John Mashek, Veteran Political Reporter, Is Dead at 77

November 7, 2009
John Mashek, Veteran Political Reporter, Is Dead at 77
By WILLIAM GRIMES

John W. Mashek, a reporter and columnist who covered national politics
for nearly half a century for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe
and other publications, died Tuesday in Rockville, Md. He was 77 and
lived in Washington.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, his son William said.

Mr. Mashek was a young reporter at The Dallas Morning News in 1960 when
the paper sent him to Washington to cover the high-powered Texas
Congressional delegation, which included Lyndon B. Johnson and Sam
Rayburn, the speaker of the House.

After working briefly as a press spokesman at the Justice Department
under Robert F. Kennedy, he was hired by U.S. News & World Report in
1964 to open its Southwest bureau in Houston. There he reported on the
space program, the civil rights movement and Johnson's visits to the
summer White House. He became the magazine's chief Congressional
correspondent in 1970. Four years later, as Gerald R. Ford took office
as president, Mr. Mashek was named White House correspondent. In 1978,
he became the magazine's political editor.

After a brief stint as national correspondent for The Atlanta
Constitution, Mr. Mashek was hired by The Boston Globe in 1988 to report
from its Washington bureau. He appeared as a panelist on nationally
televised presidential and vice-presidential debates during the 1984,
1988 and 1992 election campaigns. After retiring in 1995, he wrote
opinion articles for U.S. News & World Report and, making the transition
to electronic journalism, maintained his own blog, where he expressed
liberal opinions on politics and social issues.

Affable and courteous, Mr. Mashek showed a knack for cultivating
high-level sources and maintaining friendships with ideological foes.
"The liberal readers of this blog may be surprised or even angered to
read that the Prince of Darkness and I are friends," he wrote last year
in an appreciation of the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak, who
died in August. "That's the way it is."

John Walter Mashek was born on Dec. 9, 1931, in Sioux Falls, S.D. He
spent the last two years of high school in Fargo, N.D., where he played
semiprofessional baseball and coached an American Legion team whose
lineup included Roger Maris.

After attending North Dakota State University, he transferred to the
University of Minnesota, where he studied journalism and political
science and was the sports editor of the student newspaper. He received
a bachelor's degree in 1953.

In the Army, which he entered straight out of college, he served as a
public information officer at Fort Hood, near Killeen, Tex.
Unofficially, one of his most important assignments was to make sure
football players from the Big 10 were sent to Fort Hood, whose team was
locked in a fierce rivalry with Fort Sill in Oklahoma.

Mr. Mashek began working as a cub reporter for The Morning News in 1955,
covering the courts. That year he married Sara Allen Stone, who survives
him. In addition to their son William, of Bethesda, Md., he is also
survived by his sons Thomas, of Swarthmore, Pa.; David, of Pittsburgh;
and James, of Biloxi, Miss.; a sister, Maureen, of Edina, Minn.; and
seven grandchildren.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
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