Witcover was born in Union City, New Jersey, to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. He was raised Catholic and showed an early interest in writing. He wrote in his memoirs that he and a cousin produced a one-page family newspaper on Thanksgiving that they sold for a nickel.
A classmate on his high school basketball team persuaded him to apply to Columbia, which he attended for a semester before joining the Navy. He then re-enrolled in the college after the war ended and obtained a master’s degree at Columbia’s graduate school of journalism.
Years later, he told a reporter that he thought his ship had come in when a newspaper in the Boston area offered him a starting job covering the Boston Braves in spring training. Before he could get started the team decided to move its franchise to Milwaukee and the opportunity died.
By 1962, 11 years after graduation, he had become a senior correspondent and the chief political writer for the Newhouse News Service.
Witcover lived in Washington with his second wife, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, a biographer of the journalist H.L. Mencken. His first marriage, of nearly four decades, to Marian Laverty, ended in divorce.
“Jules was the hardest working newsman I ever knew,” said Walter Mears, who as the chief political writer for The Associated Press traveled extensively with Witcover. “On the road, you could hear him banging the typewriter before dawn, working on one of his books. He never stopped writing columns and political histories long after most of us had retired.”
