Politically motivated:
Carl Cannon continues the family trade

Carl Cannon. Photo by Liz Linch.

By Lauren Glendenning

When he's not covering the White House or writing a book about the intricacies of Washington, one might find Carl Cannon ('75) fly-fishing in Montana, a hobby he picked up in the 1970s while attending CU.

Cannon chose CU simply because his girlfriend told him that's where she'd be going to college. He soon found himself in Boulder questioning how he had ended up there. He didn't know a single person in the state, and he didn't know much about Colorado's landscape or location.

He flew into Denver on an August night in 1971 and remembers calling his girlfriend on the phone and lamenting being so far from home. "You'll feel better in the morning when you see the mountains," she replied.

"There's mountains here?" he asked. "That's how much a California kid knew about Colorado," he said in an interview this spring. "I thought it was somewhere near Oregon."

Since graduating from the SJMC, Cannon has covered politics for newspapers and magazines, authored two books, been part of a Pulitzer prize-winning news staff and learned a good deal about geography, traveling the world for the past 12 years as a White House correspondent. In that job, he has been the recipient of the only two journalism awards that honor White House coverage, the Gerald R. Ford Prize and the Aldo Beckman Memorial Award. Cannon said he didn't start out by covering presidential campaigns or the White House, but by reporting on police, courts and crime.

One of his college buddies, Steve Sander ('74), said Cannon possesses the innate characteristics of a reporter.

"Carl has one of those unique personalities just born to be a journalist. He grew up with journalism in his blood," said Sander, sports marketing and advertising principal at Pure Brand Communications in Denver.

It took a while for his blood to start pumping stories, though. Cannon said he didn't enter college with any certainty of a major or career path. During his early college years, he thought about majoring in history or forestry. He decided to take a break from school after completing a few semesters of required arts and sciences classes. He said he wasn't sure he would even return to school until he ended up working a construction job and realized that adulthood meant spending most of one's waking hours at work. "I figured I'd better find something I liked doing," he said.

Cannon found himself at his parents' home near Washington, D.C., and began thinking about what to do with his education and career. His father, Lou Cannon, was covering the White House for The Washington Post, and Carl Cannon started to think that his dad's job wasn't so bad.

"Well, my old man loves his job," Cannon said he thought. "I'm gonna be a reporter."

Cannon called CU to see what he'd have to do to get back into school. He remembers talking on the phone with the late Professor Sam Archibald ('46). Cannon was ready to embark on his journalism education, and Archibald told him to be back in Boulder the following day if he wanted to make it in time for a winter reporting class.

One seat had opened up in the class, so Cannon got on a plane and began his journey into the world of reporting.

Some of his first work appeared in a small weekly paper in nearby Louisville. Cannon said that the late Professor Mal Deans suggested that he write stories for the paper to gain experience and clips.

"They paid me $5 an article," Cannon said. "The editor's name was Percy Conarroe. He was a calm unflappable person, a mentor, and he paid me in cash, 15 or 20 dollars at a time; it was beer money."

Cannon didn't know he'd wind up as an influential Washington reporter. He said he was interested in writing a hard-edged city column somewhere or doing some investigative pieces on cops.

"My dad was a political reporter," Cannon said. "I wanted to be Jimmy Breslin. I wanted to write about police, hookers and corruption."

But Carl Cannon found himself not only following in Lou Cannon's footsteps, but working in his town when his editors at the San Jose Mercury News sent him to the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau in 1982.

"The managing editor said it was the top reporting job on the paper," he recalled. "Who wouldn't want the top reporting job? So I came here to Washington," he said.

During a trip to Boulder last summer, Cannon said he showed his 10-year-old daughter the apartment where he sat writing letters to prospective newspaper employers. He remembered the cramped quarters where he typed drafts of letters over and over again on his typewriter until they were perfect.

"I haven't had to write a letter since," he said.

Instead of writing letters to news employers, it seems as though the employers have been seeking him out. Cannon worked on a weekly in northern Virginia, small dailies in Virginia and Georgia, and was recruited to the San Diego Union and the San Jose Mercury News, which sent him to cover the nation's capital. Since then he accepted offers at The Baltimore Sun and National Journal, where he works today.

After covering California politics and the '84, '88, and '92 presidential campaigns for Knight-Ridder, he found himself part of a news team that won a Pulitzer prize for coverage of the 1989 California earthquake.

Cannon said he reminds people that the Pulitzer is not his alone, that he shared it with the entire staff at the San Jose Mercury News.

He remembers the beginning of the prize-winning coverage as an exciting day for Bay Area baseball. He had flown out from Washington to watch baseball, but he quickly found himself at work.

The Oakland A's had defeated the San Francisco Giants in the first two games of the 1989 World Series, and Game 3 was the Giants' first home game of the series. He said he had two tickets right behind the Giants' dugout.

When the earth began to shake, Cannon said he was in his hotel's elevator. The elevator stopped, and the tiny space went dark. He said he forced the door open and crawled to his hotel room floor while helping a woman in the elevator do the same. Cannon recalled that debris lined San Francisco streets. He called his old newsroom at the San Jose Mercury News and asked what they needed. He gathered quotes from people all over the city and called them in throughout the night. After a couple of hours of sleep, he said he cleared debris off his car around 4 a.m. and drove south more than 40 miles to his newsroom where he took a seat in "the slot" and commenced doing rewrite duties for the Mercury News' afternoon editions.

That news staff was awarded the Pulitzer prize for deadline reporting in 1990, the same year he became Knight-Ridder's chief political reporter in Washington.

Cannon said he remembers thinking that news coverage in Washington would be relatively easy.

A friend who knew that Cannon had initially avoided covering politics called him after he'd been in Washington a few months and asked how it was going.

"The stories here are laying in the street," Cannon replied. "You just have to bend over and pick them up."

And pick them up he did. He covered the White House for The Baltimore Sun from 1993 to 1998, then moved to the National Journal in 1998 to cover the same beat. Cannon went on to win the Ford Prize in 1999 for Distinguished Reporting of the Presidency for his coverage of Bill Clinton.

He won the Beckman award this year for a National Journal cover story on Michael Gerson, the chief wordsmith for George W. Bush. That award was given on April 29 at this year's dinner hosted by the White House Correspondents' Association, an organization for which Cannon had served as president.