Jules Witcover, Legendary Political Journalist, Dies at 98
By • August 18, 2025 0 1950
Jules Witcover, old-school political reporter, author of 20 books and writer of hundreds of columns — including a few for this publication — died Aug. 16 in his Georgetown home on Q Street, where he lived with his wife Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. He was 98.
For more than half a century, Witcover wrote for newspapers — mostly notably, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Star, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Newark Star-Ledger.
He co-wrote “Politics Today,” a five-day-a-week syndicated column, for over 24 years with Jack Germond — perhaps his most famous assignment. Witcover came to be seen as a “journalistic institution,” according to media critic Howard Kurtz.
Born in Union City, New Jersey, on July 16, 1927, Witcover graduated from Columbia University after World War II and worked for Newhouse Newspapers, arriving in Washington, D.C., in 1954. He covered political campaigns for decades. Among his most traumatic moments in reporting was his standing a few feet from Sen. Robert F. Kennedy when he was fatally shot in 1968.
One of the last columns Witcover wrote was in defense of Joe Biden, which The Georgetowner published in 2023.
Neighbor Edward Segal has long admired the longtime journalist’s insights and observations. “I had the opportunity to meet and interview Witcover a couple of times when I was researching my 2024 book, ‘Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them.’ He was generous with his time and read the draft manuscript,” Segal said. “I was honored that he agreed to write the foreword to the book.”
Among the accolades for the liberal Witcover, cited in today’s Washington Post, are the following.
“Mr. Witcover ‘is old-fashioned in the sense of being possessed of an empirical eye,’ former journalist and Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal wrote in a New York Times review. ‘He clearly enjoys politics, tries to understand the particular motivations of politicians and observes events to see how it all plays out. His approach is the opposite of using people and circumstances as grist for the turn of phrase, whose object is not really to describe the man in the arena but to polish the image of the spectator.’ ”
“ ‘I think at a time when mainstream political journalism was at its peak, there was no better practitioner than Jules Witcover, and there’s a whole body of work that few if any can ever equal,’ Al Hunt, a Bloomberg columnist and former Wall Street Journal correspondent, told The Washington Post in 2019, when the updated Biden biography was published.”
Memorial services are not yet announced. This story will be updated.
Jules Witcover in 1997 and on Aug. 1, 2025. Courtesy Marion Rodgers.
