He stayed at the Times for nine years, working as a roving reporter, and serving at the Washington, D.C., New York City, and United Nations bureaus, and overseas in Ceylon, India, Japan, Pakistan, South Africa and Zaire.
After working at The New York Times Magazine as a staff writer and freelancer for a short time in the 1970s (where he notably covered the Watergate scandal in two issue-length articles that served as the basis for a 1976 book, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, and even correctly guessed that Deep Throat, the secret informant who provided information on the scandal to Bob Woodward, was Mark Felt), Lukas quit reporting to pursue a career in book and magazine writing, becoming known for writing intensely researched nonfiction works.
My father quickly developed tuberculosis – psychosomatically triggered, the doctors thought – forcing him to seek treatment in an Arizona sanatorium.
[6]In 1997, Lukas' book, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America, was undergoing final revisions.
[8] Lukas won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for "The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick" in the now-defunct award category of Local Investigative Specialized Reporting.
[9] The New York Times article documented the life of a teenager from a wealthy, Greenwich, Connecticut-based family who became involved in drugs and the hippie movement before being bludgeoned to death in the basement of an East Village tenement.
The Lukas Prize Project, co-administered by the Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, supports the work of American nonfiction writers.