Muriel Dobbin, a retired Baltimore Sun Washington Bureau reporter who covered President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Watergate hearings and trial, died July 18 at her Washington home. She was 94.
No cause of death was available.
Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, she became a newspaper reporter when she was 17. In an autobiographical sketch, she said she covered “everything from rabbit shows to murders.” She had a Baltimore pen pal and used that association to land a job on The Baltimore Sun’s Sunday department.
She settled on East Madison Street in Mount Vernon, but soon found the job to be unchallenging.
“I was bored to death writing about ladies painting flowers on eggshells and listening to four women in the Society Section solemnly discussing which weddings should be on page one, two, or three. I didn’t fit in well in the Sunday section,” she wrote in “The Life of Kings,” a 2016 book.
While living in Baltimore, she said she preferred spending time with police reporters and frequenting the old Calvert House, a Calvert Street bar and restaurant near Mercy Medical Center.
In 1963, she was sent to the paper’s Washington, D.C., bureau, ostensibly to cover First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. In her memoir, Ms. Dobbin recalled that it was not meant to be. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and Ms. Dobbin was present at Andrews Air Force Base when the slain president’s body arrived.
She witnessed Mrs. Kennedy, who was still wearing her blood-soaked, Chanel-style pink suit, at the airport. Asked by staff if she wanted to change her clothes. Mrs. Kennedy declined.
“Let them see what they did to him,” Ms. Dobbin reported the First Lady’s response.
In her first months in Washington, Ms. Dobbin said she was “green” and inexperienced as a Capitol Hill and White House reporter.
“She … not only survived, but thrived. She became one of the first women regularly covering the President and went on to a career that included covering three presidents, the Watergate hearings and trials and, for a decade, the Western United States,” said a newspaper colleague and friend, Carl Leubsdorf.
Mr. Leubsdorf also said, “she got crosswise with President Lyndon B. Johnson after he took her — holding a cup of beer for him — and Hearst’s Marianne Means on a wild car ride around his Texas ranch — and then violated an unwritten rule by telling fellow reporters about it. When it got into print, Johnson was unhappy and made that clear to Dobbin.
“There I am at a Rose Garden ceremony, and he walks through the crowd to me,” Dobbin recalled in an interview before her retirement with McClatchy’s house organ. “He was a very large man, a very tall man. I’ll never forget it. He leaned over and said, ‘You betrayed me.’ No, I didn’t. ’Yes, you did.’”
She and President Johnson settled their differences and she was invited upstairs in the White House for an hour-long chat because his wife, Ladybird, was out of town and he hated being alone, Mr. Leubsdorf said.
After being unchallenged in Baltimore, she delighted in covering the Senate’s Watergate hearings and the subsequent trial of the Watergate burglars, where she became quite friendly with Judge John Sirica.
“It was like going to the theater every day,” she recalled. “It was the most dramatic time I think I’ve ever seen in this country because we were dealing with the toppling of a president.”
“Muriel was remarkable as a journalist and in her own personality as well. She was gritty and witty. She was a terrific reporter. She made the way for women,” said a Sun colleague, Frederick “Fred” Hill.
Ms. Dobbin later became The Sun’s West Coast correspondent, covering 13 states, although she never drove a car. She subsequently joined US News & World Report and later reported for the McClatchy News bureau. In 1997, she became the second woman president of the Gridiron Club. She retired in 2004.
She wrote four novels, including “Going Live,” about the competition among three women television reporters.
Survivors include a stepson, Blake Sell, of Williamsburg, Virginia; and a stepdaughter, Kathy Sell, of Cathedral City, California. Her husband, Ted Sell, a Los Angeles Times reporter and McClatchy newspaper executive, died in 1989.
Have a news tip? Contact Jacques Kelly at jkelly@baltsun.com and 410-332-6570.
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