Chattanooga has a rich history of providing Pulitzer Prize winners. Charles Bartlett, a political reporter with Chattanooga ties and close friend of John F. Kennedy, was the first of the prize winners.
Born in 1921 into a wealthy Chicago family, he became the seventh generation to graduate from Yale University, where he wrote for the student newspaper.
Charlie Bartlett served as a Naval intelligence officer in the Pacific during World War II. Afterward he ran across another young Navy officer, John F. Kennedy, who had served in the Pacific, at the Ta-boo nightclub in Palm Beach, Fla., where both families had winter homes. That encounter started a lifelong social and political relationship.
Bartlett’s acquaintance with the Sulzberger publishing family led to Arthur Sr. hiring him in 1946 as a general assignment reporter at The Chattanooga Times. The bachelor lived at 204 Scenic Highway on Lookout Mountain, loved Chattanooga and developed many friends.
Eighteen months later the Times sent him to be its Washington, D.C., correspondent. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for a series of articles leading to a Senate investigation into a conflict of interest charge, involving Harold E. Talbott, Secretary of the Air Force in President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. His friend John Kennedy urged Charlie Bartlett to move on, offering a brotherly scold: “It is a shame to keep writing that stuff and sending it down to die in Chattanooga.” But Bartlett later reflected, “The most interesting newspapering I did was in Chattanooga. I learned more about what makes the world run in Chattanooga than in Washington It’s sort of a game up here. The politicians show their best side and the reporters find out what really went on.”