the Tennessee Valley Authority, he covered the agency for 20 years. In 1940, he spent a year at Harvard University, where he studied labor relations, utility organization, and civic management on a Nieman Fellowship. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war he "stayed in as an enlisted [man] for another six months" so he could go to Siberia. He also went to Shanghai. During his years at The Tennessean, he "exposed labor-management corruption, strip mining abuses, nursing home maltreatment of the elderly, civil rights violations and government corruption at the federal, state and local levels." Caldwell "was known across the region of the Tennessee Valley as a journalist whose stories often reflected a positive tone. He was a crusading reporter, for example, on behalf of public power and community development." A former Tennessee Valley Authority chairman said, "Nat Caldwell is responsible for more TVA and Corps of Engineers dams and lakes than any member of Congress." For a 1968 series on nursing home care, Caldwell had himself admitted into one such home in Nashville. "Nashvillians who plan to send an elderly relative to one of this city's 26 nursing homes," he wrote at the beginning of the first article, "should be aware that they may be committing their loved one to a crowded, unsanitary, ignored existence." One nursing home owner told colleagues of Caldwell's, posing as his niece and nephew "You got to conquer an old man like that." Caldwell wrote, "I have been called a hard-boiled reporter. Often. In those three weeks, I cried. And not at anything that happened to me." The six-week investigation by him and other reporters involved all 26 private nursing homes in Nashville. In 1976, after Caldwell wrote an article challenging Mississippi businessman James F. Hooper III's qualifications to serve on the TVA board, Hooper sued Caldwell, along with the Tennessean, East Tennessee Research Corp., and two of that firm's employees, for over $2.4 million in a libel suit. On one occasion, The Tennessean "had to provide police protection when a series of articles resulted in his being physically assaulted." Another time, "the newspaper was sued for $1 million by a nominee for the TVA Board after a U.S. Senate Committee recited Caldwell's news stories as grounds for refusing to confirm the nomination." In 1949, he spent several months in the Middle East. He studied Tennessee Valley Authority-style