Longtime Washington Post editor Robert Ames Alden died at age 87 in June, 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. 

He died on June 1 at his home in McLean, Virginia, from what his widow, Diane Alden, described as complications from Alzheimer's.

He 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 and one who had been personally involved in some of its more notable coverage.

As night news editor in 1963, for example, 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, Alden  was the principal architect for the layout of the Post’s coverage of the resignation of President Nixon.

Alden is shown in Washington Post photo at right by Marie Marzi.

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 advocate among National Press Club members for the admission of women into the Club, where he served as president in 1976.

Toward the end of a 1984 appearance on C-SPAN, he showed a mock souvenir edition of the Post that highlighted his leadership as Club president, among other career highlights to that point. The main headline extolled his "persistence."

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 (think of the category RBIs: runs batted in) and was an award-winning writer.

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Alden, shown at left in a 1959 Washington Post photo, earned 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 bestowed a distinguished alumnus award and described Alden as “a living legend” in Washington journalism.

This editor attended that ceremony with him after meeting him the previous evening at the Press Club bar, where he had exercised his raconteur's gift to describe his encounters with the great and near great through the decades, including such officials as Lyndon Johnson, heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano, and film stars Gary Cooper and Elizabeth Taylor.

In early 2010, Alden joined with four others (former U.S. Navy captain and businessman Ron Fisher, and former White House correspondents John Kelly and John Edward Hurley, plus this editor) in co-founding the Justice Integrity Project to investigate complex, under-covered news stories of importance. The bios, one of the most heavily read sections on this website, are here.

Our initial focus was on politically motivated federal prosecutions and similar actions by the U.S. Justice Department involving issues of unwarranted secret pressures. One controversy then was the "U.S. attorney firing scandal," whereby eight and by some counts nine presidentially appointed U.S. attorneys were firedfor failure to use their regional criminal powers either to bring dubious cases against political targets or to protect friends of the presidency.

Such cases are much in the news even now, as evident in the controversies surrounding Attorney General William Barr and such defendants as Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen and such forced-out officials as FBI Director James Comey, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and recently ousted New York U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Berman, below at right. Berman was head of New York's Southern District, which holds broad jurisdiction over Wall Street and many of President Trump's interests, supporters and several high profile suspected criminal confederates. 

At the outset of our project a decade ago, one such case arose out of the U.S. attorney firing scandal was the longstanding federal corruption investigation of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. He had been his state's most popular Democrat. He became a target by Alabama Republicans in the state attorney general's office from the first month that he assumed office in 1999. It was no coincidence that Bush senior advisor Karl Rove was pressuring the Justice Department personnel to use their powers for political purposes after Rove had been a consultant to Alabama business interests during their successful 1990s effort to flip the state's supreme court from all-Democrat to all-Republican.

Siegelman underwent relentless prosecution on dubious corruption charges ramped up during the Bush presidency beginnning in 2001. The core charge against Siegelman was that he had founded a foundation before his governorship to advocate for better K-12 funding in Alabama and that he had reappointed businessman Richard Scrushy, a donor to the foundation, to a state board on which the Republican Scrushy was already serving under previous Republican governors. 

The result? A seven-year sentence imposed on both defendants after Siegelman's second trial despite massive evidence including whistleblower revelations that the prosecution had been hoked up to remove him from elective politics, particularly because of his planned re-election campaign in 2006. 

Alden provided vital advice to the project on that story, which was published May 2009 as front page exclusive by the Huffington Post under the title Siegelman Deserves New Trial Because of Judge’s ‘Grudge’, Evidence Shows.  Another headline, $300 Million in Bush Military Contracts Awarded to Judge’s Private Company, pointed the way to the trial judge's conflict of interest and likely financial corruption, both factors that helped explain the vast number of irregularities in the prosecution and courtroom procedures.

Our project, JIP, published scores of stories on the Siegelman / Scrushy case that generating many hundreds of thousands of page views. Among the headlines were: 

• Siegelman's Judge Accused Of Beating Wife, Affair With Clerk
• Wife-Beating Siegelman Judge Resigns, Ends Horrid Career With Civic Lesson 
• Alabama Judicial Scandal Could Taint Many Cases, Not Just Siegelman's