C8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022
Obituaries
BY HARRISON SMITHSherry Jones, an Emmy-win-
ning documentary producer who
wedded investigative reporting
with dramatic visuals, crafting
television films that explored
foreign affairs, American politics
and national security issues in-
cluding the Cuban missile crisis
and the CIA torture program
approved after 9/11, died Feb. 14
at a hospital in Washington. She
was 73.
The cause was cancer, said her
friend Charlie McBride.
As the head of her own pro-
duction company, Washington
Media Associates, Ms. Jones
made more than two dozen films
for the PBS documentary series
“Frontline,” working with the
show from its first season in
- She also made documenta-
ries for CNN and ABC and collab-
orated with journalists including
Bill Moyers, Peter Jennings, Rog-
er Wilkins, Hedrick Smith and
William Greider, typically work-
ing with them on all aspects of
the reporting, script and story-
telling.
“If we had more filmmakers
like her in Washington, undaunt-
ed by fear, unaffected by threats
and unspoiled by praise, the
American people would see and
know a lot more clearly how
power works its will,” said Moy-
ers, who collaborated with her
for more than two decades on
documentaries such as “High
Crimes and Misdemeanors”
(1990), an Emmy-winning exam-
ination of the Iran-contra affair.
For one of their early projects,
about the influence of money in
politics, Ms. Jones engineered a
climactic shot in which a com-
puter printout unspooled across
the Capitol grounds, listing cam-
paign contributions to each
member of Congress, according
to Moyers. “It must have been
almost a mile long,” he said. “It
was one of the most dramatic
and effective visuals you could
have in a documentary. She al-
ways had that kind of eye.”
Ms. Jones’s documentaries
won top honors in broadcast
journalism, including eight
Emmy Awards, three duPont-
Columbia Awards and three Pea-
body Awards. She also received
three Edward R. Murrow Awards
from the Overseas Press Club of
America, including for “Return
of the Czar” (2000), a “Frontline”
episode about the rise of Russian
President Vladimir Putin, the
former KGB officer whose moves
against Ukraine prompted Presi-
dent Biden to announce new
sanctions against Russia on
Tuesday.
Along with her documentary
“The Struggle for Russia” (1994),
about post-Soviet leader Boris
Yeltsin, “Return of the Czar”
“should be required watching for
anyone trying to understand Pu-
tin today,” said Thomas S. Blan-
ton, the director of the National
Security Archive at George
Washington University, where
Ms. Jones was a senior fellow.
The film featured interviews
with veteran U.S. policymakers
as well as Russian observers,
including a former human rights
commissioner in Moscow who
said that Putin’s election to the
presidency may eventually be
seen “as the twilight of Russian
democracy.”
Ms. Jones visited Moscow un-
der leader Mikhail Gorbachev
and studied Russian to improve
her reporting, ultimately win-ning the trust of Soviet officials
who allowed her to use rare
archival footage for documenta-
ries such as “In the Shadow of
Sakharov” (1991), a 90-minute
portrait of the Russian physicist
and human rights activist.
But she was probably best
known for digging into Washing-
ton scandals and controversies,
including in documentaries
about disgraced lobbyist Jack
Abramoff and the detention and
interrogation program approved
by the George W. Bush adminis-
tration, in which suspected ter-
rorists and other detainees were
subjected to sleep deprivation,
waterboarding, solitary confine-
ment and other brutal “en-
hanced interrogation” tech-
niques.
Ms. Jones investigated the
program’s history and origins in“Torturing Democracy” (2008),
obtaining archival documents
that linked the interrogation tac-
tics used at Guantánamo Bay to a
survival training program that
the U.S. military developed dur-
ing the Cold War. She also inter-
viewed former detainees and
Bush administration officials
such as Richard L. Armitage, a
deputy secretary of state and
torture critic who said that he
was subjected to waterboarding
as part of a military training
exercise during the Vietnam War.
“There is no question in my
mind — there’s no question in
any reasonable human being,
there shouldn’t be, that this is
torture,” he said while discussing
waterboarding in the film. “I’m
ashamed that we’re even having
this discussion.”
Produced and written by Ms.
Jones, the film earned a Robert F.
Kennedy Journalism Award but
was not initially embraced by
PBS. A version of the documen-
tary was sent to the public broad-
caster in May 2008, according to
a New York Times report, but
PBS said it did not have a slot to
air the documentary nationally
until Jan. 21, 2009, the day after
Bush left office.
Ms. Jones rejected that offer
and, with help from Moyers,
appealed to individual stations
to air the film sooner. “It’s been
very frustrating,” she told the
Times in October 2008, a few
months after Congress starting
holding hearings on the interro-
gation program. “There’s some-
thing of a public discussion go-
ing on and there’s reporting that
ought to be out there.”
Blanton, the National Security
Archive director, said in a phone
interview that Ms. Jones was thefirst documentarian “to put to-
gether the genealogy of the tor-
ture program,” and noted that
she questioned its morality sev-
eral years before a Senate Intelli-
gence Committee report deliv-
ered new allegations of cruelty.
“She was such an acute ob-
server. Sherry had an instinct for
turning over the locks, shining a
light into the dark places, trying
to understand the roots of the
scandal or the crisis or the pol-
icy,” he said, “and then present-
ing context and detailed report-
ing in visually compelling ways.”
Sherry Lynn Jones was born in
Austin on April 21, 1948, and
grew up in Shawnee, Okla. Her
mother was a social worker who
worked for the state, and her
father was a traveling salesman
who sold school supplies.
Ms. Jones graduated from the
University of Oklahoma in 1970
and received a master’s degree in
journalism from Northwestern
University the next year.
She worked on political cam-
paigns for Democratic senators
Fred R. Harris (Okla.) and
George S. McGovern (S.D.) before
coming to Washington, launch-
ing her documentary career in
the early 1970s as a field pro-
ducer for Oscar-winning film-
maker Charles Guggenheim. By
the end of the decade she had
founded her own production
company.
Ms. Jones’s “Frontline” docu-
mentaries included “Throwaway
People” (1990), a portrait of the
Shaw neighborhood in North-
west Washington, and “The Lost
American” (1997), an investiga-
tion into the life and disappear-
ance in Chechnya of humanitari-
an worker Fred Cuny. (She as-
sembled evidence suggesting hewas murdered by a Chechen
intelligence commander.)
She also wrote and produced
the TV movie “Watergate Plus
30” (2003), examining the fall of
Richard M. Nixon’s presidency
through interviews with key
players such as White House aide
Jeb Stuart Magruder, who said
that the break-in was personally
ordered by Nixon — a bombshell
claim that was not universally
accepted.
Ms. Jones retired from film-
making soon after the release of
“Torturing Democracy,” having
grown tired of the seemingly
endless process of raising money
to make documentaries, accord-
ing to her friend McBride. She
split her time between homes in
Washington and Dameron, Md.,
on the Chesapeake Bay, where
she volunteered at an organic
farm and screened some of her
films at nearby St. Mary’s College
of Maryland.
Survivors include her husband
of 43 years, Alan Stone, a sculp-
tor and former chairman of the
Washington Project for the Arts;
and a brother.
In an email, Moyers recalled
that he and Ms. Jones “were like
a combative married couple
when we collaborated on scripts,
often working through the night
in the editing room as we resist-
ed each other’s draft or edits,
only to emerge as the sun rose
over Lafayette Square (three
blocks from her office) and we
walked to the Hilton for break-
fast, agreeing each had improved
the other’s effort.
“Then we would go back and
soon be at the other’s throat,” he
continued. “No quarrel ever
made it past the first pass of
bacon and eggs.”SHERRY JONES, 73
Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker explored U.S. torture, Iran-contra
ALAN STONE
Sherry Jones made more than
two dozen films for the PBS
series “Frontline,” including an
episode about Vladimir Putin.BY MATT SCHUDELWalter R. Mears, who was one
of the country’s most influential
political reporters while cover-
ing 11 presidential elections for
the Associated Press, winning a
Pulitzer Prize in 1977 and earn-
ing a place in history as a central
figure in Timothy Crouse’s clas-
sic book about the 1972 cam-
paign, “The Boys on the Bus,”
died March 3 at his home in
Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 87.
The cause was cancer, said his
daughters, Susan Mears and
Stephanie Stich.
Mr. Mears spent most of his
career at the AP, which sent his
dispatches to thousands of
newspapers, making him per-
haps the country’s most widely
read political journalist, if not
necessarily the best known. He
covered every presidential elec-
tion from 1960 through 2000,
assessing the candidates and
framing the issues of the day
with seasoned authority and the
reflexes of a sprinter.
“It is intense, high-pressure
reporting and writing that, for-
tunately, turned out to be my
special talent,” Mr. Mears wrote
in a 2003 memoir, “Deadlines
Past.” “In the right circum-
stances, I could produce a story
as fast as I could type.”
In “The Boys on the Bus,”
Crouse described Mr. Mears as “a
youngish man with sharp pale
green eyes who smoked cigaril-
los” who had “worked his way up
the hard way, by getting stories
in fast and his facts straight
every time.”
By 1972, he was already re-
garded as something of a speed-
writing savant and political ora-
cle. Other reporters, uncertain of
how to approach a story, went to
him saying: “Walter, Walter,
what’s our lead?”
Mr. Mears had a knack for
finding a new wrinkle or a fresh
regional angle that would keep
his political reports from being
rote recitations of a speech he
had heard dozens of times. As
soon as a candidate started
speaking, he started writing.
“The entire room was erupt-
ing with clattering typewriters,”
Crouse wrote, “but Mears stood
out as the resident dervish. His
cigar slowed him down, so he
threw it away. It was hot, but he
had no time to take off his blue
jacket. After the first three min-
utes, he turned to the phone at
his elbow and called the AP
bureau in L.A.”
Almost the only people in the
country who did not regularly
see Mr. Mears’s work were resi-
dents of major cities, whose
newspapers were large enough
to send their own reporters on
the road.
His most challenging assign-
ment came in 1968, he told NBC
journalist Tim Russert in 2003.
President Lyndon B. Johnson
decided not to seek reelection in
the face of a populist campaign
by Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-
Minn.) and a late grass-roots
effort by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy
(D-N.Y.). On the Republican side,
onetime vice president Richard
M. Nixon was seeking political
rehabilitation.
That year, civil rights leader
Martin Luther King Jr. was slain
in April, followed two months
later by the assassination of
Kennedy, shortly after he won
the California primary. Sen. Hu-
bert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.),
who had not participated in a
single primary, was nominated
during a Democratic National
Convention in Chicago marred
by protests and riots.
“Hubert H. Humphrey, apos-
tle of the politics of joy,” Mr.
Mears wrote, “won the Demo-
cratic presidential nomination
tonight under armed guard.”
In “The Boys on the Bus” year
of 1972, Mr. Mears covered such
failed Democratic candidates as
Humphrey, Sen. Edmund S.
Muskie (Maine) and Alabama’s
segregationist governor GeorgeWallace before the nomination
was claimed by Sen. George S.
McGovern (S.D.). McGovern lost
in a landslide to Nixon, who later
resigned the presidency in the
wake of the Watergate scandal.
While following Nixon’s cam-
paign, Mr. Mears later wrote in
his memoir: “I never met so
many people who later wound
up in prison.”
Writing at a breakneck pace,Mr. Mears produced reams of
copy that, through some kind of
literary alchemy, was not only
factual but also sometimes
touched with notes of poetic
grace. He won his Pulitzer for his
coverage of the 1976 race be-
tween Republican Gerald Ford
and Democrat Jimmy Carter,
summing up the outcome in a
sentence: “In the end, the im-
probable Democrat beat the un-elected Republican.”
When he began covering
presidential politics in 1960, Mr.
Mears said politicians were easy
to approach and would even
invite reporters for drinks. That
irreverent, cantankerous style
was captured in “The Boys on
the Bus,” but there was still a
widely held respect for the office
of the presidency, among report-
ers and the public alike.
“When I covered Goldwater
and Bobby Kennedy and Nixon,”
Mr. Mears told USA Today in
2000, “when they went out to
campaign, you would still see
parents holding up children to
see the next president of the
United States.”
But the rise of cable television,
political consultants and the
ubiquitous presence of micro-
phones “cheapened everything,”
making candidates more guard-
ed and voters more cynical.
“Information has been deval-
ued in favor of opinion,” Mr.
Mears said, “and the line be-
tween the two has blurred.”
Walter Robert Mears was born
Jan. 11, 1935, in Lynn, Mass. His
father was an executive with a
chemical company, and his
mother was a homemaker.
“Journalism was my only am-bition, from my earliest knowl-
edge that people work for a
living,” Mr. Mears said in a 1983
interview for the reference work
Contemporary Authors. “When
other kids talked about being
firemen or ballplayers, I talked
about being a reporter.”
He began working for the AP
while still a student at Middle-
bury College in Vermont. He
graduated in 1956 and was elect-
ed to the Phi Beta Kappa honor
society.
He was based in New England
before becoming a Washington-
based political reporter in 1961.
The next year, his first wife, the
former Sally Danton, and their
two young children, Walter Jr.
and Pamela, died in a house fire
at the family home in Mount
Vernon. Mr. Mears was injured
while trying to rescue them.
He then threw himself into his
job, working 18 hours a day,
eventually becoming AP’s chief
political writer. He was briefly
the Washington bureau chief of
the Detroit News, only to return
to the wire service after a few
months, because “I couldn’t take
the pace. It was too slow.”
After five years as AP’s execu-
tive editor in New York, Mr.
Mears returned to Washington
in 1989 as political columnist.
He retired after the 2000 presi-
dential election, in which the
Supreme Court determined that
Republican George W. Bush pre-
vailed over Democrat Al Gore.
Throughout his career, Mr.
Mears was fond of the conces-
sion speeches — confession
speeches — of losing candidates.
One of his favorites came in
1976, when Arizona congress-
man Morris Udall lost several
Democratic primaries: “The
people have spoken, the bas-
tards.”
Mr. Mears’s marriages to
Joyce Lund and Carroll Ann
Rambo ended in divorce. His
fourth wife, journalist Fran
Richardson, died in 2019. Survi-
vors include two daughters from
his second marriage, Susan
Mears of Boulder, Colo., and
Stephanie Stich of Austin; a
brother; and five grandchildren.
In 1983, Mr. Mears published
a book, “The News Business,”
co-written with onetime NBC
News anchor John Chancellor.
He moved to Chapel Hill in 2005
and taught journalism at the
University of North Carolina and
Duke University.
Reflecting on his career in a
2003 interview with NBC’s Rus-
sert, Mr. Mears confessed that he
missed the excitement of the
campaign trail, the rush of re-
porting on deadline.
“I’m waiting for somebody to
call and say, ‘Get on the bus,’ ” he
said. “I’ll go in a minute.”WALTER R. MEARS, 87
Pulitzer winner featured in classic book on campaign journalists
RICK BOWMER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Bill Clinton is interviewed by reporters, including Walter Mears, right, in 2000. Mr. Mears covered every presidential election
from 196 0 to 2000. “It is intense, high-pressure reporting and writing that ... turned out to be my special talent,” he wrote in a memoir.ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. M ears t alks with presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976.
He won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of that year’s race.