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Richard Lawson Wilson was an American journalist
Wilson was born in Galesburg, Illinois, and raised in Newton, Iowa. He was the son of Frank and Emily Wilson, and was the youngest of nine children.
He attended the University of Iowa, at Iowa City, Iowa. There he met and later married fellow journalist Katherine Y. Macy, a graduate of the University of Iowa and the Columbia University School of Journalism.
After receiving his B.A. in 1926, he began his reporting career at The Des Moines Register in Des Moines, Iowa. After a year at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1928, he returned to Des Moines as City Editor and then to Washington, D.C., in 1933 to set up the Washington bureau of the Register, at that time owned by the Cowles family, who owned newspapers in the midwest and published the now-defunct Look magazine. He became chief of the Washington bureau for all Cowles publications in 1950, and occupied that post until his retirement in 1970. Wilson was elected President of the National Press Club for the year 1940. He was also very active in the Gridiron Club.
During World War II, Wilson travelled extensively abroad as a war correspondent. In 1954, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, "[f]or his exclusive publication of the FBI Report to the White House in the Harry Dexter White case before it was laid before the Senate by J. Edgar Hoover."
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