The Early Works   

xxi/ixxEFORE "ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN," some journalists wrote books that could be considered precursors to this newly identified genre. Here are six of the most memorable:

Jacob A. Riis
"How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York"
(Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890)

Jacob Riis wrote about deplorable housing conditions for more than a decade in New York City newspapers before expanding his relatively narrow exposés into an all-encompassing book. A normally self-effacing Danish immigrant, Riis gathered so much of his information from fieldwork that putting himself into the narrative seemed natural. Writing about the exploitation of Caucasian teenage girls in Chinatown's tenements, Riis discusses his attempt, accompanied by a policeman, "to stop a Chinaman whom we found beating his white 'wife' with a broom handle in a Mott Street cellar. He was angry at our interference, and declared vehemently that she was 'bad.' " The wielder of the broom handle addressed Riis, saying surely the reporter also beat his wife when she behaved badly. "My assurance that I did not, that such a thing could not occur to me, struck him dumb with amazement," Riis relates.

Ida M. Tarbell
"All in the Day's Work"
(Macmillan, 1939)

Before the 1950s, almost every book I have found that even marginally falls into the journalist-at-the-center-of-a-big-story genre is an autobiography. Ida Tarbell's is probably the most significant of the bunch because she focuses at length on her role in one of the most important, best-reported exposés ever‹her investigation of rapacious, unregulated near-monopoly businesses, exemplified by Standard Oil Co. and its chief executive, John D. Rockefeller. Tarbell began her reporting on Standard Oil and Rockefeller in 1900, before the term "investigative reporting" had been coined. Her work, serialized in McClure's Magazine, then expanded into a book published in 1904, is the first modern investigative project. The key to her memorable work: following the paper trail. Before Tarbell, journalists almost never built their stories on documents. Tarbell uses lawsuits, legislative hearings, executive branch agency rulings, land deeds and many other documents to build her case. "All in the Day's Work" describes Tarbell's dismissal of warnings that Rockefeller would ruin her career, explains how she obtained exclusive hush-hush interviews with Standard Oil executive H.H. Rogers, and details how she worked in tandem with researcher John Siddall to discover telling incidents in Rockefeller's closely guarded personal life.

Clark R. Mollenhoff
"Washington Cover-Up"
(Doubleday and Co. Inc., 1962)

Clark Mollenhoff joined the Washington bureau of Cowles Publications in 1950, a tall, burly young man with a law degree, a booming voice and a zeal for reform that led him to push government officials in ways that most journalists never had. Identified mostly with the Des Moines Register and Tribune, Mollenhoff won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for his exposure of labor racketeering. This book, his first of many, places him at the center of efforts to reduce bureaucratic secrecy in the White House and Congress.

Jessica Mitford
"The American Way of Death"
(Simon & Schuster, 1963; published posthumously in a revised edition by Knopf, 1998, called "The American Way of Death Revisited")

Nobody conducted investigations quite like Jessica Mitford, a Brit who married an American lawyer and settled in California. Her mix of outrage, sarcasm and humor works beautifully. Mitford bends conventional wisdom and explains why in this early passage:
This would normally be the place to say (as critics of the American funeral trade invariably do), 'I am not, of course, speaking of the vast majority of ethical undertakers.' But the vast majority of ethical undertakers is precisely the subject of this book. To be 'ethical' merely means to adhere to a prevailing code of morality, in this case one devised over the years by the undertakers themselves for their own purposes. The outlook of the average undertaker, who does adhere to the code of his calling, is to me more significant than that of his shadier colleagues, who are merely small-time crooks such as may be found in any sphere of business. Scandals, although they frequently erupt (misuse by undertakers of the coroner's office to secure business, bribery of hospital personnel to 'steer' cases, the illegal reuse of coffins, fraudulent double charges in welfare cases), are not typical of the trade as a whole, and therefore are not part of the subject matter of this book.

George Thiem
"The Hodge Scandal: A Pattern of American Political Corruption"
(St. Martin's, 1963)

Chicago Daily News reporter George Thiem placed himself at the center of a high-profile Illinois political scandal, breaking a story in 1956 about how state auditor Orville Hodge had robbed taxpayers of about $2.5 million through payroll padding, fraudulent expense accounts, nepotism and phony contracts. The Daily News investigation began when Thiem's editor received a tip from a political opponent of Hodge about recent unrestrained spending by the auditor. "When such charges originate with the party out of power, an experienced reporter learns to discount them," Thiem writes. "But you can't afford to ignore them entirely. Politicians know more about each other than does the unsuspecting voter. One or two tips out of ten may be based on fact and result in revelations of official skulduggery."

Seymour M. Hersh
"My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath"
(Random House, 1970)

This account probably should have received more credit for jump-starting the genre than "All the President's Men." After all, Seymour Hersh won his Pulitzer for helping expose a scandal four years before Woodward and Bernstein. And Hersh did it without the backing of an influential paper. But Hersh's account of how he uncovered a Vietnam War atrocity centering on the actions of Lt. William L. Calley Jr. didn't resonate with book buyers and reviewers the way "All the President's Men" did. Maybe it is partly because Hersh leaves himself out of the narrative until page 133.