Saturday, July 1, 2000 | 2:39 a.m.
Day in, day out the Las Vegas Sun has been bringing home the news to its readers for 50 years. While most of the stories have been what readers expect -- thorough reports of the day's news -- many have become legendary, transcending the memories of daily news.
Here is a sampling of some of those stories that are recounted whenever the legacy of the Sun is the topic:
McCarthy
Of the many battles Hank Greenspun and the Sun fought, one of the most significant helped bring down U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who in the 1950s used the threat of communism as an excuse for conducting witch-hunt hearings that ruined the lives of many innocent people.
A Greenspun column re-printed in his 1966 autobiography "Where I Stand," told of an Aug. 11, 1951, closed-door Senate committee hearing where ex-communist Albert Levitt "testified that he had seen Joe McCarthy at communist meetings -- the same Joe McCarthy who is now pretending to lead the fight against communism."
In a speech before the American Journalism Historians Association in October 1985 in Las Vegas, Greenspun shared his memories of the McCarthy era.
"If I weren't the type of editor who senses a wrong and sits down to his typewriter with no one to edit me and bangs out a column calling McCarthy a communist ... I probably wouldn't be here speaking to you today," Greenspun told the large crowd.
"In my daily column on the front page of the Sun I began exposing McCarthy for the liar, charlatan and danger to America that he represented."
That even included Greenspun getting indicted for inciting McCarthy's murder. Greenspun had written in his Jan. 8, 1954, column: "Sen. Joe McCarthy has to come to a violent end. ... Destroy people and they in turn destroy you.
"The chances are that McCarthy will eventually be laid to rest at the hands of some poor innocent slob whose reputation and life he has destroyed through his well-established smear technique."
Defended by Washington, D.C., attorney Edward Morgan -- a former McCarthy friend -- Greenspun was acquitted of the charges during a 1955 federal trial in Las Vegas.
Greenspun told the journalism historians of the indictment: "I must admit it was a frightening period of my life."
Still, Greenspun said he went to Washington to observe McCarthy's hearings and "my writings became more explicit. ... These columns later became the basis for his censure in the Senate."
On the day McCarthy came to Las Vegas to speak in 1952, Greenspun's column rapped McCarthy for his State Department witch hunt and his vile slandering of Gen. George Marshall and future President Dwight Eisenhower as well as "the whole atmosphere of witless hysteria that he had brought to the country."
Greenspun sat in the audience as McCarthy called him "an admitted ex-communist." McCarthy apparently intended to call Greenspun an "ex-convict" for his conviction on a charge of supplying guns to Israel during its struggle for independence. Before McCarthy could correct himself, Greenspun stormed the stage.
"Come back here, you dirty demagogue, and show me your proof," Greenspun yelled as McCarthy fled. "Show me your proof" became the rallying cry of McCarthy's foes.
The Senate committee investigating McCarthy's charges of subversion in the State Department later found McCarthy's accusations to be a "fraud and a hoax on the United States Senate." McCarthy was subsequently censured.
The day after McCarthy died in 1957 from the apparent complications of alcoholism, Greenspun, in his column, recommended that, instead of flowers, money should be sent to a fund "for victims of McCarthy's recklessness and demagoguery."
When a United Press reporter asked Greenspun if he agreed with one newspaper's account that the Sun publisher was one of McCarthy's assassins, Greenspun said: "All deaths sadden me -- some more than others -- the story is not true. No one assassinated McCarthy. He committed suicide. He drank himself to death."
Yablonsky
The Sun's rich tradition of shining light on public officials who abuse their power extended to Joseph Yablonsky, who ran the FBI office in Las Vegas from 1980 to 1983. Yablonsky led political corruption investigations such as Nevscam and Operation Yobo that resulted in some convictions, but was he accused of mounting vendettas.
The Sun dared to question Yablonsky's motives through scathing columns by Greenspun and a series of articles by the newspaper's investigative reporters. Yablonsky's targets included then-U.S. District Judge Harry Claiborne and then-Nevada Attorney General Brian McKay. Then-Sen. Paul Laxalt also accused the special agent of placing him on a "hit list" of prominent Nevadans.
Greenspun and the newspaper railed against Yablonsky for using infamous Mustang Ranch brothel owner and convicted felon Joe Conforte to go after Claiborne and for covering up a secret probe of McKay's military career during the latter's 1982 campaign.
Yablonsky constantly protest-ed the newspaper's coverage. He once demanded that a Sun reporter be tossed from a Rotary Club luncheon where the agent was speaking. But Yablonsky earned his comeuppance when he was censured and placed on probation by then-FBI Director William Webster for the McKay probe. Greenspun didn't hold back in the following day's edition.
"The Nevada FBI needs a bath with antiseptic to cure its infection," he wrote on July 3, 1983. "It has to be cleansed of the disease of lying and it must start at the top."
Yablonsky took retirement later that year.
Propane tanks
High on the list of environmental causes championed by the Sun was its insistence that Yellow Cab owner Milton Schwartz remove a 30,000-gallon propane tank near the corner of Oakey Boulevard and Main Street. Greenspun wrote that if the tank exploded, it had the potential to wipe out an area 5 miles square.
"Only in Las Vegas do we permit a gigantic time bomb to sit in the heart of our city because the fire marshal thinks it's safe -- unless something causes it to explode," Greenspun wrote on Feb. 10, 1984. "Maybe I'm nuts, but I suspect we are dealing with invisible government, where decisions are made that are totally incomprehensible, but allegedly, financial."
Fellow columnist Brian Greenspun, Hank's son, weighing in on the same matter, was no less angered by the tank.
"We have waited for almost two years for our elected officials to take a stand by removing this menace from our midst," he wrote on Jan. 9, 1985. "There has been lip service but little else from those charged with the responsibility for the health and safety of our community."
Schwartz eventually moved the tank to an industrial area but only after dozens of Sun columns and stories and pressure from city officials.
That would have been the end of it, but Schwartz sued the Greenspuns and the newspaper in 1985 for allegedly defaming him. The case didn't make it to trial until 1991, but after four weeks of testimony the jury ruled against Schwartz and he was ordered to pay $275,000 in attorney fees and costs. Schwartz appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court, but the high court in 1994 upheld the trial verdict.
PEPCON
No one in the Las Vegas Valley will forget what they were doing on May 4, 1988, when four blasts rocked Clark County, killing two people, injuring 350 and causing $70 million worth of damage.
The explosion at Pacific Engineering & Production Co. of Nevada -- known by locals as PEPCON -- shattered nerves and prompted residents to recall other tragedies that touched the lives of Las Vegans such as the 1980 MGM Grand fire that killed 84 people.
For decades the plant produced the rocket fuel booster ammonium perchlorate until that day in May when it exploded in a black cloud of smoke and flames, registering 3.5 magnitude on the Richter scale at monitors 215 miles away in California.
The Las Vegas Sun mobilized its entire staff to write the stories, capture the shock and disbelief in photographs, and investigate the cause for months following the explosions that rocked new urban neighborhoods growing around the plant.
For its coverage, the Sun won 10 first-place awards from the Nevada State Press Association two years in a row. In addition to the immediate dramatic coverage, the newspaper formed a special investigative team of reporters and a year after the disaster produced a special section on changes at the industrial site, improved safety regulations and a congressional step to move dangerous chemical companies outside the valley.
IRS
Many folks talk a big game when it comes to fighting the Internal Revenue Service, but the Sun's attacks on the IRS have no rivals in the mainstream media. Hank Greenspun wrote about 100 columns on the subject, and Sun reporters cranked out scores of articles on IRS investigations of Nevadans.
The newspaper exposed not only harassment of citizens from the wealthiest resort moguls to rank-and-file casino employees, but also the questionable tactics used by the IRS to gather information. Greenspun was particularly perturbed by the agency's wiretaps and "snooper school."
In a Jan. 24, 1971, editorial headlined "Throw The IRS Out!," Greenspun took the Stardust hotel-casino to task for failing to challenge an agency probe of its records.
"The management of the Stardust Hotel is doing the gaming industry and the state a tremendous disservice," he wrote. "By their inaction in failing to prevent an unlawful intrusion upon the privacy of patrons of their casino they are affecting the business of every hotel and the income of Nevada."
Greenspun launched a full-scale war with the IRS after the agency hit him with an exorbitant tax bill stemming from business dealings with Howard Hughes. He fought the revenuers in court and pulled off a rare victory for the common man.
Other Sun editors such as Ruthe Deskin and Bryn Armstrong felt the wrath of the IRS when they were hassled over their income tax returns. But the newspaper fought back and in 1973 published a series of stories that amounted to an audit of the IRS. The long-running series included personal stories of outrageous actions by the IRS against citizens across the country.
Greenspun accused the agency of "lawlessness."
"The IRS has become foremost of all the corruptive influences which are attempting to run away with the government, taking it out of the hands of the people," he wrote on Oct. 24, 1973. "In so doing, the IRS has assumed the position that it is above the Supreme Court of the United States, beyond the reach of Congress and superior in power to the executive branch of government.
"Usually when IRS agents walk through the door, the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution go out the window."
Yucca Mountain
The roots of a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain grew from the 1950s when Las Vegas residents could read their morning Sun -- before sunrise -- from the brilliant flash of the federal government's atomic bomb blasts 65 miles away.
When President Harry S. Truman chose the Nevada Test Site for nuclear weapons experiments in 1951, Las Vegans welcomed the jobs. In the 1970s the Test Site ranked as the second-largest industry in the state, behind mining.
Billionaire Howard Hughes, from his ninth-floor suite at the Desert Inn, alerted Southern Nevada to the dangers of all things nuclear. Hughes tried to force the government to move atomic weapons tests to Alaska and worried about radiation contaminating the ground water in the Las Vegas Valley.
Congress in 1987 singled out Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the lone site to study as the nation's burial ground for 77,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste. Greenspun immediately opposed the idea of Nevada, which has no nuclear power plants of its own, becoming the burial site for the lethal waste.
During a public hearing in the 1980s, Greenspun stepped up to the microphone and told off Department of Energy officials, who were trying to get the media to call Yucca Mountain a repository.
"No matter what you call it, it's still a damn dirty dump," Greenspun said.
The Sun has led the nation in Yucca Mountain coverage ever since. And the paper, through columns and editorials, continues its uncompromising opposition to dumping the nation's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.
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