From Fauquier Now:
Prominent author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist “Nick” Kotz died Sunday after an accident at his home near Broad Run, according to Virginia State Police.
Mr. Kotz got out of the driver’s seat of his car to retrieve an item from the rear passenger side, state police said. His 2006 Mercedes rolled backwards and pinned him.
Mr. Kotz, 87, died in the driveway of his home on Galemont Lane, Senior Trooper B. Boteler said.
Working for the Des Moines Register, Mr. Kotz in 1968 won the Pulitzer for National Reporting “for his reporting of unsanitary conditions in many meat packing plants, which helped insure the passage of the Federal Wholesome Meat Act of 1967.”
He also worked at The Washington Post and as a freelance writer. Mr. Kotz received the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Washington correspondence, the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award and the first Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award. His study of American military leadership won the National Magazine Award for public service. His book Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics, and the B-1 Bomber (2006) won the Olive Branch Award.
Mr. Kotz’s other books include:
• The Harness Maker’s Dream: Nathan Kallison and the Rise of South Texas, tells the story of Ukrainian immigrant Nathan Kallison’s journey to the United States (2013).
• Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America (2006).
• A Passion For Equality: George Wiley and the Movement , with his wife, Mary Lynn Kotz (1977).
• Let Them Eat Promises: The Politics of Hunger and The Unions, with Haynes Johnson (1971).
Nathan K. “Nick” Kotz was born September 16, 1932, in San Antonio, Texas.
He graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College and did graduate study in international relations at the London School of Economics. After college, he served as a lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.
He served as an adjunct professor at the American University School of Communications and as a senior journalist in residence for a semester at Duke University.
Mr. and Mrs. Kotz played major roles in organizing successful opposition to the proposed Disney’s America history theme park near Haymarket in 1994.
His wife is a journalist and author of Rauschenberg: Art and Life and co-author of Upstairs at the White House: My Life With the First Ladies. Their son, Jack Mitchell Kotz, is a photographer.
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Also see “How a Professor and 14 Students Won a National Magazine Award for Public Service.
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