The renown of reporters is obviously far more fleeting than of most of the heroes and rogues they report on. That is as it should be: Journalists are but small sharks ever circling a luxury liner, living off day-old food thrown overboard while hoping that the whole ship goes down so they can consume some overfed celebrity passengers, too. Sadly, the ship usually makes it to port.

However spectacular the scoop, the scoopers are soon forgotten. Thus it was with Douglas Wilson, who died last week. As The Journal’s Washington Bureau chief, Mr. Wilson broke the news on Aug. 7, 1974, that Richard Nixon was about to resign the presidency because of the Watergate scandal.

Mr. Wilson got word of it from Rabbi Baruch Korff, Nixon’s remarkably Machiavellian and worldly “favorite rabbi,” who then lived in Rehoboth, Mass. (and later Providence, perilously close to the attractive young folk at Brown University, where he got himself into hot water). I knew Rabbi Korff a bit and can testify to his globe-trotting, vivid, if sometimes implausible storytelling, confiding and conspiratorial whisper, a photo collection worthy of the Smithsonian and the many curious alliances suggested by those images.

Nixon complied with Mr. Wilson’s story and announced on Aug. 8 that he would resign the next day. I well remember the huge block headline in The New York Times that sultry evening as I walked by a newsstand near my Brooklyn subway stop. “Nixon Resigns” screamed the briefly ecstatic gray lady. Later that month, I worked in Washington for a week in The Wall Street Journal’s Washington Bureau — nice oriental rugs there: This was the heyday of the supremely confident and free-spending press, and the newspeople there were full of good cheer.

The town’s usual Congo-like torpor in August was tempered by the momentary good feelings from new President Ford’s very un-Nixonian manner. For one thing, he made his own toast, especially on camera! These feelings would mostly disperse the next month when the Man from Michigan (stupidly, in my view) pardoned the tormented statesman.

Anyway, Mr. Wilson received the Merriman Smith Memorial Award from the White House Correspondents Association (named after an indefatigable UPI reporter), one of those sacred journalism prizes not controlled by the publishers and promotion departments of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I suppose he would have preferred a Pulitzer but suspect he would have made a career change anyway. Fear of a heart attack or of catching a bad case of self-importance in the Potomac Basin’s swamps?

He moved quickly, the next year, doing what many now-decayed journalists would have liked to have done –– returned to a bucolic alma mater, in his case, Amherst College, and worked in very respectable flackery and publication jobs for that fine school until his 2003 retirement, when he would have qualified for early Social Security payments. At Amherst, he must have had what they call “a life” — away from the adrenaline overloads of the all too many silly missions of daily journalism (considered full of vast import one day, and forgotten within about 12 hours), of which he is now an historical footnote. But among Amherst alumni, he might be virtually immortal.

— Robert Whitcomb