Fifty years ago, the AP dropped a bombshell report — the federal government had enrolled 600 Black men in a 40-year study of untreated syphilis. Months after the story dropped on July 25, 1972, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study came to an end.
“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. “But I think there might be something here.”
Lederer was working at the AP bureau there in 1968 when she met Peter Buxtun. Three years earlier, while pursuing graduate work in history, Buxtun had taken a job at the local Public Health Service office in 1965; he was tasked with tracking venereal disease cases in the Bay Area. During a recent interview at her North Carolina home, Heller recalled putting the leaked PHS documents in her briefcase. She says she didn’t get around to reading the contents until the flight back to Washington.
She even reached out to her mother’s gynecologist, a “straight down the line, middle of the road, superior doctor.” “Every couple of years, they would write something about it,” she says. “Mostly it was about the findings — none of the morality was ever questioned.”“I knew that people had died, and I was about to tell the world who they were and what they had,” she says, her voice dropping. “And finding any joy in that ... would have been unseemly.”She says the lede of the story — the first paragraph or sentence of a news article — came to her quickly.
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