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Joe passed on 17 October at the age of 91. Among his many awards and honors, he received a 1971 National Magazine Award, the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for magazine writers, several reporting awards from the Pennsylvania Press Association, and the 1991 Philip M. Stern Award presented by Washington Independent Writers.
Joe served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps from 1956 to 1958 and was a graduate of the Army Intelligence School and the U.S. Army Special Warfare School. The understanding of the intelligence world he gleaned in these years would become an important underpinning of his future reportage.
After completing his military service, he became a general assignment reporter for The Dallas Morning News, where his beat included everything from city council meetings to criminal court cases to political campaigns and elections. In 1961, Joe joined The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was eventually named chief of the Washington bureau and functioned as the newspaper’s White House correspondent during the Johnson presidency. In those tumultuous years, Joe covered the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the onset of the Vietnam War, and the domestic turmoil that accompanied the rise of the antiwar movement. As these events unfolded, Joe haunted the briefing rooms of the White House, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department, and conducted hundreds of private interviews to present the news of the day to the American people.