Journalism lost one of its great ones this weekend with the passing of Mary Lou Forbes, 83, after a brief battle with cancer. She was Commentary Editor of The Washington Times from its earliest days and was one of a core group of former Washington Star newsroom characters who helped launch the upstart conservative daily.
Forbes was among the first women to succeed at the highest levels of news reporting and commentary journalism, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for her reportage in covering the civil rights struggle in Virginia. She also tutored the early careers of folks like Carl Bernstein, and created a prize-winning multiple-page commentary section, which helped the Times challenge the hegemony of The Washington Post and launched the career of America’s most widely read columnist, Cal Thomas.
When I joined the reporting staff of the Times in 1985, I worked for Woody West, then the managing editor, and thus never had the opportunity of working with Mary Lou. But in almost three decades in Washington, D.C., I have never heard a single negative word about her or the quality of her work.
Woody and Mary Lou were the heart of the Star crowd at the Times and were equally adept at detecting BS, regardless of its source. They represented American journalism at its best. I quickly developed an immense and enduring respect for these two and I shall always lament the loss of their kind from America’s daily newspaper newsrooms. As you can see from this obit in the Times on West, he and Mary Lou both died rather quickly at advanced ages after being diagnosed with cancer.
My former Examiner colleague Quin Hillyer offers a moving tribute to Mary Lou, as does my former Times colleague, Don Lambro. I commend both to you.
