A journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize, John M. Hightower from Coal Creek, Tennessee, attended UT from 1927 to 1929. He started as an engineering major and applied to change his major to liberal arts, but was denied on grounds that his grades did not indicate success in the new field. He left Knoxville for New York and, failing to get a newspaper job, became a floorwalker at a Newark, New Jersey, department store. He returned to Knoxville and began his journalistic career at the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
He joined the Associated Press in 1933. In 1943 he was sent to Quebec to cover the secret meeting between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and in 1944 he was assigned to the Washington Bureau of the Associated Press as a diplomatic reporter. Early in 1951, he accurately predicted the dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur by President Truman.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 for “the sustained quality of his coverage of news of international affairs.” In the same year, he also received the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for “exceptionally meritorious coverage of the State Department,” and the national journalism fraternity Sigma Delta Chi’s annual award for “distinguished service in the field of Washington correspondence.” The Sigma Delta Chi award cited for special excellence his articles predicting and appraising the removal of General Douglas MacArthur.
Hightower was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. In 1980 he was elected to the Hall of Fame of the Washington Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He retired from the Associated Press in 1971 and joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico. He was inducted into UT’s Alumni Academic Hall of Fame in 1994.