coffers of three major organized crime families. Later, Congress enacted an omnibus anti-organized crime bill.

Also, Kelly helped develop New York's Parent and Student Savings (PASS) tuition savings program that allowed tax deductions for parents and/or guardians on their deposits for their dependents' future student tuition. Under the new law, students could declare the funds as income on their tax returns spread over a five-year, post-graduation period.

In retirement, Kelly served on the boards of the New York Symphonic and the Japan-U.S. Concert Society. He has also served on boards of trustees of philanthropic foundations that emphasize in grants in health, education and the arts.

Summing Up

John Kelly strongly encouraged me to join the OPC as a vital institution for journalists and press freedom. Kelly generously paid my OPC initiation fee and constantly provided our Justice Integrity Project with news tips, important new books and advice until his final months.

John was remarkably civic-spirited, creative and deeply knowledgeable. For example, he encouraged national security commentator and former Navy Intelligence officer Wayne Madsen to research and publish the 2017 book The Almost Classified Guide to CIA Front Companies, Proprietaries & Contractors, a unique, 413-page A-Z encyclopedia of organizations that have been publicly reported as linked to the agency (albeit not-necessarily conclusively).

Yet Kelly was reticent throughout his life about most of his first-hand observations obtained under conditions of secrecy. He declined almost all requests to be photographed and lived by what he regarded as an honor code about his confidentiality agreements and service, even while he irreverently used an email of his own devise that included the letters “xspook.”

In appreciation for John’s impressive career and inspiring personal qualities, Wayne Madsen and I collaborated last year in creating a 30-minute video homage, 

The Kelly video was viewable only privately until now. But we make the video public on YouTube (embedded here for this column for OPC colleagues, whom he so much admired. It primarily portrays the long-ago news events that Kelly covered and not his own role. That’s because his work habits encouraged him to focus constantly on his next story or civic project, and not collect an archive of personal clips and other memorabilia.

In that spirit, the video was presented a year ago to our then-ailing friend. It references a lingering mystery about one of his stories about Richard Nixon – and it calls for Kelly (just after the seven-minute mark) to go on the road once again to get to the bottom of the story.

The larger purpose? Not the Nixon tale. Instead, it was to remind him and anyone else that in a troubled and busy world some still know and deeply appreciate his kind of old-school dedication and skill.

Robert Ames Alden retired from the Washington Post in 2000 after more than 48 years as an editor, making him the longest-serving editor in the paper’s history until that point. As night news editor in 1963, he put together the Post's first extra edition since Pearl Harbor to cover the assassination of President Kennedy. As world news editor in 1974, he was the principal architect for the Post’s coverage of the resignation of President Nixon. Culminating a seven-year effort in 1975, he co-founded and later led the National Press Foundation to improve journalism education. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was the leading male advocate for the admission of women into the National Press Club, where he served as president in 1976.

The first native Washingtonian to lead the Press Club, he began his career as a sportswriter for the Cleveland Press in 1947. He helped innovate the use of more statistics in baseball coverage and was an award-winning writer. He was a visionary community leader in planning a green, central park, library, outdoor stage, community center and theater for McLean, VA, whose Alden Theatre carries his name. He earrned bachelor and master’s degrees from the George Washington University, where he won the university's top history award as a student for 17 years in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2005, university officials bestowing a distinguished alumnus award described Alden as “a living legend” in Washington journalism.

 Robert Ames Alden, a former Washington Post editor, was the 1976 National Press Club president. Photo: Marie Marzi for the Washington Post.

Excerpted Biographies

Justice Integrity Project, In Memoriam: Post Editor, JIP Co-Founder Robert Alden, 1932-2020, Andrew Kreig, June 21, 2020. Longtime Washington Post editor Robert Ames Alden died this month at age 87, leaving an inspiring leadership legacy in journalistic and other civic affairs. Of particular note here, he was one of five founding directors of the Justice Integrity Project (JIP) a decade ago and provided active encouragement and other support until his final illness. 

National Press Club, 1976 Club President Bob Alden dies, Gil Klein, June 15, 2020. Former National Press Club President Robert Alden, who had been an active member for more than six decades, died June 7 at his home in McLean at the age of 87.

The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, his wife, Diane Alden, told the Washington Post.

Alden had been a Washington Post news and layout editor for 48 years, helping to design and lay out the newspaper’s first section with stories that included the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.

Joining the Club in 1957, Alden took an active role in the Club’s governance in the early 1970s and was elected president for 1976.

Before his death, he was the most senior past Club president.

In 1970, he took a leading role in pushing the all-men’s Club to admit women. During a debate among members that year, Alden came down hard for finally including them.

“The Club is the most important non-government news forum in Washington,” Alden said. “Women are now an important segment of the national press. A court challenge under the 14th Amendment would be disastrous.”

In the final vote taken at the Club’s annual meeting Jan. 15, 1971, the measure passed 227 to 56.

After that, Alden became an advocate for advancing women into Club leadership positions.

“I will always be grateful for the moral support Bob gave me and other women journalists who joined the Club right after the official barriers to our membership came down,” said Vivian Vahlberg, who was elected the Club’s first woman president for the year 1982.

“Not everyone was welcoming, but Bob surely was,” Vahlberg said. “He fought hard for women to be admitted and was jubilant when we were. And, he supported me every step of the way as I moved up the ladder.”

During his year as president, Alden led the drive to create the National Press Foundation, a non-profit, tax exempt foundation that was designed to support the Club’s library, professional development and scholarship work. The Foundation later split with the Club, which then created the National Press Club Journalism Institute as a separate entity.

Alden was born in Washington on Feb. 5, 1933. He spent some of his childhood in Ohio and his first journalism job was with the Cleveland Press from 1947 to 1951.

He returned to Washington first as a statistician for the Office of Price Stabilization before joining the Washington Post in 1952.

While working at the paper, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s degree in history in 1968 at George Washington University.

In 1958, he married Diane Heidkamp, who survives him along with four children, four grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

A resident of McLean, Virginia. since 1953, he was a longtime civic activist helping to plan McLean’s downtown, including a park and community center. The 386-seat community theater is named for him.

“I had the pleasure of getting to know Bob Alden later in his life,” said current Club President Mike Freedman. “I remember him as a gracious and dedicated person who was justifiably proud of his many contributions to both The Washington Post and the National Press Club. Our time together left a lasting impression of a good and decent man who made a positive difference personally and professionally. It was an honor to know him.”

Washington Post, Robert Alden, Washington Post news and design editor, dies at 87, Bart Barnes, June 13, 2020. Robert A. Alden, a Washington Post news and layout editor for 48 years who helped design the inside pages of the newspaper’s first section, died June 7 at his home in McLean, Va. He was 87.

The cause was complication from Alzheimer’s disease, his wife, Diane Alden, said.

Mr. Alden retired from The Post in 2000. His career included the design and layout of newspaper pages containing stories, photographs and headlines about happenings that ranged from routine procedures of local governing boards to airplane crashes, natural disasters and historic events including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.

On busy nights, the page designs and layouts had to be changed several times to keep up with fast-breaking events.

Mr. Alden was also president of the National Press Club in 1976, and he was a co-founder of the National Press Foundation, which supports educational programs for journalists. He was among the early advocates of the admission of women to press-club membership, which came about in the 1970s.

Mr. Alden had lived in McLean since 1953 and saw it evolve from a rural community of dairy cows and farms into a bustling suburb of shops and expensive houses. He was a longtime civic activist who helped plan McLean’s downtown, including a park and community center. The 386-seat community theater is named in his honor.

Robert Ames Alden was born in Washington on Feb. 5, 1933, and he spent part of his childhood in Rocky River, Ohio. As a high school student, he worked part-time at the Cleveland Press from 1947 to 1951 as a writer and reporter.

Returning to Washington after high school, he was a statistician at the Office of Price Stabilization before joining The Post news staff in 1952.

While working at the paper, he attended George Washington University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s degree in history in 1968.