By Robert D. McFadden, The New York Times
Ronnie Dugger, the crusading editor of a small but influential Texas journal who challenged presidents, corporations and America’s privileged classes to face their responsibility for racism, poverty and the perils of nuclear war, died on Tuesday at an assisted living facility in Austin, Texas. He was 95.
His daughter, Celia Dugger, the health and science editor of The New York Times, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Dugger was Editor of The Daily Texan in 1950-51. He remained a supporter of The Daily Texan thoughout his life. He was especially vocal in 1971 when the editorial independence of The Texan and Texas Student Media was threatened by a takeover attempt by the chairman of the Board of Regents. Mr. Dugger was inducted into The Daily Texan Hall of Fame by Friends of The Daily Texan in 2015.
Inspired by Thomas Paine’s treatises on independence and human rights, Mr. Dugger was the founding editor, the publisher and an owner of The Texas Observer, a widely respected publication, based in Austin, that with few resources and a tiny staff took on powerful interests, exposed injustices with investigative reports and offered an urbane mix of political dissent, narrative storytelling and cultural criticism.
In an anthology, “Fifty Years of The Texas Observer” (2004), Mr. Dugger recalled that in 1954, when his weekly began, a gentlemen’s agreement of silence on sensitive matters pervaded public discourse in the deeply conservative Lone Star State.
“We were as racist, segregated and anti-union as the Deep South from which most of our Anglo pioneers had emerged,” Mr. Dugger wrote, adding:
“Mexican Americans were a hopeless underclass concentrated in South Texas. Women could vote and did the dog work in the political campaigns, but they were also ladies to be protected, above all from power. Gays and lesbians were as objectionable as Communists. And the daily newspapers were as reactionary and dishonest a cynical gang as the First Amendment ever took the rap for.”
In Mr. Dugger’s 40-year tenure, The Observer set its sights not on objectivity but on accuracy, “fairness” and “moral seriousness.” It laced commentary into its reportage and addressed issues ignored by state newspapers, like the lynching and shooting of Black people in East Texas. It denounced anti-Communist witch hunts, opposed the Vietnam War and championed labor, civil rights and the environment.
Investigative articles exposed corporate greed, political chicanery and government corruption. Many were picked up and expanded upon by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other mainstream publications. Some Observer disclosures led to government hearings, judicial reviews and legislative reforms, and won awards from press and legal groups.
In 1955, Mr. Dugger wrote of two nightriders who stormed through a Black town in East Texas, spraying bullets into a school bus, houses and a cafe, where John Reese, a Black 16-year-old, was killed. Two white youths were arrested, but only one, who signed a confession, was tried, in 1957.
Mr. Dugger covered the trial, which lasted one day. At the end, he reported, a defense lawyer told the jury, which was all white, “This boy wanted to scare somebody and keep the niggers and the whites from going to school together — now that’s the truth about it.”
The jury ruled that the defendant had fired the fatal shot “without malice” and recommended a suspended sentence. The judge agreed.
With anemic circulation and advertising revenues, The Observer relied on donations and barely survived from year to year. But it became a home for outstanding writers like Molly Ivins, Willie Morris, Jim Hightower, Billy Lee Brammer and Kaye Northcott.
Mr. Dugger covered many of the big stories, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. He rode in a press bus in the presidential motorcade and wrote an impressionist 7,000-word piece.
“Come now on the last voyage of Mr. Kennedy,” the article began. Then, in meticulous detail, Mr. Dugger told of the president’s final day and his last moments as gunshots cracked across Dealey Plaza, Secret Service men scrambled and the president’s car sped away to Parkland Memorial Hospital.
“Inside the hospital all was in chaos,” he related. Rumors flew. “I first believed and comprehended that he was dead when I heard Doug Kiker of The New York Herald Tribune swearing bitterly and passionately, ‘Goddamn the sonsabitches!’” Later, after doctors gave way to a priest for the last rites, a White House press secretary confirmed that the president was dead.
Forrest Wilder, a former editor of The Observer and now a senior writer at Texas Monthly, said in an interview for this obituary in 2018 that Mr. Dugger was “a man ahead of his time by 50 years, a Southerner who spoke up for gay rights and addressed nuclear annihilation long before those ideas were commonly discussed in Texas.”
Mr. Dugger also wrote biographies of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan and a book on the pilot of a weather reconnaissance plane who gave the all-clear for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He contributed articles to The Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and other publications.
Mr. Dugger taught at the Universities of Illinois and Virginia and at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. He lectured widely, advocating national health insurance, public funding of election campaigns, curbs on corporate power and stronger civil rights protections for racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants and the L.G.B.T.Q. community. But his most passionate theme was nuclear perils.
Bill Moyers, in a blog post marking The Observer’s 50th anniversary, suggested that Mr. Dugger’s stewardship — as editor from 1954 to 1965, then as publisher until 1994, when he turned ownership over to the nonprofit Texas Democracy Foundation — would be his most lasting legacy.
“Not a day passes that I don’t wish we could clone The Texas Observer, plant it smack dab in the center of the nation’s capital and loose the spirit of Thomas Paine,” Mr. Moyers wrote. “Paine was the journalist of the American Revolution whose pen shook the powerful and propertied, challenged the pretensions of the pious and privileged and exposed the sunshine patriots who turned against the revolutionary ideals of freedom, equality and justice. That spirit permeates The Texas Observer.”
Ronald Edward Dugger was born in Chicago on April 16, 1930, to William and Mary (King) Dugger. His father was a bookkeeper.
The family moved to San Antonio, where Ronnie and his brother, Roy, attended public schools. Fascinated with journalism, Ronnie began working at 13 as a sportswriter for The San Antonio Express-News.
After graduating from Brackenridge High School in San Antonio in 1946, he attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in government and economics, edited the student newspaper and earned a bachelor’s degree with high honors in 1950. He then studied politics and economics at the University of Oxford in England for a year.
His marriage in 1951 to Jean Williams, a teacher, ended in divorce. In 1982, he married Patricia Blake, a Time magazine editor. She died in 2010.
In addition to his daughter, Celia, from his first marriage, Mr. Dugger is survived by a son, Gary, also from his first marriage, and six grandchildren.
On Mr. Dugger’s watch, The Observer’s circulation remained small, between 6,000 and 12,000, but its readers included congressmen, legislators, and community and business leaders. It morphed from a tabloid weekly into a biweekly in 1962, and later into a bimonthly magazine, but it kept its crusading character.
Mr. Dugger ran for the United States Senate twice — in 1966 in Texas as an independent (he dropped out before the balloting) and in 2000 in New York, where he narrowly lost a race for the Green Party nomination.
His book “Dark Star: Hiroshima Reconsidered in the Life of Claude Eatherly” (1967) profiled the B-29 reconnaissance plane pilot who reported clear skies over Hiroshima before the Enola Gay dropped the bomb that destroyed the city in 1945.
Mr. Eatherly’s avowed feelings of guilt after the war were disputed by many who supported use of the bomb to end the conflict, but they were accepted by antinuclear groups and by Mr. Dugger. The New York Times Book Review called “Dark Star” a carefully reported “moral and personal statement.”
In “The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson” (1982), Mr. Dugger folded essays about Texas, Vietnam and nuclear weapons into a biography that ended with Johnson’s years as the Senate majority leader.
Mr. Dugger’s “On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency” (1983) used excerpts from 500 Reagan radio commentaries in the late 1970s to bolster his argument that his subject was a “dogged right-wing ideologue.” Writing in The Times Book Review, David E. Rosenbaum said, “Researchers may want to concentrate on particular chapters, for nowhere else is so much documented derogatory information about the 40th president of the United States presented in such well-organized fashion.”
In 1996, Mr. Dugger was a founder of the Alliance for Democracy, a grass-roots organization that aimed to “end corporate domination of politics, economics and the media” and “create a true democracy.”
Mr. Dugger, who lived in Austin, was inducted into the Daily Texan Hall of Fame in 2015. In 2012, when he received Long Island University’s George Polk Award for lifetime achievement in journalism, he used his acceptance speech to ask a few questions:
“Why are nuclear weapons called ‘weapons of mass destruction’ when morally they are weapons of mass murder? President Obama calls for a nuclear-free world, but says it’s not likely in our lifetimes. Why not? And what is the political and ethical responsibility of the American citizen for our H-bombs?”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.