Jack White, 63; News Story on Nixon’s Taxes Prompted ‘I Am Not a Crook’ Line

Jack White, the reporter whose story on President Nixon’s underpayment of income taxes prompted Nixon to utter the famous line “I am not a crook,” died Wednesday. He was 63.

White died at his Cape Cod home, said WPRI-TV Channel 12 in Providence, where he worked as a reporter. The cause of death was not announced.

White’s 1973 report shared the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. While working for the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin, White got a tip that Nixon paid only a minimal amount of federal tax in 1970 and 1971.

White checked tax records in reporting the story and found the tip was correct. Nixon was forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes.

White’s scoop on Nixon almost didn’t happen. The night he was prepared to write the story, the union representing reporters in Providence voted to strike. He later recalled rolling the story out of his typewriter and putting it in his wallet.

“I was dreading the information I had was going to get out there. I was checking out-of-town newspapers,” he later told the Providence Journal.

The strike ended 12 days later, and the story ran Oct. 3, 1973. The story revealed that Nixon and his wife, Pat, paid just $793 in income taxes in 1970 and $878 in 1971 and received a tax refund totaling more than $131,000 for those two years.

At an Associated Press managing editors convention the month after the story ran, one of White’s colleagues at the Evening Bulletin asked Nixon about his income taxes, and the president replied: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”

Nixon ultimately agreed to pay $476,000 in back taxes.

White began his career in 1969 as a reporter for the Newport Daily News. He moved the next year to the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin, where he worked as a general assignment reporter, Newport bureau chief and head of the newspaper’s first permanent investigative team.

He later worked for WBZ-TV Channel 4 in Boston and was a reporter for the Cape Cod Times before joining WPRI in 1985 as chief investigative reporter. He won two Emmy Awards for his television reporting.

“Whatever he did was right,” said Jim Taricani, a reporter at WJAR-TV Channel 10, another Providence station. “It was accurate. It was fair.”