Earl Mazo


Earl Mazo was an American journalist, author, and government official.

Education and early life

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Mazo migrated to the United States as a small child with his parents, Sonia and George Mazo. The Mazos settled in Charleston, South Carolina where they lived in the Hannah Enston Building. Mazo would later graduate from Clemson University. During World War II, he served as a public relations officer with the U.S. Army Air Force's 385th Bomb Group and was stationed in the United Kingdom.

Career

Mazo reported for Stars and Stripes, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Reader's Digest, and served for one year during the presidency of Harry Truman as a deputy assistant secretary of defense. In later life, Mazo was employed as head of the professional staff of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Printing.
In 1959, Mazo authored a biography of Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon: A Political and Personal Portrait. The following year, he published a series of exposés on serious voter fraud in the United States which, he believed, cost Nixon the 1960 U.S. presidential election. His reports prompted a successful appeal by Nixon to Mazo's editors to terminate the series of stories on the grounds that the U.S. could not afford a constitutional crisis at the height of the Cold War. Nixon allegedly said to Mazo that "our country can't afford the agony of a constitutional crisis – and I damn well will not be a party to creating one, just to become president or anything else". Mazo would later express his disappointment at the decision, believing the series would have put him in contention for the Pulitzer Prize.

Personal life

Mazo was widowed from his first wife, but later remarried. He died at a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland from complications resulting from a fall at his home in Chevy Chase.