Sherry Jones, an Emmy-winning documentary producer who wedded investigative reporting with dramatic visuals, crafting television films that explored foreign affairs, American politics and national security issues including the Cuban missile crisis and the CIA torture program approved after 9/11, died Feb. 14 at a hospital in Washington. She was 73.
The cause was cancer, said her friend Charlie McBride.
As the head of her own production company, Washington Media Associates, Ms. Jones made more than two dozen films for the PBS documentary series “Frontline,” working with the show from its first season in 1983. She also made documentaries for CNN and ABC and collaborated with journalists including Bill Moyers, Peter Jennings, Roger Wilkins, Hedrick Smith and William Greider, typically working with them on all aspects of the reporting, script and storytelling.
“If we had more filmmakers like her in Washington, undaunted by fear, unaffected by threats and unspoiled by praise, the American people would see and know a lot more clearly how power works its will,”said Moyers, who collaborated with her for more than two decades on documentaries such as “High Crimes and Misdemeanors”(1990), an Emmy-winning examination of the Iran-contra affair.
For one of their early projects, about the influence of money in politics, Ms. Jones engineered a climactic shot in which a computer printout unspooled across the Capitol grounds, listing campaign contributions to each member of Congress, according to Moyers.“It must have been almost a mile long,” he said. “It was one of the most dramatic and effective visuals you could have in a documentary. She always had that kind of eye.”
Ms. Jones’s documentaries won top honors in broadcast journalism, including eight Emmy Awards, three duPont-Columbia Awards and three Peabody Awards. She also received three Edward R. Murrow Awards from the Overseas Press Club of America, including for “Return of the Czar” (2000), a “Frontline” episode about the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer whose moves against Ukraine prompted President Biden to announce new sanctions against Russia on Tuesday.
Along with her documentary “The Struggle for Russia” (1994), about post-Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin, “Return of the Czar” “should be required watching for anyone trying to understand Putin today,” said Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, where Ms. Jones was a senior fellow. The film featured interviews with veteran U.S. policymakers as well as Russian observers, including a former human rights commissioner in Moscow who said that Putin’s election to the presidency may eventually be seen “as the twilight of Russian democracy.”
Ms. Jones visited Moscow under leader Mikhail Gorbachev and studied Russian to improve her reporting, ultimately winning the trust of Soviet officials who allowed her to use rare archival footage for documentaries such as “In the Shadow of Sakharov” (1991), a 90-minute portrait of the Russian physicist and human rights activist.
But she was probably best known for digging into Washington scandals and controversies, including in documentaries about disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the detention and interrogation program approved by the George W. Bush administration, in which suspected terrorists and other detainees were subjected to sleep deprivation, waterboarding, solitary confinement and other brutal “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Ms. Jones investigated the program’s history and origins in “Torturing Democracy”(2008), obtaining archival documents that linked the interrogation tactics used at Guantánamo Bay to a survival training program that the U.S. military developed during the Cold War. She also interviewed former detainees and Bush administration officials such as Richard L. Armitage, a deputy secretary of state and torture critic who said that he was subjected to waterboarding as part of a military training exercise during the Vietnam War.
“There is no question in my mind — there’s no question in any reasonable human being, there shouldn’t be, that this is torture,” he said while discussing waterboarding in the film. “I’m ashamed that we’re even having this discussion.”
Produced and written by Ms. Jones, the film earned a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award but was not initially embraced by PBS. A version of the documentary was sent to the public broadcaster in May 2008, according to a New York Times report, but PBS said it did not have a slot to air the documentary nationally until Jan. 21, 2009, the day after Bush left office.
Ms. Jones rejected that offer and, with help from Moyers, appealed to individual stations to air the film sooner. “It’s been very frustrating,” she told the Times in October 2008, a few months after Congress starting holding hearings on the interrogation program.“There’s something of a public discussion going on and there’s reporting that ought to be out there.”
Blanton, the National Security Archive director, said in a phone interview that Ms. Jones was the first documentarian “to put together the genealogy of the torture program,” and noted that she questioned its morality several years before a Senate Intelligence Committee report delivered new allegations of cruelty.
“She was such an acute observer. Sherry had an instinct for turning over the locks, shining a light into the dark places, trying to understand the roots of the scandal or the crisis or the policy,” he said,“and then presenting context and detailed reporting in visually compelling ways.”
Sherry Lynn Jones was born in Austin on April 21, 1948, and grew up in Shawnee, Okla. Her mother was a social worker who worked for the state, and her father was a traveling salesman who sold school supplies.
Ms. Jones graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1970 and received a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University the next year.
She worked on political campaigns for Democratic senators Fred R. Harris (Okla.) and George S. McGovern (S.D.) before coming to Washington, launching her documentary career in the early 1970s as a field producer for Oscar-winning filmmaker Charles Guggenheim. By the end of the decade she had founded her own production company.
Ms. Jones’s “Frontline” documentaries included “Throwaway People” (1990), a portrait of the Shaw neighborhood in Northwest Washington, and “The Lost American”(1997), an investigation into the life and disappearance in Chechnya of humanitarian worker Fred Cuny. (She assembled evidence suggesting he was murdered by a Chechen intelligence commander.)
She also wrote and produced the TV movie “Watergate Plus 30” (2003), examining the fall of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency through interviews with key players such as White House aide Jeb Stuart Magruder, who said that the break-in was personally ordered by Nixon — a bombshell claim that was not universally accepted.
Ms. Jones retired from filmmaking soon after the release of “Torturing Democracy,” having grown tired of the seemingly endless process of raising money to make documentaries, according to her friend McBride. She split her time between homes in Washington and Dameron, Md., on the Chesapeake Bay, where she volunteered at an organic farm and screened some of her films at nearby St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Survivors include her husband of 43 years, Alan Stone, a sculptor and former chairman of the Washington Project for the Arts; and a brother, Tom Jones, an attorney in Washington State and his wife, Leslie Tregillus and their two daughters, Andrea and Erin Jones who live in New York. In an email, Moyers recalled that he and Ms. Jones “were like a combative
In an email, Moyers recalled that he and Ms. Jones “were like a combative married couple when we collaborated on scripts, often working through the night in the editing room as we resisted each other’s draft or edits, only to emerge as the sun rose over Lafayette Square (three blocks from her office) and we walked to the Hilton for breakfast, agreeing each had improved the other’s effort.
“Then we would go back and soon be at the other’s throat,” he continued. “No quarrel ever made it past the first pass of bacon and eggs.”
