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HONORING WORLD WAR II VETERAN AND LEGENDARY REPORTER MORTON A. MINTZ
______
HON. JAMIE RASKIN
of maryland
in the house of representatives
Friday, January 28, 2022
Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize Mr. Morton Abner Mintz, a World War II veteran and legendary investigative reporter who turned 100 years old this week. And what a century it has been for this great and modest man of exceptional gifts.
Born January 26, 1922, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mr. Mintz enlisted in the Navy after graduating from the University of Michigan. He served as Communications Officer and then Commanding Officer in World War II on USS LST 505, which supported troops in the D-Day Invasion of Normandy from June 6 to June 25, 1944; the Invasion of Southern France from August 15 to September 25, 1944; and in the Pacific Theater during the assault and occupation of Okinawa from May 29 to June 10, 1945, and subsequently in China.
Married for 68 years to the lovely Anita Inez Franz until she passed away in 2015, he has two daughters, Margaret and Roberta, and a son Daniel, 10 grandchildren and a great-grandson. Following his service in the Navy, Mr. Mintz became a newspaper reporter and editor in St. Louis, then moved to Washington, D.C. to work at the Washington Post in 1958. He was to become one of America's most independent, highly respected, and public-interested reporters. For decades he was a first-
class investigative journalist and peerless muckraker.
Widely recognized by his peers for his relentless focus on protecting the public against both corporate and governmental abuses of power, the prodigious Mr. Mintz covered a wide range of topics, including anticompetitive business practices, automobile safety, air pollution, the tobacco, pharmaceutical and medical device industries, waste and fraud in military contracting, the corrupting power of the campaign finance regime and the corrosive influence of lobbying and large corporate donations on elected officials. He knew much could be learned from covering seemingly obscure congressional hearings and reading the fine print in legislation and administrative rulemaking processes.
Mr. Mintz' dogged investigative work repeatedly exposed corporate actions undertaken to increase profit at the expense of consumer safety, leading to significant government regulations that curbed corporate misconduct and saved lives.
In 1962, he broke the story of how FDA scientist Frances Kelsey had discovered the dangers of the drug Thalidomide, which led to the last-
minute banning of the drug from entering the US market and likely avoiding thousands of horrifying birth defects as were experienced in Europe. In the late 1960s, Mr. Mintz chronicled the inadequate testing of the original birth control pills and, years later, tracked the story of how a pharmaceutical corporation willfully ignored the safety hazards of the contraceptive Dalkon Shield, causing serious injury to thousands of women. He broke the extraordinary story of General Motors' corporate surveillance of Ralph Nader, the automaker's biggest public critic. He wrote about how profit driven decisions in the infant formula business led to great harm in impoverished populations with limited access to safe drinking water. And he reckoned with difficult and indigestible truths, such as in a 1983 exclusive interview with Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who had served in the Roosevelt administration, where he revealed some of the story behind the refusal of the United States during World War II to bomb the rail lines transporting Holocaust victims to the Birkenau or the Auschwitz concentration camps.
Following his retirement from the Washington Post in 1988, Mr. Mintz continued his work as a journalist and media critic. In 1993, he exposed the failure of the American Civil Liberties Union to inform its members that it accepted money from the tobacco industry and, under the guise of defending free speech, also actively opposed legislation that would ban or limit tobacco advertising and promotion. In 1999, he wrote media criticism for Tompaine.com. ``Mort Wants to Know,'' and posed questions that the press should be asking of presidential and congressional candidates in the 2000 national elections. A Senior Advisor to the Nieman Watchdog Project for many years, he also contributed commentary to niemanwatchdog.org on vital topics including military spending, congressional ethics and oversight, single payer health insurance, pharmaceutical pricing, executive pay, corporate welfare and the corporate shield that protects executives from punishment for their decisions to market products known to be harmful, as well as tough questions that reporters should be asking legislators and corporate executives. He served as chair of The Fund for Investigative Journalism for three years and on the board of Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
Mr. Mintz was an active member of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild. His bestselling book ``America, Inc.: Who Owns and Operates the United States,'' written with the late Jerry S. Cohen, demonstrated the pervasive and often hidden influence of corporate power. Mintz and Cohen later co-wrote ``Power, Inc.: Public and Private Rulers and How to Make Them Accountable,'' continuing their investigation of the pernicious impact of unaccountable power in the interlocking corporate and government realms. Mr. Mintz's other books include ``The Therapeutic Nightmare,'' ``By Prescription Only,'' ``The Pill: An Alarming Report'' and ``At Any Cost: Corporate Greed, Women, and the Dalkon Shield.'' He received many prestigious journalism awards including Nieman Fellowship 1964, the Worth Bingham, Heywood Broun, Raymond Clapper and George Polk Memorial Awards, the Columbia Journalism Award, The Playboy Foundation's Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award for Lifetime Achievement, (More) Magazine's A.J. Liebling Award, the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild award for Public Service and for Distinguished Writing and the Association of Trial Lawyers of America Special Literary-Public Service Award.
I have known Morton Mintz since the seventh grade when his son Daniel became one of my closest friends. As kids, we all marveled at Mr. Mintz, an old-fashioned gentleman with a golden pen, rock-ribbed integrity and sparkling intelligence.
I commend Mr. Mintz for his splendid commitment and service to the public interest always--whether the subject be consumer safety, corporate and government accountability, or the truth about humanity's wars--through his many decades of extraordinary investigative reporting, I am proud to share a small piece of his story with my colleagues and the nation.
Madam Speaker, I urge my colleagues to join me in recognizing Mr. Morton Mintz on the occasion of his 100th birthday for his exceptional service to our nation, both as a patriot in uniform and as a crusading investigative reporter in love with the truth.
____________________
SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 168, No. 18
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