After Penn State, Barlett served as a special agent with the
U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps for three years until 1956, when he began his journalistic career as a reporter for the
Reading (Pennsylvania) Times. Nine years later he became an investigative journalist for
The Plain Dealer, and later took similar jobs with
The Chicago Daily News and
The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he met his collaborator James B. Steele. in 1975 for a series called "Auditing the Internal Revenue Service" published by
The Inquirer. They won their second Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and the
Gerald Loeb Award for Large Newspapers in 1989 at the
Inquirer for their coverage of temporary tax breaks embedded in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Their 1991
Inquirer series
America: What Went Wrong? was named by the
New York University department of journalism as 51st on its list of the 100 best pieces of journalism of the 20th century. Rewritten as a book it became a No. 1
New York Times bestseller. It is one of seven books Barlett and Steele have published, five of which were written while at
The Inquirer. It was while they were at
Time that the investigative reporting team won their two National Magazine Awards, as well at their record breaking 6th George Polk Award, although this time for excellence in magazine journalism. After leaving
Time over monetary issues, Barlett and Steele were hired by
Vanity Fair to be contributing editors under the agreement that they would contribute two articles in their signature long-form style each year. In 2007, Barlett and Steele, while still working for Vanity Fair, were featured in the PBS documentary series ''
Exposé: America's Investigative Reports'' in an episode entitled "Friends In High Places," which was about government contracts. When asked on the program how they managed to work for so many years together, Barlett said, "We're both very boring. Who else reads the tax codes?" == Death ==