Journalism in Action: Beverly Deepe Keever and Her Career

Beverly prepared for the wedding at her parent’s home in Belvidere, Nebraska. She and Chuck married on Valentine’s Day, 1969.

Keever moved to Washington, D.C. in August 1968 and lived in a small barely-furnished apartment. Keever described her new job and her apartment to Chuck in this letter.

In this letter from August 1974, Beverly Keever tells her parents and sister about what it is like to work at the Capitol Hill News Service and the difficulty of covering media-savy Senators. She also discusses the resignation of President Nixon (“Tricky Dicky”), the biggest news in the U.S. that month.

At the Capitol Hill News Service,  Beverly Keever was tasked with covering the Kentucky Senators. In letters to Chuck she often complained how much mining legislation she had to cover, but every so often she got to cover interesting topics. This article is about a Department of Justice investigation into election financing violations by Kentucky Democrat Senators, August 1974.

This article by Beverly Keever covers how Kentucky Senators blocked legislation that would have put public funds toward election financing, so that candidates would be discouraged from taking lobbyist money. Written for the Capitol Hill News Service, August 1974.

By the Autumn of 1974, most of Keever’s letters to Chuck document day-to-day life as a journalist in Washington, D.C. This letter from October 17, 1974 discusses the difficulties of their long-distance relationship and her work with Capitol Hill News Service covering Kentucky senators.

This letter from Beverly Keever to Chuck Keever from December 1974 discusses work, friends, negative news coverage of the Marine Corps in Vietnam, and Christmas gift shopping.

In 1975, it became clear the South Vietnamese government would fall and the U.S. would need to evacuate all Americans and as many Vietnamese allies as possible. Beverly Keever worried about Chuck’s safety in Vietnam, and her letters from mid-1975 are often asking for updates on Chuck’s safety.

While a professor at the University of Hawai’i, Keever was not shy about criticizing the institution for its lack of transparency, especially when University of Hawai’i refused to release information about the pay, hiring, or severance packages given to top-level administration. In this letter to the President of the Hawai’i State Senate, Keever criticizes the University for its lack of transparency around Navy research grants.

Beverly Keever was deeply involved in Freedom of Information activism in Hawai’i. This poster is for the “Stop Closed Door Government, Vote ‘No’ on S.B. 2858” event at the University of Hawai’i, held by Freedom of Information Hawai’i in 1987, which Keever organized.

Beverly Keever often testified in front of the Hawai’i legislature on Freedom of Information laws and other laws relating to journalistic access to government information. In 1991, she testified in opposition of H.B. 1019, which restricted who could have access to government records.

Beverly Keever was deeply interested in both teaching journalism and diversity in the journalism field. Here, Keever stands in front of a large conference poster titled “Integrating Learning: From Idea to Story to Newspaper to Web” by Professors Ann Auman and Beverly Keever, which was presented at a Diversity in Journalism event.

As a university professor, Keever kept track of her publications, awards, and activism in a detailed CV. This CV from around 2005 captures her University of Hawai’i career.

In 2013, Keever published her memoir of her time in Vietnam, Death Zones and Darling Spies. In writing the book, Keever used her articles, her papers she had saved from Vietnam, and governemnt documents that she had not had access to at the time.

Because of her News Zero book, Keever was often asked to write about the legacy of U.S. nuclear testing. She wrote both academic articles on the subject and news articles intended for a wider audience. She has been instrumental in drawing attention to the lives of those who lived through the tests.