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born 1975
The claim: Charlie Savage was born in 1975 in Fort Wayne and raised here, and unlike several entries in this section, his Fort Wayne chapter includes his first professional formation. The Allen County Public Library's own account of him frames the arc in one line: from the Journal Gazette to the New York Times. Savage worked as a news clerk at the Journal Gazette, Fort Wayne's morning paper, in his youth, an experience he has credited with launching him toward the internships and the career that followed. He graduated from Harvard College in 1998 and took a master's degree at Yale Law School on a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship.
The prize and the beat: Savage built the defining legal reporting beat of the post 9/11 era: presidential power, and what the war on terror did to it. At the Boston Globe, his 2006 series on presidential signing statements, the quiet instrument by which President George W. Bush claimed the right to disregard provisions of laws he signed, won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2007. He moved to the Washington bureau of the New York Times in 2008 and wrote the beat's two standard histories, Takeover (2007) and Power Wars (2015). His full entry, one of the longest modern lives in the people record, stands there. The fame roll's point is the route: the most decorated legal reporter of his generation started as a clerk in a Fort Wayne newsroom, fetching and filing in the paper his city read at breakfast.
Sources:
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Charlie Savage profile ("Originally from Fort Wayne, Ind."; Harvard College; the Yale Law School master's; the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting at the Boston Globe; the New York Times from 2008).
- Allen County Public Library, Pages and Voices: Charlie Savage ("From the Journal Gazette to the New York Times"; his journey from Fort Wayne to Harvard).
- His published biography page (Takeover, 2007; Power Wars, 2015; the 2007 Pulitzer).