Savage ’98 Wins Pulitzer Prize

A decade ago, Charles C. Savage ’98 was a Winthrop House English concentrator and publisher of The Harvard Advocate. On Monday, Savage brought in the first national reporting Pulitzer Prize for The Boston Globe in 24 years.

In a series of articles, Savage’s reporting showed Bush’s frequent use of “signing statements”—official assertions by the president of his power to ignore certain provisions in laws he deemed unconstitutional.

The statements are not confidential but Savage was the first to reveal their systematic use.

“It was hiding in plain sight,” Savage said, “but no one was talking about it.”

In the first article, published on Jan. 4, 2006, Savage wrote, “When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.”

Savage later reported on Bush’s use of another statement to avoid certain requirements in the USA Patriot Act.

His April 30, 2006 story in the Globe reported, “President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.”

Savage was editor of the fiction board on the Advocate and became its publisher as a senior. He also comped The Crimson but never finished.

Savage wrote three articles for The Crimson’s editorial board and one for the news board before moving on to work at Mission Hill and Harvard Model Congress.

“Being an English major is great training for being a journalist,” Savage said in a phone interview.

He explained that the skills needed for analyzing a long piece of prose are the same as those needed for analyzing, digesting, and explaining lengthy government documents.

Daniel M. Engber ’98, now a writer for Slate and a friend of Savage from their days in Winthrop, worked with Savage at the Advocate. He recalled their experience writing for the travel guide Let’s Go in the summer after their senior year.

“I felt like I was very conservative in all of the things I did for the guide and Charlie had done all sorts of amazing things, like hang-gliding,” he said.

“I feel a little bit of pride every time his name comes up” around Slate’s offices, Engber said.

Sewell Chan ’98, a reporter for The New York Times and former Crimson news executive editor, remembered Savage as “incredibly courageous in many ways.”

“He’s really the star of our class,” Chan said.

The Pulitzer Prize Board has awarded prizes in 21 areas of journalism, poetry, drama, prose, and music since the inception of the award in 1917. The Pulitzer Prize was endowed by Joseph Pulitzer, a 19th-century journalist and publisher who left $2 million to Columbia University for the endowment of a journalism school and the establishment of the Pulitzer Prizes, according to the Pulitzer Web site.