How an AP reporter broke the Tuskegee syphilis story

SOUTHPORT, N.C. — Jean Heller was toiling away on the floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center when an Associated Press colleague from the opposite end of the country walked into her workspace behind the event stage and handed her a thin manila envelope. “I’m not an investigative reporter,” Edith Lederer told the 29-year-old Heller as competitors typed away beyond the thick grey hangings separating news outlets covering the 1972 Democratic National Convention. A 1968 story on the team for AP World, the wire service’s employee newsletter, described the squad as “10 men and one cute gal.” A caption under the 5-foot-2 Heller’s photo called the “pixie-like” reporter “lovely and competent.” Lederer knew Heller from their days together at AP’s New York headquarters, then at 50 Rockefeller Plaza, where Heller started out on the radio desk. that would fit a, what today we would call a profile or a search engine search, for ‘Tuskegee,’ ‘farmers’, ‘Public Health Service,’ ‘syphilis,’” Heller says. They found an obscure medical journal — Heller can’t recall the title — that had been chronicling the study’s “progress.” “Every couple of years, they would write something about it,” she says.