Nick Pistor, RIP

A good reporter dead, suddenly, at 43.

Photo by David Carson (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

Whether he knew it or not—and I suspect he did—Nicholas J.C. Pistor significantly impacted the trajectory of my life.

Nick and I lost touch over the years, though we never really corresponded much after our brief time together at Saint Louis University.

His death, shared by a mutual friend, was sudden. Specifics aren’t yet known, but he went to the hospital feeling unwell and never left.

Going into SLU, I’d always been drawn to politics and journalism. It’s strange—my parents were political, but in a generic way. Meeting Bob Dole at a fundraiser, that sort of thing. My dad later got involved in GOP politics in Cleveland for a bit, but it wasn’t a push. It was a choice.

Mr. Thompson, my gym and civics teacher, made us write papers in sixth grade about who we supported and why. I don’t remember much about my paper—or Bob Dole—but like picking the Saint Louis Blues in ’93, I picked the Republican Party in ’96.

I came to SLU after co-founding and leading my high school’s Young Republicans. I had goals: join a fraternity (#RushTKE), get on Student Government, and get involved with College Republicans.

Shortly after arriving on campus, I met Nick at a YR meeting and went to join him and his roommate / aide de camp, R. Blake Moore at the the Continental Life Building for a cigar and drinks.

Nick saw potential in me, and my drunk teenage self didn’t know it, but Nicholas J.C. Pistor was a College Republican kingmaker of sorts.

His obituary in the Post-Dispatch, a paper he loved and where he later worked, says he was the state chairman of the Missouri Federation of College Republicans. I don’t remember that time, as it predated me at SLU. When I met him, he was the First Vice Chair of the College Republican National Committee, which is kind of a big deal.

It is interesting, and perhaps a chapter Nick didn’t want to dwell on because his true love was journalism. If you look at his impressive biography, it is nowhere to be found. There isn’t much about him and the CRNC on the internet, either. It’s like my memory and this random campaign filing on The Democratic Underground are the only proof this actually happened.

College Republicans are a strange lot. Imagine the TPUSA events you see depicted now, but imagine instead of SEC fraternity bros in MAGA hats, they’re nerds in suits who are true political freaks. That was us.

There was always a Nixonian element to Pistor in those college years. He even spoke in a Nixonian way, both in real life and on the phone. It could be haunting when he was frustrated, which he often was with stupid people. That’s CR politics for you. Blood feuds and backroom deals. And scandals (real and imagined).

One of the early memories I have of Nick was the, er, Nixonian joy he had about totally nailing somebody in a lie. How? He tape recorded the phone call he had with them via a Radio-Shack device, on his apartment phone. This was 2002, so consider it in that setting.

I don’t recall if Nick followed through on the nailing. It’s not like there were smart phones, large email attachments, or the like. Laptops weighed like 8 pounds. Was he going to put the little tape in a mobile recorder and play it back to them? Play it to them over the phone? (I can picture that, actually.)

My dog-eared copy of The 48 Laws of Power still sits on my library shelf because Nick told me that I had to read it if I wanted to succeed in politics.

His AIM name was KENNEDYNIXON1960. I think you get the picture.

I say altered the trajectory not in a way where Nick pulled me into politics and journalism: I think I was destined to be active there no matter what. Nick was able to propel me, as a local CR political boss, to offices I might otherwise not earn, or might have earned more slowly.

I won a contentious election as 1st Vice Chair of the College Republicans by a handful of votes. The Pistor backing won it for me. It also won me my first “frenemy”, my defeated opponent.

Convinced that I was destined to be SGA President, having won just that CR election (I was appointed as First Year Senator along with the rest), I ran as a Sophomore against Nick’s advice, opting to take my old boss/mentor Josh Mandel’s advice, which was: run! Nick was right.

In a 5 way field, I placed third, though earned the school paper’s endorsement. Nick, though he’d later become a professional journalist, and a very good one, had very little interest in The University News. He wrote one item that remains on their site about Newt Gingrich in 2001.

Nick had also gotten me in a position to eventually become 1st Vice Chairman of the Missouri Federation of College Republicans. I quickly figured out that I didn’t want to follow that route Nick took, rising through the ranks of wrangling these CR chapters. I wanted to be a staffer.

Given that it was an election year, and eager to get into campaigning, I resigned my roles in both groups and took a semester off from school to work for the Bush campaign.

Nick’s CR career came to an end, as after you graduate, it’s hard to remain relevant in College Republicans not being, you know, in college. The management of CRs is usually out of college, but it’s knives out for those then-high-paying positions and Nick did not win the knife fight.

One of our mutual friends from those CR days, Nick Langworthy, is very pro-Trump—he was an early endorser in Buffalo when he was the party chair—and he’s now a member of Congress. Nick Pistor, if he had wanted to, could have easily become a local party boss himself.

There were some scandals, too, as is not surprisingly common in CR politics. Nick got out and went to his other love: journalism.

Before we get to his professional career, where he got to be a mentee of the great Bill McClellan, and would go on to win awards and write books, I want to tell you a little about SGA TRUTH.

It will not shock or surprise you that the party of fax-blasts and right wing crank newsletters, had its own gossip sheet about College Republican politics in the pre-social media era.

I do not know for sure, and I can’t ask Nick since he has passed, but in my mind, Nick founded SGA TRUTH. A 2005 email exchange we had started with a terse correction from Nick about when SGA TRUTH was founded. I incorrectly said 1996 because I said that Phil Lyons, the moderator of SGA, said it started around then. (I do not recall if this was, in fact, true all these years later.) Nick said “you full well know better” and that “I find this offensive.”

Him having graduated and in the professional world, I didn’t interact with him much, but that was a dumb excuse not to contact him. I should have checked. I don’t think he wanted the credit for creating SGA TRUTH, necessarily, but my facts were wrong and that pissed him off.

Reading some of these old emails, you can hear Nick’s voice. Re-read that bit about “full well know better” in a Nixon voice and that’s how it I read it at the time in my head. It’s how I hear it now. Like all great writers, if you are lucky enough to know them personally, you can hear them read stories in your head. Nick was like that, both in print, tweets (he was prolific), and in emails.

For example: this line in his self- written bio just slays me: “Before joining the Post-Dispatch, Pistor graduated from the Jesuit-affiliated Saint Louis University.” Nick was deeply Catholic—we were in the Knights of Columbus together, briefly—and he sort of detested what he (not-wrongly) perceived was SLU tiptoeing away from its Catholic identity into more of an affiliation.

It is likely from this CR gossip sheet, whose name escapes me, that Nick created SGA TRUTH, which was an anonymous e-blast sent to SGA officials and interested parties. It broke some serious news because Nick was a good journalist. I wasn’t around for it yet, but it resulted in resignations and drop outs. His reporting for the P-D would have the same result. He also broke some big non-political stories there, like the health of the beloved Gateway Arch.

SGA TRUTH, like Nick, was often darkly, crudely, funny. As Mark Zinn observes in his FOX 2 obituary:

Pistor loved his hometown of Millstadt, Illinois, the Cardinals, and trying to crack a joke whenever he had the opportunity. While a soft-spoken and often quiet man, Pistor’s crude but never malicious humor made his energy palatable.

Fresh off Bush’s electoral victory, and my earlier SGA loss, I did what all scorned candidates do, which was resurrect an anonymous newsletter journalism concept. Newly 21, I quickly took a job at Humphrey’s, my home away from home, and worked to catch up after my semester on the campaign trail, blogging about SGA politics and working at a bar. I don’t even recall whether or not I actually got Nick’s permission. I might have just done it.

Better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission, hoping that copying the name and format (but not the voice) as an homage would guarantee forgiveness. And it kind of did. Nick never told me not to do it, or to stop.

My SGA TRUTH had a webpage. And, like Nick, I made news, too, both in the Kingmaking kind and reportorial kind. But my anonymity did not last long. Nick could keep up the illusion he was not SGA TRUTH. I could not. I wanted to be part of the story and, ultimately, did.

I will let future Pulitzer Prize winning reporter (and friend) Joe Palazzolo and Jared Vandergriff tell the story for The University News.

You can (and should) read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

Yeah, I was a bit of a jerk! I did not like Chappelle and I definitely endorsed Johns, but the reason for Chappelle’s grievance was because I nailed him and it destroyed his ticket overnight, fatally crippled his chances at being SGA President.

Here’s the story, as written by one of my best friends (and a groomsman), Bobby Metzinger¹:

Last week, administrators of SGATruth.com, an anonymously maintained weblog with a reputation for scathing-and often spurious-critiques of SLU Organizations. sent an email message to SGA members suggesting that Chappelle had bribed Butler with an iPod. The allegation initially seemed feckless, an attempt to sully the front-runner's reputation in the critical period prior to the elections. However, Chappelle responded by summoning together ticket members last Saturday, at which point he admitted to taking part in using the students' money, gathered from the Student Activities Fee, to pay for an ipod. The ticket dissolved afterward.

If you read Palazzolo and Vandergriff, it had been quite a while for me, you will see that Andrew took his defeat very graciously. He went on to be a journalist in video, which tracks, as he was the founder of SLU TV.

I adapted one of Nick’s old intros for an early newsletter, and it’s classic Nick:

SGA Truth is back to spread the love. Hide your skeletons in your
closets because SGA Truth is here to fill your quest for thought provoking
literature and knowledge. The one, the only, often imitated, but never
duplicated, the uncompromising da, da, da, da SGA Truth. Once again the
communication forerunner in the SGA, the only publication of the SGA
(official or otherwise) continues.

Dancing under the protection of New York V. Solomon, the legend lives on.

He never said anything about it to me, but I can see in hindsight him potentially not liking my continuation of SGA TRUTH. I re-read the “one, only, often imitated” and realize that, I was indeed an SGA TRUTH imitator. A successful one at that. But still, an imitator. He didn’t write that with future me in mind, it was a joke, but one now that I get an extra laugh out of.

At that time, I was already creating websites. I was learning how to build them in management MIS classes. I built one for my campaign, I had a personal site, and would go on to create dozens of little short-lived domains over the years.

That was a passion I kept alive, even through my days in Congress. An April Fool’s Day joke, where a reporter called my direct line on April Fool’s Day to ask about my blog prompted a brief panic, and then a sudden retirement from blogging. (I was careful and didn’t talk about my actual work in the U.S. Senate.) I was aggregating news, talking about Saint Louis and Cleveland things, learning about my new hometown of Alexandria (sound familiar?), et cetera.

In fact, I was blogging about “great bits” in The Weekly Standard by my future friend and colleague Matt Labash.

In a way, I owe a lot of that to Nicholas J.C. Pistor. He nudged me towards what I wanted to do, perhaps knowing before I did that I wanted to do it, and that I might be good at it. His friend Mark Justice writes “Nick Pistor wasn’t one for photos” and that’s 100 percent true.

In talking with some old friends yesterday about Nick, it occurred to me that there is only one picture of us I can recall. It’s from the end of the analog era. I know what it looks like, who was in it, and where it was, but I can’t seem to find it. I want to and am looking.

As you can probably tell, Nick and I did not remain particularly close after he went into journalism and I went to Washington. We were always friendly and occasionally stayed in touch. He had moved onto a new chapter, and so did I. They were not “glory days” but formative ones.

When I left the hill, I updated Nick about my job at TWS. I was sure to thank him, noting that I wasn’t sure I ever did back then. He said I did, but said the repeated thanks were appreciated.

Looking back now, on our first FB messenger exchange in 2012 (10 years after we met) we talked about my new job in professional journalism.

Nick says: “I’m sure you’ll do ok. Just always remember to be interesting.”

“Part of the 48 Laws” I quickly replied.

“Something like that.” I pictured him smirking while typing.

The 48 Laws of Power wasn’t Nick anymore. But Nick was one of a kind, as you can see here, him recently looking back on his college years, a month before his untimely death:

Nick was an ardent lover of people, politics, places and institutions. In his own way, he became a bit of his own institution, but in particular: his hometown of Millstadt, the City of Saint Louis, the Cardinals, and the Post-Dispatch.

He was awfully proud of his reporting work, which you can see on his bio, and his two books: Shooting Lincoln: Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the Race to Photograph the Story of the Century and The Ax Murders of Saxtown: The Unsolved Crime That Terrorized A Town and Shocked the Nation. He later left journalism to do consulting work, but the news never left him.

Admittedly, I never read either of his books. Some friend! But, as Cincinnati has a world class library system, I’ll soon be able to read Nick’s books. I owe him that much, and I look forward to hearing his writerly voice from beyond the grave.

Rest in peace, Nick, and thanks for giving a young me a boost. I’ll never forget it.

Other Remembrances:

Angela Bingaman, a political fundraiser, has a wonderful remembrance of him.

Mark Zinn, a local journalism colleague of his, who also wrote FOX2’s obit.

His former P-D colleague Christine Byers has this:

Today at 12:26 p.m. the world lost a truly brilliant mind when Nicholas J.C. Pistor lost his battle with a sudden acute illness. He was 43 years old. He was a dear friend, inspiration and confidant to me. We were coworkers at the Post-Dispatch, and he was the kind of friend that didn’t let too much time pass before he would reach out just to say hello, and not care that you didn’t reach out first. God bless his loving family, whom I had the privilege of meeting in Nick’s final moments today along with former reporter Denise Hollinshed. Funeral arrangements are pending with Leesman Funeral Home in his hometown of Millstadt, Illinois. I’m going to honor him today by going to the voting booth in the city he so loved.

1. Bobby was the only winning member of my “Students for Students” ticket prior to this report, winning a Grand Forest Senate Seat.