Ronnie Dugger, Texas Observer founder, dies at 95

Ronnie Dugger, Titan of Texas Journalism, Dies at 95

Ronnie Dugger, the founding editor of the Texas Observer, died Tuesday morning in Austin following a history of Alzheimer's disease. He had recently turned 95.

"Ronnie was a man who towered over his colleagues in Texas journalism for decades," said Ben Sargent, retired Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist for the American-Statesman who now contributes to the Observer. "His career, his passion for the Texas Observer and its mission, and his powerful and fearless body of work were always directed toward the noblest things about the American democracy, toward the good of the people, and, most of all, toward the truth. We can only hope that Ronnie will serve as an inspiration and example to the journalists who need to take up those causes going forward."

Dugger's Early Career and the Texas Observer

In 1954, Dugger agreed to lead the progressive Texas Observer magazine. He wrote this statement for the publication's masthead: "We will serve no group or party but will hew to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it."
While serving as editor of UT's student newspaper in 1950 and 1951, Dugger penned fiery editorials that landed him on the radar of a group of progressive Texas Democrats who later organized the Observer.

"Ronnie had been a liberal crusader during his tenure at The Daily Texan, whose public denunciations of the demagogic U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare had attracted the attention of progressive Democrats in Texas," said Don Carleton, founding director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. "He accepted their offer after they agreed to give him exclusive editorial control of the journal."

Notable Staff and Contributors

During his 40-odd years with the Observer, Dugger worked as a writer, editor, and publisher, and helped attract and guide some of the leading literary and journalistic talents of the day. They included: Billy Lee Brammer, Molly Ivins, Willie Morris, Kaye Northcott, and Jim Hightower.
Among the magazine's other distinguished staff and contributors were the first woman to serve as Texas secretary of state, Minnie Fisher Cunningham; folklorist and author J. Frank Dobie; humorist and First Amendment defender John Henry Faulk; economist James K. Galbraith; writer and editor Dagoberto Gilb; investigative reporter Jake Bernstein; novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry; and photographer Alan Pogue.

Dugger's Legacy

In his classic 1967 memoir, "North Toward Home," Morris described Dugger as "not only one of the great reporters of our time in America; more than that, he had imbued an entire group of young and inexperienced colleagues with a feel for Texas, for ‘commitment' in the most human sense, and for writing."

"Dugger dug his talons into Gov. Allan Shivers," journalist and author Larry L. King wrote in his book, "In Search of Willie Morris."
King listed other Dugger targets: "conservative state legislators, uncaring corporations, fat-cat lobbyists, the reactionary Dallas Morning News, LBJ, and any person or institution who failed his high standards of honesty and caring."

Dugger's Fearless Journalism

Dugger took particular aim at the most powerful Texan, future President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who unsuccessfully tried to enlist the journalist as a confidant.
"Lyndon Johnson loathed what Ronnie wrote about him because it was so on target," said Bill Moyers, journalist and White House Press Secretary during the LBJ administration. Johnson "constantly tried to figure him out so he could either convert him or compromise him — he failed."

A Life of Principle

Dugger was born April 16, 1930, in Chicago.
American-Statesman journalist Brad Buchholz wrote a long, admiring profile of Dugger in 2012 that deemed him a "free man" at age 81.
In one of the best descriptions of Dugger's independence and moral dedication, Buchholz described an incident in the early 1950s when a 21-year-old Dugger reflected on life and its choices after his car broke down on a cold road west of Austin.
"While I was out there, the thought came into my mind that I was not going to do anybody else's work," Dugger told Buchholz. "I decided what I had to do with my life was sort of like the scout on Western caravans who went ahead and looked for the ambushes and big rivers, and came back and talked to the people who had to turn the wagons.

Personal Life and Legacy

Dugger married twice, first to Jean Williams and then to Patricia Blake, both of whom are deceased. He and his first wife had two children, Gary Dugger and Celia Dugger, a health and science editor for The New York Times.
In 2011, Dugger won recognition for his cumulative career at the annual George Polk Awards, given by Long Island University for "intrepid, bold and influential work of the reporters themselves, placing a premium on investigative work that is original, resourceful and thought-provoking."

"Ronnie was an outstanding example of an important American historical type: the muckraker," the Briscoe Center's Carleton said. "Although he never held office, his political opinions and reports were widely noted, if not well-acknowledged. His work has shed much-needed light on public corruption, social injustice, the critical need to protect a liberal education and economic inequality."

Dugger's enduring legacy was the Observer.
"When I visited Ronnie at his home two years ago, Ronnie's grasp of the world around him was slipping away," said Lou Dubose, who landed a job at the Observer in the 1980s and served as political editor of the Austin Chronicle before becoming editor of the independent Washington Spectator. "But he was making plans to start a movement like the Alliance for Democracy, the quixotic national progressive group he cofounded in the mid-nineties. We would publish a call-to-action in the Observer and begin a nonviolent progressive revolution."

In March 2023, the board of directors of the nonprofit Texas Democracy Foundation, which owns the Observer, announced that the publication would close down because of financial difficulties. Yet soon after, the staff led a fundraising campaign that kept the magazine going.

"I still think of Ronnie driving to Mayflower, Texas, a year after creating the Observer in 1954," Dubose said. "A subscriber had tipped him off about the murder of a Black teenager, treated as spot news by the local media. Ronnie was a white reporter from a liberal newspaper, walking into a Jim Crow town. He worked local sources to identify the murderer, walked up to his house to question him, and then asked the local sheriff if the shooter was on his list of suspects.

"That work defined what Ronnie Dugger stood for as a journalist."

This is a developing story. Check back for additional material.
This story has been updated to add video. In an earlier version of this post, Kaye Northcott's name was misspelled.