Jack Newfield, 66; Newspaper Columnist, Expert on New York

Jack Newfield, a muckraking newspaper columnist and author of books about such leaders as Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and New York City mayors Ed Koch and Rudolph W. Giuliani, has died. He was 66.

Newfield, who also created television documentaries, died Monday at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City of kidney cancer that had spread to his lungs, said family spokesman Howard Rubenstein.

The epitome of advocacy journalism that flourished in the 1960s and ‘70s, Newfield wrote about the leading subjects of his time: civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War movement, corruption in New York City government, and consumer abuses such as lead paint and nursing home neglect.

Newfield had a happy home from 1964 to 1988 with the alternative newspaper the Village Voice.

“I could balance these rather obvious conflicts of interest,” he wrote in “Somebody’s Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working- Class Journalist,” his 2002 autobiography, “only because I was working for a paper like the Voice, which specialized in personal advocacy reporting and made no pretense of objectivity. It defined itself as a corrective to the mainstream media and a forum for personal experiences, honestly described.”

Newfield’s own experiences included getting arrested July 4, 1963, and spending two days in a Mississippi jail for participating in a civil rights sit-in. Another was throwing a typewriter from the window of his Chicago hotel at police he saw beating demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic Convention.

The columnist, who increased his following with regular lists including “The Ten Worst Judges” and “The Ten Worst Landlords,” worked for the New York Daily News from 1988 until he resigned in 1990 in sympathy with striking co-workers, and for the next decade at the New York Post.

At the time of his death, he was writing for the New York Sun and was a fellow at the Nation Institute. Throughout his career, he contributed articles to such magazines as the Nation, Playboy, Parade and New York.

He wrote, as Washington Post writer Colman McCarthy noted in a review of “The Education of Jack Newfield,” a 1984 collection of columns, “hard, cutting stories that stir readers rather than merely hurt the subjects. He is a reformer, not a scalp-hunter.”

Newfield was the author or co-author of 11 books, beginning with 1966’s “A Prophetic Minority” about his civil rights campaign experiences in the South.

A close friend of Kennedy who saw the senator fatally shot at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, Newfield wrote “Robert Kennedy: A Memoir” in 1969 and reprised the book in a 1998 Discovery Channel documentary of the same title.

The author skewered boxing corruption and impresario Don King in the 1995 book “Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King,” and won an Emmy for his related PBS documentary, “Don King: Unauthorized,” in 1991.

An expert on his native New York, Newfield lambasted Koch in the 1988 book he wrote with Wayne Barrett, “City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York,” and offered a kinder appraisal of a subsequent mayor in his 2003 “The Full Rudy: The Man, the Mayor, the Myth.”

Newfield, whose father died when he was 4, grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. He idolized Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, and once called him “the first outsider/underdog I identified with.”

Newfield, who won a George Polk Award in 1980 for investigative reporting, wanted to be a journalist from age 9 when he started reading Murray Kempton’s graceful prose in the New York Post.

As he earned a journalism degree at Hunter College of the City University of New York, he was further influenced by such writers as Norman Mailer and I.F. Stone, whom Newfield once likened to Sherlock Holmes.

It was Stone, he said, who taught him to “read all the documents, read all the transcripts, annoy the bureaucrats to give you the memos. Read, read, read.”

He is survived by his wife, Janie, and two children, Rebecca and Joey.