By: (AP) Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and World War II veteran Robert L. Rose has died of complications from prostate cancer at his home in Alexandria, Va., his son Michael said Tuesday. He was 77.
Rose, who died Monday, spent 22 years with the now-defunct
Chicago Daily News, coordinating a series of probing articles on the mob and a groundbreaking series about offering birth control advice to public aid recipients in Chicago, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1963.
At the
Daily News, Rose is credited with boosting the career of Chicago's gruff Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mike Royko by allowing him to write a column, and for letting noted foreign correspondent Georgie Anne Geyer leave the city beat for international news.
He spent 12 years as the paper's West Coast bureau chief, covering the social and political tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s -- from the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the trial of his assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, to the trials of Charles Manson, Angela Davis, Patty Hearst, and Daniel Ellsberg, as well as Richard Nixon's return to civilian life after Watergate and his resignation from the presidency.
After the paper folded in 1978, Rose went to work for
The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., which took him to Washington, D.C., where he retired in 1987. Rose was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1998.
He had an early start in the military, running away from home at 15 and spending a year in Canada's air force until his father brought him home. During World War II, he served as a U.S. infantryman in Europe from 1943-45.
He is survived by his wife, Lu Neill Rose, and his son Michael from a previous marriage.
Services will be held at Arlington National Cemetery on Sept. 4.
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