John M. Crewdson

John M. Crewdson (born December 15, 1945) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. He was a senior correspondent for the Chicago Tribune for 24 years.

Early life

He attended public schools in Albany, California. In 1970, Crewdson graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in economics. He interned for The New York Times' Washington bureau which was followed by a year of graduate study at Oxford University.

Career

Crewdson joined The New York Times after his graduate work at Oxford, and covered the Watergate scandal and various scandals related to the CIA and the FBI. He later became a national correspondent based in the newspaper's Houston bureau.

Later, Crewdson joined the Chicago Tribune as a national news editor. In 1989, he wrote a 50,000-word history of the discovery of the AIDS virus. In 1990, Crewdson joined the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau. In 1994, he wrote about a scandal in breast cancer research that led to strengthening government scrutiny of clinical trials.

In 1996, Crewdson wrote a special report for the Tribune about commercial airplanes' inadequate medical equipment for passenger health emergencies. That report was one of three finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.

On November 12, 2008, Crewdson was one of five editorial staff members laid off from the Tribune's Washington, D.C. bureau.

Pulitzer Prize

Crewdson was the recipient of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting "For his coverage of illegal aliens and immigration" while writing for the New York Times.

Books

John Crewdson has written three books.

• The Tarnished Door: The New Immigrants and the Transformation of America ISBN 9780812910421 (Times Books, 1983) Looks at the world of illegal aliens residing in the United States and explores topics including the chaos, inadequacy, and corruption of American immigration policy and service.
• By Silence Betrayed: Sexual Abuse of Children in America (Little Brown & Co: 1988) ISBN 9780316160940 Interviews with experts and victims.
• Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo ISBN 9780316134767 (Little Brown & Co. 2002). Describes the competition between scientists--including Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute--over credit for the discovery of the HIV virus in a study that offers a revealing look at how scientific and research laboratories really work. Reprint ISBN 9780316090049 (Back Bay Books, 2003)