Jack C. Landau.

Jack C. Landau, a Key Club member of SPJ since 1979, died Aug. 9 in Arlington, Va.

Born Jacob Charles Landau on April 10, 1934, he was an avid supporter of the First Amendment and tirelessly worked to educate and inform the public about the essential role of a free press in modern society.

He co-founded the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and served as its executive director from 1970 to 1985. He was also instrumental in starting the First Amendment Hotline, a free service offering First Amendment and FOI-related legal advice to journalists.

With an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a law degree from New York University, Landau used his journalistic and legal training to report Washington, D.C., political news and fight for the exposure of governmental information in the public interest. While leading the Reporters Committee, Landau and the organization sued to release more than 40 million documents and recordings from the Nixon administration, with which he was familiar because of his previous post as press secretary to Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell.

Landau also held a number of reporting posts with various outlets, including the Bergen Evening Record, The Associated Press, Newhouse News Service and the Washington Post. In 1996, he was inducted into the FOIA Hall of Fame.